69833189
submission
DillyTonto writes:
The 'state of the art' in big-data unstructured data (text) analysis turns out to use a method of categorizing words and documents that, when tested, offered different results for the same data in 20% of the time and was flat wrong another 10%, according to an analysis by researchers at Northwestern. Researchers offered a more accurate method, but only as an example of how to use community detection algorithms to improve on the leading method (LDA). Meanwhile, a certain percentage of answers from all those big data installations will continue to be flat wrong until they're re-run, which will make them wrong in a different way.
68423033
submission
DillyTonto writes:
DARPA has put out a call for ideas on how to build a fast, autonomous, maneuverable UAV that can fly up to 45 mph, navigate without assistance from humans or GPS into and through buildings that are a labyrinth of stairwells, small rooms, narrow hallways and terrorists. DARPA wants this drone to fly like the bird in this awesome hawk POV video that shows it shooting through gaps narrow enough it has to tuck its wings to get through.
33747849
submission
DillyTonto writes:
Want to know how strong your password is? Count the number of characters and the type and calculate it yourself. Steve Gibson's Interactive Brute Force Password Search Space Calculator shows the how dramatically the time-to-crack lengthens with every additional character in your password, especially if one of them is a symbol rather than a letter or number.
Worst-case scenario with almost unlimited computing power for brute-forcing the decrypt:
6 alphanumeric characters takes 0.0000224 seconds to crack
10 alpha/nums with a symbol takes 2.83 weeks.
33544149
submission
DillyTonto writes:
US officials have acknowledged playing a role in the development and deployment of Stuxnet, Duqu and other cyberweapons against Iran.
The acknowledgement makes cyberattacks more legitimate as a tool of not-quite-lethal international diplomacy.
It also legitimizes them as more-combative tools for political conflict over social issues, in the same way Tasers gave police less-than-lethal alternatives to shooting suspects and gave those who abuse their power something other than a club to hit a suspect with. Political parties and single-issue political organizations already use "opposition research" to name-and-shame their opponents with real or exaggerated revelations from a checkered past, jerrymander districts to ensure their candidates a victory and vote-suppression or get-out-the-vote efforts to skew vote tallies. Imagine what they'll do with custom malware, the ability to DDOS an opponent's web site or redirect donations from an opponent's site to their own.
Cyberweapons may give nations a way to attack enemies without killing anyone. They'll definitely give domestic political groups a whole new world of dirty tricks to play.
32325691
submission
DillyTonto writes:
Amazon got shelled by analysts and the press after releasing a buggy first iteration of the Fire edition of the Kindle e-reader. Three weeks later the Kindle Fire owned 14 percent of the whole market for tabs. Three months later, more than half of all Android tablets sold are seven-inch Kindle Fires, despite a huge bias among buyers for 10-inch tablets. How could a heavily modded e-reader beat full-size tablets by major PC vendors? It's cheaper than any other tab or e-reader on the market, for one thing. It's also hot enough to give the most expensive tabs a run for their money. In the fast-growing tablet market, the question is no longer 'an iPad or something else?' It's 'an iPad, or a Kindle Fire, or explain at length why buying something else makes any sense at all.
