Microsoft on Thursday provided an update on Office 2019, in which it revealed that the apps will only run on Windows 10. From a report: In a support article for service and support of Windows and Office, Microsoft has revealed you’ll need to upgrade to Windows 10 if you want the latest version of Office without subscribing to the company’s Office 365 service. It’s a move that’s clearly designed to push businesses that are holding off on Office 365 into subscriptions, as the standalone Office 2019 software will only be supported on Windows 10 and not Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 machines. Microsoft is also altering the support lifecycle for Office 2019, so it will receive 5 years of mainstream support and then “approximately 2 years of extended support.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Tag: political
Movie Ticket Sales Hit A 22-Year Low in 2017
An anonymous reader quotes the Los Angeles Times: Hollywood is celebrating the end of 2017 with astronomical sales from “Star Wars: The Last Jedi, ” which is on track to soon exceed $1 billion in global ticket sales and eventually become the biggest movie of the year. But that won’t be enough to write a happy storyline for the industry. Although movie ticket sales in the U.S. and Canada are expected to dip just below last year’s record of $11.38 billion, the number of tickets sold is projected to drop 4% to 1.26 billion — the lowest level since 1995, according to preliminary estimates from studio executives. The falloff in ticket sales can mostly be explained by a handful of movies that flopped, especially during the dreary summer season that posted the worst results in more than two decades. Even such massive hits as “Wonder Woman, ” “Thor: Ragnarok” and “It” couldn’t make up for a lackluster summer lineup populated by rickety franchises (“Alien: Covenant”) and poorly reviewed retreads (“The Mummy”). However, the long-term decline in attendance reflects systemic challenges facing the industry. Audiences are spending less time going to the movies and are consuming more entertainment on small screens and through streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon that are spending billions on original video content. At the same time, while higher ticket prices have helped to offset attendance declines, they have made consumers pickier about what movies they’re willing to go see. And those increasingly discerning consumers turn to social media and Rotten Tomatoes to decide what’s worth their time and money. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Movie Ticket Sales Hit A 22-Year Low in 2017
World’s First ‘Solar Panel Road’ Opens In France
The world’s first solar road has officially opened in the small village of Tourouvre-au-Perche in Normandy, France. The road is 1 kilometer long and can generate enough electricity to power the street lights. The Verge reports: That might not sound very impressive for 30, 000 square feet of solar panels — and it kind of isn’t, especially for its $5.2 million price tag. The panels have been covered in a silicon-based resin that allows them to withstand the weight of passing big rigs, and if the road performs as expected, Royal wants to see solar panels installed across 1, 000 kilometers of French highway. There are numerous issues, however. For one, flat solar panels are less effective than the angled panels that are installed on roofs, and they’re also massively more expensive than traditional panels. Colas, the company that installed the road, hopes to reduce the cost of the panels going forward and it has around 100 solar panel road projects in progress around the world. Earlier this year, Solar Roadways partnered with the Missouri Department of Transportation to upgrade a small stretch of the historic Route 66 roadway with solar-powered panels. They too are facing the same seemingly insurmountable cost problems as Colas and the French. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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World’s First ‘Solar Panel Road’ Opens In France
Facebook Employees Tried To Remove Trump Posts As Hate Speech
An anonymous reader quotes a report from USA Today: Facebook employees pushed to remove some of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s Facebook posts — such as one proposing the ban of Muslims from entering the U.S. — from the service as hate speech that violated the giant social network’s policies, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. The decision not to remove the Trump posts was made by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the newspaper reported. Employees complained that Facebook was changing the rules for Trump and some who review content on Facebook threatened to quit. “When we review reports of content that may violate our policies, we take context into consideration. That context can include the value of political discourse, ” Facebook said in an emailed statement. “Many people are voicing opinions about this particular content and it has become an important part of the conversation around who the next U.S. president will be. For those reasons, we are carefully reviewing each report and surrounding context relating to this content on a case by case basis.” Senior members of Facebook’s policy team posted more details on its policy on Friday: “In the weeks ahead, we’re going to begin allowing more items that people find newsworthy, significant, or important to the public interest — even if they might otherwise violate our standards.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Facebook Employees Tried To Remove Trump Posts As Hate Speech
Researcher Gets 20 Days In Prison For Hacking State Websites As Political Stunt
An anonymous reader writes from a report via Softpedia: David Levin, 31, of Estero, Florida will spend 20 days in prison after hacking two websites belonging to the Florida state elections department. Levin, a security researcher, tested the security of two Florida state election websites without permission, and then recorded a video and posted on YouTube. The problem is that the man appearing in the video next to Levin was a candidate for the role of state election supervisor, running for the same position against the incumbent Supervisor of Elections, Sharon Harrington. Harrington reported the video to authorities, who didn’t appreciate the media stunt pulled by the two, and charged the security researcher with three counts of hacking-related charges. The researcher turned himself in in May and pleaded guilty to all charges. This week, he received a 20-day prison sentence and two years of probation. In court he admitted to the whole incident being a political stunt. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Researcher Gets 20 Days In Prison For Hacking State Websites As Political Stunt
New evidence suggests DNC hackers penetrated deeper than previously thought
The suspected hacking of a Democratic National Committee consultant’s personal Yahoo Mail account provides new evidence that state-sponsored attackers penetrated deeper than previously thought into the private communications of the political machine attempting to defeat Republican nominee Donald Trump. According to an article published Monday by Yahoo News, the suspicion was raised shortly after DNC consultant Alexandra Chalupa started preparing opposition research on Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort. Upon logging in to her Yahoo Mail account, she received a pop-up notification warning that members of Yahoo’s security team “strongly suspect that your account has been the target of state-sponsored actors.” After Chalupa started digging into Manafort’s political and business dealings in Ukraine and Russia, the warnings had become a “daily occurrence,” Yahoo News reported, citing a May 3 e-mail sent to a DNC communications director. (credit: Yahoo News) It was one of more than 19,000 private DNC messages posted to WikiLeaks on Friday. The massive e-mail dump came five weeks after DNC officials said hackers with backing from the Russian government had breached its network and made off with opposition research into Trump and almost a year’s worth of private e-mail. The airing on WikiLeaks, which included messages in which DNC officials derided Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, has already led to the resignation of Chair Debra Wasserman Schultz. Now, the revelations about Chalupa’s Yahoo account suggest the hack may have gone deeper than previously reported. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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New evidence suggests DNC hackers penetrated deeper than previously thought
Scientists Announce Plans For Synthetic Human Genomes
An anonymous reader writes: After it was reported three weeks ago that scientists have held a secret meeting to consider creating a synthetic human genome, the participants of that meeting have officially published their plans. They announced a plan to launch a project that would radically reduce the cost of synthesizing human genomes — a revolutionary development in biotechnology that could enable technicians to grow human organs for transplantation. The Washington Post reports: “The announcement, published Thursday in the journal Science, is the latest sign that biotechnology is going through a rapidly advancing but ethically fraught period. The promoters of synthetic genomes envision a project that would eventually be on the same scale as the Human Genome Project of the 1990s, which led to the sequencing of the first human genomes. The difference this time would be that, instead of ‘reading’ genetic codes, which is what sequencing does, the scientists would be ‘writing’ them. They have dubbed this the ‘Genome Project-write.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Scientists Announce Plans For Synthetic Human Genomes
Magic cards generated by neural networks
@RoboRosewater is a twitter account that posts, once a day, a Magic: The Gathering card generated by a recurrent neural network. [via Ditto ] This is an implementation of the science described by Vice’s Brian Merchant in this article . Reed Morgan Milewicz, a programmer and computer science researcher, may be the first person to teach an AI to do Magic, literally. Milewicz wowed a popular online MTG forum—as well as hacker forums like Y Combinator’s Hacker News and Reddit—when he posted the results of an experiment to “teach” a weak AI to auto-generate Magic cards. He shared a number of the bizarre “cards” his program had come up with, replete with their properly fantastical names (“Shring the Artist,” “Mided Hied Parira’s Scepter”) and freshly invented abilities (“fuseback”). Players devoured the results. Here’s the code , and here’s a simple text-only generator . Magic: The Gathering is Turing-complete .
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Magic cards generated by neural networks
Politiwoops uploads its 1.1 million-tweet collection to the Internet Archive
Twitter may have revoked Politiwoop’s API access but that isn’t stopping the political watchdog from preserving its already-sizeable collection of online gaffs and retractions from elected officials . Politiwoops, which archived the deleted tweets of politicians in 35 countries worldwide, announced on Wednesday that it will upload its collection of 1.1 million formerly-deleted tweets to the Internet Archive for perpetual preservation. This move follows the publication earlier this month of an open letter penned by 17 international rights groups — including the EFF, Sunlight Foundation and Human Rights Watch — urging Twitter to reverse its decision. That letter has since been endorsed by more than 50 more rights groups from across the globe. “Social networks should take into account international norms about transparency and the right to information, ” Arjan El Fassed, director of Open State Foundation, said in a statement. “When politicians turn to social networks to amplify their views, they are inviting greater scrutiny of their expression.” However, to date, Twitter has refused to review the decision. [Image Credit: AFP/Getty Images] Filed under: Internet Comments Source: Open State , Internet Archive Tags: Human Rights Watch, Internet Archive, politics, politiwoops, Social networks, Sunlight Foundation, twitter
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Politiwoops uploads its 1.1 million-tweet collection to the Internet Archive
First Library To Support Anonymous Internet Browsing Halts Project After DHS Email
An anonymous reader writes with an update to the news we discussed in July that a small library in New Hampshire would be used as a Tor exit relay. Shortly after the project went live, the local police department received an email from the Department of Homeland Security. The police then met with city officials and discussed all the ways criminals could make use of the relay. They ultimately decided to suspend the project, pending a vote of the library board of trustees on Sept. 15. DHS spokesman Shawn Neudauer said the agent was simply providing “visibility/situational awareness, ” and did not have any direct contact with the Lebanon police or library. “The use of a Tor browser is not, in [or] of itself, illegal and there are legitimate purposes for its use, ” Neudauer said, “However, the protections that Tor offers can be attractive to criminal enterprises or actors and HSI [Homeland Security Investigations] will continue to pursue those individuals who seek to use the anonymizing technology to further their illicit activity.” …Deputy City Manager Paula Maville said that when she learned about Tor at the meeting with the police and the librarians, she was concerned about the service’s association with criminal activities such as pornography and drug trafficking. “That is a concern from a public relations perspective and we wanted to get those concerns on the table, ” she said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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First Library To Support Anonymous Internet Browsing Halts Project After DHS Email