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Submission + - "Calibration" error changes Illinois touchscreen votes (watchdog.org) 4

Submitted by BobandMax
BobandMax writes: In a truly shocking occurrence, a Cook County, Illinois touchscreen voting device changed votes from Republican to Democrat. Voting officials removed the machine and determined that a calibration error was at fault. The voter who brought the problem to their attention, Republican state representative candidate Jim Moynihan, was later "allowed" to vote for Republicans. Some things never change, regardless technology.

Submission + - Million of British Imperial Documents Being Digitised (bbc.com)

Submitted by Intrepid imaginaut
Intrepid imaginaut writes: A transgender singer hits stardom in Baghdad. Officials scramble to impose order after a Kuwaiti restaurant is found to be selling cat meat. Gulf royals on an official visit to London are left marooned in a drab south London suburb because of a shortage of hotel rooms in the West End.

These are some of the quirky stories hiding in nine miles of shelving at the British Library (BL) that hold the India Office Records — millions of documents recording Britain's 350-year presence in the sub-continent.

The India Office did not only administer India, it also exercised colonial rule over an area stretching west as far as Aden. That's why the files cover Persia and Arabia. And the reason the stories are coming to light is that the Qatar Foundation has paid £8.7m for nearly half a million documents relating to the Gulf to be digitised.

Work started in 2012, and many of those documents have now gone online at the Qatar National Library's digital library portal.

Submission + - Oldest human genome reveals when our ancestors had sex with Neandertals (sciencemag.org) 1

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: DNA recovered from a femur bone in Siberia belongs to a man who lived 45,000 years ago, according to a new study. His DNA was so well preserved that scientists were able to sequence his entire genome, making his the oldest complete modern human genome on record. Like present-day Europeans and Asians, the man has about 2% Neandertal DNA. But his Neandertal genes are clumped together in long strings, as opposed to chopped up into fragments, indicating that he lived not long after the two groups swapped genetic material. The man likely lived 7000 to 13,000 years after modern humans and Neandertals mated, dating the mixing to 52,000 to 58,000 years ago, the researchers conclude. That’s a much smaller window than the previous best estimate of 37,000 to 86,000 years ago.

Submission + - Google announces Inbox, a new take on email organization (blogspot.com)

Submitted by Z80xxc!
Z80xxc! writes: The Gmail team announced Inbox this morning, a new way to manage email. Inbox is email, but organizes it differently. Messages are grouped into "bundles" of similar types, "highlights" pull out and display key information from messages, and messages can be "snoozed" to come back later as a reminder. Inbox is invite-only right now, and you can email inbox@google.com to request an invite.

Submission + - 6,000 Year Old Temple Unearthed in Ukraine

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A massive archaeological dig of an ancient Ukrainian village first begun in 2009 has yielded a discovery that I sort of hope ends up inspiring a video game: a massive, scary-sounding temple. From the article: "Inside the temple, archaeologists found the remains of eight clay platforms, which may have been used as altars, the finds suggested. A platform on the upper floor contains "numerous burnt bones of lamb, associated with sacrifice," write Burdo and Videiko, of the Institute of Archaeology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. The floors and walls of all five rooms on the upper floor were "decorated by red paint, which created [a] ceremonial atmosphere."
Maybe this is what Putin has been after.

Submission + - The 'Traditional' Database Administrator Is Doomed (dice.com)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: Traditionally, database administrators (also known as DBAs) have been at the center of the data-management universe: There was always a need to have someone optimize the performance of applications by making sure data was well structured. But with the rise of Hadoop and other Big Data platforms, there’s no longer a premium on structure. In fact, many programmers are choosing to write their applications to Hadoop or other classes of so-called NoSQL databases to specifically eliminate the need to rely on having a DBA. That's not to say the "classic" DBA is going away, as there will always be transaction-processing applications invoking structured data; but even there, the rise of NoSQL alternatives such as Apache Cassandra is changing the way processing is done. Database administrators are going to need to evolve to meet this brave new world — but what else is new?

Submission + - Delivering Malicious Android Apps Hidden In Image Files

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers have found a way to deliver a malicious app to Android users by hiding it into what seems to be an encrypted image file, which is then delivered via a legitimate, seemingly innocuous wrapper app. Fortinet malware researcher Axelle Apvrille and reverse engineer Ange Albertini created a custom tool they dubbed AngeCryption, which allows them to encrypt the payload Android application package (APK) and make it look like an image (PNG, JPG) file . They also had to create another APK that carries the "booby-trapped" image file and which can decrypt it to unveil the malicious APK file and install it. A malicious app thusly encrypted is nearly invisible to reverse engineers, and possibly even to AV solutions and Google's Android Bouncer.

Submission + - E-citizens unite: Estonia opens its digital borders

Submitted by bauernakke
bauernakke writes: Estonia has invited people to register as e-residents — a step towards a world where a person’s identity online matters just as much as their identity offline.
The deal offers lucrative tax options as well as the convenience of being able to do business from anywhere in the world.

Submission + - Statoil's oil find in North Sea bigger than expected

Submitted by stephendavion
stephendavion writes: An oil find by Statoil in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea is much bigger than earlier thought and the find could be tied into the Grane field, the firm said in a statement on Tuesday. The discovery, first proven in 1992, contains between 30 and 80 million barrels of recoverable oil, well above previous estimates for about 6 million barrels, the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate added.

Submission + - Using Apple's Metal Compute Shaders for Parallel Processing in iOS

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Apple's Metal is a new technology that gives developers low overhead access to the GPU via a C++ style language. As well as the commonly used vertex and fragment shaders, Metal supports compute shaders for parallel processing.

In a series of two blog posts (here and here), Simon Gladman demonstrates how to implement Metal compute shaders under Swift and then run a reaction diffusion model using cellular automata on an iPhone.

Submission + - Australian physicists build reversible tractor beam (anu.edu.au)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Physicists at Australian National University have developed a tiny tractor beam that improves in several ways upon previous attempts. First, it operates on scales which, while still tiny, are higher than in earlier experiments. The beam can move particles up to 200 microns in diameter, and it can do so over a distance of 20 cm. "Unlike previous techniques, which used photon momentum to impart motion, the ANU tractor beam relies on the energy of the laser heating up the particles and the air around them. The ANU team demonstrated the effect on gold-coated hollow glass particles. The particles are trapped in the dark center of the beam. Energy from the laser hits the particle and travels across its surface, where it is absorbed creating hotspots on the surface. Air particles colliding with the hotspots heat up and shoot away from the surface, which causes the particle to recoil, in the opposite direction. To manipulate the particle, the team move the position of the hotspot by carefully controlling the polarization of the laser beam.

Submission + - Facebook to DEA: Stop Using Phony Profiles to Nab Criminals

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: CNNMoney reports that Facebook has sent a letter to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration demanding that agents stop impersonating users on the social network. "The DEA's deceptive actions... threaten the integrity of our community," Facebook chief security officer Joe Sullivan wrote to DEA head Michele Leonhart. "Using Facebook to impersonate others abuses that trust and makes people feel less safe and secure when using our service." Facebook's letter comes on the heels of reports that the DEA impersonated a young woman on Facebook to communicate with suspected criminals, and the Department of Justice argued that they had the right to do so. Facebook contends that their terms and Community Standards — which the DEA agent had to acknowledge and agree to when registering for a Faceook account — expressly prohibit the creation and use of fake accounts. "Isn't this the definition of identity theft?" says Privacy researcher Runa Sandvik. The DEA has declined to comment and referred all questions to the Justice Department, which has not returned CNNMoney's calls.

Submission + - Dr.Who to teach kids to code (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by DCFC
DCFC writes: The BBC is releasing a game to help ten 8-11 year olds get into coding. Based on Dr.Who, it alternates between standard platform game and programming puzzles that introduce the ideas of sequence, loops, if..then, variables and a touch of event driven programming...and you get to program a Dalek to make him more powerful, apparently the BBC thinks upgrading psychopathic racist death machines is a good idea.

Submission + - First Demonstration Of Artificial Intelligence On A Quantum Computer

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: Machine learning algorithms use a training dataset to learn how to recognise features in images and use this 'knowledge' to spot the same features in new images. The computational complexity of this task is such that the time required to solve it increases in polynomial time with the number of images in the training set and the complexity of the "learned" feature. So it's no surprise that quantum computers ought to be able to rapidly speed up this process. Indeed, a group of theoretical physicists last year designed a quantum algorithm that solves this problem in logarithmic time rather than polynomial, a significant improvement. Now, a Chinese team has successfully implemented this artificial intelligence algorithm on a working quantum computer, for the first time. The information processor is a standard nuclear magnetic resonance quantum computer capable of handling 4 qubits. The team trained it to recognise the difference between the characters '6' and '9' and then asked it to classify a set of handwritten 6s and 9s accordingly, which it did successfully. The team say this is the first time that this kind of artificial intelligence has ever been demonstrated on a quantum computer and opens the way to the more rapid processing of other big data sets--provided, of course, that physicists can build more powerful quantum computers.

Submission + - Annals of sleazy domain name squatting

Submitted by lpress
lpress writes: The domain name ebola.com is for sale. In the meantime, the folks who own it are redirecting to ebola.org, where you can read frightening articles and purchase BHT, a nutritional supplement that could help with ebola. I don't know which is more depressing — the fact that someone would try to exploit the ebola epidemic this way or that there are enough people who would pay for BHT to fend off ebola to make squatting on disease domain names a profitable business.

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