Submission + - Police warn sharing James Foley killing video is a crime (theguardian.com)
Twitter suspended dozens of accounts that published the graphic footage while YouTube tried to remove several copies of the video, which was first uploaded on Tuesday night.
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo tweeted: "We have been and are actively suspending accounts as we discover them related to this graphic imagery. Thank you."
The unprecedented social media clampdown came as the Metropolitan police warned that even viewing the video could constitute a criminal offence in the UK.
The force said in a statement: "The MPS counter-terrorism command (SO15) is investigating the contents of the video that was posted online in relation to the alleged murder of James Foley. We would like to remind the public that viewing, downloading or disseminating extremist material within the UK may constitute an offence under terrorism legislation."
Submission + - Putin government moves to take control of Energia 1
The move appears to be part of an effort by Russia’s government to obtain majority control over Energia, of which it owns a 38-percent share. The directors elected Igor Komarov as its new chairman of the board. Komarov is chief of the Russian United Rocket and Space Corporation (URSC), the government-owned company tasked with consolidating Russia’s sprawling space sector.
The government is also conducting a criminal investigation of Lopota, which might be justified but appears to be a power play designed to both eliminate him from the game as well as make sure everyone else tows the line so that URSC can take complete control.
Submission + - UK Government Report Recommends Ending Online Anonymity (techdirt.com)
Comment Re:AI is always "right around the corner". (Score 4, Insightful) 564
The chess programs had the rules of chess programmed into them, and the move to play was calculated by rating different moves in the search space using an algorithm that was programmed by the developers of the AI system. This means that it is only specialised to chess.
To be the AI in movies like The Terminator, the program will need to be able to learn the rules and strategies of chess itself, and adapt its algorithm over time. To simplify the problem of recognising the elements on the board (machine vision), you could represent the board as an 8x8 array of Unicode characters.
Teaching the rules is difficult because you need a way of communicating those rules, which means that the program will need to understand language and the meaning behind the language (or enough meaning to understand rules to a particular game). Also, chess has a lot of rules that can be complex (en passant, castling, etc.) so it would be better to start with a simple game like tic tac toe or connect 4.
The real threat is not in a generic AI that deems humans as a threat, but a specially tasked program or AI that miscalculates: allowing machines to control drones or military aircraft to perform air strikes, or similar things. There, if a machine gets things wrong it can cause untold destruction. Think SkyNet/The Terminator, but here the machines do not know what they are doing (they don't have independent thought or understanding like humans and animals), they just classify humans (or buildings) as a threat -- that is, this can be via a decision tree like in the chess games and the best "move" is to attack any building.
Submission + - Oklahoma's Earthquakes Linked To Fracking (vox.com)
Feed Google News Sci Tech: Google tells UK media which of their stories it is hiding from search results - (google.com)
Times of India
PCWorld
Google has informed several U.K. media which of their news articles it is hiding in search results shown to European Union users as a consequence of a recent EU court ruling that gives people the “right to be forgotten” by search engines under certain...
Google right to be forgotten 'to get messy' after BBC story disappearsCNET
Censorship claimed as Google cuts search resultsSalt Lake Tribune
Google 'forgets' BBC man's blog post: We saw what you did thereRegister
Wall Street Journal (blog)-Businessweek-PC Magazine
all 164 news articles
Submission + - TrueCrypt is dead? What now? 7
"The development of TrueCrypt was ended in 5/2014 after Microsoft terminated support of Windows XP." It goes on to list migration instructions. Is this the end for our beloved open source, multi-platform crypto solution? The question is what now? Planned forks? Any recommendations for freely available, open and multi-platform solutions that will allow for moving storage devices from Linux -> Windows -> Mac?
Submission + - Google Starts Blocking Extensions Not In The Chrome Web Store
Submission + - Parenting Rewires the Male Brain (sciencemag.org) 1
Submission + - Uk to end net neutrality (dailydot.com)
Comment Re:Fuzz Testing. Next! (Score 1) 116
They are all tools that can be applied to improve the quality of the code. No one thing is "The Solution".
* Test Driven Development (TDD) is a good approach to ensure that the code you write is testable. This will not work for things like UI code, but other code will benefit.
* Unit Tests can either be developed via a TDD-like approach (easier to do), or after the code is written (harder to do).
* Automated Regression Tests (a superset of Unit Tests) provide good coverage for ensuring code works as expected without involving a large manual testing team. These will only detect the things covered by the automated tests.
* Static Code Analysis tools can pick up a lot of problem areas, but will not detect every problem. These results can be used to identify what tests need to be created to prevent future regression.
* Fuzz testing is good at providing strange data to e.g. a protocol or file format parser. These are intended to be soak tests -- e.g. "does my regular expression parser handle all these strange and possibly invalid constructs". Fuzz testing would have most likely found the heartbleed bug (because it would have permutated the length of data to request). Any failures here should be converted to Unit/Regression tests to ensure that the problem is (a) fixed by any code changes made and (b) does not occur in the future. Fuzz testing will typically find hard to identify bugs (e.g. data races) that are not easy to identify from manually constructed tests or static analysis.
* Manual/ad hoc testing is important as it can uncover bugs that the developers are not aware of.
* Code and Security Reviews help identify potential issues (e.g. if you have someone knowledgeable about SQL injection, they can assess whether some code is vulnerable to that attack).
None of these is a silver bullet, but the more you have the better the code will be.
Comment Re:OpenGL drivers on other platforms (Score 3, Informative) 158
If you read the blog post, they don't use letters: N=NVIDIA, X=Mesa, I=Intel, A1=AMD, A2=ARM/Mali, Q=Qualcomm/Adreno, P=PowerVR. There is no mention of Apple.