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Comment Deep Leaning seems so slanted (Score 1) 50

by vocatan (#59337006) Attached to: Firefox To Get Page Translation Feature, Like Chrome
I had to giggle when I followed the link through to https://browser.mt/software and saw the section with the contributions by Mozilla... (text bolded by me)

Mozilla Firefox, popular web browser.
Deep Speech: Deep Leaning STT Engine, localizable speech-to-text engine that uses deep learning techniques to transcribe speech to text. It has more than 9,400 stars, and over 1,600 forks on GitHub repository.
TTS: Deep Leaning TTS Engine, Localizable text-to-speech engine that uses deep learning techniques to speak written text.


with these two Deep Leaning[sic] contributions - won't there be concerns about slanted translations?

Comment Re:Boo hoo (Score 1) 427

by vocatan (#57820784) Attached to: Former Edge Browser Intern Alleges Google Sabotaged Microsoft's Browser
I was going to post EXACTLY this same point! From the trenches at Netscape, during the middle of the browser wars, it was plain as daylight that Microsoft was doing all sorts of nefarious things to ensure that the Netscape browser would not run as well as Internet Explorer. In fact, if memory serves correctly, I seem to recall there was specific evidence of the operating system even maliciously looking for code signatures that would indicate that it was NETSCAPE code running. Man, revenge may have taken 20 years, but it sure feels friggin' sweet..... Stick that bright green dinosaur where the sun don't shine, Microsoft.

Submission + - Firefox Prepares to Mark All HTTP Sites "Not Secure" After HTTPS Adoption Rises (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The increased adoption of HTTPS among website operators will soon lead to browsers marking HTTP pages as "Not Secure" by default, and Mozilla is taking the first steps. The current Firefox Nightly Edition (version 59) includes a secret configuration option that when activated will show a visible visual indicator that the current page is not secure. In its current form, this visual indicator is a red line striking through a classic lock that's normally used to signal the presence of encrypted HTTPS pages.

According to Let’s Encrypt, 67% of web pages loaded by Firefox in November 2017 used HTTPS, compared to only 45% at the end of last year.

Submission + - Youbit Shuts Down Crypto-Currency Exchange After 2nd Hack, Files For Bankruptcy (bbc.com)

Submitted by phalse phace
phalse phace writes: After experiencing another hack, South Korean crypto-currency exchange Youbit has closed their doors and is filing for bankruptcy.

Youbit, which lets people buy and sell bitcoins and other virtual currencies, has filed for bankruptcy after losing 17% of its assets in the cyber-attack.

It did not disclose how much the assets were worth at the time of the attack.

In April, Youbit, formerly called Yapizon, lost 4,000 bitcoins now worth $73m (£55m) to cyberthieves.

South Korea's Internet and Security Agency (Kisa) which investigates net crime, said it had started an enquiry into how the thieves gained access to the exchange's core systems.

Kisa blamed the earlier attack on Youbit on cyber-spies working for North Korea. Separate, more recent, attacks on the Bithumb and Coinis exchanges, have also been blamed on the regime.

No information has been released about who might have been behind the latest Youbit attack.

In a statement, Youbit said that customers would get back about 75% of the value of the crypto-currency they have lodged with the exchange.

Submission + - Older Adults' Forgetfulness Tied To Faulty Brain Rhythms In Sleep, Study Says (npr.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Older brains may forget more because they lose their rhythm at night. During deep sleep, older people have less coordination between two brain waves that are important to saving new memories, a team reports in the journal Neuron. The finding appears to answer a long-standing question about how aging can affect memory even in people who do not have Alzheimer's or some other brain disease. The study was the result of an effort to understand how the sleeping brain turns short-term memories into memories that can last a lifetime, says Matt Walker, the author of the book Why We Sleep. "What is it about sleep that seems to perform this elegant trick of cementing new facts into the neural architecture of the brain?" To find out, Walker and a team of scientists had 20 young adults learn 120 pairs of words. "Then we put electrodes on their head and we had them sleep," he says. The electrodes let researchers monitor the electrical waves produced by the brain during deep sleep. They focused on the interaction between slow waves, which occur every second or so, and faster waves called sleep spindles, which occur more than 12 times a second. The next morning the volunteers took a test to see how many word pairs they could still remember. And it turned out their performance was determined by how well their slow waves and spindles had synchronized during deep sleep.

Next, the team repeated the experiment with 32 people in their 60s and 70s. Their brain waves were less synchronized during deep sleep. They also remembered fewer word pairs the next morning. And, just like with young people, performance on the memory test was determined by how well their brain waves kept the beat, says Randolph Helfrich, an author of the new study and a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley. The team also found a likely reason for the lack of coordination associated with aging: atrophy of an area of the brain involved in producing deep sleep. People with more atrophy had less rhythm in the brain, Walker says.

Submission + - CDC Director Says No Words Are Actually Banned At the CDC (pbs.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald on Sunday addressed a report that President Donald Trump’s administration had banned the CDC from using seven words or phrases in next year’s budget documents. The terms are “fetus,” “transgender,” “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “evidence-based” and “science-based,” according to a story first reported on Friday in The Washington Post. But Fitzgerald said in a series of tweets on Sunday said there are “no banned words,” while emphasizing the agency’s commitment to data-driven science. “CDC has a long-standing history of making public health and budget decisions that are based on the best available science and data and for the benefit of all people—and we will continue to do so,” she said.

A group of the agency’s policy analysts said senior officials at the CDC informed them about the banned words on Thursday, according to the Post’s report. In some cases, the analysts were reportedly given replacement phrases to use instead. But in follow-up reporting, The New York Times cited “a few” CDC officials who suggested the move was not meant as an outright ban, but rather, a technique to help secure Republican approval of the 2019 budget by eliminating certain words and phrases. A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, said the reported decree on banned words was a misrepresentation.

Submission + - Dec. 18, 2017: The Internet Is Really Slow Right Now In The U.S.A.

Submitted by Freshly Exhumed
Freshly Exhumed writes: Two major backbone internet service providers, Level 3 and Cogent, appear to be suffering from massive outages and downgraded service, according to ISP monitoring service Downdetector, with users in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Dallas, Atlanta, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., apparently being hit the hardest. Comcast is also said to be affected to a lesser degree.

Comment In one word: SELECTION! (Score 1) 186

by vocatan (#55318509) Attached to: Nearly 4 Million People In US Still Subscribe To Netflix DVDs By Mail
If you want some truly timeless classics, you have to delve into the vault of physical DVDs.

Sneakers: https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/...
THX 1138: https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/...

On the flip side, there are other movies which have come out on DVD which Netflix refuses to release to their loyal customers:
Ghost In The Shell : https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/...

Intrigued to hear what others have to say.

Comment Re: Plenty of examples to go by (Score 2) 230

by vocatan (#53329575) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Could A 'Smart Firewall' Protect IoT Devices?
Steve Gibson had suggested a configuration of three routers to isolate IoT devices. https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-545.... Again, it depends on how much you want to put "common consumers" through. I'd submit that unless it's ridiculously easy, the vast majority of consumers would simply scoff and claim it wasn't worth the trouble. (And those are the folks who probably were the main constituents of the recent botnets)

Comment Re:CRC (Score 2) 440

by vocatan (#41210083) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How Do I De-Dupe a System With 4.2 Million Files?
Be VERY careful about only relying upon the file contents -- my wife spent 3 weeks tagging a large (~8,000 images) collection of family photos -- and the method she used was to put the children's names in the filename. Being the clever geek, I ran a MD5 against all the files, and compared both filesize and MD5 -- and triumphantly purged all the binary duplicates -- only to find that the filename itself was important to retain. Also, note that some application such as Apple's iPhoto will conveniently retain multiple copies of the same image in various dimensions - as well as the original image before any transformations would apply. Bottom line: doing a filename+filecontents hash (single O(n) to calculate over entire file set), and then comparison of the hash feels _to me_ as the safest approach.

Comment Google catches up to Netscape? (Score 2, Informative) 175

by vocatan (#30956260) Attached to: Google To Pay $500 For Bugs Found In Chromium
Netscape used to offer a "bug Bounty" for issues reported -- xref article "BUGS BOUNTY By Philip Elmer-DeWitt Monday, Oct. 23, 1995 " http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,983604,00.html "[...]Netscape last week began offering cash awards to anybody who can find a security hole in the beta, or test, version of its latest browser software. Under the so-called Bugs Bounty program, the first person to identify a "significant" security flaw wins $1,000. Lesser bugs earn smaller prizes ranging from $40 sweatshirts to $12 coffee mugs. The idea, explains a company spokesperson, is to get hackers to hack when it will do the Netscape some good--before the product is officially released.[...]" So - given inflation, does this mean that the value of a bug has gone down over time - or was Netscape just paying way above market value? :D

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