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Submission + - Bloomberg Reporters Caught Spying on Terminal Users

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Big Bloomberg is watching you. CNN reports that was the unsettling realization Goldman Sachs execs came to a few weeks ago when a Bloomberg reporter inadvertently revealed that reporters from the news and financial data provider had surveillance capabilities over users of Bloomberg terminals. 'Limited customer relationship data has long been available to our journalists,' acknowledged a Bloomberg spokesman. 'In light of [Goldman's] concern as well as a general heightened sensitivity to data access, we decided to disable journalist access to this customer relationship information for all clients.' Business Insider is now reporting on allegations that Bloomberg reporters used terminals to spy on JPMorgan during the 'London Whale' disaster; Bloomberg bragged about its leadership on this story.

Submission + - Why is Science Behind a Paywall? (priceonomics.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Priceonomics blog has a post that looks into how so much of our scientific knowledge came to be gated by current publishing models. 'The most famous of these providers is Elsevier. It is a behemoth. Every year it publishes 250,000 articles in 2,000 journals. Its 2012 revenues reached $2.7 billion. Its profits of over $1 billion account for 45% of the Reed Elsevier Group — its parent company which is the 495th largest company in the world in terms of market capitalization. Companies like Elsevier developed in the 1960s and 1970s. They bought academic journals from the non-profits and academic societies that ran them, successfully betting that they could raise prices without losing customers. Today just three publishers, Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, account for roughly 42% of all articles published in the $19 billion plus academic publishing market for science, technology, engineering, and medical topics. University libraries account for 80% of their customers.' The article also explain how moving to open access journals would help, but says it's just one step in more significant transformation scientific research needs to undergo. It points to the open source software community as a place from which researchers should take their cues.

Submission + - Realtime GPU Audio (acm.org)

Submitted by CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes: Two researchers at San Francisco State University has successfully implemented hardware acceleration for realtime audio using graphics processing units (GPUs). "Suppose you are simulating a metallic plate to generate gong or cymbal-like sounds. By changing the surface area for the same object, you can generate sound corresponding to cymbals or gongs of different sizes. Using the same model, you may also vary the way in which you excite the metallic plate--to generate sounds that result from hitting the plate with a soft mallet, a hard drumstick, or from bowing. By changing these parameters, you may even simulate nonexistent materials or physically impossible geometries or excitation methods. There are various approaches to physical modeling sound synthesis. One such approach, studied extensively by Stefan Bilbao, uses the finite difference approximation to simulate the vibrations of plates and membranes. The finite difference simulation produces realistic and dynamic sounds (examples can be found at http://unixlab.sfsu.edu/~whsu/FDGPU). Realtime finite difference-based simulations of large models are typically too computationally-intensive to run on CPUs. In our work, we have implemented finite difference simulations in realtime on GPUs."

Comment Happy to Beta Test (Score 2) 66

by Giant Ape Skeleton (#37316014) Attached to: Stanford AI Class 'Beta' For Commercial Launch?
I completed my enrollment the other day and am extremely psyched to have the opportunity to participate. Opted for the 'Basic' track as I don't have the time/energy for the whole enchilada. If they want to use my feedback to help develop a monetized version, that's fine with me; I get to learn cool stuff from smart people, and the provider of the service gets to improve their product.

Comment Re:sources close to the investigation (Score 1) 135

by Giant Ape Skeleton (#36138988) Attached to: Amazon Servers Used In Sony Playstation Hack

TFA is totally bullshit.

I think that the hackers used a few open L1 proxies on Amazon AWS.

In my list of open proxies, there are around 20 proxies on Amazon AWS, of the form ec2-??-??-??-???.us-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com:80 ec2-??-??-??-??.ap-southeast-1.compute.amazonaws.com:80 ec2-??-??-??-??.compute-1.amazonaws.com:80 ec2-??-??-??-??.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com:80 where ??-??-??-?? is an IP address.

...so in order to find the perpetrators, we simply need to determine which seven of those proxies were used in the attack!
Graphics

Wolfenstein Gets Ray Traced 184

Posted by Soulskill from the ach-mein-framen dept.
An anonymous reader writes "After showcasing Quake Wars: Ray Traced a few years ago, Intel is now showing their latest graphics research project using Wolfenstein game content. The new and cool special effects are actually displayed on a laptop using a cloud-based gaming approach with servers that have an Intel Knights Ferry card (many-core) inside. Their blog post has a video and screenshots."
Security

Submission + - US military prepares for cyber command (defencetalk.com)

Submitted by Young Wild and Free
Young Wild and Free writes: The US administration is planning to create a new military command to counter cyber attacks on the country's sensitive computer networks, a US defense official said on Wednesday. The move would be part of a planned overhaul of cyber security policies now being weighed by the White House, the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told AFP.
Toys

Submission + - Toys for Telekinesis? (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Kaliann
Kaliann writes: Toys that respond to brainwaves are the next generation of unique user interfaces. The Washington Post looks at the current market appeal and future uses of technology that can meaningfully respond to the thoughts of a user. Currently the toys have a fairly simple basic idea: the harder you concentrate the more the object moves. A sensor on the forehead picks up brain waves that are associated with concentration, then levitates a ball in response: basic biofeedback. While this may seem to be a rather humble beginning, progress in this field could have astounding consequences in the advancement of technologies devoted to thought-controlled devices. As the author points out, Jedi Beer Pong is within our grasp.
Security

Submission + - Mariners Develop High Tech Pirate Repellents 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "NPR reports that owners of ships that ply the dangerous waters near Somalia are looking at options to repel pirates including slippery foam, lasers, electric fences, water cannons and high-intensity sound — almost anything except guns. One defense is the Force 80 squirt gun with a 3-inch nozzle that can send 1,400 gallons a minute 100 yards in any direction. "It is a tremendous force of water that will knock over anything in its path and will also flood a pirate's ship very quickly," says Roger Barrett James of the the Swedish company Unifire. Next is the Mobility Denial System, a slippery nontoxic foam that can be sprayed on just about any surface making it impossible to walk or climb even with the aid of a harness. The idea would be to spray the pirate's vessel as it approached, or to coat ropes, ladders, steps and the hull of the ship that's under attack. The Long Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD, a high-powered directional loudspeaker allows a ship to hail an approaching vessel more than a mile away. "Knowing that they've lost the element of surprise is half the battle," says Robert Putnam of American Technology Corp. The LRAD has another feature — a piercing "deterrent tone" that sounds a bit like a smoke detector alarm with enough intensity to cause extreme pain and even permanent hearing loss for anyone directly in the beam of sound that comes from the device. But Capt. John Konrad, who blogs for the Web site Gcaptain.com, says no anti-pirate device is perfect. "The best case scenario is that you find these vessels early enough that you can get a Navy ship detached to your location and let them handle the situation.""

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