Thursday - Slashdot User

DARPA Wants To Get Rid of Password Protection 205

Posted by samzenpus on Friday November 11, 2011 @01:47AM from the forget-the-words dept.

coondoggie writes "Researchers from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will next week detail a new program it hopes will develop technology to dramatically change computer system security authorization. The program, called Active Authentication, looks to develop technology that goes way beyond today's use of hard to remember password protection and determine identity through 'use of software applications that can determine identity through the activities the user normally performs,' DARPA said."

Pakistan Bans Encryption 351

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday August 30, 2011 @06:44PM from the for-undecipherable-reasons dept.

An anonymous reader writes "After some rumors of this last month, Pakistan has now officially told all of the country's ISPs that they need to block all encrypted VPNs since content running over such services cannot be monitored by the government."

IBM Watson To Replace Salespeople and Cold-Callers 316

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday July 06, 2011 @06:08PM from the coming-to-a-drive-thu-near-you dept.

An anonymous reader writes "After conquering Jeopardy! and making inroads into the diagnosis of medical maladies, IBM's next application for Watson is improving sales and customer support. Companies will be able to simply fill Watson (or rather, DeepQA) with domain-specific information about products and services, and sit back as it uses its natural language processing skills to answer the queries of potential customers. The potential benefits are huge. Watson could either augment existing sales and support teams, or replace them entirely. Also, in a beautiful and self-fulfilling twist, the first application of this re-purposed Watson will be be internally, at IBM, to help sell more IBM Watsons to other companies."

NHS Moving To Cloud For Security 69

Posted by timothy on Tuesday July 05, 2011 @10:06AM from the you'll-feel-a-slight-pinch-of-skepticism dept.

twoheadedboy writes "The NHS, one of the biggest public sector organisations in Europe, is to use a cloud-based security model to protect its 1.3 million users. This comes amidst a big move to the cloud in the UK public sector."

Is the Rise of Wearable Electronics Finally Here? 98

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday June 21, 2011 @08:04PM from the don't-let-charlie-stross-design-them dept.

ptorrone writes "MAKE Magazine takes a look at the last ten years or so of 'wearable electronics.' From wireless watches to LCD goggles, MAKE predicts we are collectively entering a new era of wearables. As the price for enabling components drops, always-on connectivity in our pockets and purses increases, and access to low-cost manufacturing resources and know-how rises, we'll see innovation continue to push into these most personal forms of computing."

Kurzweil: Human-Level Machine Translation By 2029 186

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday June 21, 2011 @06:00PM from the still-no-klingon dept.

An anonymous reader writes "In a video interview with the Huffington Post, noted futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that machines will reach human levels of translation quality by the year 2029. However, he was quick to highlight that even major technological advances in translation do not replace the need for language learning. 'Even the best translators can't fully translate literature,' he pointed out. 'Some things just can't be expressed in another language.'"

Military Drone Attacks Are Not 'Hostile' 892

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday June 18, 2011 @08:23PM from the napalm-hugs-and-frag-grenade-kisses dept.

sanzibar writes "Not satisfied with the legal conclusion of the DOJ, the Obama administration found other in-house lawyers willing to declare a bomb dropped from a drone is not 'hostile'. The strange conclusion has big implications in determining the President's compliance with the law. If drone strikes are in fact hostile and the Libyan campaign continues past Sunday, he may very well be breaking the law."

Comment LA Times and Boston Herald say Palin was right (Score 3, Informative) 767

by Thursday on Monday June 06, 2011 @10:42AM (#36350148) Attached to: Palin Fans Deface Paul Revere Wikipedia Page

LA Times backs up Sarah Palin:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2011/06/sarah-palin-says-paul-revere-warned-the-british.html

And so does Boston Herald:

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/us_politics/view/2011_0606you_betcha_she_was_right_experts_back_palins_historical_account/

Researcher Claims Magnets Can Affect Blood Viscosity 175

Posted by timothy on Thursday June 02, 2011 @02:42PM from the degaussing-or-leeching-or-both? dept.

BuzzSkyline writes "A few minutes in a high magnetic field (1.3 Tesla) is enough to thin blood by 30%, potentially leading to a new drug-free therapy to prevent heart attacks. The powerful field causes blood cells to line up in chains that flow much more easily than randomly-scattered individual cells, according to research scheduled to appear this month in the journal Physical Review E." I can't help thinking of Penn & Teller's look at magnets-as-medicine, though at least the idea here described sounds testable and doesn't rely on the power of suggestion.

The Next Phase of Intelligent TVs Will Observe You 294

Posted by samzenpus on Monday May 30, 2011 @02:47PM from the unseen-mechanized-eye dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Japan based NHK Science & Technology Research Laboratories (STRL) is testing an interface which observes TV viewers, determines their interest and provides information related to the TV program in accordance with the way they are watching it. UTAN (user technology assisted navigation) TV viewing interface, as it is called, has a camera mounted on the TV which photographs the viewer and estimates the viewer's degrees of interest, concentration, etc. The information is processed by a tablet PC and recommended information is shown to the viewer. It is possible to show individual interests as well, in case there are multiple viewers."

The Logical Leap: Induction In Physics 630

Posted by samzenpus on Monday January 10, 2011 @03:28PM from the read-all-about-it dept.

FrederickSeiler writes "When David Harriman, this book's author, was studying physics at Berkeley, he noticed an interesting contrast: 'In my physics lab course, I learned how to determine the atomic structure of crystals by means of x-ray diffraction and how to identify subatomic particles by analyzing bubble-chamber photographs. In my philosophy of science course, on the other hand, I was taught by a world-renowned professor (Paul Feyerabend) that there is no such thing as scientific method and that physicists have no better claim to knowledge than voodoo priests. I knew little about epistemology [the philosophy of knowledge] at the time, but I could not help noticing that it was the physicists, not the voodoo priests, who had made possible the life-promoting technology we enjoy today.' Harriman noticed the enormous gulf between science as it is successfully practiced and science as is it described by post-Kantian philosophers such as Feyerabend, who are totally unable to explain the spectacular achievements of modern science." Read on for the rest of Frederick's review.

Scientists Advocate Replacing Cattle With Insects 760

Posted by samzenpus on Monday January 10, 2011 @05:57AM from the beetle-stroganoff dept.

rhettb writes "Scientists in the Netherlands have discovered that insects produce significantly less greenhouse gas per kilogram of meat than cattle or pigs. Their study, published in the online journal PLoS, suggests that a move towards insect farming could result in a more sustainable — and affordable — form of meat production."

Obama Eyeing Internet ID For Americans 487

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday January 08, 2011 @10:11AM from the anti-troll-doctrine dept.

Pickens writes "CBS News reports that the Obama administration is currently drafting the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, which will be released by the president in the next few months. 'We are not talking about a national ID card,' says Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, whose department will be in charge of the program. 'We are not talking about a government-controlled system. What we are talking about is enhancing online security and privacy and reducing and perhaps even eliminating the need to memorize a dozen passwords, through creation and use of more trusted digital identities.' Although details have not been finalized, the 'trusted identity' may take the form of a smart card or digital certificate that would prove online users are who they say they are. These digital IDs would be offered to consumers by online vendors for financial transactions. White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt says that anonymity and pseudonymity will remain possible on the Internet. 'I don't have to get a credential if I don't want to,' says Schmidt. There's no chance that 'a centralized database will emerge,' and 'we need the private sector to lead the implementation of this.'"

Swedish Firm Proposes City Buildings On Rails 223

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday January 05, 2011 @01:35PM from the jesus-does-not-have-wheels-ralph dept.

Lanxon writes "A Swedish architecture firm that came up with a plan to roll buildings through a city on rails has won third prize in a competition to develop the Norwegian city of Åndalsnes. The company, Jagnafalt Milton, suggested that existing and new railroads could be built to provide the base for buildings that could be positioned differently depending on the seasons and on the weather. It proposed designs for rail-mounted single- and double-berth cabins, along with a two-story suite, reports Wired."

UN Considering Control of the Internet 402

Posted by Soulskill on Friday December 17, 2010 @09:42AM from the if-you-strike-me-down dept.

Dangerous_Minds writes "News has surfaced in the wake of the WikiLeaks story that the United Nations is mulling total inter-government regulation of the internet. The initiative was spearheaded by Brazil and supported by other countries including India, China, Saudi Arabia and South Africa. Drew Wilson of ZeroPaid commented that while the Cablegate story may be bad, attempting to destroy WikiLeaks would only make matters worse for various governments around the world, given what happened when the music industry shut down Napster ten years ago."

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