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Submission + - Is Tricking a Robot Hacking? (ssrn.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new paper by security researchers and legal experts asks whether fooling a driverless car into seeing a stop sign as a speed sign, for instance, is the same as hacking into it. Can you get into trouble under anti-hacking laws for tricking machine learning? Do you have inadequate security if your product is too easy to trick? Interesting read.

Comment Re:Well (Score 1) 274

by Striver (#48508679) Attached to: A Mismatch Between Wikimedia's Pledge Drive and Its Cash On Hand?

And I pay $1200/m making minimum wage.

$9.50/hr *160 hours/mo = $1520/mo - $1200 rent = $320/mo for food, transportation, utilities, phone, internet, clothing etc. Someone might actually pull that off if they were working 80 hours a week...but you probably wouldn't find them commenting on /. ($9.50 in Washington DC is the highest state minimum wage in the US. most places it is significantly lower)

Submission + - Why Movie Streaming Services Are Unsatisfying — and Will Stay So (nytimes.com)

Submitted by mendax
mendax writes: A New York Times op-ed reports:

A team of web designers recently released an astonishingly innovative app for streaming movies online. The program, Popcorn Time, worked a bit like Netflix, except it had one unusual, killer feature. It was full of movies you’d want to watch.

When you loaded Popcorn Time, you were presented with a menu of recent Hollywood releases: “American Hustle,” “Gravity,” “The Wolf of Wall Street,” “12 Years A Slave” and hundreds of other acclaimed films were all right there, available for instant streaming at the click of a button.

If Popcorn Time sounds too good to be true, that’s because it was. The app was illegal — a well-designed, easy-to-use interface for the movie-pirating services that have long ruled the Internet’s underbelly. Shortly after the app went public, its creators faced a barrage of legal notices, and they pulled it down.

But like Napster in the late 1990s, Popcorn Time offered a glimpse of what seemed like the future, a model for how painless it should be to stream movies and TV shows online. The app also highlighted something we’ve all felt when settling in for a night with today’s popular streaming services, whether Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, Hulu, or Google or Microsoft’s media stores: They just aren’t good enough.

Submission + - Microsoft remotely deleted Tor from Windows machines to stop botnet (dailydot.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft remotely deleted old versions of Tor anonymizing software from Windows machines to prevent them from being exploited by Sefnit, a botnet that spread through the Tor network. It's unclear how many machines were affected, but the total number of computers on the Tor network ballooned from 1 million to 5.5 million as Sefnit spread.

"By October, the Tor network had dropped two million users thanks to Sefnit clients that had been axed. No one, not even the Tor developers themselves, knew how Microsoft had gone on a silent offensive against such a big opponent and won a decisive battle," the Daily Dot reported.

In a blog post, Microsoft claimed it views Tor as a "good application," but leaving it installed presented a severe threat to the infected machines.

Comment Re:Makes Sense? (Score 1) 377

by Striver (#45639397) Attached to: Study: People Are Biased Against Creative Thinking

Just like most mutations are unsuccessful, most creative ideas are not "welfare increasing", after all, the status quo came about for a reason and your idea has to be pretty clever to beat it in all, or even most, metrics.

Of course, on the off chance a creative idea *is* successful, we're all for it, but that's pretty hard to determine in advance. And more importantly, after the fact, all the discomfort from change (and one shouldn't underestimate how much change hurts psychologically) has already been paid for, so we can simply enjoy the benefits.

Bad analogy since it is a myth that most mutations are unsuccessful. They have found that each individual has 60 to 100 genetic mutations...all quite functional.

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/30692/title/Our-own-60-mutations/

Comment Re:Another creation (Score 1) 37

by Striver (#44064485) Attached to: Adafruit's Smart Helmet Helps Navigate to NYC's Citi Bike Stations

Another creation of the All powerful bike lobby. Helmets are just a particularly sturdy stepping stone on the way towards totalitarianism.

Yeah...This seems pretty raving out of context. Just FYI, here is the context http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWf2JyIKrN4 There are more videos about this and it is a long standing sore spot in NYC

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