October 26, 2017 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

What happened to Las Vegas shooter’s hard drive? It’s a mystery

Enlarge / Vehicles drive past a Las Vegas billboard featuring a Federal Bureau of Investigation tip line number on Interstate 515. On October 1, Stephen Paddock killed 58 people and injured more than 450 after he opened fire on a large crowd at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival. (credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images) Local and federal investigators still have not come up with a motive that sparked a Nevada man to commit one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history. More than three weeks after Stephen Paddock opened fire and killed 58 people and wounded hundreds of others attending a country music festival below his Las Vegas hotel room, authorities appear stumped about uncovering a critical piece of information—Paddock’s hard drive—that could potentially lead them to other suspects. Stephen Paddock. (credit: Facebook ) Some madmen leave behind manifestos of sorts, like the one from Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber. His 35,000-word manifesto railing against technology paved the way for his 1996 arrest after his brother, David, realized it was written by his sibling. Paddock, who killed himself in his Mandalay Bay hotel room after the October 1 shooting rampage, hasn’t left any hint of a motive to explain his murders. The FBI is currently examining computers and cellphones in the FBI’s lab in Quantico tied to the Paddock case. However, a hard drive in a laptop found in the shooter’s hotel room is now missing, according to The Associated Press . Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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What happened to Las Vegas shooter’s hard drive? It’s a mystery

Inspired by brain’s visual cortex, new AI utterly wrecks CAPTCHA security

Enlarge / A representation of how physically close feature recognition units are built hierarchically to create an object hypothesis. (credit: Vicarious AI) Computer algorithms have gotten much better at recognizing patterns, like specific animals or people’s faces, allowing software to automatically categorize large image collections. But we’ve come to rely on some things that computers can’t do well. Algorithms can’t match their image recognition to semantic meaning, so today you can ensure a human’s present by asking them to pick out images of street signs. And algorithms don’t do especially well at recognizing when familiar images are distorted or buried in noise, either, which has kept us relying on text-based CAPTCHAs, the distorted text used to verify a human is interacting with Web services. Or we had relied on them ’til now, at least. In today’s issue of Science , a Bay Area startup called Vicarious AI describes an algorithm they created that is able to take minimal training and easily handle CAPTCHAs. It also managed general text recognition. Vicarious’ secret? They modeled the structure of their AI on information we’ve gained from studying how the mammalian visual cortex processes images. Thinking visually In the visual cortex, different groups of neurons recognize features like edges and surfaces (and others identify motions, which aren’t really relevant here). But rather than viewing a scene or object as a collection of these parts, the neurons start communicating among each other, figuring out by proximity which features are part of a single object. As objects are built up and recognized, the scene is built hierarchically based on objects instead of individual features. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Inspired by brain’s visual cortex, new AI utterly wrecks CAPTCHA security

NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1070 Ti battles AMD’s latest video cards

NVIDIA has largely been sitting pretty since the GeForce 10-series arrived and gave it a comfortable performance lead in the graphics realm, but things have changed: AMD’s Vega cards are at least fast enough that you might consider them instead. Needless to say, NVIDIA isn’t about to let that situation stand. It’s launching the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti, a $449 upper mid-range card that could outperform the $399 Vega 56 and undercut the $499 Vega 64 on price. For all intents and purposes, it’s very nearly as powerful as a GTX 1080: you have the same core clock speed as the pricier board, and only slight hits to the CUDA core count (2, 432 vs. 2, 560), texture units (152 vs. 160) and boost clock (1, 683MHz vs. 1, 733MHz). About the only major difference is that you’re still limited to ‘just’ GDDR5 memory instead of the speedier GDDR5X on the 1080. Pre-orders are starting today ahead of the November 2nd release, and it’s notable that both the Founders Edition card and the official suggested retail price are the same. You’re not necessarily paying extra to go with the first-party design this time around. The real dilemma is whether or not it’s worth springing for the 1070 Ti, at least those models that cling to the stock specifications. It’s entirely possible to score an overclocked GTX 1070 for less than $400 if you play your cards right, and the Vega 56 (if you can find it; it’s not as common) still packs quite a punch. The 1070 Ti is mostly alluring if you prefer NVIDIA hardware and want near-1080 speed without paying the well over $500 it typically costs to get a full-fledged 1080. With that said, keep an eye out for overclocked third-party boards that don’t carry a significant premium — those may hit the sweet spot and give you a reason to jump to the 1070 Ti instead of sticking to the regular 1070 or AMD’s offerings. Via: Ars Technica Source: NVIDIA (1) , (2)

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NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1070 Ti battles AMD’s latest video cards

Watch a real rocket scientist figure out (and beat) carnival scams

As a parent you often are forced by your tyrannical children to try carnival games. This, according to ex-NASA and JPL engineer Mark Rober, is a bad idea. Rober and his friends – including a professional baseball player – dismantle every carnival game they can find, assessing the probabilities of winning and point out that the only ones you could feasibly win are the throwing games… Read More

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Watch a real rocket scientist figure out (and beat) carnival scams

Giant worms roam Australia

Stilgar: Usul, we have wormsign the likes of which even God has never seen. Paul: Streuth! Say hi to Digaster longmani , an enormous earthworm reported on by 7 News Queensland in Australia . Adds Fox News : Robert Raven, Head of Terrestrial Biodiversity at the Queensland Museum, told the news site the earthworm in Mace’s photo could measure up to three feet long once it relaxes and stretches out. “In the 1970s, I was walking through Lamington National Park and could hear them beneath me as they gurgled through some water,” Raven recalled. “Seeing them is a sign we are getting good rain.”

Big hard disks may be breaking the bathtub curve

(credit: Alpha six ) Low-cost cloud backup and storage company Backblaze has published its latest set of hard disk reliability numbers for the second quarter of 2017. While the company has tended to stick with consumer-oriented hard disks, a good pricing deal has meant that it also now has several thousand enterprise-class disks , allowing for some large-scale comparisons to be drawn between the two kinds of storage. The company has also started to acquire larger disks with capacities of 10TB and 12TB. The company is using two models of 8TB Seagate disk: one consumer, with a two-year warranty, and the other enterprise, with a five-year warranty. Last quarter, Backblaze noted some performance and power management advantages to the enterprise disks, but for the company’s main use case, these were of somewhat marginal value. The performance does help with initial data migrations and ingest, but the performance benefit overall is limited due to the way Backblaze distributes data over so many spindles. (credit: Backblaze ) In aggregate, the company has now accumulated 3.7 million drive days for the consumer disks and 1.4 million for the enterprise ones. Over this usage, the annualized failure rates are 1.1 percent for the consumer disks and 1.2 percent for the enterprise ones. At least for now, then, the enterprise disks aren’t doing anything to justify their longer warranty; their reliability is virtually identical. The focus now is on what happens to the consumer disks as they pass their two-year warranty period. Will they show the same reliability, or will deterioration become more apparent? Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Reddit rids itself of Nazi subreddits

Reddit embarked on a purge of violence-advocating content today , the targets generally being Nazis and their friends, but also at least one animal abuse subreddit and one targeting white people. The newly banned and removed pages include r/NationalSocialism, r/Nazi, r/whitesarecriminals and r/far_right. Reddit’s new policy says: “Do not post content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people.”

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Reddit rids itself of Nazi subreddits

Vintage motion capture session from the making of Mortal Kombat (1992)

This 1992 behind-the-scenes footage of a Scorpion motion capture session from the making of Mortal Kombat could easily be a piece of absurdist Dada performance art. (via Uncrate )

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Vintage motion capture session from the making of Mortal Kombat (1992)

Saudi Arabia Becomes First Nation To Grant Citizenship To Humanoid Robot

Saudi Arabia became the first country in the world to offer citizenship to a humanoid robot, but Brad Keywell, CEO of Uptake, a predictive analytics technology company, told FOX Business on Thursday artificial intelligence (AI) will not replace humans anytime soon. From a report: “Humans are made super-human through the intelligence that can be derived from these sensors and there is a clear argument that’s made about the possibility that there will be no humans, there’d be just autonomous everything… but this is something that has historically involved humans and I just don’t see that changing, ” he told Maria Bartiromo on “Mornings with Maria.” Uptake’s products are used in a collection of industries ranging from energy to aviation, helping “people and machines work better and faster, ” according to the company website. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Guitarist demonstrates beautiful tonal differences in "The Four Seasons" Guitars

Master luthier John Monteleone created a series of four archtop guitars , one for each season. Anthony Wilson of The Met shows how and why each sounds different than the others. (more…)

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Guitarist demonstrates beautiful tonal differences in "The Four Seasons" Guitars