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EU

Google Wins Fight To Restrict Right-To-Be-Forgotten Ruling To EU Search Engines (venturebeat.com) 66

Google has won a long-standing battle with the European Union (EU), after the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled the company can limit the scope of the "right-to-be-forgotten" (RTBF) regulation to searches made within the EU. From a report: Today's announcement was largely expected, given that an adviser to the EU's top court backed Google's case in January. (ECJ judges typically follow the advice given by the advocate general.) But now it's official, meaning Google and others will only have to delist search results from search engines inside the EU's perimeters. "The Court concludes that, currently, there is no obligation under EU law for a search engine operator who grants a request for de-referencing made by a data subject, as the case may be, following an injunction from a supervisory or judicial authority of a Member State, to carry out such a de-referencing on all the versions of its search engine,â the ECJ said in a press release.
AI

Breakthrough In Automatic Handwritten Character Recognition Sans Deep Learning (technologyreview.com) 66

subh_arya writes: Researchers from NYU, UToronto and MIT have come up with a technique that captures human learning abilities for a large class of simple visual concepts to recognize handwritten characters from World's Alphabet. Their computational model (abstract) represents concepts as simple programs that best explain observed examples under a Bayesian criterion. Unlike recent deep learning approaches that require thousands of examples to train an efficient model, their model can achieve human-level performance with only one example. Additionally, the authors present several "visual Turing tests" probing the model's creative generalization abilities, which in many cases are indistinguishable from human behavior.

Submission + - Hype in science papers on the increase

schwit1 writes: In the past forty years the use by scientists of descriptive words to positively hype their results in their papers has increased steadily.

Researchers at the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands say that the frequency of positive-sounding words such as 'novel', 'amazing', 'innovative' and 'unprecedented' has increased almost nine-fold in the titles and abstracts of papers published between 1974 and 2014. There has also been a smaller — yet still statistically significant — rise in the frequency of negative words, such as 'disappointing' and 'pessimistic'.

...The most obvious interpretation of the results is that they reflect an increase in hype and exaggeration, rather than a real improvement in the incidence or quality of discoveries, says Vinkers. The findings "fit our own observations that in order to get published, you need to emphasize what is special and unique about your study," he says. Researchers may be tempted to make their findings stand out from thousands of others — a tendency that might also explain the more modest rise in usage of negative words.

The word 'novel' now appears in more than 7% of PubMed paper titles and abstracts, and the researchers jokingly extrapolate that, on the basis of its past rise, it is set to appear in every paper by the year 2123.

This study was focused on the medical field, so it is unclear if its results could be extrapolated to other science fields.

Submission + - 0-Day GRUB2 Authentication Bypass Hits Linux

prisoninmate writes: A zero-day security flaw was discovered by developers Ismael Ripoll and Hector Marco in the upstream GRUB2 packages, which did not correctly handled the backspace key when the bootloader was configured to use password protected authentication, thus allowing a local attacker to bypass GRUB's password protection. Versions from 1.98 (December, 2009) to 2.02 (December, 2015) are affected. At the moment, it looks like only a few distributons received the patched GRUB2 versions, including Ubuntu, Debian (Squeeze LTS only) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. Arch Linux devs should release a patched GRUB2 version in the next hours.

Submission + - Replacement for Mozilla Thunderbird? 3

maxcelcat writes: I've used Thunderbird for about a decade, and Netscape Mail before that (I have an email from 1998 from Marc Andreessen, welcoming me to Netscape Email, telling me different fonts can add impact to my emails).

Thunderbird has served me well, but it's getting long in the tooth.

Given the lack of development and the possibility that it's going End of Life, what should I use instead? I have multiple email accounts and an archive of sixteen years of email. I could get a copy of Outlook, but I don't like it.

Things I like about Thunderbird:
  • Supports multiple email accounts
  • Simple interface
  • Storage structure is not one monolithic file
  • Plain Text email editor
  • Filtering

Things I don't like:

  • HTML email editor
  • Folders are hard to change and re-arrange

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