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Comment Re:Bull business model (Score 1) 120

Personalized advertising is an annoying invasive business model that shows you more of the stuff you don't need anymore - I don't need more TV ads after I bought one. I'm with Apple on this one.

Yes but this is Apple, you either have to side with Apple as they unfairly victimise developers who based their entire business model on advertising or you have to side with the Advertisers and Developers against Apple while the former are tracking every move you make so they can shove herbal Viagra ads in your face. That is like deciding whether to side with Hitler against against Stalin or Stalin against Hitler. Next thing you know you are reading Franklin D. Roosevelt's biography for clues on how to pick a side.

Somewhat off-topic: Tracking every move you make is not required to shove herbal Viagra adds in your face.
Microsoft

Child Abuse Verdict Held Back By MS Word Glitch 191

Posted by samzenpus from the messy-verdict dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Last week several defendants including one high-profile TV presenter were sentenced in Portugal in what has been known as the Casa Pia scandal. The judges delivered on September 3 a summary of the 2000-page verdict, which would be disclosed in full only three days later. The disclosure of the full verdict has been postponed from September 8 to a yet-to-be-announced date, allegedly because the full document was written in several MS Word files which, when merged together, retained 'computer related annotations which should not be present in any legal document.' (Google translated article.) Microsoft specialists were called in to help the judges sort out the 'text formatting glitch,' while the defendants and their lawyers eagerly wait to access the full text of the verdict."
Google

Google Caffeine Drops MapReduce, Adds "Colossus" 65

Posted by samzenpus from the time-to-upgrade dept.
An anonymous reader writes "With its new Caffeine search indexing system, Google has moved away from its MapReduce distributed number crunching platform in favor of a setup that mirrors database programming. The index is stored in Google's BigTable distributed database, and Caffeine allows for incremental changes to the database itself. The system also uses an update to the Google File System codenamed 'Colossus.'"
Image

Officials Use Google Earth To Find Unlicensed Pools 650

Posted by samzenpus from the eye-in-the-sky dept.
Officials in Riverhead, New York are using Google Earth to root out the owners of unlicensed pools. So far they've found 250 illegal pools and collected $75,000 in fines and fees. Of course not everyone thinks that a city should be spending time looking at aerial pictures of backyards. from the article: "Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, DC, said Google Earth was promoted as an aid to curious travelers but has become a tool for cash-hungry local governments. 'The technology is going so far ahead of what people think is possible, and there is too little discussion about community norms,' she said."
Security

Attacking Game Consoles On Corporate Networks 79

Posted by Soulskill from the waggle-the-wiimote-to-lock-it-down dept.
A pair of security researchers speaking at DefCon demonstrated how video game consoles, which are becoming increasingly common break room or team-building toys, can open vulnerabilities in corporate networks. "[They] found that many companies install Nintendo Wii devices in their work places, even though they don’t let you walk into the company with smartphones or laptops. (Factories and other sensitive work locations don’t allow any devices with cameras). By poisoning the Wii, they could spread a virus over the corporate network. People have a false sense of security about the safety of these game devices, but they can log into computer networks like most other computer devices now. In the demos, the researchers showed they could take compromised code and inject it into the main game file that runs on either a DS or a game console. They could take over the network and pretty much spread malware across it and thereby compromise an entire corporation. The researchers said they can do this with just about any embedded device, from iPhones to internet TVs."
Education

NAMCO Takes Down Student Pac-man Project 218

Posted by Soulskill from the chasing-ghosts dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The core of how people first learn to do stuff — programming, music, writing, etc. — is to imitate others. It's one of the best ways to learn. Apparently a bunch of students using MIT's educational Scratch programming language understand this. But not everyone else does. NAMCO Bandai sent a takedown notice to MIT because some kids had recreated Pac-man with Scratch. The NAMCO letter is pretty condescending as well, noting that it understands the educational purpose of Scratch, but 'part of their education should include concern for the intellectual property of others.'"
Software

Submission + - Russian chatbot passes Turing Test (news.com)

Submitted by
CurtMonash
CurtMonash writes: "According to Ina Fried, a chatbot is making the rounds that successfully emulates an easily-laid woman. As such, it dupes lonely Russian males into divulging personal and financial details at a rate of one every three minutes. All jokes aside — and a lot of them come quickly to mind — that sure sounds like the Turing Test to me. Of course, there are caveats. Reports of scary internet security threats are commonly overblown. There are some pretty obvious ways the chatbot could be designed to lessen its AI challenge by seeking to direct the conversation. And finally, while we are told the bot has fooled a few victims, we don't know its overall success rate at fooling the involuntary Turing "judges.""

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