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Comment Re:Hydrogen! (Score 1) 217

The Riversimple car is supposed to look at the whole issue of people transport. Most journeys don't carry 5 people so why carry all the baggage of 5 seats? Most journeys are short and relatively slow speed so why produce a car that does 80mph? Regardless of the top speed, the car has been designed to be as slippery as possible and, in tests, proved to have one of the lowest levels of aerodynamic and rolling drag on the road. And then there is the obsolescence that car manufacturers build in - this vehicle was conceived, top to bottom, for maximum life.

We have to rethink transport, not just replace the engine. This is what Riversimple is all about.

Comment It's about learning and coming up with a concept (Score 1) 186

As a graduate of the same course (albeit some 30 years ago) I have to tell Slashdotters that these guys have been asked to come up with a challenging concept and to see if they can do initial design studies to make it work in principal. They didn't have to actually make it work - even if some projects do actually go that far. That is what they have started Aweigh for - "We've come up with something interesting, so let's see if we can make something out of it". They have identified that there is a need for improved navigation systems that don't use GPS - they're right. Using a sextant can be accurate but even with practise it can be time consuming. Plus it needs to be done at the right time, in the right weather, with a clear head. Dead reckoning hasn't been updated for years. Then there is the RDF system but that only works in coastal regions and has probably been dismantled. They should be congratulated, not knocked. Besides, they're putting their lives into this project - if they can't fund Aweigh or can't make it work then they've just donated the time in trying to the benefit of the rest of mankind. Give them some time and we'll all know if this is going to be good or just another student project that does nothing except help train the student for their future.

Submission + - Happy birthday Alan Turing! How modern technology could win WWII in 13 minutes (digitalocean.com)

DevNull127 writes: A grateful reporter whose father-in-law liberated a concentration camp after D-Day reports on a high-tech team that "accomplished in 13 minutes what took Alan Turing years to do — and at a cost of just $7."

"In late 2017, at the Imperial War Museum in London, developers applied modern AI techniques to break the 'unbreakable' Enigma machine used by the Nazis to encrypt their correspondences in World War II."

Two Polish co-founders of a company called Enigma Pattern decided to honor Alan Turing's ground-breaking work at Bletchley Park, where Turing had automated the testing of over 15 billion possible passwords each day by building what's considered the first modern computer. They took the problem to a modern cloud infrastructure provider, renting what he describes as "2,000 minions that do the tedious work" — specifically, crunching 41 million combinations each second — using Grimm's Fairy Tales to train an algorithm to recognize when it had found a commonly-used German word (including familiar bedtime stories like Hansel & Gretl and Rumpelstiltskin). "In the end the AI could not understand German. But it did what machine learning does best: recognize patterns." "After 13 minutes of minion work, boom! The new Bombe had broken the code." Turing's birthday is Saturday — and it's nice to see him being remembered so fondly.

Submission + - Autonomous Boats Will Be On the Market Sooner Than Self-Driving Cars (vice.com)

An anonymous reader writes: In the autonomous revolution that is underway, nearly every transportation machine will eventually be self-driving. For cars, it’s likely going to take decades before we see them operating freely, outside of test conditions. Some unmanned watercraft, on the other hand, may be at sea commercially before 2020. That’s partly because automating all ships could generate a ridiculous amount of revenue. According to the United Nations, 90 percent of the world’s trade is carried by sea and 10.3 billion tons of products were shipped in 2016. According to NOAA’s National Ocean Service, ships transported $1.5 trillion worth of cargo through US ports in 2016. The world’s 325 or so deep-sea shipping companies have a combined revenue of $10 billion.

Startups and major firms like Rolls Royce are now looking to automate the seas and help maritime companies ease navigation, save fuel, improve safety, increase tonnage, and make more money. As it turns out, autonomous systems for boats aren’t supremely different than those of cars, beyond a few key factors—for instance, water is always moving while roads are not, and ships need at least a couple miles to redirect. Buffalo Automation, a startup in upstate New York that began at the University at Buffalo, just raised $900,000 to help commercialize its AutoMate system—essentially a collection of sensors and cameras to help boats operate semi-autonomously. CEO Thiru Vikram said the company is working with three pilot partners, and intends to target cargo ships and recreational vessels first. Autonomous ships are an area of particular interest for the International Maritime Organization (IMO), which sets the standards for international waters. It launched a regulatory scoping exercise last year to analyze the impact of autonomous boats. By the time it wraps in 2020, market demand may make it so that we already have semi-autonomous and unmanned vessels at sea.

Submission + - MIT just discovered a way to mass produce graphene in large sheets (inhabitat.com)

Paige.Bennett writes: Up till now, graphene has been produced in small batches in labs. But MIT just found a way to mass produce graphene in large sheets using a process that rolls out five centimeters of graphene each minute. The longest span so far was nearly four hours, which produced about 10 meters of graphene.

Submission + - 19-year-old archivist charged for downloading freedom-of-information releases

Ichijo writes: According to an article on CBC News, a Canadian teen "has been charged with 'unauthorized use of a computer,' which carries a possible 10-year prison sentence, for downloading approximately 7,000 freedom-of-information releases. The provincial government says about 250 of those contain Nova Scotians' sensitive personal information."

"When he was around eight...his Grade 3 class adopted an animal at a shelter, receiving an electronic adoption certificate. That lead to a discovery on the classroom computer. 'The website had a number at the end, and I was able to change the last digit of the number to a different number and was able to see a certificate for someone else's animal that they adopted,' he said. 'I thought that was interesting.' The teenager's current troubles arose because he used the same trick on Nova Scotia's freedom-of-information portal, downloading about 7,000 freedom-of-information requests."

Comment Re:Sailfish on Sony Xperia (Score 3, Interesting) 304

I've had a number of Jolla devices. My wife has a Jolla phone. If I were on the market today for a new phone, I'd be running Sailfish. The guys at Jolla are building genuine independence and, by being relatively obscure, I think manage to keep things secure yet flexible. Much of my work is in Linux admin and to be able to do that work, natively, straight off my phone is a joy.

Word of warning: it's like Linux on the desktop - it works really well but you need to engage your brain. There is no easy way of syncing your music on your phone to some music library on some cloud service but hey, if you want to, you can find a way. Don't use a Jolla if you want a brain-dead experience or if you suffer regularly from hang-overs.

Word of warning 2: When you meet someone else running Sailfish in the wild the amount of excitement generated probably needs a health warning - for you and those around you. If you have a heart problem, don't go looking for other Jolla fans outside a Jolla event.

Comment Look at SailfishOS (Score 1) 304

I've been running SailfishOS on a Jolla for several years. Never had a problem. Frequently updated with good, reliable updates. I have full root access to the device. I can add my own scripts and apps. Many packages have been ported. Yup, there are a few missing pieces (like whatsapp but which /.er needs needs them when you can run bash?). Soon to be running on Sony hardware. I think that the Russians and the Chinese think that there is a need for a genuine free OS (as in free from the US snooping) so I hope it won't die anytime soon. Sad that the Jolla tablet didn't work out - that is a truly lovely piece of hardware to use.

https://jolla.com/

Comment They make me speed up... (Score 1) 174

I run 4 miles a day across London as part of my commute and well over half of this is in the gutters because there are too many people walking (shambling whilst yakking on their iPhones?) on the footpaths. There is a painted speed bump just 1/4 of a mile from my final destination (just by Borough Market). It never slows me down. Quite the opposite - I always speeds me up as I race to clear it before some muppet slams on their breaks to avoid it and skids their car into me.

Never mind - even if I were Mo Farrar I'd be struggling to get to 20 miles an hour...

Submission + - BBC [UK] gets go-ahead to detect iPlayer packets over encrypted Wi-Fi. (telegraph.co.uk)

product_bucket writes: The BBC has been given permission to use a new technology to detect users of the iPlayer who do not hold a TV licence. Researchers at University College London have apparently developed a method to identify specially crafted packets over an encrypted Wi-Fi link without needing to break the underlying encryption itself. TV Licensing (the fee-collecting arm of the BBC) has said the practice is under regular scrutiny by independent regulators, but declined to elaborate on how the technique works.

Comment Re:Don't Panic (Score 1) 535

As a mentor at a London based start-up school in the last few years I have seen a rapid shift to the brightest and most innovative new wannabie entrepreneurs coming to London from other EU memberstates rather than from the UK - at least attending our school. They have good ideas and plenty of determination and significantly out do most of the home grown people.

Submission + - Microsoft Open-Sources Checked C, a Safer Version of C (softpedia.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft has open-sourced Checked C, an extension to the C programming language that brings new features to address a series of security-related issues. As its name hints, Checked C will add checking to C, and more specifically pointer bounds checking. The company hopes to curb the high-number of security bugs such as buffer overruns, out-of-bounds memory accesses, and incorrect type casts, all which would be easier to catch in Checked C. Despite tangible benefits to security, the problem of porting code to Checked C still exists, just like it did when C# or Rust came out, both C alternatives.

Submission + - Would you trust medical data stored on AWS by CareMonkey? (caremonkey.com)

rolandw writes: My teenage daughter's school in the UK wants me to approve the storage of her full medical details in CareMonkey. CareMonkey say that this data is stored on AWS and their security page says that it is secured by every protocol ever claimed by AWS (apparenlty). As a sysadmin and developer who has used AWS extensively for non-secure information my alarm bells are sounding. Should I ignore them and say yes? Why would you refuse?

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