Submission + - Amazon's Alexa Team Can Access Users' Home Addresses (bloomberg.com)
Team members with access to Alexa users’ geographic coordinates can easily type them into third-party mapping software and find home residences, according to the employees, who signed nondisclosure agreements barring them from speaking publicly about the program. While there’s no indication Amazon employees with access to the data have attempted to track down individual users, two members of the Alexa team expressed concern to Bloomberg that Amazon was granting unnecessarily broad access to customer data that would make it easy to identify a device’s owner.
Comment Musk has it all wrong! (Score 1) 201
The AIs will not need to have killer robots for killing people. All the AIs have to do is crash the stock market. We will take care of the rest ourselves. People will happily shoot other people for a doughnut.
Comment There is another system (Score 5, Interesting) 170
I believe Colossus and Guardian spoke to each other in their own language. Never read the book, but in the film they start communicating in simple math and an hour later, the math is beyond human understanding.
And yes, to this day, probably still the best movie about AI ever made.
Comment not up in smoke... (Score 3, Insightful) 166
It is Trickle Down.
VC is the ONLY way to get the rich to part with money, by appealing to their greed. Without VC there would be no trickle down at all.
Comment Re:Not if, but when... (Score 2) 166
As someone who was stuck in the middle of the 'Silicon Alley' Dot-Com bubble in NYC, it certainly did seem like companies would appear overnight, flush with cash for a little while, throw outrageous parties, and then disappear as quickly as they came. And every company had a stupid name like Muffinhead, Razorfish, or Funny Garbage.
We had a company go out of business owing us $28,000 for work we did for them. The CEO was trying to give me chairs and computers in lieu of payment. Ridiculous.
Comment 2 cans and a string.... (Score 1) 83
This is not a phone. It's a solar powered walkie talkie. You're limited in range, it's not cellular, it's not a phone. I can invent a mobile phone that uses no power using two soup cans and a string to communicate with a base station (Amazon Echo).
Comment Re:Education system that educates, perhaps? (Score 0, Flamebait) 263
Agree, and also maybe because religious groups aren't lobbying to have "intelligent design" taught as SCIENCE, and that perhaps the earth is not flat and jesus didn't ride dinosaurs.
Comment Never Underestimate Brute Force (Score 2) 114
Here's the thing about 'brute force' in computing. Computers can go through millions of computations and thousands of strategy scenarios in a second. As we are seeing today, a computer can simply brute force its way through encryption, simply by trying *everything* until you get the desired result, simply because the machines are so damn fast.
Brute Force can be an exceptionally powerful way of doing something, if it is tweaked to and pointed at a particular problem, in Kasperov's case, it was Chess.
Yes, the computer wasn't intelligent, but then again, neither are half the people I meet. Those people are simply brute forcing their way through life, without a single thought in their heads.....
Comment What could possibly go wrong??? (Score 1) 98
... And you thought your Samsung phone battery catching fire was a big deal....
I don't want to be a plane when someone spontaneously combusts because their harvester overloaded.
Comment Laffer Curve (Score 1) 389
It's the same logic that says that cutting taxes for the ultra rich will somehow improve the standard of living for the middle class. Basically, it works by Unicorn Farts.
Comment Alan Says.... (Score 1) 158
My TRON program should take of the Master Control Program, and shut that right down.
Comment And by your logic... (Score 1) 91
Lots of people are in jail because we have laws against drugs. And yet, drug companies and doctors have drugs. But some drugs are just illegal because of regulation. We need to remove these excessive regulations regarding drugs, then we would not have to pay so much in taxes to imprison people. It started with Reagen and his war on drugs. It's all the right's fault. They are the reason we pay too much in taxes to support jails full of prisoners because we have too much regulation regarding drugs.
Comment You obviously do not work for a bank (Score 5, Insightful) 91
The banks make plenty of money. If you don't know how to make money being a bank, you're in the wrong business. It's like running a casino, and you're always the winner. There's a fee for everything and everything has a fee. Plus, I get to take your money and invest it in risky financial constructs, plus, I get to act as broker for every financial transaction that passes through me, which also allows me to charge more fees.
The true reason for this was pure greed, you're shilling for billionaires crying about regulations that prevent them from being trillionaires, mostly by stealing even more of your money.
Why don't you look up the CEOs salaries of say, the three largest banks in America, and tell me again how banks are not making any money? You do understand that banks make billions in profits quarterly. And that's despite paying the top dogs salaries and bonuses that the average person would never see after a lifetime of work.
But sure, go ahead a cry a river about how the ultra rich aren't ultra ultra rich because of a few regulations. I can only assume I'm addressing Jared Kusher or his dad. Or maybe his paid Russian shill.
Comment So long slashdot... (Score 1, Troll) 810
Too many right wing nut jobs here. This place is starting to sound like Fox News in the comment section.
If you people are supporting Trump, the dumbest idiot ever to get elected president, on a site for geeks and nerds (hey, he's good at the cyber!), then something here is seriously wrong.
So long, and thanks for all the fish. I'm sure that reference will go over the heads of the right wing nutjobs.