Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Comment Disable Google Assistant (Score 1) 68

First do this:

https://www.tech-recipes.com/r...

Android (at least my moto x4) will still respond to the "Ok Google" hotword and prompt you to set up Google Assistant. You probably don't want that, so go into Settings > Apps > Google > Permissions and uncheck the microphone permission.

Keep an eye on that; you know all of this runs afoul of their conversion strategy so they'll find an excuse to turn it back on or tie that permission to something you actually want to do.

Honestly, I don't know if Google knows what it wants or why some people find this sort of thing objectionable.
Privacy

Fujitsu Tech Can Track Heavily Blurred People In Security Videos 45

Posted by timothy from the ok-but-how-do-the-heavily-blurred-people-live? dept.
itwbennett writes Fujitsu has developed image-processing technology that can be used to track people in security camera footage, even when the images are heavily blurred to protect their privacy. The company says that detecting the movements of people in this way could be useful for retail design, reducing pedestrian congestion in crowded urban areas or improving evacuation routes for emergencies. An indoor test of the system was able to track the paths of 80 percent of test subjects, according to the company.

Submission + - Harvard climate skeptic scientist has made a fortune from corporate interests (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: Elected officials who want to block the EPA and legislation on climate change frequently refer to a handful of scientists who dispute anthropogenic climate change. One of scientists they quote most often is Wei-Hock Soon, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who claims that variations in the sun’s energy can largely explain recent global warming. Newly released documents show the extent to which Dr. Soon has made a fortune from corporate interests. 'He has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. At least 11 papers he has published since 2008 omitted such a disclosure, and in at least eight of those cases, he appears to have violated ethical guidelines of the journals that published his work.' The Koch Brothers are cited as a source of Dr. Soon's funding.

Comment Re:Give me a damn web browser (Score 5, Interesting) 157

by vastabo (#45672687) Attached to: Google Brings AmigaOS to Chrome Via Native Client Emulation

This is Google demonstrating that their platform for abstracting a client's hardware is robust and performant. I suspect that Amiga emulation is just because it's cool.

Having this layer of abstraction protects Google from the machinations of software vendors who might want a piece of their action.
The Internet

BP Hired Company To Troll Users Who Left Critical Comments 263

Posted by Soulskill from the can-you-see-why-people-love-oil-companies dept.
An anonymous reader sends this news from Al-Jazeera: "BP has been accused of hiring internet 'trolls' to purposefully attack, harass, and sometimes threaten people who have been critical of how the oil giant has handled its disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The oil firm hired the international PR company Ogilvy & Mather to run the BP America Facebook page during the oil disaster, which released at least 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf in what is to date the single largest environmental disaster in U.S. history. The page was meant to encourage interaction with BP, but when people posted comments that were critical of how BP was handling the crisis, they were often attacked, bullied, and sometimes directly threatened. ... BP's 'astroturfing' efforts and use of 'trolls' have been reported as pursuing users' personal information, then tracking and posting IP addresses of users, contacting their employers, threatening to contact family members, and using photos of critics' family members to create false Facebook profiles, and even threatening to affect the potential outcome of individual compensation claims against BP."

Comment Re:What's Missing (Score 1) 157

by vastabo (#45100575) Attached to: Google X Display Boss: Smartphones, Tablets, Apps Are "Mind-Numbing"

If you had an Apple II, you had everything you needed to develop new software for it.

Looks like they used a Multics box at MIT. http://www.frankston.com/public/?name=ImplementingVisiCalc

Mobile phones and tablets have no such tools.

Really?
http://developer.android.com/tools/sdk/eclipse-adt.html
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/IDEs/Conceptual/iOS_Simulator_Guide/GettingStartedwithiOSStimulator/GettingStartedwithiOSStimulator.html

Their operating systems are shit packed on top of shit

Rather subjective. They do quite a bit more than Apple DOS or MS-DOS ever did.

fiddly little distraction machines that function as brightly colored noisy little pets

Same as it ever was:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King's_Quest

a way to drain their parents' wallets by sending nonsense to each other 24 hours a day

Ever use a BBS back in the day?

the world-changing technology the PC made possible

The PC made computing accessible to commonfolk where it was previously the province of large institutions. Mobile continues this trend.

With the exception of FOSS, there hasn't been shit developed for any platform since.

We invented a new platform. Web Applications and APIs facilitated by cheap, commodity hardware have changed the nature of human communications and learning in the last 15 years.

distracted by Unity and HTML5 and Haskell and all the other flavors of proprietary dumbfuckery

Huh? None of those are proprietary. If a young person chose to learn about and use Haskell, I think they'd be well-equipped to learn quite a lot about how computers work.

Comment Re:Unity is hard (Score 1) 302

by vastabo (#43119923) Attached to: Shuttleworth On Ubuntu Community Drama
Because he's trying to make an interface for a convergence device where it no longer matters if you're running it on a phone, tablet, or desktop.

You know, a Unified interface. It's a hard problem--you need only look at Windows 8 to see how badly it can go wrong. Apple started to move in that direction with Launchpad too, but I don't really know if they can make it work either. In the not-too-distant future, you'll be able to sync your computing environment between all your various devices and persist settings and whatnot through the cloud (like a very distributed home directory or roaming profile).

Anyway, Mark Shuttleworth is trying to go where the puck will be, not where it is. And he's trying to do it with open source software. I wish him the best of luck.
Games

Palm Pre and WebOS Get Native Gaming 49

Posted by Soulskill from the break-out-your-rocket-launcher dept.
rboatright writes "WebOS developers have been waiting, and with the 1.3.5 release, Palm's open source page suddenly listed SDL. Members of the WebOS internals team took that as a challenge and within 24 hours had a working port of Doom running in SDL on the Pre, in a webOS card. 48 hours later, they not only had Quake running, but had found in the latest LunaSysMgr the requirements to launch a native app from the webOS app launcher from an icon just like any other app. At the same time, the team demonstrated openGL apps running. With full native code support, with I/O available via SDL, developers now have a preview into Palm's future intent with regard to native code SDK's, and a hint of what's coming."

Slashdot Top Deals

No line available at 300 baud.

Close