Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Submission + - Bumble Open Sourced Its AI That Detects Unsolicited Nudes (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As part of its larger commitment to combat “cyberflashing,” the dating app Bumble is open sourcing its AI tool that detects unsolicited lewd images. First debuted in 2019, Private Detector (let’s take a moment to let that name sink in) blurs out nudes that are sent through the Bumble app, giving the user on the receiving end the choice of whether to open the image. “Even though the number of users sending lewd images on our apps is luckily a negligible minority — just 0.1% — our scale allows us to collect a best-in-the-industry dataset of both lewd and non-lewd images, tailored to achieve the best possible performances on the task,” the company wrote in a press release.

Now available on GitHub, a refined version of the AI is available for commercial use, distribution and modification. Though it’s not exactly cutting-edge technology to develop a model that detects nude images, it’s something that smaller companies probably don’t have the time to develop themselves. So, other dating apps (or any product where people might send dick pics, AKA the entire internet?) could feasibly integrate this technology into their own products, helping shield users from undesired lewd content. When Bumble first introduced this AI, the company claimed it had 98% accuracy.

Submission + - PyTorch becomes part of the Linux Foundation (linuxfoundation.org)

Submitted by Hammeh
Hammeh writes: PyTorch, the open source AI framework led by Meta researchers, is to become a project governed under the Linux Foundation. It moves governance of the project to a neutral home, with the promise of greater trust to act as a catalyst for more rapid development.

Submission + - USB-C upgrade delivers a whopping 240W (cnet.com) 2

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: An upgrade to the USB-C standard will accommodate levels of up to 240 watts, an improvement that could let you plug power-hungry devices like gaming laptops, 4K monitors and printers into the universal port. The jump in maximum power is more than double today's 100-watt capacity. The USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), the industry group that develops the technology, revealed the new power levels in the version 2.1 update to its USB Type-C specification on Tuesday. Cables supporting 240 watts will have additional requirements to accommodate the new levels. And USB-IF will require the cables to bear specific icons "so that end users will be able to confirm visually that the cable supports up to...240W," USB-IF said in the specification document.

A capacity of 240 watts is enough to run larger monitors, printers, gaming laptops and other devices. Dell's UltraSharp 32-inch 4K monitor has a peak power usage of 230 watts, for example, the same level as HP's 17-inch Omen gaming laptop.

Submission + - Facebook's Secret Settlement On Cambridge Analytica Gags UK Data Watchdog (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Remember the app audit Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg promised to carry out a little under three years ago at the height of the Cambridge Analytica scandal? Actually the tech giant is very keen that you don’t. The UK’s information commissioner just told a parliamentary subcommittee on online harms and disinformation that a secret arrangement between her office and Facebook prevents her from publicly answering whether or not Facebook contacted the ICO about completing a much-trumpeted ‘app audit’. “I think I could answer that question with you and the committee in private,” information commissioner Elizabeth Denham told questioner, Kevin Brennan, MP.

Pressed on responding, then and there, on the question of whether Facebook ever notified the regulator about completing the app audit — with Brennan pointing out “after all it was a commitment Mark Zuckerberg gave in the public domain before a US Senate committee” — Denham referred directly to a private arrangement with Facebook which she suggested prevented her from discussing such details in public. “It’s part of an agreement that we struck with Facebook,” she told the committee. “In terms of our litigation against Facebook. So there is an agreement that’s not in the public domain and that’s why I would prefer to discuss this in private.”

Comment UK railway system is a joke. This won't make it. (Score 1) 18

by Hammeh (#60571018) Attached to: Hydrogen-Powered Train Makes Its First Trip in the UK
Currently in the UK, some trains still dump raw sewage directly onto the tracks. Even if this technology works, the dream that current private railway operators will adopt it is a pipe dream. They would literally rather let people crap all over the network than invest in new trains or technology.

Comment Autonomous cars won't work in cities. (Score 2) 31

by Hammeh (#60419987) Attached to: UK Will Take a Crack At Regulating Future Self-Driving Car Systems
I can't wait for the day that cities introduce low speed autonomous only zones for town centres. With vehicle manufacturers liable for the vehicles safety, they will be overly cautious. No need to wait on traffic signals to change for you to cross the road, just step into the road and all of the cars are guaranteed to stop for you. Traffic congestion hell will likely follow.

Comment This goes against their free market ideology (Score 1) 124

by Hammeh (#60385035) Attached to: Should the U.K. Government Form a Coalition to Buy ARM?
I for one can't see how the Tories would fit this into their ideology of the free market knows best. If you look at the current business climate in the UK, they have strongly favoured privatisation of pretty much everything. Railways, power, royal mail and even some NHS services. The main idea being that a free market is one in which firms produce and sell goods and services in competition with one another, and in which government provides a so-called ‘level playing field’ and operates anti-trust rules to prevent monopolies blocking competition. A principle is that capitalist entrepreneurs take risks in making investments, and gain rewards in the form of profits commensurate with those risks. There can't be a level playing field for competition in this field if the largest chip design company is owned by the government (or even strongly backed by it). Innovation would be immediately reduced as smaller players realise they have no way to fairly compete.

Submission + - Offshore wind in Europe won't need subsidies much longer (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Once renewable sources of electricity meet or beat the costs of fossil fuel generation, everything changes. With the immediate financial benefit just as clear as the long-term environmental benefit, utilities turn their attention to how to make it work rather than debating whether it’s worth the investment. Solar and onshore wind technologies have hit this point in recent years, but the unique challenges presented by offshore wind have required different solutions that have taken time to mature. Governments have provided some subsidies to encourage that progress, and global capacity grew to 28 gigawatts last year. But those subsidies make it trickier to calculate how close to cost-competitive offshore wind has become. A team led by Imperial College London’s Malte Jansen worked to compare 41 offshore wind projects in Europe going back to 2005. The researchers’ analysis suggests offshore wind, at least in Europe, is on the cusp of dropping below the price of more traditional generating plants.

Bids to provide electricity in these auctions have ranged from €0 to €150 per megawatt-hour, with that value setting the minimum guaranteed price. The €0 bids came in recent auctions in Germany and the Netherlands, and they represent utilities that were confident in their unsubsidized revenue selling at wholesale market prices. The researchers’ estimates for actual revenue at these wind farms came in at €50-150 per megawatt-hour. But the interesting thing is the downward trend over time—dropping about 6 percent per year over the whole time period, and more like 12 percent per year if you start with 2015. For wind farms that won’t start operating until after this year, the range drops to €50-70 per megawatt-hour. And €50, the researchers say, is at the “lower end of [cost] estimates for fossil fuel generators.”

Submission + - Randomness theory could hold key to internet security (cornell.edu) 1

Submitted by bd580slashdot
bd580slashdot writes: Randomness theory could hold key to internet security

Summary from Science Daily:

Researchers identified a problem that holds the key to whether all encryption can be broken — as well as a surprising connection to a mathematical concept that aims to define and measure randomness.

Text from Cornell University:
https://news.cornell.edu/stori...

Is there an unbreakable code?

The question has been central to cryptography for thousands of years, and lies at the heart of efforts to secure private information on the internet. In a new paper, Cornell Tech researchers identified a problem that holds the key to whether all encryption can be broken — as well as a surprising connection to a mathematical concept that aims to define and measure randomness.

"Our result not only shows that cryptography has a natural 'mother' problem, it also shows a deep connection between two quite separate areas of mathematics and computer science — cryptography and algorithmic information theory," said Rafael Pass, professor of computer science at Cornell Tech.

Pass is co-author of "On One-Way Functions and Kolmogorov Complexity," which will be presented at the IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, to be held Nov. 16-19 in Durham, North Carolina.

"The result," he said, "is that a natural computational problem introduced in the 1960s in the Soviet Union characterizes the feasibility of basic cryptography — private-key encryption, digital signatures and authentication, for example."

For millennia, cryptography was considered a cycle: Someone invented a code, the code was effective until someone eventually broke it, and the code became ineffective. In the 1970s, researchers seeking a better theory of cryptography introduced the concept of the one-way function — an easy task or problem in one direction that is impossible in the other.

For example, it's easy to light a match, but impossible to return a burning match to its unlit state without rearranging its atoms — an immensely difficult task.

"The idea was, if we have such a one-way function, maybe that's a very good starting point for understanding cryptography," Pass said. "Encrypting the message is very easy. And if you have the key, you can also decrypt it. But someone who doesn't know the key should have to do the same thing as restoring a lit match."

But researchers have not been able to prove the existence of a one-way function. The most well-known candidate — which is also the basis of the most commonly used encryption schemes on the internet — relies on integer factorization. It's easy to multiply two random prime numbers — for instance, 23 and 47 — but significantly harder to find those two factors if only given their product, 1,081.

It is believed that no efficient factoring algorithm exists for large numbers, Pass said, though researchers may not have found the right algorithms yet.

"The central question we're addressing is: Does it exist? Is there some natural problem that characterizes the existence of one-way functions?" he said. "If it does, that's the mother of all problems, and if you have a way to solve that problem, you can break all purported one-way functions. And if you don't know how to solve that problem, you can actually get secure cryptography."

Full paper is here:
https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/4...

Submission + - Researchers achieve AI breakthrough using light to perform computations (independent.co.uk)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Current processors used for machine learning are limited in performing complex operations by the power required to process the data. The more intelligent the task, the more complex the data, and therefore the greater the power demands.

Researchers from George Washington University in the US discovered that using photons within neural network (tensor) processing units (TPUs) could overcome these limitations and create more powerful and power-efficient AI.

A paper describing the research, published today in the scientific journal Applied Physics Reviews, reveals that their photon-based TPU was able to perform between 2-3 orders of magnitude higher than an electric TPU.

Submission + - Samsung Blu-ray players reportedly bricked by XML parsing error (theregister.com)

Submitted by Hammeh
Hammeh writes: Since the middle of last month, thousands of Samsung customers found their older internet-connected Blu-ray players had stopped working.

In the days that followed, complaints about devices caught in an endless startup boot loop began to appear on various internet discussion boards, and videos documenting the device failure appeared on YouTube.

To fix the issue, Samsung eventually advised customers to return their inoperable video players for repairs. There is no software fix.

"We are aware of the boot loop issue that appeared on certain 2015 Samsung Blu-Ray players and are offering free mail-in repairs to customers who have been impacted," a representative of the mega-manufacturer said in a Samsung forum post.

It was speculated by netizens and some media reports that a HTTPS certificate error was to blame. However, it's been suggested to The Register that the cause of the failure was an XML file downloaded by the network-connected devices from Samsung servers during periodic logging policy checks.

This file, when fetched and saved to the device's flash storage and processed by the equipment, crashed the system software and force a reboot. Upon reboot, the player parsed the XML file again from its flash storage, crashed and rebooted again. And so on, and so on, and so on. Crucially, the XML file would be parsed before a new one could be fetched from the internet, so once the bad configuration file was fetched and stored by these particular Samsung Blu-ray players in the field, they were bricked.

Submission + - Statisticians warn that AI is still not ready to diagnose COVID-19 (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by shirappu
shirappu writes: The development of AI systems for medical application is constantly ongoing, and ranges from chatbots and medical imaging to automating paperwork and predictive diagnosis. Many believe AI systems can ease the workload of doctors by predicting COVID-19 in CT scans and X-ray images.

However a group of medical statisticians is reviewing many of these predictive models as they are released, and so far they still aren't performing to a high enough level. The main problems appear to be (perhaps unsurprisingly) a lack of necessary data, and not enough domain expertise.

The leader of the above group of statisticians, Maarten van Smeden, pointed to a lack of cooperation between researchers as a road block in the way of developing truly accurate models. "You need expertise not only of the modeler," he said, "but you need statisticians, epidemiologists and clinicians to work together to make something that is actually useful."

Submission + - US Utilities Are Cleaning Up Their Act With Emissions Down 8% (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: U.S. utilities are producing less greenhouse gases as they continue to shift away from coal. Carbon dioxide emissions from the 100 biggest U.S. electricity producers fell 8% last year, according to a report Wednesday from the environmental group Ceres. Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, two other key pollutants produced by burning coal, declined by 23% and 14%, respectively.

The results reflect the increasing impact of the green transition as power producers shutter coal plants in favor of cheaper and cleaner natural gas and renewables. More than 9 gigawatts of coal capacity is expected to be permanently retired this year, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Utilities’ carbon emissions have declined 28% since 2000 even as U.S. gross domestic product climbed, a sign that cutting pollution need not constrain economic development. The declines may be even larger this year as the coronavirus pandemic slows power consumption. Emissions will continue to come down in future years as power companies use more wind and solar, coupled with increasing installation of energy storage systems.

Submission + - Chipmaker Analog Devices to buy rival Maxim for about $21 billion (reuters.com)

Submitted by Hammeh
Hammeh writes: Reuters reports that Semiconductor maker Analog Devices Inc said on Monday it would buy rival Maxim Integrated Products Inc for about $21 billion. This is the largest U.S. deal this year and aims to boost its market share in automotive and 5G chipmaking. The deal will create a chipmaking force with a combined enterprise value of about $68 billion that will compete with larger rivals including Texas Instruments.

Slashdot Top Deals

"Call immediately. Time is running out. We both need to do something monstrous before we die." -- Message from Ralph Steadman to Hunter Thompson

Close