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Submission + - Sony plan to pull out of MPAA revealed (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Earthquake Retrofit
Earthquake Retrofit writes: The New York Times is reporting: "... Sony Pictures chairman Michael Lynton last month told industry colleagues of a plan to withdraw from the movie trade organization, according to people who have been briefed on the discussions. He cited the organization's slow response and lack of public support in the aftermath of the attack on Sony and its film “The Interview,” as well as longstanding concerns about the cost and efficacy of the group."

Submission + - Lego contraption allows scientists to safely handle insects (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Researchers have built contraption from LEGOs that can move and rotate insects every which way while keeping them stable and positioned under a microscope. The design improves on previous insect manipulators because it's cheap, customizable, and easy to build. As natural history museums work on digitizing their voluminous collections—taking high-resolution photographs of each precious beetle, bee, and dragonfly in their possession—they have to handle insects repeatedly. Now the job will be easier on the entomologists, and more insect specimens will be able to hang on to their wings—all thanks to Legos.

Submission + - Verizon Dropping data rates, but current customers have to call (consumerist.com) 1

Submitted by executioner
executioner writes: n spite of Verizon Wireless’ recent boasts that it’s “a leader, not a follower,” a new announcement from the nation’s biggest wireless company shows that Big V is indeed following the competition down the path of charging customers less for their data plans. However, current Verizon subscribers will need to let the company know they want to save money (or get more data).
It’s a little confusing, so stick with us for a moment. Verizon MORE Everything customers who currently have monthly data allotments of 1GB, 2GB, 3GB, or 4GB will have an option on how they want to save.They can either get more data for their money by getting 1GB of additional data per month for no extra charge OR they can have their bill reduced by $10/month.So someone with a 2GB plan is currently paying $50/month. If they take the free data option, that goes to 3GB for the same price. Or they can elect to stick with the 2GB and their data bill drops to $40/month.

Submission + - Programming safety into self-driving cars (nsf.gov)

Submitted by aarondubrow
aarondubrow writes: Automakers have presented a vision of the future where the driver can check his or her email, chat with friends or even sleep while shuttling between home and the office. However, to AI experts, it's not clear that this vision is a realistic one. In many areas, including driving, we'll go through a long period where humans act as co-pilots or supervisors before the technology reaches full autonomy (if it ever does). In such a scenario, the car would need to communicate with drivers to alert them when they need to take over control. In cases where the driver is non-responsive, the car must be able to autonomously make the decision to safely move to the side of the road and stop. Researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed 'fault-tolerant planning' algorithms that allow semi-autonomous machines to devise and enact a "Plan B."

Submission + - With Insider Help, ID Theft Ring Stole $700,000 in Apple Gift Cards (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: The Manhattan District Attorney’s office has indicted five people for using personal information stolen from around 200 people to fund the purchase of hundreds of thousands of dollars in Apple gift cards, which in turn were used to buy Apple products. 'Using stolen information to purchase Apple products is one of the most common schemes employed by cybercrime and identity theft rings today,' District Attorney Cyrus Vance said in a statement. 'We see in case after case how all it takes is single insider at a company—in this instance, allegedly, a receptionist in a dentists’ office—to set an identity theft ring in motion, which then tries to monetize the stolen information by purchasing Apple goods for resale or personal use,' he said.

Submission + - Homemade RC Millennium Falcon Is The Drone You've Always Dreamed Of Flying (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Here's a dose of Rebel goodness to tide you over while you wait for the next Star Wars trailer. A drone enthusiast in France recently graced the web with a few videos of a self-built quadcopter with a shell designed to look like the Millennium Falcon. It's enough to make a Star Wars fan tear up. The drone features a blue thruster light, just like the real Millennium Falcon, and has bright front lights as well. Its creator, who goes by "Oliver C", has some serious modding skills. The shape of the Millennium Falcon presented Oliver with some challenges, but he has the balance more or less handled by the time the spaceship (or quadcopter) takes its first flight outside.

Submission + - The one guy responsible for GPG is running out of money

Submitted by jasonridesabike
jasonridesabike writes: ProPublica reports that Werner Koch, the man behind GPG is in financial straits. Link to article Link to GPG donate page

The man who built the free email encryption software used by whistleblower Edward Snowden, as well as hundreds of thousands of journalists, dissidents and security-minded people around the world, is running out of money to keep his project alive. Werner Koch wrote the software, known as Gnu Privacy Guard, in 1997, and since then has been almost single-handedly keeping it alive with patches and updates from his home in Erkrath, Germany. Now 53, he is running out of money and patience with being underfunded.

Submission + - The Poem That Passed the Turing Test

Submitted by merbs
merbs writes: In 2011, the editors of one of the nation’s oldest student-run literary journals selected a short poem called “For the Bristlecone Snag” for publication in its Fall issue. The poem seems environmentally themed, strikes an aggressive tone, and contains a few of the clunky turns of phrase overwhelmingly common to collegiate poetry. It’s unremarkable, mostly, except for one other thing: It was written by a computer algorithm, and nobody could tell.

Submission + - Game Changer: Facebook Brings React Native to Native Mobile Development

Submitted by the_insult_dog
the_insult_dog writes: Despite a lack of dev tools, samples, tutorials, documentation or even a blog post or press release, Facebook's announcement that it's bringing the popular React.js JavaScript library to iOS and Android native mobile development stirred up comments like "groundbreaking" and "game changing." In a series of videos from the recent React.js Conference 2015, Facebook engineers said they're rejecting the "write-once, run-anywhere pipe dream" in favor of a "learn-once, write-anywhere" paradigm. All efforts to duplicate native performance and look-and-feel actually feel like "s__t", an engineer said in explaining the company's new approach to native development in a conference keynote video. Yet to be proven, with tools in the works, it's supposedly a huge success internally at Facebook and experts said the new approach could shake up the whole mobile dev industry.

Submission + - Navy: More railguns and lasers, less gunpowder (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: “Number one, you’ve got to get us off gunpowder,” said Greenert, noting that Office of Naval Research-supported weapon programs like Laser Weapon System (LaWS) and the electromagnetic railgun are vital to the future force. “Probably the biggest vulnerability of a ship is its magazine—because that’s where all the explosives are.”

Submission + - Shattered chromosome cures woman of immune disease (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Call it a scientific oddity—or a medical miracle. A girl who grew up with a serious genetic immune disease was apparently cured in her 30s by one of her chromosomes shattering into pieces and reassembling. Scientists traced the woman’s improvement to the removal of a harmful gene through this scrambling of DNA in one of her blood stem cells—a recently identified phenomenon that until now had only been linked to cancer.

Submission + - Scientists crack viral "enigma code" (huffingtonpost.com)

Submitted by barlevg
barlevg writes: A new paper to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claims a breakthrough in our understanding of viral replication and could lead to new to new treatments for polio, HIV and even the common cold. Biologist Peter Stockley, with the help of mathematician Reidun Twarock, has cracked the code for how replicated viral RNA molecules self-assemble, a process Stockley calls a "Harry Potter moment:" the instructions are in plain sight... but only appear once the RNA has been folded.

Comment Re:Bots (Score 4, Insightful) 467

by Zocalo (#48988535) Attached to: Twitter CEO: "We Suck" At Dealing With Trolls, Vows To Kick Them Out
Might as well mention Twitter's URL shortening service, "t.co", too since that's another area of the business riddled with abuse that they just don't seem to care about. Spammers and malware pushers have been using Twitter's "t.co" links for ages to link to sites, malware and so on, yet Twitter simply doesn't care. Send an abuse report to most other link shortening services and the malicious link is usually dead within a couple of days, and more often within a few hours, yet "t.co" links seem to be inspired by De Beers and last forever so presumably the abuse reports are simply /dev/null'd. On the plus side, you can pretty much guarantee any email with a "t.co" link is spam and score it accordingly (or just reject them outright since the FP rate is so low), but it would be nice if they did something about that too.

Submission + - The Algorithm That 'Sees' Beauty in Photographic Portraits

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But what if the beholder is a machine? Scientists from Yahoo Labs in Barcelona have trained a machine learning algorithm to pick out beautiful photographic portraits from a collection of not-so-beautiful ones. They began with a set of 10,000 portraits that have been rated by humans and then allowed the algorithm to "learn" the difference by taking into account personal factors such as the age, sex and race of the subject as well as technical factors such as the sharpness of the image, the exposure and the contrast between the face and the background and so on. The trained algorithm was then able to reliably pick out the most beautiful portraits. Curiously, the algorithm does this by ignoring personal details such as age, sex, race, eye colour and so on and instead focuses only on technical details such as sharpness, exposure and contrast. The team say this suggests that any subject can be part of a stunning portrait regardless of their looks. It also suggests that "perfect portrait" algorithms could be built in to the next generation of cameras, rather like the smile-capturing algorithms of today.

Submission + - DOJ Tells Court It Hasn't Read Torture Report, Tells Press It Has

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In an attempt to keep the 6000+ page report that the Senate put together on the CIA's torture program secret, the DOJ has told a court that it hasn't read the copy of the report the Senate gave them. In fact, it says that it hasn't even opened the package. Yet, just a few weeks ago, the DOJ told the NY Times that it had read the whole unredacted report and didn't find anything new in it. It seems clear that the DOJ is either lying to the court or to the press — or possibly both.

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