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Comment Re:Chimp interview ... (Score 1) 336

by lister king of smeg (#49521643) Attached to: Update: No Personhood for Chimps Yet

I think to be granted rights of a person you should;
A - Be able to ask un-coached to be considered a person. (to prevent some one from say training a chimp that sign language for "give me liberty" is rewarded with a banana and having no idea of what it is asking.
B- And pass a Turing test. (to prevent a simple script form filling out forms and DDoS the legal system with requests for person hood for computer viriuses.)

Comment Re:Trus but verify... not (Score 3) 67

The new Tor network, funded by the government, and with no back doors! Really, we promise!

Tor has always been funded by the government. The part that built Tor wants a secure way to communicate with undercover government operatives and foreign dissidents. the government isn't homogenous with one goal it has competing faction with their own conflicting goals.

Submission + - Security Companies Peddling Snake Oil - Buyer Beware Says Paul Vixie

Submitted by penciling_in
penciling_in writes: There are no silver bullets in Internet security, warns Paul Vixie in a co-authored piece along with Cyber Security Specialist, Frode Hmmedal: "Just as 'data' is being sold as 'intelligence', a lot of security technologies are being sold as 'security solutions' rather than what they for the most part are, namely very narrow focused appliances that, as a best case, can be part of your broader security effort." We have to stop playing "cops and robbers" and pretending that all of us are potential targets of nation-states, or pretending that any of our security vendors are like NORAD, warn the authors.

Submission + - Do you want a great baby, or your baby? (baltimoresun.com)

Submitted by Baruch Atta
Baruch Atta writes: If you had the choice, would you choose to have a baby that was sired by a top man, genius, athletic, with the charactoristics that you wish you had, tall, blond hair, blue eyes, maybe?
Or would you rather just father your own DNA, with all it's flaws?
This story in the Baltimore Sun
Atlanta Sperm Bank Sued Tells us just what kind of trouble may be lurking even if you choose the designer baby.
"Then last June, almost seven years after Collins gave birth to a son conceived with his sperm, they got a batch of emails from the sperm bank that unexpectedly — and perhaps mistakenly — included the donor's name. That set them on a sleuthing mission that quickly revealed he is schizophrenic, dropped out of college and had been arrested for burglary, they said in a lawsuit filed March 31 in Atlanta."

Submission + - Chrome's Push Notifications See Early Adoption From eBay, Facebook, Pinterest

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google last week released Chrome 42 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The biggest addition is undoubtedly native push notifications, which can be sent to users even after Chrome has been closed, as long as the user first grants explicit permission. Today, Google has revealed that early adopters have already signed on to leverage the feature in Chrome for desktop and Android. These include Beyond the Rack, eBay, Facebook, Pinterest, Product Hunt, SI.com’s Fansided, and Vice News. Furthermore, Roost and Mobify have started letting developers integrate Web-based push notifications into their sites. Google believes that as long as notifications are timely and personalized, they can save users the necessary time and effort of manually checking for updates from a mobile site, just like from a native app. Bringing push notifications to the web will bridge the gap between apps and sites, the company hopes.

Submission + - Old Marconi Patent Inspires Tiny New Gigahertz Antenna (ieee.org)

Submitted by agent elevator
agent elevator writes: Gehan Amaratunga and a group of engineers in England noted that the Guglielmo Marconi’s famous British patent application from 1900 had an interesting and little noticed detail. It depicted a transmitter linked to an antenna connected to a coil, which had one end dangling while the RF signal was fed to the middle of the coil. That detail inspired them to develop a way to reduce the size of a GHz antenna without significant transmission loss by using dielectrics as the radio wave emitting material instead of conductors.

Submission + - Cheaply-expanded data centers may be vulnerable to power-hacking (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A report from researchers in Virginia and Ohio suggests that on-the-cheap data center expansions could make installations vulnerable to malicious shut-downs by cyber-attackers with no special privileges — in fact the most restricted attack model, SaaS, proved in tests to be most likely to enable a complete data center shut-down. 'Power Attack: An Increasing Threat to Data Centers' [http://www.cs.wm.edu/~hnw/paper/NDSS14.pdf] posits that companies such as Google and IBM are augmenting their data center capacity without effecting the very expensive power-provisioning upgrades that should accompany growth, relying instead on 'oversubscription' and load analysis to stop the circuit breakers from tripping. The researchers present three successful models of attack, using PaaS, IaaS and SaaS, and also use publicly available information from Google's data center in Lenoir, North Carolina.

Submission + - Indosat partners with Facebook to deliver free internet in Indonesia (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Ooredoo Group’s Indonesian branch Indosat has today announced a partnership with Facebook to launch the social media giant’s Internet.org initiative in the region, offering free internet services to Indonesians. Forming part of the national program ‘Internet Tanpa Pulsa Untuk Semua’, the Indosat and Facebook alliance will see easy and free internet access offered across Indonesia. Internet.org will provide basic services to Indonesians including access to essential news coverage, health information, education, and social media. Indosat has said that it is the first internet provider in the area to offer the services, and noted that it had been a significant move in line with Ooredoo’s corporate responsibility model.

Submission + - Swift Tops List of Most-Loved Languages and Tech (dice.com)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: Perhaps developers are increasingly overjoyed at the prospect of building iOS apps with a language other than Objective-C, which Apple has positioned Swift to replace; whatever the reason, Swift topped Stack Overflow's recent survey of the "Most Loved" languages and technologies (cited by 77.6 percent of the 26,086 respondents), followed by C++11 (75.6 percent), Rust (73.8 percent), Go (72.5 percent), and Clojure (71 percent). The “Most Dreaded” languages and technologies included Salesforce (73.2 percent), Visual Basic (72 percent), WordPress (68.2 percent), MATLAB (65.6 percent), and SharePoint (62.8 percent). Those results were mirrored somewhat in recent list from RedMonk, a tech-industry analyst firm, which ranked Swift 22nd in popularity among programming languages (based on data drawn from GitHub and Stack Overflow) but climbing noticeably quickly.

Submission + - The Machines Are Coming

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Zeynep Tufekci writes in an op-ed at the NYT that machines can now process regular spoken language and not only recognize human faces, but also read their expressions. Machines can classify personality types, and have started being able to carry out conversations with appropriate emotional tenor. Machines are getting better than humans at figuring out who to hire, who’s in a mood to pay a little more for that sweater, and who needs a coupon to nudge them toward a sale. It turns out that most of what we think of as expertise, knowledge and intuition is being deconstructed and recreated as an algorithmic competency, fueled by big data. "Machines aren’t used because they perform some tasks that much better than humans, but because, in many cases, they do a “good enough” job while also being cheaper, more predictable and easier to control than quirky, pesky humans," writes Tufekci. "Technology in the workplace is as much about power and control as it is about productivity and efficiency."

According to Tufekci technology is being used in many workplaces: to reduce the power of humans, and employers’ dependency on them, whether by replacing, displacing or surveilling them. Optimists insist that we’ve been here before, during the Industrial Revolution, when machinery replaced manual labor, and all we need is a little more education and better skills but Tufekci says that one historical example is no guarantee of future events. "Confronting the threat posed by machines, and the way in which the great data harvest has made them ever more able to compete with human workers, must be about our priorities," concludes Tufekci. "This problem is not us versus the machines, but between us, as humans, and how we value one another."

Submission + - 3D Printing Market is Rapidly Growing to $20 Billion Industry by 2019 (blogspot.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: ZDNet reported on the findings from analysts Canalys, who previously announced that the 3D printing market was worth $3.3 billion worldwide. Canalys stated that the sector is on track to generate around $5.2 billion this year, and will "become a double-digit billion dollar market" by mid-2016, before growing to a value of $20 billion by 2019.

Submission + - More Problems At The Patent Office

Submitted by BarbaraHudson
BarbaraHudson writes: The work habits of examiners at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) have once again come under scrutiny and been found wanting, according to a new report.

An audit by the Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Commerce, USPTO’s parent agency, showed that supervisors have no way to know whether examiners are issuing quality patents that will ensure an innovation is protected.

“We found that USPTO’s performance appraisal plans and related policies cannot distinguish between examiners who issue high-quality decisions versus those who issue low-quality decisions,” the report said. In addition, auditors found that nearly all examiners are graded “above average” on performance evaluations, entitling them to bonuses averaging more than $6,000 per year.

The inspector general last year found multiple abuses in USPTO’s telework program, including end-loading, examiners being paid full salaries despite not working for several weeks a year and even one examiner who’d installed a “mouse-mover” program on his home computer so auditors couldn’t tell he was not working. When it was discovered, supervisors did nothing.

It is unknown it an examiner filed a patent for a "method and device to move the mouse to defraud taxpayers."

Submission + - FBI can't cut Internet and pose as cable guy to search property (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Harrah for some common sense:
A federal judge issued a stern rebuke Friday to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's method for breaking up an illegal online betting ring. The Las Vegas court frowned on the FBI's ruse of disconnecting Internet access to $25,000-per-night villas at Caesar's Palace Hotel and Casino. FBI agents posed as the cable guy and secretly searched the premises.

The government claimed the search was legal because the suspects invited the agents into the room to fix the Internet. US District Judge Andrew P. Gordon wasn't buying it. He ruled that if the government could get away with such tactics like those they used to nab gambling kingpin Paul Phua and some of his associates, then the government would have carte blanche power to search just about any property.

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