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Submission + - SPAM: The Hilarious (and Terrifying?) Ways Algorithms Have Outsmarted Their Creators 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Flying saucers have yet to land—at least, not that we've confirmed—but alien intelligence is already here. As research into AI grows ever more ambitious and complex, these robot brains will challenge the fundamental assumptions of how we humans do things. And, as ever, the only true law of robotics is that computers will always do literally, exactly what you tell them to.

A paper recently published to ArXiv highlights just a handful of incredible and slightly terrifying ways that algorithms think. These AI were designed to reflect evolution by simulating generations while other competing algorithms conquered problems posed by their human masters with strange, uncanny, and brilliant solutions.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What would you pay to see open sourced? 1

Submitted by jbrase
jbrase writes: A couple weeks back, I noticed this story about a petition to Adobe to release Flash as open-source. This dovetails neatly with something that I have been thinking about recently:

It is in the interest of the open-source community to make open-source development as profitable as possible. One potential means of making money from open source is crowdfunding. However, heretofore proprietary vendors are not likely to be enthusastic about using their flagship product to try out a relatively untested business model.

Crowdfunding the open source release of legacy technologies of historical significance could provide a low-risk way for vendors to experiment with making money by crowdfunding: The product has already turned them a profit.

With that, I'd like to ask Slashdot readers, what would you pay to see open sourced?

Submission + - New Amiga to go on sale in late 2017 (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: From Apollo Accelerators, emerged last week: the company's forthcoming “Vampire V4” can work as a standalone Amiga or an accelerator for older Amigas.

Submission + - ACLU files funny amicus brief supporting John Oliver's Free Speech Rights (aclu.org)

Submitted by UnknowingFool
UnknowingFool writes: The ACLU of West Virginia has filed a hilarious amicus curae brief arguing that Murray Energy's lawsuit of John Oliver should be dismissed based on First Amendment rights.

To recap: On June 17, John Oliver on his show, Last Week Tonight, did a segment on the coal industry and particularly on Bob Murray, CEO of the Ohio-based Murray Energy Corporation. Specifically, John Oliver poked fun of Murray by comparing him to a geriatric Dr. Evil and taunting him with a person in a squirrel costume. Oliver did this after Murray's lawyers sent the show a cease and desist letter and threatening to sue after the show reached out to Murray Energy for comments while preparing the segment.

Not surprisingly Murray's lawyers filed a lawsuit against the show a few days after the broadcast. In the lawsuit, Murray Energy is seeking to bar Last Week Tonight and HBO from airing the episode again. Also they want to impose a gag order on Oliver and the show writers from publicly discussing the suit (gag order). As noted by Oliver and the ACLU, Murray has sued others in past, particularly any news outlets that reported unfavorably against him and his company.

In the legal brief by the ACLU they have organized arguments with the names like "Anyone Can Legally Say 'Eat Shit, Bob!'" and " . . . You Can’t Sue People for Being Mean to You, Bob".

Submission + - Baltimore Cops Keep Accidentally Recording Themselves Planting Drugs On People

Submitted by Black Lifes Matter
Black Lifes Matter writes: In the latest civil rights outrage, Baltimore Cops have allegedly been found to be planting evidence in order to imprison innocent citizens. A video described as "multiple officers working together to manufacture evidence” has been posted to YouTube. Police reportedly were unable to find any evidence, turned off the body cameras for half an hour, and turned them back on just in time to find planted evidence. But this wouldn't be the first time the Baltimore police have been caught. How can the police be trusted? Are we now to the point where all police should have the onus of proving a crime positively with body cam footage?

Submission + - Slashdot is on Life Support - How do we fix it? 7

Submitted by doyouwantahotpocket
doyouwantahotpocket writes: As an avidly religious and daily reader of Slashdot since first stumbling upon the site as a teenager in 1999, I have always been fascinated by the stories: New and groundbreaking technologies, stories of distant galaxies and nebulae, breakthroughs in atom smashing, diagrams of technological wonder, the every so often in depth hacker expose'.

Slashdot has changed, and for the worse. The front page is dying, and not updated as nearly as frequently as it was back in the day. We used to have stories hour on the hour, sometimes 2 or 3 in one hour. Now days, the front page is just not updated as often. The submissions just aren't that great anymore. They're thin, and hastely chopped together. Firehose is more like a leaky waterhose.

Slashdot has been bought and sold so many times... I feel much of the community has left among a sense of betrayal.

Here is the question.

How do restore the glory of the old days to our beloved Slashdot?

Comment Re:The solution is simple... (Score 1) 90

I'm no "Lord of the Manor"; but, I believe my speech to be well annunciated and clear.

Are you the town crier? Are your annunciations well enunciated?

Do you affect people such that it has a positive effect on them?

(I'm sure I'll pay the price for being a silly pendant; where's that preview button? ;-) )

Comment Re:Overthinking a simple problem (Score 1) 224

by anybody_out_there (#54375651) Attached to: Slashdot Asks: How Do You Handle Interruptions At Work?

[] wearing headphones []

This has never saved me. I monitor how long it takes from putting on the headphones to be interrupted. Far too often, it's less than 60 seconds. The virtually unbeatable record stands at zero seconds. Every now and then I can work without being interrupted, but having my headphones on doesn't seem to stop anyone. I wish they would use the internal IM system! Much less distracting.

Submission + - Iron-age potters accidentally recorded Earth's magnetic field strength

Submitted by Solandri
Solandri writes: We've only been able to measure the Earth's magnetic field strength for about 2 centuries. During this time, there has been a gradual decline in the field strength. In recent years, the rate of decline seems to be accelerating, leading to some speculation that the Earth may be losing its magnetic field — a catastrophic possibility since the magnetic field is what protects life on Earth from dangerous solar radiation. Ferromagnetic particles in rocks provide a long-term history which tells us the poles have flipped numerous times. But uncertainties in dating the rocks prevents their use in understanding decade-scale magnetic field fluctuations.

Now a group of archeologists and geophysicists have come up with a novel way to produce decade-scale temporal measurements of the Earth's magnetic field strength from before the invention of the magnetometer. When iron-age potters fired their pottery in a kiln to harden it, it loosened tiny ferromagnetic particles in the clay. As the pottery cooled and these particles hardened, it captured a snapshot of the Earth's magnetic field. Crucially, the governments of that time required pottery used to collect taxed goods (e.g. a portion of olive oil sold) to be stamped with a royal seal. These seals changed over time as new kings ascended, or governments were completely replaced after invasion. Thus by cross-referencing the magnetic particles in the pottery with the seals, researchers were able to piece together a history of the Earth's magnetic field strength spanning from the 8th century BCE to the 2nd century BCE. Their findings show that large fluctuations in the magnetic field strength over a span of decades are normal.

Submission + - University DDoSed by Its Own IoT Devices (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An unnamed university has suffered a DDoS attack at the hand of its own IoT devices, according to a sneak preview of Verizon's upcoming yearly data breach report. The DDoS attack was caused by an unnamed IoT malware strain that connected to the university's smart devices, changed their default password, and then launched brute-force attacks to guess the admin credentials of nearby devices.

Investigators said that the hacked devices would then start an abnormally high level of DNS lookups that flooded the university's DNS server, which in turn resulted in the server dropping many DNS requests, including legitimate student traffic. The university's IT team said that many of these rogue DNS requests were related to seafood-related domains. The university said that over 5,000 smart devices had been taken over during this incident. Investigators regained access over hijacked devices after they took the university's network offline and used a script to capture the new admin password, and then rewrite it with their own.

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