itwbennett - Slashdot User

Submission + - Cute Humanoid Robot Gets Watson's Brains (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett on Monday February 16, 2015 @09:26AM

itwbennett writes: 'Japanese mobile carrier SoftBank introduced a talking household machine called Pepper last year, and it’s now hooking up with Watson, IBM’s artificial intelligence platform,' reports IDG News Service's Tim Hornyak. But don't expect the cute robot to suddenly become useful. Pepper was designed to convey emotion, not to perform tasks, but with Watson on board, Pepper still faces communication challenges. 'Watson requires a degree of robustness in voice recognition that Pepper lacks,' Osaka University roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro, known for his extremely lifelike android-style humanoid robots, said in an email. 'SoftBank and IBM are planning to use Watson with Pepper, but they haven’t specified how,' says Hornyak.

Submission + - LG Exec Indicted Over Broken Samsung Washing Machine (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett on Monday February 16, 2015 @08:51AM

itwbennett writes: Jo Seong-jin, the head of LG’s home appliance division, was indicted Sunday by prosecutors in Seoul for allegedly damaging Samsung Electronics’ washing machines before the IFA electronics show in Berlin last September. The company says it was his regular practice to test the rival company’s machines, something he has done while working for LG for the past 38 years, and has released closed-circuit television footage in his defense showing him testing Samsung products including washing machines, dish washers and refrigerators. Jo and two other employees are charged with vandalism, defamation and obstruction of business.

Submission + - FAA Proposes Rules To Limit Commercial Drone Use (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 16, 2015 @01:51AM

An anonymous reader writes: In an attempt to bring order to increasingly chaotic skies, the Federal Aviation Administration on Sunday proposed long-awaited rules on the commercial use of small drones, requiring operators to be certified, fly only during daylight and keep their aircraft in sight. The rules, though less restrictive than the current ones, appear to prohibit for now the kind of drone delivery services being explored by Amazon, Google and other companies, since the operator or assigned observers must be able to see the drone at all times without binoculars. But company officials believe the line-of-sight requirement could be relaxed in the future to accommodate delivery services.

Submission + - Cybercriminal Gang Plunders Nearly $1B From Banks Over Two Years (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett on Sunday February 15, 2015 @10:00PM

itwbennett writes: A still-active cybercriminal gang, whose members are suspected to be from Russia, Ugraine, other parts of Europe and China, has stolen up to a $1 billion from banks in at least 25 countries since 2013, Kaspersky Lab said Sunday. The gang infiltrated networks with malware and spied on employees’ computers to facilitate large wire transfers.

Submission + - EU Preparing Vast Air Passenger Database (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh on Friday February 13, 2015 @01:13PM

jfruh writes: Despite privacy concerns and doubts over its usefulness, a plan to track passengers entering or leaving the European Union in a series of national databases is likely to become reality by the end of the year. Legislation working its way through the European Parliament will authorize European nations to set up databases of the sort already in use in the UK, and to share information with each other. All the EU parties except the Greens are in favor.

Submission + - Another Surprise In Jeb Bush's Email Cache: Viruses (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett on Friday February 13, 2015 @10:03AM

itwbennett writes: In addition to personal phone numbers and email addresses for hundreds of people who corresponded with him, there’s something else inside the cache of emails that Jeb Bush released this week: computer viruses. Alongside a Web interface to read the emails, Bush also offered raw Microsoft Outlook files, and it’s in those files where the viruses lurked in file attachments. Many are old and easily detectable with modern anti-virus software, but they still might pose a threat to some people running older computers or without anti-virus software. For example, in the email database from 2001 there are several attachments that carry the “Happy99.exe” file, a computer worm for Windows 95, 98 and NT systems, also known as “Ska,” which first appeared in 1999.

Submission + - Five Years After The Sun Merger, Oracle Says It's Fully Committed To SPARC (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh on Thursday February 12, 2015 @12:38PM

jfruh writes: Sun Microsystems vanished into Oracle's maw five years ago this month, and you could be forgiven for thinking that some iconic Sun products, like SPARC chips, had been cast aside in the merger. But Oracle claims that the SPARC roadmap is moving forward more quickly than it did under Sun, and while the number of SPARC systems sold has dropped dramatically (from 66,000 in Q1 '03 to 7,000 in Q1 '14), the systems that are being sold are fully customized and much more profitable for the company.

Submission + - What Intel's $300 million diversity pledge really means (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett on Wednesday February 11, 2015 @04:28PM

itwbennett writes: Intel’s Rosalind Hudnell responsible for implementing the company’s much-publicized $300 million initiative to bring more women and under-represented minorities into its workforce by 2020. But even with Intel’s renewed commitment to diversity, the company’s workforce will still be just about 32 percent women in five years, Hudnell estimated. Here's a rough breakdown of how the money will be spent: The funds will be applied over five years to change hiring practices, retool human resources, fund companies run by minorities and women, and promote STEM education in high schools.

Submission + - Drop In Smartphone Thefts After Kill-Switch Introduction (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett on Wednesday February 11, 2015 @11:13AM

itwbennett writes: In San Francisco, overall robberies and thefts dropped 22 percent from 2013 to 2014, but those involving smartphones were down 27 percent, according to data out today. Thefts and robberies of iPhones fell 40 percent. In New York, smartphone theft dropped 16 percent overall with iPhone figures down 25 percent. And London saw smartphone thefts from persons drop 40 percent in a year. Law enforcement officials, who have been at the forefront of demands to include a 'kill switch' in all smartphones, hailed the news as proof that the technology is working as a deterrent.

Submission + - Your Java Code Is Mostly Fluff, New Research Finds (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett on Wednesday February 11, 2015 @10:33AM

itwbennett writes: In a new paper (PDF), researchers from the University of California, Davis, Southeast University in China, and University College London theorized that, just as with natural languages, some — and probably, most — written code isn’t necessary to convey the point of what it does. The code and data used in the study are available for download from Bitbucket. But here's the bottom line: Only about 5% of written Java code captures the core functionality.

Submission + - Five Technologies That Betrayed Silk Road's Anonymity (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett on Monday February 09, 2015 @04:22PM

itwbennett writes: Silk Road was based on an expectation of anonymity: Servers operated within an anonymous Tor network. Transactions between buyers and sellers were conducted in bitcoin. Everything was supposedly untraceable. Yet prosecutors presented a wealth of digital evidence to convince the jury that Ross Ulbricht was Dread Pirate Roberts, the handle used by the chief operator of the site. From Bitcoin to server logins and, yes, Facebook, here's a look at 5 technologies that tripped Ulbricht up.

Submission + - Windows 10 May Not Run On Low-RAM Phones Microsoft Sells (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh on Monday February 09, 2015 @01:32PM

jfruh writes: Microsoft's big plans for Windows 10 include a single codebase that runs on devices from cell phones to servers. Unfortunately, many of the phones it sells under its own brand name may not run it. Low-end Lumia phones, mostly designed by Nokia's smartphone unit before Microsoft swallowed it, only have 1GB of RAM — half what Windows 10 currently requires.

Submission + - EU Parliament Blocks Outlook Apps For Members Over Privacy Concerns (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh on Monday February 09, 2015 @01:23PM

jfruh writes: Microsoft last week released Outlook apps for iOS and Android, but one group that won't be getting to use them is members of the European Parliament. They've been advised by their tech staff that the apps are insecure and that they shouldn't download them — and if they have, they should change their Outlook passwords.

Submission + - Five Years Later, How Is The Sun-Oracle Marriage Working Out? (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh on Monday February 09, 2015 @01:18PM

jfruh writes: Five years ago, Oracle's acquisition of Sun finally closed, merging two storied but wildly culuturally different Silicon Valley institutions. With the Sun brand now completely vanished, how has the combination worked out? Tech commentator Andy Patrizio looks at the former Sun product lines in Oracle's portfolio and finds that the last half-decade has been bad for SPARC, Solaris, and MySQL but good for high-end hardware and (despite the naysayers) Java.

Submission + - Are Carriers Trying To Steal Wi-Fi's Spectrum? Not Exactly (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett on Monday February 09, 2015 @09:17AM

itwbennett writes: LTE is coming to the fat 5GHz unlicensed radio band that much of consumers’ Wi-Fi use now depends on. The idea drew skepticism at first, but the mobile industry is starting to agree on some steps to make sure wireless LANs don’t get trampled under LTE’s feet. The first trial deployments are expected to begin this year, and users could get faster service as the technology is rolled out. Here's a look at how it will work.

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