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Comment Now you've got me thinking... (Score 1) 83

by sraasch (#60542942) Attached to: $1 Hearing Aid Could Treat Millions With Hearing Loss

My father-in-law is seriously hard of hearing (read: almost deaf). He has hearing aids that ran him >$2400 that he has trouble using, and often don't work well. A low-cost project like this with additional processing to tune the amplification for his particular hearing would be a great thing for his family.
Security

Researchers Easily Breached Voting Machines For the 2020 Election (engadget.com) 123

Posted by BeauHD from the way-too-easy dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: The voting machines that the U.S. will use in the 2020 election are still vulnerable to hacks. A group of ethical hackers tested a bunch of those voting machines and election systems (most of which they bought on eBay). They were able to crack into every machine, The Washington Post reports. Their tests took place this summer at a Def Con cybersecurity conference, but the group visited Washington to share their findings yesterday. A number of flaws allowed the hackers to access the machines, including weak default passwords and shoddy encryption. The group says the machines could be hacked by anyone with access to them, and if poll workers make mistakes or take shortcuts, the machines could be infiltrated by remote hackers.
Facebook

Facebook To Create Virtual Reality Social Media World Called Horizon (bbc.com) 58

Posted by BeauHD from the VR-world dept.
dryriver shares a report from the BBC: Facebook is creating an immersive environment called Horizon to tempt people into spending more time in virtual reality. The VR app will be a mix of social places where users can mingle and chat, and other areas where they can play games against each other. People will inhabit and explore the virtual spaces via a cartoon avatar. The app will be made available and tested in early 2020, by a small group of Facebook users. Details about Horizon and early footage of the virtual space were shown off at Facebook's Oculus Connect 6 developer conference this week. Facebook said anyone using Horizon would be able to call on human "guides" to help them navigate and become more familiar with the virtual environment. The guides will not be "moderators" who will police behavior, said Facebook. It added that it would include tools that let people manage how they interact with other users. It will also have options that let people shape and build their own part of the environment. They will also be able to design their own avatars. The entire space has been given a cartoon-like feel as it is intended to be used on Facebook's Oculus Quest headset, which does not have the high resolution graphics of PC-linked headsets.

Sam Machkovech, a reporter for Ars Technica, who has tried Horizon, said Facebook had put "a ton of work" into the version he saw, to make it as welcoming as possible. But he noted that Horizon was "yet another" combination of apps, chat and avatars which Facebook had produced in just a few years. He suggested that it was still searching for a good combination that proved properly tempting to users. "We're still waiting for Facebook to inspire confidence that it will launch a social-VR app and stick with it for more than two years," he wrote. Anyone interested in joining Horizon can sign up to be an early tester. You can watch the strange YouTube pre-rendered CGI ad for Facebook Horizon here.

Comment Re:Be aware of this (Score 1) 346

by sraasch (#56595026) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How Would a Self-Aware AI Behave?

It *will* happen... but soon? I doubt it. It's one thing to create a natural-looking program that will pass whatever version of a Turing test you'd like and it might even *look* like it's self-aware, but it's something entirely different to create something that is truly self-aware.

Like I said, it will happen, but all the hype surrounding "AI" and "machine intelligence" is largely just that. There are applications that can make use of neural networks, but none of these is "intelligent", let alone anywhere near self-aware.

BTW: If you have a python library that I can use to build myself a self-aware assistant, please provide a pointer!

Comment Administration just cut $10M from NASA (Score 1) 113

by sraasch (#56587478) Attached to: Congress Is Quietly Nudging NASA To Look for Aliens

The WH just cut the NASA program responsible for validating greenhouse gas emissions: https://smmry.com/http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/05/trump-white-house-quietly-cancels-nasa-research-verifying-greenhouse-gas-cuts

I think I'd rather spend the money bringing this program back rather than feeding ICE more information on potential immigrants.
The Courts

Judge Berates Prosecutors In Xbox Modding Trial 285

Posted by Soulskill from the your-uppance-has-come dept.
mrbongo writes with this excerpt from Wired: "Opening statements in the first-of-its-kind Xbox 360 criminal hacking trial were delayed here Wednesday after a federal judge unleashed a 30-minute tirade at prosecutors in open court, saying he had 'serious concerns about the government's case.' ... Gutierrez slammed the prosecution over everything from alleged unlawful behavior by government witnesses, to proposed jury instructions harmful to the defense. When the verbal assault finally subsided, federal prosecutors asked for a recess to determine whether they would offer the defendant a deal, dismiss or move forward with the case that was slated to become the first jury trial of its type. A jury was seated Tuesday."
Open Source

Open Source OCR That Makes Searchable PDFs 133

Posted by timothy from the word-of-advice dept.
An anonymous reader writes "In my job all of our multifunction copiers scan to PDF but many of our users want and expect those PDFs to be text searchable. I looked around for software that would create text searchable pdfs but most are very expensive and I couldn't find any that were open source (free). I did find some open source packages like CuneiForm and Exactimage that could in theory do the job, but they were hard to install and difficult to set up and use over a network. Then I stumbled upon WatchOCR. This is a Live CD distro that can easily create a server on your network that provides an OCR service using watched folders. Now all my scanners scan to a watched folder, WatchOCR picks up those files and OCRs them, and then spits them out into another folder. It uses CuneiForm and ExactImage but it is all configured and ready to deploy. It can even be remotely managed via the Web interface. Hope this proves helpful to someone else who has this same situation."
Space

Supermassive Black Hole Is Thrown Out of Galaxy 167

Posted by samzenpus from the moving-to-better-quarters dept.
DarkKnightRadick writes "An undergrad student at the University of Utrecht, Marianne Heida, has found evidence of a supermassive black hole being tossed out of its galaxy. According to the article, the black hole — which has a mass equivalent to one billion suns — is possibly the culmination of two galaxies merging (or colliding, depending on how you like to look at it) and their black holes merging, creating one supermassive beast. The black hole was found using the Chandra Source Catalog (from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory). The direction of the expulsion is also possibly indicative of the direction of rotation of the two black holes as they circled each other before merging."
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Tech Lessons from the Mob and Red Light District (cio.com)

Submitted by
Chris Lindquist
Chris Lindquist writes: "Organized crime, porn peddlers, gambling sites — they all use technology to make a killing. CIO.com has posted several stories that spell out how the seedy side uses IT for profit. From the online techniques of penny stock scammers to innovation lessons from a pair of "accidental pornographers," to what you can do to fend off cybercriminals, find out what they do right when they're doing wrong."

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