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Comment: First interesting comment... (Score 2) 102

by openfrog (#43602987) Attached to: IBM Makes a Movie Out of Atoms

Atom jokes are fine, but the parent is the first interesting or informative comment on the whole thread.

The "making of" linked at the end of the movie is well made and stimulating. I particularly liked this comment from the director of the project:

"If I can do this and I can get a thousand kids join science, rather than go to law school, I would be super happy".

+ - The World Wide Web is twenty today

Submitted by openfrog
openfrog writes "On 30 April 1993 CERN published a statement that made World Wide Web ("W3", or simply "the web") technology available on a royalty-free basis. By making the software required to run a web server freely available, along with a basic browser and a library of code, the web was allowed to flourish.

By late 1993 there were over 500 known web servers, and the WWW accounted for 1% of internet traffic, which seemed a lot in those days (the rest was remote access, e-mail and file transfer). Twenty years on, there are an estimated 630 million websites online.

The CERN has a very nice commemoration page."

Comment: Re:If we can't manage a planets resources... (Score 2) 414

by openfrog (#43440049) Attached to: Stephen Hawking Warns Against Confining Ourselves To Earth

...then we are basically a cosmic cancer.

Quite right. Furthermore, and this is where I find difficult to follow Hawking's spiel, if we entertain the dream that we will eventually find another place to live, this will be used to keep the lid, the already quite heavy lid, on efforts to properly address environmental issues on planet earth.

Comment: Re:Profound implications! (Score 1) 88

by openfrog (#43291329) Attached to: Mobile Phone Use Patterns Identify Individuals Better Than Fingerprints

The issue is not that they can tell which phone number you use, obviously. As I see it there are three problems with this kind of tracking technology:

Secondly, mass surveillance is not just about you as an individual. By looking at where you go when and how long you stay there and correlating this with who else goes there at the same time one can make deductions about social networks within society without ever looking at one person up close.

I am with you on abuse from repressive regimes. But when you say "with this technology", I fail to understand. All the uses and abuses you mention are already not only possible, but routinely done by repressive regimes, and some. "This technology" adds nothing to the equation, except perhaps marginal cases where they would want to track you "across devices".

In this regard, I can only find that the profound implications mentioned in the article are not so much profound as they are obscure.

Comment: Re:Profound implications! (Score 1) 88

by openfrog (#43290951) Attached to: Mobile Phone Use Patterns Identify Individuals Better Than Fingerprints

Here's what it does mean.

With access to this data (even if its through an abstraction API), I could match back a profile created based on one device (using a device ID) with a new device owned by the same person.

So lets say I'm a retailer and I want to track your visits to my stores based on your device ID... with this abstracted "fingerprint" API I could conceivably request a match back for your new device against the database and get your old device ID in response, voila - anonymous transition of the profile to your new device. I can now continue tracking you with no lost history.

Mmmmh! You begin with the proviso: "With access to this data"...

Well if you have access to this data, you will not be a retailer...

Comment: Profound implications! (Score 4, Insightful) 88

by openfrog (#43290433) Attached to: Mobile Phone Use Patterns Identify Individuals Better Than Fingerprints

Profound implications for privacy... The analogies are perplexing. Should I also worry about the fact that I have ten fingers with ten fingerprints at the end of them (not mentioning toes) means that it is impossible for me to have privacy? Recent research on 1.5 Million users shows that phone numbers uniquely identify subjects 100% of the time. That does not sound like this has profound implications for privacy, does it? Now admittedly, they talk about randomly chosen "spatio-temporal points", meaning, if you think of it, that you have a good chance at any time, of being either at home or at your place of work. But since your phone number already identifies you, the profound implications for privacy referred to in the article somehow escape me...

Comment: 6 km/h on sidewalks! (Score 1) 86

by openfrog (#43259591) Attached to: Hitachi's Tiny Robo-Taxi Carries 1 Passenger and No Driver

The company conducted a test in Tsukuba (Ibaraki Prefecture) within a roughly 18 km wide sidewalk. It can get to a speed of 6 km/h.

However, not only the video does not show it in operation in situ, but does not even show it running at all. The presentation instead consists of stills showing someone sitting in it and entering or exiting.

The story is interesting in that it shows a companies rushing to demonstrate the technology and how it can be used.

Comment: Two-way transparency argument a valid one (Score 1) 307

by openfrog (#43191277) Attached to: Should We Be Afraid of Google Glass?

If the police officers and border guards were forced to wear them, they perhaps would have an incentive to treat you decently and not to violate your rights.

If worn by participants in a demonstration, also interesting, especially if streamed live.

The argument of equalizing the relation between the powerful and the powerless in surveillance does have merit. Especially when the NSA is currently building a 65 Megawatts datacenter, where they will have the possibility to trace everyone whereabouts.

From another commnent: yes a red LED will blink when recording.

Comment: Inexact summary and linked article (Score 1) 147

by openfrog (#42965935) Attached to: Tech Leaders Create Most Lucrative Science Prize In History

The article stated makes it look like this is the initiative of Zuckerberg, and manages to misreport the scale of this prize.

See the foundations website: http://www.breakthroughprizeinlifesciences.org/

Not 11 prizes totalling 33 millions as reported, but 5 prizes of 3 M each.

Also the sponsors are listed, in that order,

                Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki
                Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan
                Yuri Milner

Comment: FUD Campaign continuing (Score 5, Informative) 347

by openfrog (#42936957) Attached to: Google Looks To Cut Funds To Illegal Sites

I have mod points, but not finding anyone questioning this source... Have you RTFA? This is The Telegraph! There is no source cited AT ALL. You don't know who said what in which context. Nothing.

Microsoft has hired the CEO of Burton-Marsteller with the official function of spreading FUD on Google.

But frankly, this sounds more like this comes from The Onion... Nobody here questions sources anymore?

Comment: Re:Wrong Premise, Approach from a Different Angle (Score 3, Insightful) 267

by openfrog (#42930917) Attached to: Do Patent Laws Really Protect Small Inventors?

From the article:

Mr Baylis has been lobbying for the patent system to become more robust and to turn the theft of intellectual property into a white-collar crime that carries a prison sentence... Currently patent infringement is considered to be a civil matter in the UK rather than a criminal matter... ...Students need to be taught about intellectual property in schools...

Mr Baylis is representing himself as the small guy (incorrectly claiming the invention of the crank radio), making the exact case that the big guys are currently lobbying the government for.

If Mr Baylis had been what he pretends he was, with the laws he is advocating for, he would have risked ending up in prison on top of losing his house.

Comment: Re:Don't forget the disinformation. (Score 1, Funny) 848

by openfrog (#42927709) Attached to: Billionaires Secretly Fund Vast Climate Denial Network

'We exist to help donors promote liberty which we understand to be limited government, personal responsibility, and free enterprise,' says Whitney Ball, chief executive of the Donors Trust.

And don't forget the disinformation. We can't have all that freedom with an informed public.

Oh for that, when we achieve the goal of a "limited government", we can spend a bit again to institute a ministry of truth.

Google

+ - Microsoft very particular style of "competing" now in the open->

Submitted by openfrog
openfrog writes "The New York Times has an interesting article about Mark Penn joining Microsoft, in charge of "strategic and special projects".

Penn made a name for himself in Washington by bulldozing opponents through smear campaigns. Now he spends his days trying to do the same to Google, on behalf of its archrival Microsoft.

This a scaling up of the anti-Google campaigns he has been mounting up since 1990 as CEO of the PR firm Burson-Marsteller, on behalf of his old Harvard friends Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.

Presenting this as a defensive posture for past wounds inflicted on Microsoft, the new strategy is described as moving from working in the shadows to one of perpetrating attacks in plain view.

Reading this makes one feel like distant the idea that capitalism works from competing to bring a better product to the consumer.

I propose creating a new category on Slashdot to track down this behaviour, where we would detect and expose distasteful PR strategies in action, for the benefit of journalists, bloggers and reviewers who could otherwise fall in for the lies."

Link to Original Source
Privacy

+ - Students protest biometric scanner move->

Submitted by
Presto Vivace
Presto Vivace writes "Newcastle University students protest biometric scanner move

UNIVERSITY students may have to scan their fingerprints in future — to prove they are not bunking off lectures. ... ... Newcastle Free Education Network has organised protests against the plans, claiming the scanners would "'turn universities into border checkpoints" and "reduce university to the attendance of lectures alone".

"

Link to Original Source

Let him choose out of my files, his projects to accomplish. -- Shakespeare, "Coriolanus"

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