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Businesses

Amazon's Delivery Drones Will Be Able To Track Your Location 99

Posted by samzenpus from the wherever-you-go dept.
stowie writes: According to the filing with the USPTO, the e-commerce giant's delivery drones will be able to communicate with each other, find the best flight path available, and update the delivery location as a customer changes location. Package delivery locations will be updated as customers move around, so a package can come to you at work or home, depending on where you are when your shipment is ready — including pulling location data from a smartphone. There will also be relay locations, allowing drones to drop off packages for further transport, or to recharge or swap batteries. Amazon even supplies a mockup of what its delivery drone could look like, including eight propellers, two removable power modules and much more.
Facebook

Is Facebook Keeping You In a Political Bubble? 179

Posted by samzenpus from the tell-me-what-I-want-to-hear dept.
sciencehabit writes: Does Facebook make it harder for people with different political views to get along? Political scientists have long wondered whether the social network's news feed selectively serves up ideologically charged news while filtering out content from different camps. Now, a study by Facebook's in-house social scientists finds that this does happen, though the effect seems to be very small. "There's a growing concern that social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter allow us to more precisely engineer our informational environments than ever before, so we only get info that's consistent with our prior beliefs," says David Lazer, a political and computer scientist who authored a commentary on the paper.
The Military

FAA: Big Tech Challenges For Massive Washington, DC Warbirds Flyover 54

Posted by samzenpus from the blast-from-the-past dept.
coondoggie writes: It will be one of the largest gatherings of flying WWII aircraft in history as 56 famous vintage warbirds will fly through restricted airspace over the National Mall Friday in remembrance of the 70th anniversary of VE-Day or Victory in Europe Day. The huge flyover, dubbed "The Arsenal of Democracy," of so many different types of aircraft – from seaplanes to fighters and the only flying B-29 Superfortress – was no easy undertaking. The first plane should be visible along the National Mall around 12:10 p.m. With roughly 90 seconds between formations, the Flyover will end by 1 p.m. Reagan National Airport will be closed to commercial traffic from 12 noon to 1 p.m. to accommodate the flights. The Flyover will be streamed live here.
The Military

FAA: Big Tech Challenges For Massive Washington, DC Warbirds Flyover 54

Posted by samzenpus from the blast-from-the-past dept.
coondoggie writes: It will be one of the largest gatherings of flying WWII aircraft in history as 56 famous vintage warbirds will fly through restricted airspace over the National Mall Friday in remembrance of the 70th anniversary of VE-Day or Victory in Europe Day. The huge flyover, dubbed "The Arsenal of Democracy," of so many different types of aircraft – from seaplanes to fighters and the only flying B-29 Superfortress – was no easy undertaking. The first plane should be visible along the National Mall around 12:10 p.m. With roughly 90 seconds between formations, the Flyover will end by 1 p.m. Reagan National Airport will be closed to commercial traffic from 12 noon to 1 p.m. to accommodate the flights. The Flyover will be streamed live here.
Google

Superfish Injects Ads In 1 In 25 Google Page Views 91

Posted by samzenpus from the protect-ya-neck dept.
An anonymous reader writes: A new report from Google has found that more than 5% of unique daily IP addresses accessing Google — tens of millions — are interrupted by ad-injection techniques, and that Superfish, responsible for a major controversy with Lenovo in February is the leading adware behind what is clearly now an industry. Amongst the report's recommendations to address the problem is the suggestion that browser makers "harden their environments against side-loading extensions or modifying the browser environment without user consent." Some of the most popular extensions for Chrome and Firefox, including ad-blockers, depend on this functionality.
Businesses

Keurig Stock Drops, Says It Was Wrong About DRM Coffee Pods 369

Posted by samzenpus from the worst-laid-plans dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Green Mountain (Keurig) stock dropped by 10% this morning after a brutal earnings report. The reason? CNN Money reports that DRM has weakened sales of their Keurig 2.0. CEO Brian Kelley admits, "Quite honestly, we were wrong." Last year Green Mountain decided to make their new coffee machines work with licensed pods only. The company says they now plan to license more outside brands, and bring back “My K-Cup” reusable filters.

Feed Google News Sci Tech: SimCity Creator Will Wright Launches 'Thred' App To Tell Stories Through Images (google.com)

From feed by feedfeeder

Forbes
SimCity Creator Will Wright Launches 'Thred' App To Tell Stories Through Images
Forbes
When you've created mega game franchises like SimCity and The Sims, collected Soviet artifacts and competed with gladiator robots, what's left to build? For famed game maker Will Wright, the answer has proven a mobile app—one Wright hopes will change...
'SimCity' creator Will Wright launches social networking appEngadget
The Sims Creator Launches 'Thred' Photo-Sharing AppPC Magazine
Will Wright sees life as a game, in the smartphone ageGamasutra
The Verge-Kotaku Australia
all 21 news articles

Open Source

Creating the Open Drone Ecosystem Takes Room To Experiment 21

Posted by timothy from the keeping-things-visible dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Over on Forbes, Jono Bacon writes about the emergence of an open drone ecosystem spearheaded by the recently announced 3D Robotics SOLO which is largely Open Source and has an Open Source SDK. Bacon's argument is that innovation comes from where we least expect it, so open access to the code and tools is critical in helping the burgeoning drone ecosystem to thrive, solve problems, and grow. See also our videos interviews with open-source drone programmers / users John Hawley, Clay McLure, and Mark F. Brown and Joel Rozenweig at the recent Embedded Linux Conference, where Bacon was also a speaker.

Submission + - Creating The Open Drone Ecosystem (forbes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Over on Forbes, Jono Bacon writes about the emergence of an open drone ecosystem spearheaded by the recently announced 3D Robotics SOLO which is largely Open Source and has an Open Source SDK.

Bacon's argument is that innovation comes from where we least expect it, so open access to the code and tools is critical in helping the burgeoning drone ecosystem to thrive, solve problems, and grow.
Crime

No Justice For Victims of Identity Theft 190

Posted by timothy from the revenge-would-be-the-best-revenge dept.
chicksdaddy writes: The Christian Science Monitor's Passcode features a harrowing account of one individual's experience of identity theft. CSM reporter Sara Sorcher recounts the story of "Jonathan Franklin" (not his real name) a New Jersey business executive who woke up to find thieves had stolen his identity and racked up $30,000 in a shopping spree at luxury stores including Versace and the Apple Store. The thieves even went so far as to use personal info stolen from Franklin to have the phone company redirect calls to his home number, which meant that calls from the credit card company about the unusual spending went unanswered. Despite the heinousness of the crime and the financial cost, Sorcher notes that credit card companies and merchants both look on this kind of theft as a "victimless crime" and are more interested in getting reimbursed for their losses than trying to pursue the thieves. Police departments, also, are unable to investigate these crimes, lacking both the technical expertise and resources to do so. Franklin notes that he wasn't even required to file a police report to get reimbursed for the crime: "'As long as their loss is covered they move on to [handling] tomorrow's fraud,' Franklin observes. And that makes it harder for victims like Franklin to move on, 'In some way, I'm seeking some sense of justice,' Franklin said. 'But it's likely not going to happen.'"

Submission + - FAA: Big tech challenges for massive Washington, DC warbirds flyover (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: It will be one of the largest gatherings of flying WWII aircraft in history as 56 famous vintage warbirds will fly through restricted airspace over the National Mall Friday in remembrance of the 70th anniversary of VE-Day or Victory in Europe Day. The huge flyover, dubbed the “The Arsenal of Democracy,” of so many different types of aircraft – from seaplanes to fighters and the only flying B-29 Superfortress – was no easy undertaking.
Biotech

Electron Microscopes Close To Imaging Individual Atoms 55

Posted by timothy from the it's-down-there-somewhere-let-me-take-another-look dept.
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Science: Today's digital photos are far more vivid than just a few years ago, thanks to a steady stream of advances in optics, detectors, and software. Similar advances have also improved the ability of machines called cryo-electron microscopes (cryo-EMs) to see the Lilliputian world of atoms and molecules. Now, researchers report that they've created the highest ever resolution cryo-EM image, revealing a druglike molecule bound to its protein target at near atomic resolution. The resolution is so sharp that it rivals images produced by x-ray crystallography, long the gold standard for mapping the atomic contours of proteins. This newfound success is likely to dramatically help drugmakers design novel medicines for a wide variety of conditions.

Submission + - Electron microscopes close to imaging individual atoms (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Today’s digital photos are far more vivid than just a few years ago, thanks to a steady stream of advances in optics, detectors, and software. Similar advances have also improved the ability of machines called cryo-electron microscopes (cryo-EMs) to see the Lilliputian world of atoms and molecules. Now, researchers report that they’ve created the highest ever resolution cryo-EM image, revealing a druglike molecule bound to its protein target at near atomic resolution. The resolution is so sharp that it rivals images produced by x-ray crystallography, long the gold standard for mapping the atomic contours of proteins. This newfound success is likely to dramatically help drugmakers design novel medicines for a wide variety of conditions.
Build

Centimeter-Resolution GPS For Smartphones, VR, Drones 63

Posted by timothy from the don't-fall-off-the-edge dept.
agent elevator writes: UT Austin engineers have come up with a software fix that corrects for the errors GPS has when using the tiny antennas on smartphones. They demoed it using a VR setup and got 2-cm accuracy. For now it runs on a separate processor from the smartphone, but they say they'll fix that. The demo appears to have been done on a rooftop. VR. Outside. On a roof. Doesn't seem like a good idea, does it?

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