Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - SPAM: The Hilarious (and Terrifying?) Ways Algorithms Have Outsmarted Their Creators 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Flying saucers have yet to land—at least, not that we've confirmed—but alien intelligence is already here. As research into AI grows ever more ambitious and complex, these robot brains will challenge the fundamental assumptions of how we humans do things. And, as ever, the only true law of robotics is that computers will always do literally, exactly what you tell them to.

A paper recently published to ArXiv highlights just a handful of incredible and slightly terrifying ways that algorithms think. These AI were designed to reflect evolution by simulating generations while other competing algorithms conquered problems posed by their human masters with strange, uncanny, and brilliant solutions.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What would you pay to see open sourced? 1

Submitted by jbrase
jbrase writes: A couple weeks back, I noticed this story about a petition to Adobe to release Flash as open-source. This dovetails neatly with something that I have been thinking about recently:

It is in the interest of the open-source community to make open-source development as profitable as possible. One potential means of making money from open source is crowdfunding. However, heretofore proprietary vendors are not likely to be enthusastic about using their flagship product to try out a relatively untested business model.

Crowdfunding the open source release of legacy technologies of historical significance could provide a low-risk way for vendors to experiment with making money by crowdfunding: The product has already turned them a profit.

With that, I'd like to ask Slashdot readers, what would you pay to see open sourced?

Submission + - New Amiga to go on sale in late 2017 (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: From Apollo Accelerators, emerged last week: the company's forthcoming “Vampire V4” can work as a standalone Amiga or an accelerator for older Amigas.

Comment Re:The solution is simple... (Score 1) 90

I'm no "Lord of the Manor"; but, I believe my speech to be well annunciated and clear.

Are you the town crier? Are your annunciations well enunciated?

Do you affect people such that it has a positive effect on them?

(I'm sure I'll pay the price for being a silly pendant; where's that preview button? ;-) )

Comment Re:Overthinking a simple problem (Score 1) 224

by anybody_out_there (#54375651) Attached to: Slashdot Asks: How Do You Handle Interruptions At Work?

[] wearing headphones []

This has never saved me. I monitor how long it takes from putting on the headphones to be interrupted. Far too often, it's less than 60 seconds. The virtually unbeatable record stands at zero seconds. Every now and then I can work without being interrupted, but having my headphones on doesn't seem to stop anyone. I wish they would use the internal IM system! Much less distracting.

Submission + - Iron-age potters accidentally recorded Earth's magnetic field strength

Submitted by Solandri
Solandri writes: We've only been able to measure the Earth's magnetic field strength for about 2 centuries. During this time, there has been a gradual decline in the field strength. In recent years, the rate of decline seems to be accelerating, leading to some speculation that the Earth may be losing its magnetic field — a catastrophic possibility since the magnetic field is what protects life on Earth from dangerous solar radiation. Ferromagnetic particles in rocks provide a long-term history which tells us the poles have flipped numerous times. But uncertainties in dating the rocks prevents their use in understanding decade-scale magnetic field fluctuations.

Now a group of archeologists and geophysicists have come up with a novel way to produce decade-scale temporal measurements of the Earth's magnetic field strength from before the invention of the magnetometer. When iron-age potters fired their pottery in a kiln to harden it, it loosened tiny ferromagnetic particles in the clay. As the pottery cooled and these particles hardened, it captured a snapshot of the Earth's magnetic field. Crucially, the governments of that time required pottery used to collect taxed goods (e.g. a portion of olive oil sold) to be stamped with a royal seal. These seals changed over time as new kings ascended, or governments were completely replaced after invasion. Thus by cross-referencing the magnetic particles in the pottery with the seals, researchers were able to piece together a history of the Earth's magnetic field strength spanning from the 8th century BCE to the 2nd century BCE. Their findings show that large fluctuations in the magnetic field strength over a span of decades are normal.

Submission + - University DDoSed by Its Own IoT Devices (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An unnamed university has suffered a DDoS attack at the hand of its own IoT devices, according to a sneak preview of Verizon's upcoming yearly data breach report. The DDoS attack was caused by an unnamed IoT malware strain that connected to the university's smart devices, changed their default password, and then launched brute-force attacks to guess the admin credentials of nearby devices.

Investigators said that the hacked devices would then start an abnormally high level of DNS lookups that flooded the university's DNS server, which in turn resulted in the server dropping many DNS requests, including legitimate student traffic. The university's IT team said that many of these rogue DNS requests were related to seafood-related domains. The university said that over 5,000 smart devices had been taken over during this incident. Investigators regained access over hijacked devices after they took the university's network offline and used a script to capture the new admin password, and then rewrite it with their own.

Comment Re:And people who back up to a network share, or r (Score 1) 236

I created a backup / warm spare system based on read-only rsync pull to a remote server that keeps several de-duplicated copies, and makes each backup bootable as a VM. I called it Clonebox.

Do you have a HOWTO or similar? I want to set up something like this with a new server (best practices from the start, so I hope)

Comment Re:They are totally different stories (Score 1) 430

by anybody_out_there (#53281825) Attached to: Is Technology A Bigger Story Than Donald Trump?

I would just question the underlying assumption that improvements in communities will always makes our lives better. That's traditionally been that case in the past, but it doesn't necessarily follow that it will always be the case in the future. We could be reaching a point of either diminishing returns or even a point when communities actually could have a detrimental effect on our lives.

The city is a good example. It's improved our lives in many ways, but it's also created a whole new class of problems, headaches, and population overload. Are we really quantifiably happier today than we were 100 years ago? Well, we certainly have much easier access to many more jobs and benefit from its conveniences. But has it made our overall lives that much BETTER?

Now, get off of my lawn :-)

Slashdot Top Deals

If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error. -- John Kenneth Galbraith

Close