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Comment Sadly true (Score 5, Interesting) 208

by jwest (#56119853) Attached to: New York Times CEO: Print Journalism Has Maybe Another 10 Years

I commute into a major US city every day and just today noticed someone reading an actual newspaper on the train. I can't even remember when the last time I saw that. Between me with my book and him with his newspaper, we really stood out among the rest of the passengers. If newspapers and books aren't for commuters, who are they for? And commuters have left them by. Sadly, I think this is an accurate assessment..
Crime

Taser Will Use Police Body Camera Videos 'To Anticipate Criminal Activity' (theintercept.com) 76

Posted by BeauHD from the predictive-reporting dept.
Presto Vivace quotes a report from The Intercept: With an estimated one-third of departments using body cameras, police officers have been generating millions of hours of video footage. Taser stores terabytes of such video on Evidence.com, in private servers to which police agencies must continuously subscribe for a monthly fee. Data from these recordings is rarely analyzed for investigative purposes, though, and Taser -- which recently rebranded itself as a technology company and renamed itself "Axon" -- is hoping to change that. Taser has started to get into the business of making sense of its enormous archive of video footage by building an in-house "AI team." In February, the company acquired two computer vision startups, Dextro and Fossil Group Inc. Taser says the companies will allow agencies to automatically redact faces to protect privacy, extract important information, and detect emotions and objects -- all without human intervention. This will free officers from the grunt work of manually writing reports and tagging videos, a Taser spokesperson wrote in an email. "Our prediction for the next few years is that the process of doing paperwork by hand will begin to disappear from the world of law enforcement, along with many other tedious manual tasks." Analytics will also allow departments to observe historical patterns in behavior for officer training, the spokesperson added. "Police departments are now sitting on a vast trove of body-worn footage that gives them insight for the first time into which interactions with the public have been positive versus negative, and how individuals' actions led to it." But looking to the past is just the beginning: Taser is betting that its artificial intelligence tools might be useful not just to determine what happened, but to anticipate what might happen in the future.

Comment Bad tactics (Score 0) 460

by jwest (#52538577) Attached to: Netflix Stock Price Tanks As Customers Quit Over Higher Prices

I dropped Netflix when they wanted to increase my $9 grandfathered plan to $36. They didn't give a crap that I had been a loyal customer since 1992... . So they deserve it. The customer isn't always right, but you have to ease them into your new business model. They don't understand that. The corporate culture there is too arrogant.

Comment Re:Great advice (Score 1) 248

by jwest (#45865397) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: State of the Art In DIY Security Systems?

The police won't give a shit, most burglary goes unpunished even if you give them evidence.

+1 on that. My house was broken into a couple years ago and my laptop stolen. I had Prey installed, so I was able to give the police a picture of the thief from the laptop camera and the thief's IP address with the street address associated to their account. The response was "That's nice." They never did anything. Later, I even found out the guy's name, what kind of car he drove, and that he was committing other burglaries (I left Prey running for a few weeks after the theft and got all kinds of pics and screen caps). I gave it all to the police. They still did nothing. I gave up and wiped the machine remotely. The guy's probably still out there. At least where I live, the police are not interested in theft not matter how much you evidence you give them.

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