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Comment Re:Cool world (Score 4, Informative) 216

by dissy (#49571197) Attached to: US Successfully Tests Self-Steering Bullets

This instantly reminded me of an 80's movie called Runaway with Tom Selleck, who is a part of a special task force to hunt down and destroy malfunctioning "runaway" robots.

Their handguns could lock on a target and program the bullets just before firing to stay on their target, although they looked more like miniature rocket based missiles with their own tiny engines and guidance fins.

I remember a number of the larger scenes giving a bullet-point-of-view type thing as the target goes running away and try to evade the shots by going around corners and obstacles, even purposely missing other people, before embedding into their target and exploding.

http://xirdalium.net/2012/02/1...

The above link has a picture of the bullet from this movie, and even goes on about a real prototype from Sandia National Laboratories back in 2012

https://share.sandia.gov/news/...

I wonder how much these two groups worked together on these.
Crime

TeslaCrypt Isn't All That Cryptic 52

Posted by timothy from the nelson-laugh dept.
citpyrc writes: TeslaCrypt, the latest-and-greatest ransomware branch off of the CryptoWall family, claims to the unwitting user that his/her documents are encrypted with "a unique public key generated for this computer". This coudn't be farther from truth. In actuality, the developers of this malware appear to have been lazy and implemented encryption using symmetric AES256 with a decryption key generated on the user's machine. If any of your machines are afflicted, Talos has developed a tool that can be used to generate the user's machine's symmetric key and decrypt all of the ransomed files.

Submission + - Russia 1,700 ~~~ America 0 (wakeupfromyourslumber.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: Russia has evacuated 1,700 of its citizens from Yemen while the total number of United States citizens the government of the United States of America has evacuated from Yemen stands at a perfect ZERO

In fact, Russia has evacuated American citizens from Yemens while the State Department of the United States of America has yet to do anything
Please watch the vids at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
and at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... and read the news at
http://rt.com/news/253001-yeme...
and at
http://rt.com/news/252173-yeme...

Submission + - The creation of Fact-Free-Zone in the modern world (soufangroup.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: This report outlines how the Islamic State is able to create a Fact Free Zone with very little objective reporting coming from areas under the group’s control or areas it is contesting and the way Islamic States has purported the social media services, from Facebook, to Youtube, to Tweeter, to further its course

In this age of ubiquitous information-sharing technology the Islamic State’s media effort is an integral and essential part of its operations, on a par with its military and administrative effort. In this respect it is greatly helped by the decentralized nature of social media (particularly Twitter), which has allowed each of its supporters effectively to create and operate his or her own ministry of information, echoing a standard party line as well as creating and spreading IS’s messaging. In effect, IS is crowdsourcing its own propaganda

However, Islamic States' deliberate targeting, kidnapping, and brutal killing of journalists has resulted in a vacuum in which the job for 'news reporting' falls to the laps of avid supporters of the Islamic State

There is no precedent for this, given the novelty of social media platforms and file-sharing sites, and so, in a counterintuitive move, the group has indeed maximized control of its message by giving up control of its delivery

The importance of social media to the group is evident in the way that pictures of leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declaring the Caliphate on July 4, 2014 appeared on Twitter before the video of his full speech was uploaded on YouTube, helping to ensure that it would be carried on most major international news networks

For example, links to the violent hour-long video “Flames of War,” issued by The Islamic State on September 16, 2014 through its official outlet, al Hayat Media, were posted in several places on the widely-used file-sharing site justpaste.it. These links were then tweeted out to tens of thousands of online supporters, who then re-tweeted the links, and, importantly, created new pages and links on justpaste.it. The video was also uploaded to YouTube on many accounts in order to overcome the inevitable suppression of the video for violating YouTube standards of use. Just one randomly selected page promoting the video among dozens of others, recorded 18,034 views in just seven hours on September 18, 2014, showing the ease, breadth, and speed with which the group is able to spread its message directly to the intended audience. The problems with censoring such a decentralized distribution system were well-illustrated by the two days it took mainstream social media to take notice of what was happening

The crowdsourcing of messages negates the need for a single point of contact. This might leave the group vulnerable to unofficial messages polluting its media stream but it is a small annoyance compared to the gains it reaps

Submission + - Microsoft infringes other's patents (reuters.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: A judge of the International Trade Commission of the United States of America has found that the software giant used InterDigital Inc's technology in its mobile phones without permission

The judge, Theodore Essex, said that Microsoft infringed two wireless cellular patents owned by InterDigital, and that it would not be against the public interest to ban the Microsoft devices from being imported into the United States

The ITC has the authority to stop the import of products that it determines infringe a U.S. patent. Companies frequently sue at the ITC to win an import ban and in district court to win damages

InterDigital Executive Vice President Lawrence Shay said the company looks forward to "continued discussion" with Microsoft to license its patents

The case at the ITC is No. 337-613

Comment Re:Don't forget legacy BROWSERS. (Score 3, Insightful) 218

by PCM2 (#49565481) Attached to: JavaScript Devs: Is It Still Worth Learning jQuery?

This is tricky. It's tempting to support legacy browsers, but if you do too good a job of supporting them, you don't incentivize your users to ever get their sh*t sorted, and upgrade their browsers. It's a vicious cycle I am eager to avoid.

Yeah, but when your "users" are more properly called "customers" -- or even more important, "potential customers" -- then some web dev's desire to preach the gospel must take a back seat to doing the job the way it needs to be done, rightly or wrongly.

It's fine to push for strict browser standards when the only people who will ever see your web applications are within your own organization. Public-facing sites are a different matter.

Submission + - A Cheap, Ubiquitous Earthquake Warning System (ieee.org)

Submitted by Tekla Perry
Tekla Perry writes: Earthquake alert systems that give a 10 or 20 second warning of an impending temblor, enabling automatic systems to shut down and people to take cover, are hugely expensive to build and operate. (One estimate is $38.3 milllion for equipment to span California, and another $16.1 million annually to operate.) But a Palo Alto entrepreneur thinks he's got a way to sense earthquakes and provide alerts far more cheaply and with much greater resolution. And he's got money from the National Science Foundation to begin the first test of his system--covering the Bay Area from Santa Cruz to Napa and the cities of Hollister, Coalinga, and Parkfield. He starts that test next month.

Submission + - 10 Easy Rules to Curb Over-optimistic Reporting in Computational Biology (plos.org)

Submitted by sandbagger
sandbagger writes: In in biomedical research in particular, is most often overoptimistic with respect to the superiority of new therapies or the strength of association between a risk factors and outcomes. Published results appear more more spectacular, or more satisfactory than they actually would if they reflected the truth.

Causes of this problem are diverse, numerous, and interrelated. The effects of 'fishing for significance' strategies or selective/incomplete reporting are exacerbated by design issues or publication bias. Research and guidelines on how to reduce overoptimistic reporting in the context of computational research, including computational biology as an important special case, however, are surprisingly scarce. Many methodological articles published in computational literature report the superior performance of new methods , too often in general terms and—directly or indirectly—implying that the presented positive results are generalizable to other settings.

Such overoptimistic reporting confuses readers, makes literature less credible and more difficult to interpret, and might even ultimately lead to a waste of resources in some cases.

Here are ten simple rules to address the problem of overoptimistic reporting.

Submission + - More Broadband Competition for Comcast and Verizon (xconomy.com)

Submitted by gthuang88
gthuang88 writes: Just days after Comcast and Time Warner Cable abandoned their mega-merger plans, wireless Internet service provider Webpass is expanding to Boston, its fifth major market. The region can boast of MIT, a rich history in Internet and Web, and lots of networking companies---but very little in the way of broadband competition, until now. Webpass’s very high-speed service, which is currently available in the Bay Area, San Diego, Miami, and Chicago, should be up and running in downtown Boston in three or four weeks. The company joins NetBlazr, Monkeybrains, and other broadband tech companies that are finding a niche as more people opt to “cut the cord” from big cable and telecom providers.

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