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Submission + - Samsung Smart TVs forcing ads into video streaming apps (cnet.com) 1

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: Just days after its TV voice recognition software came under fire for invading privacy, Samsung users are reporting unwanted Pepsi ads appearing while they watch their Smart TVs.

Reports are emerging that Samsung smart TVs have begun inserting short advertisements directly into video streaming apps, with no influence from the third-party app providers.

The news comes just days after Samsung made headlines for another incursion into user's lounge rooms, when it was revealed that its TV voice recognition software is capable of capturing personal information and transmitting it to third parties. The issue was discovered in the fine print of Samsung's voice recognition privacy policy, but the company says it has since changed the policy to "better explain what actually occurs" during this voice capture process.

The latest complaints directed at the South Korean electronics giant relate to a Pepsi advertisement that has reportedly started to appear during content streamed through Smart TV apps from personal media libraries and video streaming services.

The issue has been reported on the Plex streaming service — a brand of media player that allows users to stream their own video from a personal library or hard drive and push it to a smart TV.

One Plex user took to the company's customer forum to complain about the constant intrusion of ads on his Samsung TV.

"I have recently upgraded my Plex Media Server to version 0.9.1101 and every 10-15 minutes whilst watching content on my Samsung TV I get a Pepsi advertisement showing!" user Mike wrote. "At first I thought I was seeing things but no it repeats. Sometimes I can get out of it and go back to my media, others it hangs the app and the TV restarts."

Submission + - NASA confirms results for 'impossible' space drive that uses no rocket fuel (examiner.com) 1

Submitted by MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: Last August, NASA’s Eagleworks, an advanced space propulsion lab located at the Johnson Spaceflight Center south of Houston, created a great deal of excitement when it announced that it had tested a prototype of something called a Cannae Drive. Using microwaves, the device seemed to exert a minute but measurable degree of thrust when mounted on a pendulum in a vacuum chamber. NextBigFuture provided an update on the experiments on an engine that uses no fuel and seems to violate Newtonian physics.

In essence, the team at Eagleworks has been able to replicate the results of the original experiment, exerting a thrust in the area of 50 micro-Newtons. The team has been hampered by a lack of funding to fight through equipment failures. Nevertheless, they are working, very slowly, to scale up the thrust to 100 micro-Newtons. At that point, they intend to take the device to the Glenn Research Center for another replication effort.

Submission + - The Search For Neutrons That Leak Into Our World From Other Universes

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: One of the more exciting predictions from "braneworld" theories of high energy physics is that matter can leak out of other universes into our own, and vice versa. The basic idea is that our three-dimensional universe or brane is embedded in a much larger multi-dimensional cosmos. These branes can become coupled so that a quantum particle such as a neutron can exist in a superposition of states in both universes at the same time. When the neutron collides with something, the superposition collapses and the particle must suddenly exist in one brane or the other. That means neutrons from our universe can leak into other branes and then back again. Now physicists are devising an experiment to look for this neutron leakage. They plan to put a well shielded neutron detector next to a shielded nuclear reactor that produces neutrons at a research facility in France. All this shielding means the detector should not see any neutrons from inside the reactor. However, if the neutrons are leaking into another brane and then back into our world, they can bypass this shielding and trigger the detector. The team has not yet set a date for the experiment but the discovery of neutrons (or anything else) leaking into our universe would be huge.

Comment Re:my bank (Score 1) 271

by Z00L00K (#48991141) Attached to: Why Gmail Has Better Security Than Your Bank

My bank have a pin code token with challenge/response authentication. Also used to sign receiving account numbers and the sum of the transaction.

There are probably "holes" in that solution as well, but it's at least standing up against brute force attacks against the banks.

Submission + - Facebook will soon be able to ID you in any photo (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Appear in a photo taken at a protest march, a gay bar, or an abortion clinic, and your friends might recognize you. But a machine probably won't—at least for now. Unless a computer has been tasked to look for you, has trained on dozens of photos of your face, and has high-quality images to examine, your anonymity is safe. Nor is it yet possible for a computer to scour the Internet and find you in random, uncaptioned photos. But within the walled garden of Facebook, which contains by far the largest collection of personal photographs in the world, the technology for doing all that is beginning to blossom.

Submission + - What tools to cleanup a large C/C++ project?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I find myself in the uncomfortable position of having to 'cleanup' a relatively large C/C++ project. We are talking ~200 files, 11MB of source code, 220K lines of code...

A superficial glance shows that they are a lot of functions that seems to be doing the same things, a lot of 'unused' stuff and a lot of inconsistency between what is declared in .h files and what is implemented in the corresponding .cpp files.

Is there any tools that will help me catalog this mess and make it easier for me to locate/erase unused things, cleanup .h files, find functions with similar names?

Submission + - The Pirate Bay Is an FBI Honeypot: a Disconcertingly Plausible Conspiracy Theory

Submitted by Jason Koebler
Jason Koebler writes: After months of false starts and constant hype about its prospective return, The Pirate Bay finally came back this weekend. But the response hasn't been purely excitement from would-be pirates. Instead, it's been suspicion: Is the FBI running The Pirate Bay as a means to crack down on piracy?
"There is a natural paranoia that kicks in on such matters, simply based on the logic of a single site lasting this long without being truly shut down," Brian Martin, CEO of Attrition, one of the world’s most famous and longest-lasting hacker and security information websites, told me. "If done correctly, there is little to nothing that would give them away. I have talked to FBI agents hypothesizing about carrying out such replacements on sites."

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