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Privacy

Automakers Unwilling To Share Driver Data (Yet) 151

Posted by Soulskill from the give-it-time dept.
An anonymous reader writes: With Apple and Google both vying for a place in your car's dashboard, you might start wondering to what extent the data you generate while driving might be analyzed or shared with advertisers. The good news is that car manufacturers are not keen to give this data away — some have specifically said they won't let Google or Apple get their hands on it. The bad news is that they feel this way because they see your data as a new source of profit — they're just deciding how best to harvest it. One executive at Ford said, "We need to control access to that data. We need to protect our ability to create value." According to the article, "Auto companies hope to profit from in-vehicle data in a variety of ways, including the provision of travel planning services and auto repair and service information they hope will bring drivers to dealerships. They also expect to work with insurance companies, providing information that would allow insurers to base their rates on a driver's behavior behind the wheel."
The Internet

Undersea Cable Break Disrupts Life In Northern Mariana Islands 102

Posted by timothy from the pigeons-brought-this-news dept.
An anonymous reader writes: The Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands experienced a devastating undersea cable break on Wednesday, with phone, Internet, SMS, banking services, the National Weather Service office, and airliners all being affected. The US territory depends on a single undersea fiber optic connection with Guam for its connectivity to the outside world (except for a backup microwave link, which was itself damaged during a recent storm). While services are in the process of being restored, this may be a prime example of the need for reliable backup systems in our "always connected" mindset.
Democrats

Barney Frank Defends Political Hypocrisy, Game Theory Explains It 191

Posted by timothy from the consider-the-tsa dept.
HughPickens.com writes with a link to Steven I. Weiss's Atlantic article which says game theory can shed light both on what is happening in Washington and on how the bargaining power of its negotiating parties may evolve over time and comes to the conclusion that hypocrisy is essential to the functioning of Congress -- in fact, it's the only tool legislators have after they've rooted out real corruption. "Legislators do not pay each other for votes, and every member of a parliament in a democratic society is legally equal to every member," writes Congressman Barney Frank in his new memoir, Frank: A Life in Politics From the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage. For legislators, cooperation is a form of political currency. They act in concert with other legislators, even at the expense of their own beliefs, in order to bank capital or settle accounts."

Game theory sets out conditions under which negotiating parties end up cooperating, and why they sometimes fail to do so. It does so based on analyzing what drives individuals in the majority of bargaining situations: incentives, access to information, initial power conditions, the extent of mutual trust, and accountability enforcement. Instead of seeing political flip-flopping as a necessary evil, Frank suggests it is inherent to democracy and according to Frank if there's any blame to be doled out in connection with political hypocrisy, it's to be placed on the heads of voters who criticize legislators for it, instead of accepting it as a necessary part of democratic politics.
AI

An Organic Computer Using Four Wired-Together Rat Brains 190

Posted by timothy from the nothing-creepy-here-either-bob dept.
Jason Koebler writes: The brains of four rats have been interconnected to create a "Brainet" capable of completing computational tasks better than any one of the rats would have been able to on its own. Explains Duke University's Dr. Miguel Nicolelis: "Recently, we proposed that Brainets, i.e. networks formed by multiple animal brains, cooperating and exchanging information in real time through direct brain-to-brain interfaces, could provide the core of a new type of computing device: an organic computer. Here, we describe the first experimental demonstration of such a Brainet, built by interconnecting four adult rat brains."
Graphics

NVIDIA Shakes Its Flowing Mane With Life-Like HairWorks 1.1 Demo 61

Posted by timothy from the only-her-hairdresser-knows-for-sure dept.
MojoKid writes: Previously, you might not have thought much about a wig on a manikin, but checking out NVIDIA's latest tech demo, as a gamer or 3D graphics artists, hair can be pretty interesting. The video is of NVIDIA HairWorks 1.1, a simulation and rendering tool for creating lifelike hair and fur in video games. In the clip, NVIDIA shows off a Fabio-style hairdo with about 500,000 hairs that bounce and sway as the camera circles and forces move the hair. If this was a real wig, it might unseat one of the most boring videos ever. However, as an example of what modern 3D graphics can do with hair physics, it's pretty darn cool. Previous demos of HairWorks showed up to 22,000 strands of hair, making the jump to half a million much much more significant. The video was recorded with ShadowPlay on a GeForce GTX 980, which has some serious muscle, though it's not the most powerful card in NVIDIA's lineup. What's cooler than making life-like human hair? Putting flowing manes on vicious monsters, of course. Apparently, NVIDIA HairWorks simulation technology also plays a role in bringing more than a dozen creatures to life in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
Security

Crypto Experts Blast Gov't Backdoors For Encryption 102

Posted by timothy from the mr-potatohead-mr-potatohead dept.
loid_void writes with a link to a New York Times report about some of the world's best-known cryptography experts, who have prepared a report which concludes that there is no viable technical solution which "would allow the American and British governments to gain "exceptional access" to encrypted communications without putting the world's most confidential data and critical infrastructure in danger." From the article: [T]he government’s plans could affect the technology used to lock financial institutions and medical data, and poke a hole in mobile devices and the countless other critical systems — including pipelines, nuclear facilities, the power grid — that are moving online rapidly. ... “The problems now are much worse than they were in 1997,” said Peter G. Neumann, a co-author of both the 1997 report and the new paper, who is a computer security pioneer at SRI International, the Silicon Valley research laboratory. “There are more vulnerabilities than ever, more ways to exploit them than ever, and now the government wants to dumb everything down further.” The authors include Neumann, Harold Abelson, Susan Landau, and Bruce Schneier.
Security

Hacking Team Hacked, Attackers Grab 400GB of Internal Data 95

Posted by Soulskill from the bet-they-have-a-case-of-the-mondays dept.
Several readers sent word that notorious surveillance company Hacking Team has itself been hacked. Attackers made off with 400GB worth of emails, documents, and source code. The company is known for providing interception tools to government and law enforcement agencies. According to the leaked files, Hacking Team has customers in Egypt, South Korea, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Lebanon, Mongolia, Russia, Germany, Sudan, and the United States — to name a few. It has been labeled an enemy of the internet by Reporters Without Borders. "Clients have had their passwords exposed as well, as several documents related to contracts and configurations have been circulating online." Nobody knows yet who perpetrated the hack.
Education

AP CS Test Takers and Pass Rates Up, Half of Kids Don't Get Sparse Arrays At All 128

Posted by timothy from the kids-these-days dept.
theodp writes: Each June, the College Board tweets out teasers of the fuller breakouts of its Advanced Placement (AP) test results, which aren't made available until the fall. So, here's a roundup of this year's AP Computer Science tweetstorm: 1. "Wow — massive gains in AP Computer Science participation (25% growth) AND scores this year; big increase in % of students earning 4s & 5s!" 2. "2015 AP Computer Science scores: 5: 24.4%; 4: 24.6%; 3: 15.3%; 2: 7.1%; 1: 28.6%." [3 or above is passing] 3."Count them: a whopping 66 AP Computer Science students out of 50,000 worldwide earned all 80 pts possible on this year's exam." 4. "Remember that AP exam standards are equated from year to year, so when scores go up, it's a direct indication of increased student mastery." 5. "Many AP Computer Science students did very well on Q1 (2D array processing–diverse array); >20% earned all 9/9 pts" [2015 AP CS A Free-Response Questions] 6. "The major gap in this year's AP Computer Sci classrooms seems to be array list processing; Q3 (sparse array): 47% of students got 0/9 pts."

Comment Re:That's good (Score 1) 146

by Blue Stone (#50008515) Attached to: BBC Curates The "Right To Be Forgotten" Links That Google Can't

Why are we letting this hypothetical employer off the hook for basing their hiring decision on this non-issue? That's my question.

The narrative that you pose is one where people must be protected from the unreasonable views and actions of third parties as a result of finding information out efficiently. Is that feasible, practical, reasonable? And how are we to ascertain if it is worthwhile? By what metric?
Censorship

BBC Curates The "Right To Be Forgotten" Links That Google Can't 146

Posted by timothy from the good-on-them dept.
An anonymous reader writes, quoting the BBC's Internet Blog: "Since a European Court of Justice ruling last year, individuals have the right to request that search engines remove certain web pages from their search results. Those pages usually contain personal information about individuals." The BBC, however, is not obligated to completely censor the results, and so has taken an approach that other media outlets would do well to emulate: they're keeping a list of those pages delisted by the search engines, and making them easy to find through the BBC itself. Why? The BBC has decided to make clear to licence fee payers which pages have been removed from Google's search results by publishing this list of links. Each month, we'll republish this list with new removals added at the top. We are doing this primarily as a contribution to public policy. We think it is important that those with an interest in the “right to be forgotten” can ascertain which articles have been affected by the ruling. We hope it will contribute to the debate about this issue. We also think the integrity of the BBC's online archive is important and, although the pages concerned remain published on BBC Online, removal from Google searches makes parts of that archive harder to find.
United States

Google, Apple, and Others Remove Content Related To the Confederate Flag 818

Posted by Soulskill from the symbols-are-for-the-symbol-minded dept.
davek writes with news that Google is removing results related to the Confederate Flag from Google Shopping, the company's online marketplace. They're also blocking advertisements involving the flag. They say, "We have determined that the Confederate flag violates our Ads policies, which don't allow content that's generally perceived as expressing hate toward a particular group." At the same time, Apple is removing from the App Store any games or other software featuring the Confederate Flag. This, of course, follows the recent shooting in South Carolina, which triggered a nationwide debate over whether the flag should be flown at government buildings (or anywhere). Major online merchant websites like eBay and Amazon have already taken the step of banning merchandise relating to the flag.

Comment Re:Ugh (Score 4, Insightful) 127

Ad blocking was born in response to the arms race advertisers launched (and lets be fair here, also the websites that hosted them) where their ads became increasingly intolerable, obnoxious, disturbing and disruptive (to simple reading comprehension, never mind anything else). This behaviour *necessitated* a response; intitially simple pop-up blockers (now integrated into browsers AS STANDARD!) and gradually moving forward.

If anything, we've seen a lull in hostilities for the past few years as ad blockers have proved very successful, limited only by their install base.

The next round will probably involve websites refusing to show content until adblocking software is disabled (seen here and there already) and if/as this becomes more prevalent, ad blockers responding with stealthing mechanisms.

Since users ultimately own the rendering device, I'm not certain the advertisers can ever win. And god knows, they lost the moral argument long, long ago.
The Media

Sunday Times Issues DMCA Takedown Notice To the Intercept Over Snowden Article 125

Posted by Soulskill from the best-defense-is-a-hilariously-weak-offense dept.
An anonymous reader writes: On Sunday, British newspaper The Sunday Times published an article citing anonymous UK government sources claiming that the cache of documents taken by Edward Snowden was successfully decrypted by the Russians and Chinese. Shortly thereafter, Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept published scathing criticism of the article. In Greenwald's article, he included a photograph of the newspaper's front page, where the story was featured. Yesterday, The Intercept received a DMCA takedown notice from News Corp alleging that the photograph infringed upon their copyright. The Intercept is refusing to comply with the takedown demand.
Businesses

Restaurateur Loses Copyright Suit To BMI 389

Posted by samzenpus from the pay-up dept.
Frosty P writes: BMI claims Amici III in Linden, New York didn't have a license when it played four tunes in its eatery one night last year, including the beloved "Bennie and the Jets" and "Brown Sugar," winning $24,000 earlier this year, and over $8,200 in attorney's fees. Giovanni Lavorato, who has been in business for 25 years, says the disc DJ brought into the eatery paid a fee to play tunes. "It's ridiculous for me to pay somebody also," he said. "This is not a nightclub. This is not a disco joint . . . How many times do they want to get paid for the stupid music?"

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