jonquil - Slashdot User

Submission + - Google Unveils Neural Network with Ability to Determine Location of any Image (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by schwit1 on Friday February 26, 2016 @12:05AM

schwit1 writes: Here's a tricky task. Pick a photograph from the Web at random. Now try to work out where it was taken using only the image itself. If the image shows a famous building or landmark, such as the Eiffel Tower or Niagara Falls, the task is straightforward. But the job becomes significantly harder when the image lacks specific location cues or is taken indoors or shows a pet or food or some other detail.

Nevertheless, humans are surprisingly good at this task. To help, they bring to bear all kinds of knowledge about the world such as the type and language of signs on display, the types of vegetation, architectural styles, the direction of traffic, and so on. Humans spend a lifetime picking up these kinds of geolocation cues.

So it's easy to think that machines would struggle with this task. And indeed, they have.

Today, that changes thanks to the work of Tobias Weyand, a computer vision specialist at Google, and a couple of pals. These guys have trained a deep-learning machine to work out the location of almost any photo using only the pixels it contains.

Submission + - Obama Administration Set to Expand Sharing of Data That NSA Intercepts (nytimes.com)

Submitted by schwit1 on Friday February 26, 2016 @12:00AM

schwit1 writes: The Obama administration is on the verge of permitting the National Security Agency to share more of the private communications it intercepts with other American intelligence agencies without first applying any privacy protections to them, according to officials familiar with the deliberations.

The change would relax longstanding restrictions on access to the contents of the phone calls and email the security agency vacuums up around the world, including bulk collection of satellite transmissions, communications between foreigners as they cross network switches in the United States, and messages acquired overseas or provided by allies.

The idea is to let more experts across American intelligence gain direct access to unprocessed information, increasing the chances that they will recognize any possible nuggets of value. That also means more officials will be looking at private messages — not only foreigners' phone calls and emails that have not yet had irrelevant personal information screened out, but also communications to, from, or about Americans that the NSA's foreign intelligence programs swept in incidentally.

Civil liberties advocates criticized the change, arguing that it will weaken privacy protections. They said the government should disclose how much American content the NSA collects incidentally — which agency officials have said is hard to measure — and let the public debate what the rules should be for handling that information.

Comment Re:Geeks vs. Suits on this one (Score 1) 165

by jonquil on Sunday May 28, 2000 @02:46PM (#1043803) Attached to: What Will the Internet of the Future Be Like?

Yes it is depressing, however if I remember back to my days at College, it was the money driven types who ended up on the corporate consultancy gravy train, making their money but doing nothing for the art, it was the geeks who ended up doing the interesting, albeit financially unrewarding stuff, there will always be geek kids and the _quantum leaps_ in the shape of the future internet will always be inside their heads. Needless to say the suits will make money out of selling it to no brain corporations, but the geeks really aren't interested in this aspect of the future Sig removed due to lack of imagination.

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