Windows: Skype’s relatively new translator app that allowed users who speak different languages to video chat together. Now, it’s becoming a feature of the regular Skype app. Read more…
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Skype Translator Is Now Available in the Main Skype App
Following in the same vein as the Revelmode announcement yesterday , today Netflix announced that it was ordering a series based on a YouTuber. This is the future of entertainment, everyone. Read more…
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Netflix Just Bought Its Very First YouTuber
sciencehabit points out this story which may rewrite the early history of humans in North America. From the Sciencemag story: “In August of 2012, an 11-year-old boy made a gruesome discovery in a frozen bluff overlooking the Arctic Ocean. While exploring the foggy coast of Yenisei Bay, about 2000 kilometers south of the North Pole, he came upon the leg bones of a woolly mammoth eroding out of frozen sediments. Scientists excavating the well-preserved creature determined that it had been killed by humans: Its eye sockets, ribs, and jaw had been battered, apparently by spears, and one spear-point had left a dent in its cheekbone—perhaps a missed blow aimed at the base of its trunk. When they dated the remains, the researchers got another surprise: The mammoth died 45, 000 years ago. That means that humans lived in the Arctic more than 10, 000 years earlier than scientists believed, according to a new study. The find suggests that even at this early stage, humans were traversing the most frigid parts of the globe and had the adaptive ability to migrate almost everywhere.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Grisly Find Suggests Humans Inhabited Arctic 45,000 Years Ago
An anonymous reader writes: The DDoSing outfit that spawned the trend of “DDoS-for-Bitcoin” has been arrested by Europol in Bosnia Herzegovina last month. DD4BC first appeared in September 2015, when Akamai blew the lid on their activities. Since then almost any script kiddie that can launch DDoS attacks has followed their business model by blackmailing companies for Bitcoin. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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"DDoS-For-Bitcoin" Blackmailers Arrested
Apple’s iOS 9.3 introduces several new useful, interesting features, including a F.lux-like screen temperature changer based on time of day, password locks for notes, new shortcuts, and more. Apple rarely does anything big with its incremental updates, but this time it’s different. Read more…
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All the Best, New Features Coming in iOS 9.3
Uber was hit with a $7.6 million fine on Thursday after the California Public Utilities Commission found that the company failed to provide proper data on its drivers in 2014. Uber plans to pay the fine to avoid a suspension of its operating license, though it will appeal the ruling, the Los Angeles Times reports. In July 2015, a judge recommended Uber be fined upwards of $7 million for failing to provide relevant driver data under California’s new ride-hailing laws . Today’s fine stems from that recommendation. The CPUC says Uber failed to provide accessibility information (how many riders asked for accessible vehicles and actually received them), service information (pickup and payment data in each zip code where Uber operates), and the cause of each “driving incident” involving an Uber vehicle. Uber has since provided all of this information to the CPUC, the LA Times reports. Uber’s main competition, Lyft, isn’t facing any penalties in California. While you’re doing the math on all of this, remember: Uber is valued at more than $60 billion . Source: Los Angeles Times
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California fines Uber $7.6 million for not reporting driver data
Turns out we’re way closer to our self-driving car future than most of us expected. US Department of Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx announced at the Detroit Auto Show (pdf) Thursday that the Obama administration will have a national blueprint for autonomous vehicle standards by July. What’s more the administration is earmarking $4 billion of the 2017 budget to create a decade-long program that will support and accelerate development of the technology. “We are on the cusp of a new era in automotive technology with enormous potential to save lives, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and transform mobility for the American people, ” Secretary Foxx said in a statement. Currently, each state has individual laws regarding the burgeoning technology. This forces automakers and early adopters like Google to juggle multiple sets of rules and regulations, depending on where in the country the technology is being built. For example, California recently decided that a human “driver” be present at all times should something go wrong. This program should reduce the number of hoops companies have to jump through by creating an overarching, national-level development framework. Via: Re/Code Source: Department of Transportation (pdf)
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US government announces $4 billion self-driving car program
Yahoo’s business may be struggling , but millions of people still visit its site to read the news every day. That gives the company unique insights into browsing and reading habits, and today the company has released a huge swath of that data. The “Yahoo News Feed dataset” incorporates anonymous browsing habits of 20 million users between February and May of 2015 across a variety of Yahoo properties, including its home page, main news site, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Movies and Yahoo Real Estate. All told, the data set is a whopping 13.5TB and covers 110 billion unique interaction “events.” Yahoo calls it the “largest machine learning dataset” ever publicly released, and we’re inclined to believe them — there aren’t very many companies who could accumulate this much browsing data. It’s a huge amount of data, but fortunately you don’t need to worry about advertisers mining it to make more targeted ads. Yahoo is specifically releasing it only to the academic research community to help people build more effective recommendation algorithms. As noted by the MIT Technology Review , the data set includes includes headlines that Yahoo’s personalization algorithms show to visitors, a summary of the article, and which specific articles people click. There’s also some demographic data for about 7 million users that includes age, gender and location — but it’s all been anonymized. Improving recommendation algorithms is particularly relevant right now, as some of the biggest web properties rely on good recommendation engines to engage with their user. Netflix, Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook (just to name a few) all rely on serving their users relevant recommendations to keep them engaged with their products and services. Yes, it’s a way for those companies to make more money, but it also generally makes for a better user experience — as long as those recommendations are good. Yahoo’s huge data release will probably go a long way towards meeting that goal. [Image credit: Noah Berger/Bloomberg via Getty Images] Source: Yahoo (Businesswire)
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Yahoo releases massive 13.5TB web-browsing data set to researchers
(credit: SRU.edu ) Online copyright enforcer Rightscorp has agreed to pay $450,000 to end a lawsuit accusing the company of making illegal calls to cell phones. Morgan Pietz, an attorney who played a key role in bringing down Prenda Law, sued Rightscorp in 2014 , saying that the company’s efforts to get settlements from alleged pirates went too far. Rightscorp’s illegal “robocalls” violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), a 1991 law that limits how automated calling devices are used. The class-action lawsuit claimed that some Rightscorp targets were receiving one robocall on their cell phone per day. It’s generally illegal to have automated devices call cell phones. Earlier this week, Pietz and his co-counsel filed court papers outlining the settlement. Rightscorp will pay $450,000 into a settlement fund, which will be paid out to the 2,059 identified class members who received the allegedly illegal calls. Each class member who fills out an “affidavit of noninfringement” will receive up to $100. The rest of the fund will pay for costs of notice and claim administration (about $25,000) and attorneys’ fees and costs, which cannot exceed $330,000. Rightscorp will also “release any and all alleged claims” against the class members. The company had accused the 2,059 class members of committing 126,409 acts of copyright infringement. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Rightscorp agrees to pay $450,000 for illegal robocalls
Daniel Rigmaiden was a prolific and talented fraudster who made more than a million dollars filing tax-returns for dead people, using ninja forgery skills and super-tight operational security to avoid arrest for years. (more…)
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How an obsessive jailhouse lawyer revealed the existence of Stingray surveillance devices