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Submission + - Elon Musk On Autonomous Cars: Could Human Drivers Eventually Be Outlawed? (hothardware.com) 1

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: One of the highlights of the opening keynote at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference in San Jose (GTC), was NVIDIA CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang's special guest, Tesla CEO, Elon Musk and the "fireside chat" the two participated in. With NVIDIA's focus on deep learning and machine vision technologies for cars, much of the talk centered around autonomous vehicles and the notion that someday they may be so reliable, that they're actually safer on the road than cars operated by humans. Think about it. Is the idea of a vehicle that recognizes distance, velocity, weather conditions and real-time changes, faster than a human can, all that far-fetched? In the interview shot here, Musk even thinks we may get to a day when human drivers could be outlawed in favor of an all autonomous driving society.

Submission + - Users 'immune' to online security warnings, research finds (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers at Brigham Young University in Utah have conducted a series of experiments [http://security.byu.edu/research/Anderson_et_al._CHI_2015.pdf] to test users' tendency to 'Repetition Suppression' when faced with online warnings. The first study involved seeding a set of images with 'polymorphic' warnings (warnings with unusual design or behavior) whilst monitoring their brain activity. In the second the researchers got permission from Google to perform a man-in-the-middle attack on users who had been told to locate and install twenty extensions for the Chrome browser, and who subsequently received a similar seeding of 'unusual' warnings during the installation processes involved. Both studies confirmed that we become practically immune to a particular warning the first time that we see it, and furthermore that we are more likely to hesitate at a new warning-design than any notable content inside it. The report suggests "changing the content of a warning may not be enough to deter the influence of habituation".

Submission + - Police fight to keep use of Stingrays secret

Submitted by v3rgEz
v3rgEz writes: The New York Times looks at how local police are fighting to keep their use of cell phone surveillance secret, including signing NDAs with Stingray manufacturer Harris Corp and claiming the documents have been lost. It's part of a broader trend of local agencies adopting the tactics of covert intelligence groups as they seek to adopt new technology in the digital era.

Submission + - 2015: The year robotic personal assistants come to market (robohub.org)

Submitted by Hallie Siegel
Hallie Siegel writes: There’s a race going on to see which AI solution providing personal assistance is welcomed by businesses, end users and consumers, and whether this will be physical or virtual. Technology watcher Frank Toby writes that 2015 is the year robotic personal assistants will be coming to market in physical form, and available for experimentation and testing: Pepper ships in the summer in Japan, JIBO ships preorders in Q3 as does Cubic in the fall and EmoSpark in the summer. But how will these physical assistants fare against their virtual counterparts, like Siri and Google Now?

Submission + - Secure Pirate Bay 'Unblocked' By Most UK ISPs (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Following a series of blocking orders issued by the High Court, several UK ISPs are required to restrict access to many of the world’s largest torrent sites and streaming portals.

The most prominent target of these blocks is without doubt The Pirate Bay. As one of the most visited sites on the Internet it has been a thorn in the side of the entertainment industries for years.

The Pirate Bay was one of the first sites on the UK blocklist and access has been barred since 2012. Or rather should have been barred.

For a few weeks most UK Internet subscribers have been able to access TPB just fine. Ever since the site switched to CloudFlare and made the secure https://thepiratebay.se/ version default, it has become widely accessible again.

Submission + - Ex Machina: When Turing meets Bechdel test (robohub.org)

Submitted by Hallie Siegel
Hallie Siegel writes: The Bechdel Test, named after cartoonist Amy Bechdel, is a gender litmus and has become a remarkably useful indicator of power imbalance. To pass the test, a film has to have two women in it, who talk to each other, about something other than a man. Alex Garland’s first feature film Ex Machina explores the Turing Test in a very Pinteresque fashion as a young coder falls in love with an advanced AI. But does it pass the Bechdel test? Tech watcher Andra Keay gives her take. Ex Machina had its US debut at SxSW on March 14.

Submission + - SXSW: Do Androids Dream of Being You? (dice.com) 1

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: In 2010, Dr. Martine Rothblatt (founder of United Theraputics and Sirius Radio) decided to build a robotic clone of her partner, named Bina. In theory, this so-called 'mindclone' (dubbed Bina48) can successfully mimic the flesh-and-blood Bina’s speech and decision-making, thanks to a dataset (called a 'mindfile') that contains all sorts of information about her mannerisms, beliefs, recollections, values, and experiences. But is software really capable of replicating a person’s mind? At South by Southwest this year, Rothblatt is defending the idea of a 'mindfile' and clones as a concept that not only works, but already has a "base" thanks to individuals' social networks, email, and the like. While people may have difficulty embracing something engineered to replicate their behavior, but Rothblatt suggested younger generations will embrace the robots: 'I think younger people will say ‘My mindclone is me, too.’' Is her idea unfeasible, or is she onto something? Video from Bloomberg suggests that Bina48 still has some kinks to work out before it can pass for human.

Comment 24-pin uber connector!?!?! Yuck! (Score 2) 392

by MobyDisk (#49226905) Attached to: Does USB Type C Herald the End of Apple's Proprietary Connectors?

I foresee a mess coming because of the number of pins in USB type-C.

One of the big benefits to USB was that it was only 4 wires: power, ground, and a differential pair. Years ago, we all laughed at the Apple dock connector and it's gzillion pins. USB type-C seems like a throwback, with 24-pins, and a microchip. It looks like 18 of those pins require unique wires (since the ground and power pins can be shared). So that means that where I have a 4-wire USB cable now, the replacement is an 18-wire cable. Of course, most things won't need all of the features, so most cables will probably have far fewer wires than that. They'll omit the configuration wire, the sidechannel wire, the'll make the bus power a smaller gauge, eliminate some of the unused differential pairs, etc. If that happens, you will no longer be able to use any old USB cable for anything. You'll need to know what wires each USB cable has to know what devices it works with. So they'll start labeling them with nifty names like "USB type-C Lion" which has 18 gauge bus pins, and "USB type-C Gamma Monkey" which has 18 gauge bus pins and the sidechannel pins. And they will be more expensive.

Comment "Staff pick" on a copyrighted film (Score 1) 255

by MobyDisk (#49173295) Attached to: Gritty 'Power Rangers' Short Is Not Fair Use

The director's defenders rightly pointed out the absurdity of Vimeo removing the short film just hours after giving it a "Staff Pick" award, but the real absurdity runs in the opposite direction -- how did Vimeo's staff give an award to the film that they should have known was a knockoff? Presumably they had heard of the Power Rangers and knew that the movie was using the characters without permission.

Because knockoff videos happen every day and usually the copyright holder doesn't care. See "Mario Warfare", or any other group of people having fun with cosplay. The same thing goes with fan art.

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