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AI

Chatbot Eugene Wins Biggest Turing Test Ever 235

An anonymous reader writes "Eugene Goostman, a chatbot imbued with the personality of a 13-year-old boy, won the biggest Turing test ever staged on 23 June, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing. Held at Bletchley Park near Milton Keynes, UK, where Turing cracked the Nazi Enigma code during World War 2, the test involved over 150 separate conversations, 30 judges, 25 hidden humans and five elite, chattering software programs. 'Thirteen years old is not too old to know everything and not too young to know nothing,' explains Eugene's creator, Vladimir Veselov."
The Internet

Wikipedia As a "War Zone," Rather Than a Collaboration 194

horselight writes "A new study by sociologists studying social networking has determined that Wikipedia is not an intellectual project based on mutual collaboration, but a war zone. The study finds that although the content does end up being accurate as a rule, it's anything but neutral or unbiased. The study includes extensive data on access and editing patterns of users related to major events, such as the death of Michael Jackson and the edit storms that ensued." The article explains that the research (here's the paper at PLoS One) looked in particular at controversial entries, not ones about obscure duck-hunting equipment or long-settled standards.

Comment SFLvault (Score 4, Informative) 198

I have been keeping an eye on this project for a while. To quote their description: "SFLvault is a Networked credentials store and authentication manager. It has a client/vault (server) architecture allowing to cryptographically store and organise loads of passwords for different machines and services."

The design seems sound, and it is a server/client model which seem to fit well your "multi-user" requirement, which isn't fulfilled by any other password manager that I know of. It can also automagically log you into different services like SSH, MySQL or sudo and can do multi-hop.

The only issue I have found so far is that installing the server component is a bit of a pain (ie. no Debian package, as opposed to the client side)... but i guess this really depends on the "Linux" environment you are using...

I have been maintaining a list of FLOSS password managers in our public wiki for a while, any suggestions not mentionned there are welcome.

Comment tip #3 was news for me, thanks! (Score 1) 284

I was also a bit surprised to see basic stuff and some repetition in the article there, but trick #3 was really nice for me:

ssh-keygen -R remote-hostname

This will remove the entry for remote-hostname in the known_hosts file, for example if you know the key changed or (don't do that) if you think you're in a MITM attack and don't care.

now that will fix many countless fiddling around the known_hosts file...

Comment Debian packages still fubar'd (Score 1) 195

The Debian packages are really strange for XBMC. First off the Linux instructions are aimed primarily at Ubuntu. Then the other problem is that there is some kind of a fork between the "official packages" for Ubuntu and the Debian packages provided on debian-multimedia.org, the latter not being up to date (only rc2 is available).

I also note that the Ubuntu packages have an Epoch while the Debian packages do not, which makes it hard to switch between the two.

Short of adding a Ubuntu PPA to my sources.list, I am not sure how I can get this thing installed on Debian, which is a bit annoying.

I wish those great products would actually go the extra mile and work with distributions for their products to be packaged, especially since they seem to be familiar with Debian pacakging...

Comment IPv6 and 4G (Score 4, Interesting) 209

One thing that is not mentionned here is that the 4G specs actually mandate IPv6 and deprecate IPv4 support - something that should really push IPv6 adoption forward, especially with providers that offer both cell phone and traditionnal internet connectivity...

Good thing too. Getting those suckers in would have been difficult otherwise. With IPs running out in Europe this year, we are really starting to feel the pressure now...

Comment system administration basics (Score 1) 114

First, read the PSNA if you haven't already, it features good ideas on documentation and especially process and how to deal with "layer 8" (management, users, whatever is the "real world" for you).

Next step is the wiki. You seem to already have that, good. People here have suggested SemanticWiki, but I'll point you towards Ikiwiki as it has the advantage of (a) being git based so completely decentralised (have a copy of your files on your laptop during a downtime!) and (b) written in perl so you can probably extend it.

Make sure people know where your wiki is and *use* it, so it doesn't become this rotten piece of outdated documentation out there. You have only started to understand how this is going to be a pain: documenting is hard long-term work. there's a (bad) reason why people don't do it effectively: it takes time and dedication.

Next you can consider using dedicated tools for certain things like inventory or issue tracking. We have used Request Tracker with good success. It's a very solid product that does a lot, also in Perl, coincidentally enough. It also has the Asset Tracker plugin to follow inventory, but i haven't personnally used that, although I had good feedback from peers that used it successfully in an heterogeneous environment. An alternative is OCS inventory, which I haven't used either.

So, just bite the bullet: you're going in the right direction. Just consider the right tool for the right job is your next step, i guess.

Comment Some reviews and suggestions: calibre or gcstar (Score 1) 188

I happened to have scanned my modest book library here (~500 items) with GCstar, which works pretty well. It can download covers and details from Amazon and so on, based on the ISBN (although the latest version in Debian fails to do that properly for some reason). Before deciding on GCstar, I had evaluated multiple solutions, including Koha and custom-based solutions, none of which being simple enough for my uses, which made me settle on GCstar... The full details of the evaluation are in the Koumbit wiki.

Since then I have started looking into e-book readers, and family have pointed me to Calibre, a e-book management software. Now it's not necessarily very good with real libraries, but since I am likely to get such a device in the near future (and therefore accumulate digital books), this looks like a very good choice, especially since it seems to have a more complete interface (especially for batch entering ISBN numbers) and a more robust engine to talk with Amazon and friends. It also seems to be better maintained and have a stronger community.

I am not sure that is so helpful in your case, but I thought I could chime in since, well, I have a small library and most of the work is automated. :) Just need to punch in the ISBN number and choose who to lease the book to (something I will do in a custom field in Calibre). A "standard" barcode reader (that behaves like a keyboard, basically) and judicious use of keyboard shortcuts should do the trick if you are really concerned about speed.

Comment i am + STEED (Score 1) 601

... and while i won't go as far as signing this comment (i admire the dedication folks, but really...), i try to use it as much as possible. I have done PGP trainings for the masses (see this and this, in french) and I'm doing my best to strenghten the web of trust.

I am also very curious to see where the STEED project leads us, it looks like a nice way to popularize PGP.

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