joshtops - Slashdot User

Submission + - Telegram is the hot new source for pirated content (theoutline.com)

Submitted by joshtops on Friday April 13, 2018 @11:15AM

joshtops writes: But there is one more incentive to use Telegram, which has been an open secret among hundreds of thousands of users. For much of its existence, the platform has served as a haven for online pirates, rivaling the access to illegally shared files provided by the open internet.

The instant messaging platform, which as of last month is used by more than 200 million users, is riddled with thousands of groups and channels whose sole purpose of existence is to share illegally copied movies, music albums, apps, and other content.

Channel admins told The Outline that they have not come across any resistance from Telegram despite the company, along with Apple and Google, maintaining a “zero tolerance” stance on copyright infringement. This permissiveness on Telegram’s part has led to the proliferation of a cottage industry of piracy marketplaces on the service. (Channel owners and members spoke to The Outline on the condition of anonymity.)

These channels, many of which have more than 100,000 members, have been illegally distributing hundreds of movies, television shows, and songs for years, an analysis by The Outline has found. But despite being flooded with sketchy channels, Telegram has yet to acknowledge the scope of the issue and has banned only a handful of the offenders.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How Many Books Do You Read a Month?

Submitted by joshtops on Friday November 10, 2017 @11:35AM

joshtops writes: Hi fellow readers. I wanted to ask you how many books do you read in a month on average? Also wanted to understand if that number has changed over the last five years.

Comment Love the idea (Score 1) 70

by joshtops on Friday November 10, 2017 @11:28AM (#55525819) Attached to: Security Firm Creates Chatbot To Respond To Scam Emails On Your Behalf

We need more of such ideas.

Submission + - Farmers in India are using AI to increase crop yields (microsoft.com)

Submitted by joshtops on Tuesday November 07, 2017 @11:41AM

joshtops writes: The fields had been freshly plowed. The furrows ran straight and deep. Yet, thousands of farmers across Andhra Pradesh (AP) and Karnataka waited to get a text message before they sowed the seeds. The SMS, which was delivered in Telugu and Kannada, their native languages, told them when to sow their groundnut crops.

In a few dozen villages in Telengana, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, farmers are receiving automated voice calls that tell them whether their cotton crops are at risk of a pest attack, based on weather conditions and crop stage. Meanwhile in Karnataka, the state government can get price forecasts for essential commodities such as tur (split red gram) three months in advance for planning for the Minimum Support Price (MSP).

Welcome to digital agriculture, where technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cloud Machine Learning, Satellite Imagery and advanced analytics are empowering small-holder farmers to increase their income through higher crop yield and greater price control. “Sowing date as such is very critical to ensure that farmers harvest a good crop. And if it fails, it results in loss as a lot of costs are incurred for seeds, as well as the fertilizer applications,” says Dr. Suhas P. Wani, Director, Asia Region, of the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), a non-profit, non-political organization that conducts agricultural research for development in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa with a wide array of partners throughout the world.

Microsoft in collaboration with ICRISAT, developed an AI Sowing App powered by Microsoft Cortana Intelligence Suite including Machine Learning and Power BI. The app sends sowing advisories to participating farmers on the optimal date to sow. The best part – the farmers don’t need to install any sensors in their fields or incur any capital expenditure. All they need is a feature phone capable of receiving text messages.

Submission + - Tesla employees detail how they were fired, claim dismissals were not performanc (cnbc.com)

Submitted by joshtops on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @02:12PM

joshtops writes: Tesla is trying to disguise layoffs by calling the widespread terminations performance related, allege several current and former employees. On Friday, the San Jose Mercury News first reported that Tesla had dismissed an estimated 400 to 700 employees. That number represents between 1 and 2 percent of its entire workforce. But one former employee, citing internal information shared by a manager, said the total number fired is higher than 700 at this point. Most of the people let go from Tesla so far have been from its motors business, said people familiar with the matter. They were not from other initiatives like Tesla Powerwall, which is helping restore electricity to the residents of Puerto Rico now. The mass firings, which affected Tesla employees across the U.S., had begun by the weekend of Oct. 7 and continued even after the initial news report, sources said. Among those whose jobs were terminated in this phase, some were given severance packages quickly while others are still waiting on separation agreements. Some terminated employees told CNBC they were informed via email or a phone call "without warning," and told not to come into work the next day. The company also dismissed other employees without specifying a given performance issue, according to these people. "Seems like performance has nothing to do with it," one Tesla employee told CNBC under the condition of anonymity. "Those terminated were generally the highest paid in their position," this person said, suggesting that the firings were driven by cost-cutting. That assessment was echoed by several others, including three employees fired from Tesla during this latest wave.

Submission + - Intel Launches 8th Generation Core CPUs (anandtech.com)

Submitted by joshtops on Monday August 21, 2017 @12:21PM

joshtops writes: Today Intel is launching its new 8th Generation family of processors, starting with four CPUs for the 15W mobile family. There are two elements that make the launch of these 8th Gen processors different. First is that the 8th Gen is at a high enough level, running basically the same microarchitecture as the 7th Gen. But the key element is that, at the same price and power where a user would get a dual core i5-U or i7-U in their laptop, Intel will now be bumping those product lines up to quad-cores with hyperthreading. This gives a 100% gain in cores and 100% gain in threads. Obviously nothing is for free, so despite Intel stating that they've made minor tweaks to the microarchitecture and manufacturing to get better performing silicon, the base frequencies are down slightly. Turbo modes are still high, ensuring a similar user experience in most computing tasks. Memory support is similar — DDR4 and LPDDR3 are supported, but not LPDDR4 — although DDR4 moves up to DDR4-2400 from DDR4-2133. Another change from 7th Gen to 8th Gen will be in the graphics. Intel is upgrading the nomenclature of the integrated graphics from HD 620 to UHD 620, indicating that the silicon is suited for 4K playback and processing.

Submission + - Developer Accidentally Deletes Three Months of Work With Visual Studio Code (bingj.com)

Submitted by joshtops on Friday August 18, 2017 @12:24PM

joshtops writes: A developer accidentally three-month of his work. In a post, he described his experience, "I had just downloaded VScode as an alternative and I was just playing with the source control option, seeing how it wanted to stage [sic] FIVE THOUSAND FILES I clicked discard... AND IT DELETED ALL MY FILES, ALL OF THEM, PERMANENTLY! HOW THE F*UK IS THIS S*IT POSSIBLE, WHO THE HELL IS THE D******* WHO MADE THE OPTION TO PERMANENTLY DELETE ALL THE FILES ON A PROJECT BY ACCIDENT EVEN POSSIBLE? CANNOT EVEN FIND THEM IN THE RECYCLE BIN!!!! I DIDN'T EVEN THOUGHT THAT WAS POSSIBLE ON WINDOWS!!! F*CK THIS F*CKING EDITOR AND F*CK WHOEVER IMPLEMENTED THIS OPTION. I WISH YOU THE WORST.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Female Engineers, Could You Please Share Thoughts On Google Memo

Submitted by joshtops on Wednesday August 16, 2017 @10:11AM

joshtops writes: The widely circulated memo written by software engineer James Damore has become the talking point across companies in Silicon Valley, and elsewhere. In an interesting take, The Economist on Tuesday argued with the scientific or otherwise assumptions made by Damore. I was wondering what female engineers — or females in other STEM beats — think of the memo.

Submission + - From Google to Yahoo, Tech Grapples With White Male Discontent (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by joshtops on Monday August 14, 2017 @01:52PM

joshtops writes: Google isn’t the only Silicon Valley employer being accused of hostility to white men. Yahoo! Inc. and Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. were already fighting discrimination lawsuits brought by white men before Google engineer James Damore ignited a firestorm — and got himself fired — with an internal memo criticizing the company’s diversity efforts and claiming women are biologically less suited than men to be engineers. The Yahoo case began last year when two men sued, claiming they’d been unfairly fired after managers allegedly manipulated performance evaluations to favor women. They claim Marissa Mayer approved the review process and was involved in their terminations, and last month a judge ordered the former chief executive be deposed. TCS, meanwhile, is fighting three men who claim the Mumbai-based firm discriminates against non-Indians at its U.S. offices. A growing backlash against diversity advocates has gained momentum with the election of Donald Trump and his embrace of right-wing media figures including Steve Bannon, who ran Breitbart News until joining Trump’s presidential campaign. Trump has ordered a review of affirmative action policies in higher education, proposed banning transgender people in the military and advocated curbing immigration of non-English speakers to the delight of conservatives who say they’ve been muzzled by liberals.

Submission + - Developers Explain Why iOS Apps Are Getting Bulkier (ndtv.com)

Submitted by joshtops on Wednesday August 09, 2017 @10:10AM

joshtops writes: From a report: Apps are getting bigger in size, in part because developers add new features, something their users obviously appreciate, developers say. "Apps are getting bigger because iOS devices are more powerful, and developers are building more and more complex things for them without considering the impact the size will have around the world," developer Stephen Troughton-Smith tells Gadgets 360. But in part, it is also happening because developers are being careless, and adding more than one instance of files, Troughton-Smith added. "So Facebook, Twitter, and other large companies have perhaps tens or hundreds of people building their iOS apps. A lot of the components for these apps are developed independently as components, or frameworks. For each additional component you glue together into an app, there is some overhead," he explained. "Some of the teams will duplicate functionality some other team wrote. Images and other resources end up being duplicated." The high-resolution image assets that developers are required to add also contributes to the size of an app, two India-based developers, and Peter Steinberger, founder and CEO of PSPDFKit, a dev kit that is used by several popular PDF apps, told Gadgets 360. Apple can itself take some blame, too. Developers using Apple's Swift language, which the company introduced in 2014, are required to add several components to their apps that make them heavier. "Apple's new Swift language, for example, requires a bunch of components to be embedded each time it's used, because it's not yet 'ABI stable,'" Troughton-Smith explained. This means developers need to embed the versions of libraries they've developed against, and not count on the one available on the system. Another developer who didn't want to be identified said a typical app built with Swift language requires as many as 30 Swift runtime libraries to be stuffed within the app. On top of this, he added, "you will be surprised at just how many apps use common code found at places like GitHub. Developers often don't care about removing the bits that wasn't relevant to their app," he added. In a blog post published in June, marketing and research firm Sensor Tower wrote, "The total space required by the top 10 most installed US iPhone apps has grown from 164 MB in May 2013 to about 1.9 GB last month, a 12x or approximately 1,100 percent increase in just four years." The phones' storage capacity has not changed at anything close to the same rate, with the base iPhone version only recently going up from 16GB to 32GB of storage." [...] San Francisco-based developer Ben Sandofsky, who was part of the team that made Twitter's iOS app and has served as a consultant on HBO's Silicon Valley show, resonated our concerns and said often "employees at these [Western] companies live in an 'early adopter bubble.' They have LTE connections, fast Wi-Fi at home, and phones with 64 gigs of storage. This creates a huge blind spot around your average user." Sandofsky, who recently developed popular third-party Halidi camera app for iPhone, added, "another issue is advances that have made the lives of engineers and managers easier, without understanding the burden on users. It's gotten easier than ever to reuse code between iPhone apps. With a few keystrokes, an engineer can add thousands of lines of code to an app. In theory that's good, because engineers shouldn't reinvent the wheel. Unfortunately things have gotten crazy in the last few years, with engineers pulling gigantic libraries that add megabytes to their app's size, when they could build something much smaller to solve the task at hand in under an hour."

Submission + - Why We Can't Have the Male Pill (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by joshtops on Friday August 04, 2017 @12:14PM

joshtops writes: For years, headlines have promised an imminent breakthrough in male contraception. Time and again, these efforts have fallen short. Last October, for instance, researchers reported that a hormone cocktail they’d been testing curbed sperm production and prevented pregnancies. But they’d had to halt the study early because men were reporting troubling side effects, including mood changes and depression.
“The joke in the field is that the male contraceptive has been five years away for the last 40 years,” says John Amory, a research physician at the University of Washington School of Medicine who has been working on the challenge for two decades. A new form of male birth control would be a public-health triumph and could snag a significant piece of the contraceptive market—which is expected to surpass $33 billion by 2023, according to research firm Global Market Insights Inc.—or possibly expand it further. In a 2002 German survey of 9,000 men in nine countries, including Brazil, France, Germany, Mexico, and the U.S., more than 55 percent of the respondents said they’d be willing to use a new form of male birth control. A later study by Johns Hopkins University estimated that the demand could yield 44 million customers in those nine countries alone. And yet major pharmaceutical companies have mostly abandoned the chase.

Submission + - Reddit Is Testing Country-Specific Home Pages That Highlight 'Geo Popular' Conte (ndtv.com)

Submitted by joshtops on Friday July 14, 2017 @12:47PM

joshtops writes: Reddit is exploring a new way to make its front page more relevant to its readers. The social aggregation and discussion website is testing tailored home pages based on a reader's location in select places, Gadgets 360 spotted on Wednesday. The company has confirmed to us that it is indeed testing "geo popular" home pages. As part of the test, readers in Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, and United Kingdom could see a banner when they visit Reddit.com informing them of the new home page. It's unclear if registered and signed in users are also a part of the experiment. Testing from India, in one case we found several stories from r/India and r/cricket (no surprise given the sport's popularity in the country) subreddits populate the home page. Reddit is also letting people switch the home page to any of the aforementioned country's home pages. Users also have the option to switch to the global — universal — home page. n a statement, a Reddit spokesperson told Gadgets 360, "We've been testing new geo-based popular feeds as a way to surface more relevant content to users based on their location," reserving any timeframe for when — and if — Reddit plans to roll-out this feature to all its users. "We'll be adjusting as we receive feedback from users," the spokesperson added, reaffirming that users will be "able to toggle locations to see popular posts in other geographical areas or globally."

Submission + - Ola, India's Largest Ride-Hailing Service, Plans International Expansion (ndtv.com)

Submitted by joshtops on Saturday July 08, 2017 @06:06AM

joshtops writes: Indian ride-hailing company Ola, which operates in over 100 cities in the local country, is eyeing international expansion, according to a report, which cites multiple sources. The company, which leads rival Uber in India's ride-hailing market, has been looking at international markets for some time, and it has identified India's neighbours Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bangladesh as the first international countries where it will offer its services, the report added. Rival Uber already operates in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Ola is also eyeing other countries in Asia and North Africa to continue this expansion in the future, another person requesting anonymity told Gadgets 360. [...] Ola is exploring international markets at a time when Uber is increasingly expanding its reach in India. The global ride-hailing service, which operates in over 500 cities, is presently available in 29 cities in the country. India has become the fastest growing market for Uber, especially in the wake of its exit from China.

Submission + - NASA Seeks Nuclear Power for Mars (scientificamerican.com)

Submitted by joshtops on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @09:38AM

joshtops writes: As NASA makes plans to one day send humans to Mars, one of the key technical gaps the agency is working to fill is how to provide enough power on the Red Planet’s surface for fuel production, habitats and other equipment. One option: small nuclear fission reactors, which work by splitting uranium atoms to generate heat, which is then converted into electric power.
NASA’s technology development branch has been funding a project called Kilopower for three years, with the aim of demonstrating the system at the Nevada National Security Site near Las Vegas. Testing is due to start in September and end in January 2018.
The last time NASA tested a fission reactor was during the 1960s' Systems for Nuclear Auxiliary Power, or SNAP, program, which developed two types of nuclear power systems. The first system — radioisotope thermoelectric generators, or RTGs — taps heat released from the natural decay of a radioactive element, such as plutonium. RTGs have powered dozens of space probes over the years, including the Curiosity rover currently exploring Mars. [Nuclear Generators Power NASA Deep Space Probes (Infographic)]
The second technology developed under SNAP was an atom-splitting fission reactor. SNAP-10A was the first — and so far, only — U.S. nuclear power plant to operate in space. Launched on April 3, 1965, SNAP-10A operated for 43 days, producing 500 watts of electrical power, before an unrelated equipment failure ended the demonstration. The spacecraft remains in Earth orbit.

Submission + - Amazon Sues Former AWS VP Over Non-Compete Deal (geekwire.com)

Submitted by joshtops on Monday June 12, 2017 @11:57AM

joshtops writes: Amazon.com is alleging that one of its former high-ranking executives violated a non-compete agreement when he accepted a job at Bellevue-based Smartsheet, GeekWire has learned. In a lawsuit filed Friday in King County Superior Court, Amazon alleges that Gene Farrell, who served as Vice President of the AWS Enterprise Applications & EC2 Windows team, violated a non-compete agreement when he took the new job as head of product June 1 at the heavily-funded Bellevue online workplace collaboration platform. “This move is unthinkable,” Amazon wrote in a motion for a temporary restraining order that would bar Farrell from working at Smartsheet. “he cannot possibly forget everything he knows about AWS’s products and plans while he is working to develop products for its competitor.”

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