Author: kenmay

The Latest Super-Thin ATM Skimmers Are Virtually Unspottable

Just like consumer tech, criminal tech advances in leaps and bounds—and none more so than the ATM skimmer. Now, the kinds of skimmers being used are so slim and small that you’ll never see them—and their battery life means they last an age, too. Read more…

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The Latest Super-Thin ATM Skimmers Are Virtually Unspottable

The AI Boss That Deploys Hong Kong’s Subway Engineers

Taco Cowboy writes The subway system in Hong Kong has one of the best uptime, 99.9%, which beats London’s tube or NYC’s sub hands down. In an average week as many as 10, 000 people would be carrying out 2, 600 engineering works across the system — from grinding down rough rails to replacing tracks to checking for damages. While human workers might be the one carrying out the work, the one deciding which task is to be worked on, however, isn’t a human being at all. Each and every engineering task to be worked on and the scheduling of all those tasks is being handled by an algorithm. Andy Chan of Hong Kong’s City University, who designed the AI system, says, “Before AI, they would have a planning session with experts from five or six different areas. It was pretty chaotic. Now they just reveal the plan on a huge screen.” Chan’s AI program works with a simulated model of the entire system to find the best schedule for necessary engineering works. From its omniscient view it can see chances to combine work and share resources that no human could. However, in order to provide an added layer of security, the schedule generated by the AI is still subject to human approval — Urgent, unexpected repairs can be added manually, and the system would reschedules less important tasks. It also checks the maintenance it plans for compliance with local regulations. Chan’s team encoded into machine readable language 200 rules that the engineers must follow when working at night, such as keeping noise below a certain level in residential areas. The main difference between normal software and Hong Kong’s AI is that it contains human knowledge that takes years to acquire through experience, says Chan. “We asked the experts what they consider when making a decision, then formulated that into rules – we basically extracted expertise from different areas about engineering works, ” he says. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The AI Boss That Deploys Hong Kong’s Subway Engineers

Plug Facebook Into Skype For a News Feed Firehose

We know that our Facebook news feeds go through a complicated filtering process, affected both by Facebook’s internal algorithms and our own efforts to hide or show particular friends. However, not all third-party apps are so complex, and Skype will pull in your Facebook news feed pretty much as it’s published. Read more…

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Plug Facebook Into Skype For a News Feed Firehose

Xbox One’s Kinect sensor coming to Windows on July 15th

Microsoft’s plan to bundle Kinect with the Xbox One may not have been to everyone’s taste, but that’s not stopping it from expanding sales of the motion-sensing peripheral. In fact, you’ll only have to wait just over a week to get your hands on the second generation Kinect for Windows . We know because the company has updated its pre-order listing with the promise of shipment by July 15th. The sensor, which costs $199/£159, delivers better depth sensing, 1080p resolution, a wider field of view and various other improvements. Developers have been invited to publish their creations to the Windows Store, so there’ll likely be more Windows Kinect apps to download than ever before — good news if you’re not phased by the Xbox One but have always wanted to wave your arms about in front of your PC. Filed under: Gaming , Microsoft Comments Via: CVG Source: Microsoft Store (US) , (UK)

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Xbox One’s Kinect sensor coming to Windows on July 15th

Deep-sea streaming: 500-mile NEPTUNE cabling brings Internet to the ocean floor

Your home Ethernet cable doesn’t deal with any of this ish—pictured here, a sea star and a squat lobster—behind some desk. NEPTUNE Canada The Juan de Fuca tectonic plate is by far one of the Earth’s smallest. It spans just a few hundred kilometers of the Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia coast. But what the Juan de Fuca lacks in size it makes up for in connectivity. It’s home to a unique, high-speed optical cabling that has snaked its way across the depths of the Pacific seafloor plate since late 2009. This link is called NEPTUNE—the North-East Pacific Time-Series Underwater Networked Experiment—and, at more than 800 kilometers (about 500 miles), it’s about the same length as 40,000 subway cars connected in a single, long train. A team of scientists, researchers, and engineers from the not-for-profit group Oceans Network Canada maintains the network, which cost CAD $111 million to install and $17 million each year to maintain. But know that this isn’t your typical undersea cable. For one, NEPTUNE doesn’t traverse the ocean’s expanse, but instead loops back to its starting point at shore. And though NEPTUNE is designed to facilitate the flow of information through the ocean, it also collects information about the ocean, ocean life, and the ocean floor. Read 52 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Deep-sea streaming: 500-mile NEPTUNE cabling brings Internet to the ocean floor

Now YouTube Is Shaming ISPs For Slow Streaming Video

Sometime in the past few days, YouTube started showing a new error bar on slow-loading videos. “Experiencing interruptions? Find out why, ” it implores. Clicking through takes you to Google’s Video Quality Report page , comparing streaming quality of your local ISPs. If your provider’s slow, Google wants you to know. Read more…

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Now YouTube Is Shaming ISPs For Slow Streaming Video

15-Year-Old Developing a 3D Printer 10x Faster Than Anything On the Market

New submitter jigmypig writes: One of the main issues with 3D printers today is that they lack in one area; speed. A 15-year-old boy named Thomas Suarez is developing a 3D printer that he says is the most reliable, most advanced, and faster than any 3D printer on the market today. In fact he claims it is 10 times faster than any 3D printer ever created. “There’s something that makes me want to keep going and keep innovating, ” he says, laughing at being asked if he’d be better off outside climbing trees or riding a bike. “I feel that my interests will always lie in technology. Maybe I should go outside more but I just really like this stuff.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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15-Year-Old Developing a 3D Printer 10x Faster Than Anything On the Market

NASA gives the go-ahead to a rocket designed for deep space exploration

For the past few years, NASA’s been working on a powerful rocket called the Space Launch System meant for missions to the moon, Mars and other places far from our planet. While the rocket’s not quite ready to take Bruce Willis to an asteroid, it’s at least getting nearer to a launch pad — the agency has just finalized a $2.8 billion deal with Boeing to start building its core stage and developing its avionics system . The deal went through recently after the core stage passed its critical design review, where 11 experts inspected 3, 000 of its artifacts. A core stage, by the way, is the middle part of a rocket that makes up most of its body: the one Boeing’s building for the SLS is a 200-foot tower that’ll store cryogenic liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen to fuel the engines. Apparently, the last time a major NASA vehicle passed muster during one of these reviews was back in the 1970’s, and it was none other than the Saturn V, which carried many astronauts to the moon. The agency plans to earmark $6.8 billion of its funds from fiscal years 2014 through 2018 for the project and hopes to conjure up a rocket that’s ready for an unmanned mission by 2017. If that happens, the SLS could start ferrying astronauts to big space rocks or even the red planet as soon as 2021. [Image credit: NASA/MSFC ] Filed under: Science Comments Via: LA Times Source: NASA

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NASA gives the go-ahead to a rocket designed for deep space exploration