70585963
submission
jfruh writes:
Foxconn, which supplies much of Apple's manufacturing muscle and has been criticized for various labor sins, is now moving to hire employees who won't complain because they're robots. The company expects 70 percent of its assembly line work to be robot-driven within three years.
70585897
submission
jfruh writes:
Samsung may be dominating Android handset sales, but the company as a whole is cautious about its future outlooks, and has chosen to freeze the pay of employees in its home base of South Korea, the first such move since the bad old days of 2009. Is Samsung the canary in the tech coal mine? Is winter coming?
70568891
submission
itwbennett writes:
A chipset Qualcomm is introducing at Mobile World Congress next week is likely to make mobile operators happy and some Wi-Fi fans nervous. The FSM 99xx chipset for small cells, along with a matching transceiver that will go into mobile devices, are among the first products coming for so-called Licensed Assisted Access. LAA, sometimes called LTE-Unlicensed, is one of several emerging techniques to take advantage of the large amount of spectrum available in unlicensed bands used by Wi-Fi.
70568609
submission
itwbennett writes:
Google has released as open source a framework for HTTP/2, the newly updated standard for transmitting Web pages and Web applications over the Internet. The software, called gRPC, handles remote procedure calls (RPC) between servers and clients, such as browsers or mobile applications. The gRPC framework powers most of Google’s services today, fielding tens of billions of Web calls every second.
70558991
submission
itwbennett writes:
Earlier this month Reverend Dr. Christopher J. Benek raised eyebrows on the Internet by stating his belief that Christians should seek to convert Artificial Intelligences to Christianity if and when they become autonomous. Of course that's assuming that robots are born atheists, not to mention that there's still a vast difference between what it means to be autonomous and what it means to be human.
70556475
submission
itwbennett writes:
Sharp is launching a pair of landline phones designed to counter a growing form of fraud in Japan that preys upon the elderly. The 'ore ore' ('it’s me, it’s me') fraudsters pretend to be grandchildren in an emergency and convince their victims to send money, generally via ATM. Sharp’s new phones are designed to alert seniors to the dangers of unknown callers. When potential victims receive that are not registered in the internal memory of Sharp's new phones, their LED bars glow red and the phones go into anti-scam mode. An automated message then tells the caller that the call is being recorded and asks for the caller to state his or her name before the call is answered.
70548887
submission
jfruh writes:
DeepMind, a British AI company recently acquired by Google, has taught software called the Deep Q-network (DQN) onto classic Atari 2600 video games. Well, taught is the wrong word: the AI takes as input only the pixel information from the screen and the score; with an iterative process and a biologically inspired architecture, DQN learned the winning strategy for a number of games, though it fared poorly on games that required long-term planning.
70548781
submission
jfruh writes:
Most large organizations use software to keep track of the assets they control, use, or sell. But keeping track of widgets in a warehouse is very different from keeping track of something a few feet wide and miles long — like a highway, an oil pipeline, or the London Underground's train lines. Transport for London is using IBM's linear asset management software to try to improve its dodgy uptime record.
70543637
submission
itwbennett writes:
Uber Technologies is offering free rides on its uberX ride-sharing service in the South Korean capital of Seoul, after city authorities intensified their crackdown on illegal drivers by offering a reward to residents who report Uber drivers to police. South Korean law prohibits unregistered drivers from soliciting passengers using private or rented vehicles and carries a penalty of up to two years in prison or fines of up to 20 million won.
70517081
submission
itwbennett writes:
The U.S. Department of Justice and the Department of State’s Transnational Organized Crime Rewards Program announced on Tuesday that they are offering a $3 million reward for information leading to the arrest or conviction of a Russian man suspected of having served as an administrator for the destructive Gameover Zeus botnet. Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev is charged in the U.S. with several crimes related to Gameover Zeus, which targeted banking credentials and other personal information over a two-year period.
70513373
submission
itwbennett writes:
By just about any objective measure, there’s been rapid and unprecedented growth in the number of programmers asking about, learning, and writing code in Swift. Not surprising, given that Apple has designated Swift to be the eventual replacement for Objective-C. But the volume of interest in Swift doesn't mean that developers should be (or are) diving in. Erica Sadun, an experienced Apple developer who’s been using Swift since Day One, sums up developers' current relationship with Swift like this: 'It takes some grit to be doing Swift development at this time.'
70513133
submission
itwbennett writes:
Security researchers are urging users to install new Samba security updates in order to address a critical vulnerability that allows attackers to execute arbitrary code with root privileges. 'It can be exploited by a malicious Samba client, by sending specially-crafted packets to the Samba server,' the Red Hat security team said in a blog post. 'No authentication is required to exploit this flaw. It can result in remotely controlled execution of arbitrary code as root.'
70511147
submission
jfruh writes:
This may not come as a huge shock, but the director of the NSA doesn't believe that you have the right to encrypt your data in a way that the government can't access it. At a cybersecurity policy event, Michael Rogers said that the U.S. should be able to craft a policy that allows the NSA and law enforcement agencies to read encrypted data when they need to.
70511029
submission
jfruh writes:
If you're interested in making tiny Internet-capable devices at home, you no longer need an engineering degree to figure it out. ARM and IBM are teaming up to offer the mbed IoT Starter Kit—ethernet Edition, running ARM's mbed OS and connecting to IBM's BlueMix cloud.
70494541
submission
itwbennett writes:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have created a new circuit design that could lead to more power-efficient sensors. Many sensors remain idle most of the time and become active when they send or receive data. The researchers have designed a circuit for a transmitter that could reduce energy leakage by up to 100 times when a sensor is in that idle state. That could extend the battery life of sensors by many months.
