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Submission + - SMS "Text Banking" another privacy risk. Are there others? (citi.com)

Submitted by NichardRixon
NichardRixon writes: A few days ago I received an advertisement from my bank promoting "text banking" services they offer via SMS messages. This isn't new, of course, but it's a part of the story that I hadn't previously considered.

People who think that Facebook's (and probably many other companies) wholesale collection of users smartphone text messages is a harmless intrusion might feel differently if they realized the data could include banking information. Written exchanges with Aunt Mary might not reveal much of consequence, but bank account balances, account transfer logs, and lists of transactions are a different matter. Surprisingly, I've never seen this aspect of the problem discussed.

Now I'm wondering if there are other types of sensitive data finding their way into the insecure, unencrypted realm of SMS messaging. I expect that there are Slashdot readers who know. Would anyone care to enlighten the rest of us?

Note: The referenced URL to Citibank's text banking web page is a random sample taken from 371 million Google hits from a search for "text banking service".

Submission + - Radio Reporter Who Lost Voice Returns to Air Using App Built from Archived Audio (ajc.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: Jamie Dupree had been a radio reporter from 1983 until the Spring of 2016, when he lost his voice. His official diagnosis is a rare neurological condition known as “Tongue Protrusion Dystonia” – for some unknown reason when he tries to talk, his tongue pushes forward out of his mouth, and his throat clenches, leading to a voice that is strangled and strained, as it is a struggle to string together more than a few words at a time.

Dupree's plight attracted the attention of Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), who went to the floor of the House and delivered a speech that publicized Dupree's voice troubles and the lack of answers. Other reporters wrote stories about Dupree and people inside his company, Cox Media Group, tried to find a high tech solution to get him back on the air. They eventually found a Scottish company named CereProc (https://www.cereproc.com) which agreed to sift through years of Dupree's archived audio to build a voice – which, when paired with a text-to-speech application – would sound like Dupree and get him back on the radio.

Dupree writes that the App works and will allow him to “talk” on the radio again. Starting next week, be will again provide stories to news-talk radio stations and be back on the air in hourly newscasts.

Submission + - Killer robots will only exist if we are stupid enough to let them (theguardian.com) 1

Submitted by Heritype
Heritype writes: The idea of killer robots rising up and destroying humans is a Hollywood fantasy and a distraction from the more pressing dilemmas that intelligent machines present to society, according to computer scientists. Sir Nigel Shadbolt, professor of computer science at the University of Oxford, predicts that AI will bring overwhelming benefits to humanity, revolutionising cancer diagnosis and treatment, and transforming education and the workplace. If problems arise, he said, it will not be because sentient machines have unexpectedly gone rogue in a Terminator-like scenario.

“The danger is clearly not that robots will decide to put us away and have a robot revolution,” he said. “If there [are] killer robots, it will be because we’ve been stupid enough to give it the instructions or software for it to do that without having a human in the loop deciding.” Prof Shadbolt made the comments ahead of a talk at the CogX conference in London on Monday

Comment Re:Faux outrage (Score 1) 63

by NichardRixon (#56759478) Attached to: Mark Zuckerberg and the 2012 Facebook Moscow Hack

"You GAVE Facebook that information on yourself.

For people who signed up for FB, yes, I agree. And they are fucking idiots, the lot. However, the problem is those idiots give FB information on their friends who never signed up for FB, so you can't totally stay out of their clutches."

I disagree on both counts. Non-technical people can't be expected to know the ramifications of putting their information on Facebook. Even among those who know it's going to be used for targeted advertising, the many other ways this data can be used is not generally understood.

Are people who don't know that getting an auto loan from a company that calculates interest based on the rule of 78s idiots, too?

Submission + - SPAM: Autonomous vehicle helped locate 'holy grail of shipwrecks' off Colombia

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The San Jose, which was considered the “holy grail of shipwrecks,” was located with the help of an underwater autonomous vehicle operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The institution said it was holding the discovery under wraps out of respect for the Colombian government.

The treasure—which includes of gold, silver and emeralds-- has been the subject of legal battles between several nations as well as private companies.

Several weeks ago, UNESCO, the United Nations cultural agency, called on Colombia not to commercially exploit the wreck, whose exact location remains a state secret. The country hopes to build a museum and preserve the wreck, the Massachusetts-based WHOI said on its website.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - MSVC Conforms to the C++ Standard (microsoft.com)

Submitted by Dave Knott
Dave Knott writes: The Microsoft Visual C++ team has announced that, as of Visual Studio version 15.7, MSVC now conforms to the C++ standard

Our compiler has a long history: February marked the 25th anniversary of the Visual C++ product. The Microsoft C product on which Visual C++ was built is 35 years old. And through the entire history of compilers our first concern has been maintaining compatibility so that your code isn’t broken. We carefully document all changes made for conformance, making our fixes source-compatible when possible and providing workarounds when changes are needed in your code. Three years ago, we unveiled our compiler rewrite. We’ve been doing a major overhaul of the compiler in a process we’ve referred to as “Rejuvenation”.
With Visual Studio 2017 version 15.7 we’re shipping a complete implementation of almost all features in the C++ Standard, including all versions up through C++17. The remaining features have been implemented (and will ship soon) or are being implemented today. This includes the completion of some of the more difficult features that we’ve been working on from C++11/14: two-phase name lookup, expression SFINAE, extended constexpr, and pack expansions.

Submission + - SPAM: Chinese Journalist Banned From Flying, Buying Property By 'Social Credit Score'

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: China is rolling out a high-tech plan to give all of its 1.4 billion citizens a personal score, based on how they behave. But there are consequences if a score gets too low, and for some that’s cause for concern.

When Liu Hu recently tried to book a flight, he was told he was banned from flying because he was on the list of untrustworthy people. Liu is a journalist who was ordered by a court to apologize for a series of tweets he wrote and was then told his apology was insincere.

“I can’t buy property. My child can’t go to a private school,” he said. “You feel you’re being controlled by the list all the time.”

And the list is now getting longer as every Chinese citizen is being assigned a social credit score — a fluctuating rating based on a range of behaviors. It’s believed that community service and buying Chinese-made products can raise your score. Fraud, tax evasion and smoking in non-smoking areas can drop it.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - My Initial Impressions of Google's New Gmail User Interface (vortex.com)

Submitted by Lauren Weinstein
Lauren Weinstein writes: Google launched general access to their first significant Gmail user interface (UI) redesign in many years today. It’s rolling out gradually — when it hits your account you’ll see a “Try the new Gmail” choice under the settings (“gear”) icon on the upper right of the page (you can also revert to the “classic” interface for now, via the same menu).

But you probably won’t need to revert. Google clearly didn’t want to screw up Gmail, and my initial impression is that they’ve succeeded by avoiding radical changes in the UI. I’ll bet that some casual Gmail users might not even immediately notice the differences.

Submission + - Largest Star Map Ever Drops Online, Thanks to the ESA (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by S810
S810 writes: The European Space Agency has released a treasure trove of data from its Gaia Spacecraft; totaling around 1.7 billion stars. This star map is the largest of it's kind to date. In addition to the star map, the data also contains motion and color data of 1.3 billion stars relative to the Sun.

From the article, the data also includes "...radial velocities, amount of dust, and surface temperatures of lots of stars, and a catalogue of over 14,000 Solar System objects, including asteroids."

Comment Re:No it smells of nothing (Score 3, Informative) 76

by NichardRixon (#56499209) Attached to: Scientists Discover That Uranus Smells Like Rotten Eggs

It's odd that the Oxford scholars didn't mention the toxicity of hydrogen sulfide, but mention suffocation from inhalation of methane and the effects of low temperatures. Although the odor can be detected at very minute concentrations, (around 0.000047 ppm) it's about as poisonous as cyanide at about 360 ppm. Suppression of the sense of smell doesn't happen instantaneously, and many deaths have occurred because victims who noticed the odor thought the gas had dissipated when they could no longer smell it.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Are you going to accept Oath to keep Yahoo? (oath.com) 2

Submitted by shanen
shanen writes: Looking over the new terms of service and noticed several bits that I didn't like. Not sure if I just didn't notice how bad Yahoo was or if Oath is making it worse. I didn't accept them, and it let me continue for now, but I assume they are going to ram this down my throat soon, but it also seems like a lot of hassle to deal with the death of that old email address... Suggestions? Your own course of action? Right now I feel like allowing my Yahoo account to die and see what happens.

Submission + - Toronto Officer uses Brain, not Gun when Confronting Mass Murderer Suspect (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Actually, I do RTFA
Actually, I do RTFA writes: In Toronto, someone recently used a van to kill 10 people and send 9 others to the emergency room. When the first officer on the scene caught up with the suspect, things could have gone very wrong or gotten very violent. Instead, the officer had been trained in peaceful deescalation techniques. Even when the suspect threatened the officer with a gun or advanced on the officer, he kept his cool and managed to avoid even having to use a baton, talking him into surrendering.

Nice change of pace from the more trigger happy officers south of the border.

Comment Frustrating (Score 1) 151

by NichardRixon (#56493275) Attached to: Who Has More of Your Personal Data Than Facebook? Try Google

It's frustrating to realize how many Slashdot readers actually believe that Google collects all of the data it does simply for the purpose of targeted advertising. Consider the fact that they have algorithms to read every message that goes through Gmail. They combine this with data they gather in following almost everyone as they surf across the web. The emails provide loads of personal, and personally identifiable information about anyone using the service, as well as anyone replying to those who do.

Keeping this in mind, why do you think they are trying so hard to be the foremost developers of AI? To do targeted advertising?

They've been releasing bits and pieces of information on what they can already do for several years. How many here have read about it and been concerned? What will happen when their AI gets several magnitudes of order better?

To a somewhat lesser extent this applies to MS, Facebook and Amazon, and many lesser known information warehouses. None of them have shown any indication that their applications will continue to be considered to be benign, even by those who can't yet even imagine that all of this is taking place.

This is at least part of the reason that Elon Musk is pushing for government regulation of AI.

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