Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment MyCroft (Score 2) 67

The only voice assistent that'll ever enter my house is MyCroft. Whether it's Google, Apple or Amazon, they have too many interests that contradict those of the consumer. In contrast, that creates the USP for MyCroft to focus on privacy and create an open source device to gather to the niche who still values that. Just hope they make some progress with their Mark II...

Comment Re:What's wrong with XMPP, again? (Score 1) 123

I know companies using IRC internally that simply wrote a custom module for their IRC server to log all messages on channels that had to be audited (or just all messages, not sure). With IRC there's nothing that prohibits the messages from getting stored centrally. I'm not sure how that applies to XMPP due to its federated architecture.

Comment Good thing Git is distributed (Score 2) 180

No more SPoF's! Except when there's plenty of people who have no idea how git actually works, and use it much in the same fashion as they would with Subversion. Well, good reason for them to start reading up on how Git actually works so they don't have to be reliant on Github whenever a ban would be imposed.

Comment Desktop vs Server (Score 1) 268

I don't really care for the software on my desktop, as long as it works. Having said that, the only paid and closed source piece of software on my desktop is my IDE (being a developer and sysadmin). However, on servers, serving public facing services I'll probably always use open source software. If I need a bug fixed or a new feature implemented I don't want to rely on external parties. Sure, there's tons of contracts that you could sign, but experience learns that eventually the vendor isn't able to supply, and you'll need to fix things yourself.

Comment Re:Insanely complex (Score 2) 132

If this law is to be in place for the next 20+ years it'd be pretty moronic if it laid out a very detailed set of technical measures a party is expected to take. Luckily there's lawyers who can interpet the law, and apply it to the situation they're assessing, all of its context included. If other lawyers (i.e. prosecution) disagree with their views, we have judges who can elaborate on the law, and tell how it should be interpreted in situations like those.

Comment Re:Right to be forgotten? (Score 1) 132

You're leaving out some of the considerations that are at play here. That is that you have a right to learn from your mistakes, move on. Also, they're not prohibiting publishing those facts, the intention is merely to make it less easily findable. The USA has a similar mechanism, namely sealed court records, etc.
Technology

How Computer Vision Algorithms Cope With Detecting Human Figures In Art 22

KentuckyFC writes The human visual system has evolved to recognize people in almost any pose under a vast range of lighting conditions. But abstract art pushes this ability to its limits by distorting the human form. In particular, Cubism seeks to represent three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional plane by juxtaposing snapshots from different angles. The result is that a Cubist picture contains many 'fragments of perception' of the same object. That's why it is often hard for people to recognize the human figures that these pictures contain. Now a group of computer scientists have tested how computer vision algorithms fare at the task of spotting human figures in Cubist art. They compared a variety of different algorithms against humans in trying to spot human figures in 218 Cubist paintings by Picasso. Humans easily outperform all the algorithms at this task. But some algorithms were much better than others. The most successful were based on so-called "deformable parts models" that recognize human figures by looking for body parts rather than the entire form. Interestingly, the team says this backs up various studies by neuroscientists suggesting that the human brain works in a similar way.

Comment The Hague, Capital of the Netherlands (Score 3, Informative) 165

According to the Dutch constitution Amsterdam is the capital of the Netherlands, although the parliament and the Dutch government have been situated in The Hague since 1588, along with the Supreme Court and the Council of State.[1][2]

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

Security

The Startling Array of Hacking Tools In NSA's Armory 215

littlekorea writes "A series of servers produced by Dell, air-gapped Windows XP PCs and switches and routers produced by Cisco, Huawei and Juniper count among the huge list of computing devices compromised by the NSA, according to crypto-expert and digital freedom fighter Jacob Applebaum. Revealing a trove of new NSA documents at his 30c3 address (video), Applebaum spoke about why the NSA's program might lead to broader adoption of open source tools and gave a hot tip on how to know if your machines have been owned."

Slashdot Top Deals

I've noticed several design suggestions in your code.

Working...