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Submission + - New Book by Bruce Schneier: Rewiring Democracy (schneier.com)

Submitted by kipple
kipple writes: Bruce Schneier, one of the most well-known figures in all things cyber, is publishing his latest book: https://www.schneier.com/books...">Rewiring Democracy:

Rewiring Democracy looks beyond common tropes like deepfakes to examine how AI technologies will affect democracy in five broad areas: politics, legislating, administration, the judiciary, and citizenship. There is a lot to unpack here, both positive and negative. We do talk about AI’s possible role in both democratic backsliding or restoring democracies, but the fundamental focus of the book is on present and future uses of AIs within functioning democracies. (And there is a lot going on, in both national and local governments around the world.) And, yes, we talk about AI-driven propaganda and artificial conversation.

He even asked

Is anyone a Slashdot contributor? I’d like the book to be announced there.

...so I thought I'd oblige.

Comment Just fix the damn transcoding nightmare (Score 1) 108

by forged (#62421688) Attached to: Plex Wants To Become the First App You Open on Your TV Every Day
PLEX is losing track of why they even have paying customers in the first place. My Smart TV does the multi-platforms content search quite well ,thank you very much. I no longer care for other platforms' content when I open PLEX; I want to browse and then stream my local content FAST and with no excuses for transcoding especially on LAN.

Comment In the same boat. Take ownership of the accounts. (Score 1) 565

by forged (#54861559) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Someone Else Is Using My Email Address
My wife and I were both very early Gmail users (our lastname@gmail.com) and we both get a ton of accounts signup email this way. First, reset the passwords, and then go to lengths to lock them out of their own accounts. As the final blow, once you've modified all detail about their account, just change the account email address to something else entirely. The last step is to fend-off any recovery attempt. Even if they gave any details to customer service by phone (supposedly), by the time they do their old account has zero identifiable data that they can latch on to recover it.

Comment Sad no one mentioned the French TGV (Score 2) 189

by forged (#49525813) Attached to: Maglev Train Exceeds 600km/h For World Record
- Has been operating on conventional rail (cost $ vs. $$$ for maglev) since 1981.
- Is holding the world record of 574,8 km/h on conventioanl rail since 2007.
- Is linking all major cities in France and some abroad (Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, UK).
- Has commercial speeds of 280km/h for the oldest ones, to 320km/h for the current generation.
- Costs a fraction of the price of the maglev.

But, YMMV. And by all means go Japan !

Comment requires root access and will only run on Qualcomm (Score 5, Interesting) 71

by kipple (#48712167) Attached to: New App Detects Government Stingray Cell Phone Trackers

"This app requires root access and will only run on devices with Qualcomm chipset."

That's not "for android". That's playing a Qualcomm trick with the baseband.

I also wonder if a better way might be (but I'm speculating here) to use the measured distance from the nearest cell tower (called Timing Advance), as in http://stackoverflow.com/a/137... - and couple it with a public database of known celltowers locations to spot recent "additions".
Operating Systems

Plan 9 From Bell Labs Operating System Now Available Under GPLv2 223

Posted by Soulskill from the still-kicking dept.
TopSpin writes "Alcatel-Lucent has authorized The University of California, Berkeley to 'release all Plan 9 software previously governed by the Lucent Public License, Version 1.02 under the GNU General Public License, Version 2.' Plan 9 was developed primarily for research purposes as the successor to Unix by the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs between the mid-1980s and 2002. Plan 9 has subsequently emerged as Inferno, a commercially supported derivative, and ports to various platforms, including a recent port to the Raspberry Pi. In Plan 9, all system interfaces, including those required for networking and the user interface, are represented through the file system rather than specialized interfaces. The system provides a generic protocol, 9P, to perform all communication with the system, among processes and with network resources. Applications compose resources using union file systems to form isolated namespaces."
Intel

The Big Technical Mistakes of History 244

Posted by kdawson from the seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time dept.
An anonymous reader tips a PC Authority review of some of the biggest technical goofs of all time. "As any computer programmer will tell you, some of the most confusing and complex issues can stem from the simplest of errors. This article looking back at history's big technical mistakes includes some interesting trivia, such as NASA's failure to convert measurements to metric, resulting in the Mars Climate Orbiter being torn apart by the Martian atmosphere. Then there is the infamous Intel Pentium floating point fiasco, which cost the company $450m in direct costs, a battering on the world's stock exchanges, and a huge black mark on its reputation. Also on the list is Iridium, the global satellite phone network that promised to make phones work anywhere on the planet, but required 77 satellites to be launched into space."
Science

Why the First Cowboy To Draw Always Gets Shot 398

Posted by timothy from the more-guns-less-crime dept.
cremeglace writes "Have you ever noticed that the first cowboy to draw his gun in a Hollywood Western is invariably the one to get shot? Nobel-winning physicist Niels Bohr did, once arranging mock duels to test the validity of this cinematic curiosity. Researchers have now confirmed that people indeed move faster if they are reacting, rather than acting first."

Comment Missing handheld consoles (Score 1) 172

by forged (#26330595) Attached to: PS2 the Most Played Console In 2008
Would be interesting to see just how much the NDS is trouncing the PSP. Just in this household me & my wife own one each; my in-laws have 2 more; and virtually in every home with teens that we visited last summer, there was 1 for every 2 kids on average or possibly more.
Classic Games (Games)

Hasbro Finally Drops Scrabulous Lawsuit 51

Posted by Soulskill from the triple-word-score dept.
The Associated Press reports that Hasbro Inc. has now dropped the lawsuit it launched earlier this year against Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, the creators of Scrabulous, a Scrabble clone that found a sizable following on Facebook. We previously discussed Scrabulous' return to Facebook under a different name, as well as the "official" Scrabble client, which was not exactly well received. Hasbro's IP rights to the game are limited to North America, and the AP story adds: "Mattel, which owns the rights to Scrabble outside of North America, filed a lawsuit against the brothers in India claiming violations of intellectual property. It was not immediately clear what the status of that lawsuit is."

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