technology – Page 192

Virginia Police Spent $500K For An Ineffective Cellphone Surveillance System

Cell-site simulators can intercept phone calls and even provide locations (using GPS data). But Virginia’s state police force just revealed details about their actual use of the device — and it’s not pretty. Long-time Slashdot reader v3rgEz writes: In 2014, the Virginia State Police spent $585, 265 on a specially modified Suburban outfitted with the latest and greatest in cell phone surveillance: the DRT 1183C, affectionately known as the DRTbox. But according to logs uncovered by public records website MuckRock, the pricey ride was only used 12 times — and only worked seven of those times. According to Virginia’s ACLU director, “each of the 12 uses cost almost $50, 000, and only 4 of them resulted in an arrest [raising] a significant question whether the more than half million dollars spent on the device and the vehicle…was a wise investment of public funds.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read the original post:
Virginia Police Spent $500K For An Ineffective Cellphone Surveillance System

Canonical Sues Cloud Provider Over ‘Unofficial’ Ubuntu Images

An anonymous reader quotes OStatic’s update on Canonical’s lawsuit against a cloud provider: Canonical posted Thursday that they’ve been in a dispute with “a European cloud provider” over the use of their own homespun version of Ubuntu on their cloud servers. Their implementation disables even the most basic of security features and Canonical is worried something bad could happen and it’d reflect badly back on them… They said they’ve spent months trying to get the unnamed provider to use the standard Ubuntu as delivered to other commercial operations to no avail. Canonical feels they have no choice but to “take legal steps to remove these images.” They’re sure Red Hat and Microsoft wouldn’t be treated like this. Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, wrote in his blog post that Ubuntu is “the leading cloud OS, running most workloads in public clouds today, ” whereas these homegrown images “are likely to behave unpredictably on update in weirdly creative and mysterious ways… We hear about these issues all the time, because users assume there is a problem with Ubuntu on that cloud; users expect that ‘all things that claim to be Ubuntu are genuine’, and they have a right to expect that… “To count some of the ways we have seen home-grown images create operational and security nightmares for users: clouds have baked private keys into their public images, so that any user could SSH into any machine; clouds have made changes that then blocked security updates for over a week… When things like this happen, users are left feeling let down. As the company behind Ubuntu, it falls to Canonical to take action.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

British Film Institute To Digitize 100,000 Old TV Shows Before They Disappear

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Thousands of British TV programs are to be digitized before they are lost forever, the British Film Institute says. Anarchic children’s show Tiswas and The Basil Brush Show are among the programs in line for preservation. The initiative was announced as part of the BFI’s five-year strategy for 2017-2022. “Material from the 70s and early 80s is at risk, ” said Heather Stewart, the BFI’s creative director. “It has a five or six-year shelf life and if we don’t do something about it will just go, no matter how great the environment is we keep it in. “Our job is make sure that things are there in 200 years’ time.” The BFI has budgeted $14.3 million of Lottery funding towards its goal of making the UK’s entire screen heritage digitally accessible. This includes an estimated 100, 000 of the “most at-risk” British TV episodes and clips held on obsolete video formats. The list includes “early children’s programming, little-seen dramas, regional programs and the beginnings of breakfast television.” The issue for the BFI, Ms Stewart added, was also to do with freeing up storage space. “We have a whole vault which is wall-to-wall video. If we digitized it, it would be in a robot about the size of a wardrobe, ” she said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See the article here:
British Film Institute To Digitize 100,000 Old TV Shows Before They Disappear

This Cyber Monday Was the Biggest Online Shopping Day, Ever

Cyber Monday is likely to have been the biggest online shopping day in history, according to an analysis of visits to US retail websites. Online spending in the US yesterday hit a new record with $3.39bn spent online, a 10.2 percent increase year-over-year — ahead even of Black Friday, when $3.34bn was spent. ZDNet adds:Cyber Monday is expected to generate slightly less mobile revenue than Black Friday at $1.19bn, but that’s still a 48 percent increase on last year, according to the analysis by Adobe. Consumers have spent a total of $39.9bn online so far this month, it said, up 7.4 percent on last November, with 27 out of 28 days seeing online sales of over $1bn. The five best-selling toys in terms of quantity sold on Cyber Monday were Lego, Shopkins, Nerf, Barbie, and Little Live Pets. The five best-selling electronic products were Sony PlayStation 4, Microsoft Xbox, Samsung 4K TVs, Apple iPads, and Amazon Fire tablets, the company said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

View article:
This Cyber Monday Was the Biggest Online Shopping Day, Ever

Google Asked to Remove a Billion ‘Pirate’ Search Results in a Year

Copyright holders asked Google to remove more than 1, 000, 000, 000 allegedly infringing links from its search engine over the past twelve months, TorrentFreak reports. According to stats provided in Google’s Transparency Report for the past one year, Google was asked to remove over one billion links — or 1, 007, 741, 143 links. From the article: More than 90 percent of the links, 908, 237, 861 were in fact removed. The rest of the reported links were rejected because they were invalid, not infringing, or duplicates of earlier requests. In total, Google has now processed just over two billion allegedly infringing URLs from 945, 000 different domains. That the second billion took only a year, compared to several years for the first, shows how rapidly the volume of takedown requests is expanding. At the current rate, another billion will be added by the end of next summer. Most requests, over 50 million, were sent in for the website 4shared.com. However, according to the site’s operators many of the reported URLs point to the same files, inflating the actual volume of infringing content. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More here:
Google Asked to Remove a Billion ‘Pirate’ Search Results in a Year

The Mac App Store Is Full of Scams

Over the years, Apple may have improved security, filters, and screening process of apps for its Mac’s App Store, but even today things the quality of fraudulent apps continue to not only seep through its gatekeepers, but often times outnumber the good apps. How To Geek did some investigation over this and published the findings yesterday in a story titled, “Don’t Be Fooled: The Mac App Store Is Full of Scams”. It didn’t take long for the publication to find scam apps on Apple’s marquee app store for Mac computers. A search for “Microsoft Excel”, for instance, returns “Office Bundle” made by a third-party. The app offers templates — and just that — for $30. Same is the case with any Office suite application. This might not seem as a real problem to many, but as How to Geek points out, there is one more problem: almost all these apps have icons and title names that are similar to those of Microsoft’s, and Apple has had no issues with that. From the article: Let’s be blunt: these customers were ripped off, and Apple pocketed $10 each (Editor’s note: Apple charges 30 percent on all transactions on App Store(. And you’ll only see these comments if you scroll past the two five star reviews that mention the word “app” numerous times. All of these fakes use Microsoft brands like Office, Word, and Excel in the product names. The logos aren’t one-to-one copies of Microsoft’s official logos, but they’re almost always the correct color and letter (blue “W” for Word, green “E” for Excel, etcetera). Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For the First Time, Living Cells Have Formed Carbon-Silicon Bonds

From a ScienceDaily alert: Scientists have managed to coax living cells into making carbon-silicon bonds, demonstrating for the first time that nature can incorporate silicon — one of the most abundant elements on Earth — into the building blocks of life. While chemists have achieved carbon-silicon bonds before — they’re found in everything from paints and semiconductors to computer and TV screens — they’ve so far never been found in nature, and these new cells could help us understand more about the possibility of silicon-based life elsewhere in the Universe. After oxygen, silicon is the second most abundant element in Earth’s crust, and yet it has nothing to do with biological life. Why silicon has never be incorporated into any kind of biochemistry on Earth has been a long-standing puzzle for scientists, because, in theory, it would have been just as easy for silicon-based lifeforms to have evolved on our planet as the carbon-based ones we know and love. Not only are carbon and silicon both extremely abundant in Earth’s crust – they’re also very similar in their chemical make-up. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Excerpt from:
For the First Time, Living Cells Have Formed Carbon-Silicon Bonds

Google’s DeepMind Made an AI Watch Close To 5000 Videos So That It Surpasses Humans in Lip-Reading

A new AI tool created by Google and Oxford University researchers could significantly improve the success of lip-reading and understanding for the hearing impaired. In a recently released paper on the work, the pair explained how the Google DeepMind-powered system was able to correctly interpret more words than a trained human expert. From a report: To accomplish the task, a cohort of scientists fed thousands of hours of TV footage — 5000 to be precise — from the BBC to a neural network. It was made to watch six different TV shows, which aired between the period of January 2010 and December 2015. This included 118, 000 difference sentences and some 17, 500 unique words. To understand the progress, it successfully deciphered words with a 46.8 percent accuracy. The neural network had to recognize the same based on mouth movement analysis. The under 50 percent accuracy might seem laughable to you but let me put things in perspective for you. When the same set of TV shows were shown to a professional lip-reader, they were able to decipher only 12.4 percent of words without error. Thus, one can understand the great difference in the capability of the AI as compared to a human expert in that particular field. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read the original post:
Google’s DeepMind Made an AI Watch Close To 5000 Videos So That It Surpasses Humans in Lip-Reading

FBI Hacked Over 8,000 Computers In 120 Countries Based on One Warrant

Joseph Cox, reporting for Motherboard: In January, Motherboard reported on the FBI’s “unprecedented” hacking operation, in which the agency, using a single warrant, deployed malware to over one thousand alleged visitors of a dark web child pornography site. Now, it has emerged that the campaign was actually several orders of magnitude larger. In all, the FBI obtained over 8, 000 IP addresses, and hacked computers in 120 different countries, according to a transcript from a recent evidentiary hearing in a related case. The figures illustrate the largest ever known law enforcement hacking campaign to date, and starkly demonstrate what the future of policing crime on the dark web may look like. This news comes as the US is preparing to usher in changes that would allow magistrate judges to authorize the mass hacking of computers, wherever in the world they may be located. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple Abandons Development of Wireless Routers, To Focus On Products That Return More Profit

Apple has disbanded its division that develops wireless routers in a move that further sharpens the company’s focus on consumer products that generate the bulk of its revenue, Bloomberg reports. From the article:Apple began shutting down the wireless router team over the past year, dispersing engineers to other product development groups, including the one handling the Apple TV. Apple hasn’t refreshed its routers since 2013 following years of frequent updates to match new standards from the wireless industry. The decision to disband the team indicates the company isn’t currently pushing forward with new versions of its routers. Routers are access points that connect laptops, iPhones and other devices to the web without a cable. Apple currently sells three wireless routers, the AirPort Express, AirPort Extreme, and AirPort Time capsule. The Time capsule doubles as a backup storage hard drive for Mac computers. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Continued here:
Apple Abandons Development of Wireless Routers, To Focus On Products That Return More Profit

Ken May

Tag: technology