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Education

Elsevier Wants $15 Million In 'Piracy' Damages From Sci-Hub and Libgen (torrentfreak.com) 158

Posted by BeauHD from the not-on-my-watch dept.
lbalbalba writes: Elsevier, one of the largest academic publishers, is demanding $15 million in damages from Sci-Hub and LibGen, who make paywalled scientific research papers freely available to the public [without permission]. A good chunk of these papers are copyrighted, many by Elsevier. Elsevier has requested a default judgment of $15 million against the defendants for their "truly egregious conduct" and "staggering" infringement. Sci-Hub's efforts are backed by many prominent scholars, who argue that tax-funded research should be accessible to everyone. Others counter that the site doesn't necessarily help the "open access" movement move forward. Sci-Hub's founder Alexandra Elbakyan defends her position and believes that what she does is helping millions of less privileged researchers to do their work properly by providing free access to research results.
Crime

Taser Will Use Police Body Camera Videos 'To Anticipate Criminal Activity' (theintercept.com) 76

Posted by BeauHD from the predictive-reporting dept.
Presto Vivace quotes a report from The Intercept: With an estimated one-third of departments using body cameras, police officers have been generating millions of hours of video footage. Taser stores terabytes of such video on Evidence.com, in private servers to which police agencies must continuously subscribe for a monthly fee. Data from these recordings is rarely analyzed for investigative purposes, though, and Taser -- which recently rebranded itself as a technology company and renamed itself "Axon" -- is hoping to change that. Taser has started to get into the business of making sense of its enormous archive of video footage by building an in-house "AI team." In February, the company acquired two computer vision startups, Dextro and Fossil Group Inc. Taser says the companies will allow agencies to automatically redact faces to protect privacy, extract important information, and detect emotions and objects -- all without human intervention. This will free officers from the grunt work of manually writing reports and tagging videos, a Taser spokesperson wrote in an email. "Our prediction for the next few years is that the process of doing paperwork by hand will begin to disappear from the world of law enforcement, along with many other tedious manual tasks." Analytics will also allow departments to observe historical patterns in behavior for officer training, the spokesperson added. "Police departments are now sitting on a vast trove of body-worn footage that gives them insight for the first time into which interactions with the public have been positive versus negative, and how individuals' actions led to it." But looking to the past is just the beginning: Taser is betting that its artificial intelligence tools might be useful not just to determine what happened, but to anticipate what might happen in the future.
Security

Wall Street IT Engineer Hacks Employer To See If He'll Be Fired (bleepingcomputer.com) 198

Posted by EditorDavid from the that's-what-they-all-say dept.
An anonymous reader writes: A Wall Street engineer was arrested for planting credentials-logging malware on his company's servers. According to an FBI affidavit, the engineer used these credentials to log into fellow employees' accounts. The engineer claims he did so only because he heard rumors of an acquisition and wanted to make sure he wouldn't be let go. In reality, the employee did look at archived email inboxes, but he also stole encryption keys needed to access the protected source code of his employer's trading platform and trading algorithms.

Using his access to the company's Unix network (which he gained after a promotion last year), the employee then rerouted traffic through backup servers in order to avoid the company's traffic monitoring solution and steal the company's source code. The employee was caught after he kept intruding and disconnecting another employee's RDP session. The employee understood someone hacked his account and logged the attacker's unique identifier. Showing his total lack of understanding for how technology, logging and legal investigations work, the employee admitted via email to a fellow employee that he installed malware on the servers and hacked other employees.
Facebook

Facebook Begins Marking 'Fake News' As 'Disputed' (wdrb.com) 208

Posted by EditorDavid from the fakebook dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Facebook is now marking fake news as "disputed," several sites reported today. "According to Facebook's Help Center, news stories that are reported as fake by people on Facebook may be reviewed by independent, third-party fact-checkers," writes WDRB Media. "The fact-checkers will be signatories of the non-partisan Poynter Code of Principles. A story will be marked as disputed if fact-checkers find the story to be fake."

Mashable reports that the feature was rolled out quietly, and didn't gain much attention until it was noticed Friday by a reporter from Gizmodo, who tweeted a screenshot showing Facebook's new "disputed" icon. Further investigation revealed Facebook's help center now includes a page explaining how news gets marked as disputed, and another page informing users how to mark a news story as fake (which points out this feature "isn't available to everyone yet.")
Microsoft

Microsoft Finally Releases A Beta Version of Skype For Linux (betanews.com) 66

Posted by EditorDavid from the phoning-it-in dept.
"We want to create a Linux version of Skype that is as feature rich as the existing Skype on desktop and mobile platforms," read Thursday's announcement from Microsoft's Skype team. "Today, we're pleased to announce that we are ready to take the next step and promote Skype for Linux from Alpha to Beta." They're promising more than just better performance and bug fixes. "We have been listening to you and added in some of your top requests." Slashdot reader BrianFagioli shares the list:
  • One-to-one video calls can be made from Linux to Skype users on the latest versions of Skype for Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac.
  • Calls to mobiles and landlines with Skype credit.
  • Linux users can now view shared screens from other Skype desktop clients (Windows 7.33 and above, Mac 7.46 and above).
  • Unity launcher now shows the number of unread conversations.
  • Online contacts in contact list now include Away and Do Not Disturb statuses.

Comment Re:No (Score 1) 224

by orasio (#53923309) Attached to: Will humans discover life on another planet in the next 200 years?

You have no idea.
I live in Latin America, and living standards in my country are much lower than in the US, but comparable.
We may probably consume like one third, or one quarter the energy you guys do. In some parts of Asia, they may consume like 1/10 or 1/20 of what you do.

They can live without power grid, without internet, without fuel and all that stuff. They do it right now. What you describe would be just business as usual for them.
We can prevail as a civilization with probably 1/10, or 1/100 the resources we currently consume. Just need to dramatically reduce resource consumption, but survival, as a civilization, is probably not an issue.

Comment Re:Innovation (Score 5, Interesting) 361

Linux os not full of innovation.
It's full of great work, executed properly.

I was not a believer. I hated the fact that he was pushing such an outdated design for a kernel.
Yet he proved that great execution of an existing idea is much more valuable and has a much greater impact (worldwide, long lasting impact) than a beautiful, innovative design.
Robotics

Are Robots Coming To Take Investor Jobs on Wall Street? (nypost.com) 142

Posted by msmash from the they-are-coming dept.
From an article on NYPost: More investors are warming to the cold, steely embrace of the increasingly sophisticated, low-cost automated robo-advisers. The primary reason is to save money on those fees and charges. Nearly one in three investors says these machines are superior at picking stocks and lessen their risk, and almost as many say the machines are better at selecting investments for retirement than human brokers, according to a new study of US investors by market research and consulting firm Spectrem Group.

Comment Re:Probably should have focused more (Score 2) 319

by orasio (#53790261) Attached to: Firefox Fail: Layoffs Kill Mozilla's Push Beyond the Browser

Mozilla's raison d'être is political. The project had tthe mission of keeping the web open.
Software is the tool to push the politics forward.
It did succeed for a few years, and now it's over.

It's no surprise that now that Firefox is becoming irrelevant, Chrome is becoming more closed, forcing DRM down your throat and all.
Businesses

Tesla Is Investing $350 Million In Its Gigafactory, Hiring Hundreds of Workers (cnbc.com) 136

Posted by BeauHD from the rapidly-growing-industry dept.
Just weeks after the massive Gigafactory started producing batteries, Tesla has announced plans to hire more workers and use the facility to make the motor and gearbox for its upcoming Model 3 electric sedan. CNBC reports: Tesla will invest $350 million for the project, and hire an additional 550 people, according to the governor's comments. That will be over and above the company's existing commitment to hiring 6,500 people at the Gigafactory, according to comments made by Steve Hill, the director of the governor's Office of Economic Development, to Nevada newspaper the Nevada Appeal. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has made manufacturing efficiency a high priority for the company, but Tesla will require a lot of factory floor to meet its goal of to pumping out 500,000 cars by the end of 2018, and then making one million cars by 2020. Meanwhile, the city of Fremont recently approved Tesla's application for an additional 4.6 million square feet of space there.

Comment Re:Considering is different from doing something (Score 1) 218

Follow the first three rules of optimization:

1 - Don't do it
2 - Don't do it yet (only for experts)
3 - Profile, then optimize. I never see people follow this order.

http://wiki.c2.com/?RulesOfOpt...

In any case, readability is typically much more desirable than enhanced execution times. In few cases you will want to sacrifice even the smallest bit of readability, for better execution times. At least if you are not John Carmack.

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