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Submission + - Startup out of MIT promises digital afterlife — just hand over your data 1

Submitted by v3rgEz
v3rgEz writes: A new startup out of MIT offers early adopters a chance at the afterlife, of sorts: It promises to build an AI representation of the dearly departed based on chat logs, email, Facebook, and other digital exhaust generated over the years. “Eterni.me generates a virtual YOU, an avatar that emulates your personality and can interact with, and offer information and advice to your family and friends after you pass away,” the team promises. But can a chat bot plus big data really produce anything beyond a creepy, awkward facsimile?

Submission + - Company Creates Robotic Gas Pumps, Humans To Do Nothing All Day

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: The robots are most definitely coming for all of our jobs as automation takes over and we simply direct machines hovering around us for every want and desire. Now humans barely have to *DO* anything anymore with all this automation — and life is about to get even more automated. Two companies have combined forces to invent an automated gas pump, which uses advanced robotics to fuel up your car while you, well, relax. Drivers use a touchscreen to choose fuel type and pay (if that hasn't been automated yet) Then, sensors take over to locate the gas panel, open it, and deploy a special nozzle to fuel the car up. According to the inventors, the system reduces the time needed to fuel up by about 30 percent. (Note — these babies cost $50k a piece).

Submission + - Meet The Electric Porsche From 1898

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: We all talk about the Tesla Model S and Nissan Leaf as if electric cars are brand-new. Reality check: Electric cars were around long before you were alive, or your father, or maybe even your grandfather. In fact, it turns out that the very first Porsche ever built was an electric car--way back in 1898. It wasn't called a Porsche, but an "Egger-Lohner electric vehicle, C.2 Phaeton model"--or P1 for short. Designed by Ferdinand Porsche when he was just 22 years old, it has a rear electric drive unit producing all of 3 horsepower--and an overdrive mode to boost that to a frightening 5 hp! It had an impressive range of 49 miles, not that much less than many of today's plug-in cars. Porsche recently recovered the P1 from a warehouse--where it has supposedly sat untouched since 1902--and plans to display it in original, unrestored condition at the Porsche Museum in Zuffenhausen, Germany. So what have we learned? First, Porsche is no stranger to electric cars. Second, electric cars aren't quite as new as you may have thought

Submission + - EU secretly plans to put a back door in every car by 2020 (dailymail.co.uk) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A secretive EU body has agreed to develop a device to be fitted to all cars allowing police to cut off any engine at will, it emerged today. The device, which could be imposed within a decade, would also allow police to track a vehicle's movements as well as immobilise it. According to The Daily Telegraph a group of senior EU officials, including several Home Office mandarins, have signed off the proposal at a secret meeting in Brussels.
Security

Red Team, Blue Team: the Only Woman On the Team 247

Posted by timothy from the perspective-shifting dept.
ancientribe writes "Cyber security pro Kerstyn Clover in this Dark Reading post shares some rare insight into what it's like to be a woman in the field. She ultimately found her way to her current post as a member of the incident response and forensics team at SecureState, despite the common societal hurdles women face today in the STEM field: 'I taught myself some coding and computer repair in probably the most painstaking ways possible, but my experiences growing up put me at a disadvantage that I am still working to overcome,' she writes."

Submission + - Evolution of word frequencies in Porn

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Wired.co.uk reports a Google Trends-like tool for niche sexual interests, called Porngram. This tool enable everyone to map the evolution of words frequencies in the titles of almost 800,000 porn videos. Data are provided by the Sexualitics dataset, and a more global perspective on them is the subject of a research paper to be published in the first issue of the academic journal Porn Studies

Submission + - The App That Tracks Who's Tracking You (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: It's no secret that apps like maps or local weather know your current location, and you're probably cool with that because you want to use the handy services they provide in exchange. But chances are there are many other apps on your phone, anything from dictionaries to games, that are also geolocating your every move without your knowledge or permission. Now researchers are developing a new app to police these smartphone spies, by tracking which apps are secretly tracking you, and warning you about it.

Before your eyes glaze over at the mention of yet another privacy tool, it's worth noting that this new app is the first to be able to provide this line of defense between snooping apps and smartphone users for Android phones. Android's operating system is engineered not to allow apps to access information about other apps. But a team at Rutgers University found a way around that, by leveraging a function of Android’s API to send a signal whenever an app requests location information from the operating system. MIT Technology Review reported on the research today.

Submission + - A Virtual Reality Train Ride Reveals a Link Between Height and Paranoia (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: As anyone who’s been to a gig and isn’t six feet tall has probably experienced, being surrounded by people taller than you—why does that always happen?—can be annoying at best, and kind of scary at worst. There’s a certain vulnerability that comes with suddenly feeling shorter than those around you. A paper published online today in the journal Psychiatry Research looks at part of this phenomenon, by investigating the relation between height and paranoia.

The study, which was led by researchers at Oxford University and funded by the Medical Research Council, found that being shorter made people feel more mistrustful of those around them. They came to this conclusion after a virtual reality experiment in which participants took two virtual rides on the London Underground; one at their own height, and one with their height artificially reduced by 25cm (about a head). They weren’t told that their line of sight had been lowered until after the study.

Submission + - Flying Snake Mysteries Revealed

Submitted by Rambo Tribble
Rambo Tribble writes: Researchers from Virginia Tech are reporting they have uncovered the secrets behind the genus Chrysopelea's aerodynamic feats. These ophidians are capable of gliding some distance while appearing to slither through the air. The BBC's article on the revelations hosts a short video of the phenomenon. At the heart of Chrysopelea's feat is a remarkable ability of the snakes to alter their body's cross-section. Finally, snakes that don't need to be on no stinking plane.
Upgrades

AMD Catalyst Driver To Enable Mantle, Fix Frame Pacing, Support HSA For Kaveri 71

Posted by timothy from the next-step-is-the-optic-nerve dept.
MojoKid writes "AMD has a new set of drivers coming in a couple of days that are poised to resolve a number of longstanding issues and enable a handful of new features as well, most notably support for Mantle. AMD's new Catalyst 14.1 beta driver is going to be the first publicly available driver from AMD that will support Mantle, AMD's "close to the metal" API that will let developers wring additional performance from GCN-based GPUs. However, the new drivers will also add support for the HSA-related features introduced with the recently released Kaveri APU, and will reportedly fix the frame pacing issues associated with Radeon HD 7000 series CrossFire configurations. A patch for Battlefield 4 is due to arrive soon as well and AMD is claiming performance gains in excess of 40 percent in CPU limited scenarios but smaller gains in GPU-limited conditions, with average gains of 11 — 13 percent over all." First time accepted submitter Spottywot adds some details about the Battlefield 4 improvements, writing that Johan Andersson, one of the Technical Directors in the Frostbite team, says that the best performance gains are observed when a game is bottlenecked by the CPU, "which can be quite common even on high-end machines." "With an AMD A10-7850K 'Kaveri' APU Mantle provides a 14 per cent improvement, on a system with an AMD FX-8350 and Radeon 7970 Mantle provides a 25 per cent boost, while on an Intel Core i7-3970x Extreme system with 2x AMD Radeon R9 290x cards a huge 58 per cent performance increase was observed."

Submission + - Analyzing corporate contributions to open source projects

Submitted by Jason Baker
Jason Baker writes: It seems obvious that in the open source world, there is probably some relationship between how heavily a company contributes to a project and how able they might be to offer support it. But how do you measure this readiness? The raw number commits might be one option, but with big, multi-part projects, looking at the breadth of commits might help to.. In OpenStack, for example, where you have ten different projects (as of the Havana release) which are considered part of the core, looking at contributions across the span of projects might be as meaningful or even moreso at deciding whether a company is able to provide quality support for the open source product as a whole.

Submission + - How to Recover Deleted or Corrupted Digital Currency

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The popularity of Bitcoin and other digital / cryptographic currency cannot be denied. Different users like using it for different reasons, but many agree that the question of keeping their stash safe is something that occasionally keeps them up at night. With the currency’s rising popularity, different services started popping up to help solve that dilemma. Still, some chose to keep their digital money on their own devices. But what happens if these devices break down, get corrupted, or get accidentally erased?

Submission + - MIT Researchers Develop Wearable Book For Immersive Sensory Experience

Submitted by rjmarvin
rjmarvin writes: Researchers in the MIT Media Lab have combined a connected book http://sdt.bz/68665 with a wearable vest-like sensory device to give the reader a storytelling experience complete with physical sensations and emotions timed with plot development. The "Sensory Fiction" http://scifi2scifab.media.mit.... project involves the reader wearing a vest equipped with mechanisms like a body compression system, heartbeat and shiver simulator, and localized body temperature control controlled by preprogrammed responses that convey physical sensations when a page is turned.

Submission + - Why Marc Andreessen is Bullish on ARM (serverwatch.com)

Submitted by darthcamaro
darthcamaro writes: Marc Andreessen knows a thing or two about spotting Internet trends, after all he did invent the modern browser industry and is a leading venture capitalist today. At the Open Compute Summit this week, Andreessen also let it be known that he's backing ARM in the data center, which is just now getting a 64bit chip from AMD. Intel apparently isn't impressed.

"Every large scale Internet service that I'm aware is bound by the cost of the data center and they are all I/O bound," Andreessen said. "We deal with very few Internet applications at scale that are CPU bound."

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