Once upon a time, the
US was able to accomplish great things. Honest! Now we've
outsourced all of our innovation, creativity, and vision. Go China,
colonize the universe!
China
deploys 'highly efficient' rover onto Moon's surface
… Experts both in
and outside of China have described the successful soft-landing as a
significant step towards placing a Chinese astronaut on the Moon.
Some expect China to do that by 2020.
Speaking on the eve of
the landing, Professor Ken Pounds, a professor of space physics at
the University of Leicester, told The Telegraph: "What
the Chinese are now showing more than any other nation – the
Russians, the Indians even and certainly the Americans – is the
determination to actually get on with space exploration and they are
making quite rapid progress.
There was a reason for
their decision. Perhaps a good tactical option, but a very poor
strategy.
Twitter
backtracks on ‘block’ change after #restoretheblock campaign
The short-lived change
meant that blocked users could still view and interact with tweets
from the person who blocked them and could no longer see that they
had been blocked.
Twitter
said this was designed to protect victims of harassment who feared
that blocking a user would lead to retaliation.
But after a wave of
online protest, Twitter re-instated its previous policy, whereby
blocked users are notified, and are prevented from following and
interacting with their blocker.
Should “Your DNA
isn't on file” be a crime? If not, where is the threshold?
Dave Tartre reports:
Opponents
of California’s mandatory DNA collection statute told an en banc
panel of the 9th Circuit that the law violates the constitutional
rights of people who are arrested but never charged.
The
9th Circuit, which has reviewed the law twice already, was prompted
to take a third look by a US Supreme Court ruling in June that
upheld the constitutionality of a similar law passed by Maryland
voters.
Read more on Courthouse
News.
Is it really privacy
concerns or the realization that finding 100,000 violations in one 8
hour shift exceeds the ability of the entire department to write
tickets? Sure looks like the volume is so great they simply ignore
the “alarms.” Are these more toys purchased with DHS grants or
did someone sell Boston on this idea?
Shawn Musgrave reports:
The
Boston Police Department has indefinitely suspended its use of
high-tech scanners that automatically check whether drivers have
outstanding parking tickets, lapsed insurance or other violations
after a Globe investigation raised serious privacy concerns.
The
police inadvertently released to the Globe the license plate numbers
of more than 68,000 vehicles that had tripped alarms on automated
license plate readers over a six-month period. Many of the vehicles
were scanned dozens of times in that period alone.
Read more on Boston
Globe (sub. req.)
[From
the article:
The accidental release
triggered immediate doubts about whether the police could reliably
protect the sensitive data. It also raised questions about whether
police were following up on the scans, since numerous vehicles
repeatedly triggered alarms for the same offenses. One motorcycle
that had been reported stolen triggered scanner alerts 59 times over
six months, while another plate with lapsed insurance was scanned a
total of 97 times in the same span.
… More than 60 law
enforcement agencies across Massachusetts use automated license plate
recognition technology, including every police department in the
Boston area. The scanners use high-speed cameras to compare plates
against police databases, including vehicles associated with
outstanding warrants, lapsed registration, expired insurance, or
unpaid parking tickets.
The readers also record
the date, time, and GPS location of each vehicle, even in heavy
traffic. The technology thus offers a wealth of information for
surveillance as well as investigations: with enough scans over time,
police can trace a particular vehicle’s path and discern driving
habits.
… “If you go too
far in collecting information just because you can,
it undermines people’s confidence in government,” said Hecht.
“That ultimately makes law enforcement’s job much more
difficult.”
Good news for my App
writing Ethical Hackers. Also, this should catch the eye of
politicians, although the money may need to be greater to offset the
loss of all that PAC money.
Greg Avery reports:
Most
smartphone users value their privacy enough to pay extra to have
software applications keep their personal information private, a new
study shows. In fact, some are willing to pay as much as $5 to
prevent apps from sharing their location.
Read more on Puget
Sound Business Journal.
[From
the article:
A study by two
University
of Colorado Boulder economists, Scott Savage and Donald
Waldman, found the average user would pay varying amounts for
different kinds of privacy: $4.05 to conceal contact lists, $2.28 to
keep their browser history private, $2.12 to eliminate advertising on
apps, $1.19 to conceal personal locations, $1.75 to conceal the
phone’s ID number and $3.58 to conceal the contents of text
messages.
… The CU
researchers say the Value of Online Privacy study (download
here) is the first to quantify the value consumers place on
different kinds of digital privacy.
Any roadblock, no
matter how trivial, rather than admit they should have thought of it
first. (It's not to late, broadcast TV guys.)
Aereo
to major TV broadcasters: A Supreme Court decision doesn’t scare us
… Aereo is a rather
ingenious little startup, but not necessarily because of its
innovative technology. Aereo’s service streams and records the
freely available over-the-air local television content from major
broadcasters like ABC, NBC, Fox, CBS, CW, and other local stations,
delivering it to users via desktop computers, set-top boxes, and
mobile devices. It does this legally (so far at least) by using
tiny antennas (one per subscriber) to pick up those broadcast
signals and stream them to subscribers. The service is only available
to people who live within range of the TV
station signals are being broadcasted, which
means Aereo isn’t doing anything that its subscribers couldn’t
feasibly do on their own.
… Honestly, I’m a
bit surprised that broadcasters are pushing through with this
particular case, considering how unsuccessful they’ve been in
convincing the courts that Aereo is in the wrong. I say this also
because major broadcasters have a heck of a lot more to lose if the
Supreme Court does agree to hear the case and reaffirms those earlier
rulings. For instance, those that are currently paying licensing
fees for those freely broadcasted stations might decide to adopt
Aereo’s strategy, which is likely less expensive for cable TV
providers in the long term.
Once more Mr. Gore,
tell us how the earth is warming. It may amuse us during the coming
ICE AGE!
Cairo
snow: Egyptian capital sees snowfall for the first time in 112 YEARS
… The Egyptian
capital has seen snowfall for the first time in 112 years.
As reported by
Buzzfeed, Egyptians who had witnessed snow for the first time in
their lives were left amazed - with the Arabic word for snow trending
on Twitter.
...
Incredible pictures showing the normally sultry city were also
posted. One of the more bizarre images showed a camel sitting down
in the snow.
Perhaps this could be a
“Capstone” project for one of our CS grads? Interesting that
Microsoft did the scanning. May reflect Bill Gate's interest in
'antique documents.'
British
Library releases over 1 million images using Flickr Commons
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on December 14, 2013
British
Library Digital scholarship blog: ”We
have released over a million images onto Flickr Commons for
anyone to use, remix and repurpose. These images were taken from the
pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books digitised
by Microsoft who then generously gifted the scanned images to us,
allowing us to release them back into the Public Domain. The images
themselves cover a startling mix of subjects: There are maps,
geological diagrams, beautiful illustrations, comical satire,
illuminated and decorative letters, colourful illustrations,
landscapes, wall-paintings and so much more that even we are not
aware of. Which brings me to the point of this release. We are
looking for new, inventive ways to navigate, find and display
these ‘unseen illustrations’. The images were plucked
from the pages as part of the ‘Mechanical Curator’, a creation of
the British Library Labs project. Each image is individually
addressible, online, and Flickr provies an API to access it and the
image’s associated description. We may know which book, volume and
page an image was drawn from, but we know nothing about a given
image. Consider the image below. The title of the work may suggest
the thematic subject matter of any illustrations in the book, but it
doesn’t suggest how colourful and arresting these images are..
Next steps - We plan to
launch a crowdsourcing application at the beginning of next year, to
help describe what the images portray. Our intention is to use this
data to train automated classifiers that will run against the whole
of the content. The data from this will be as openly licensed as is
sensible (given the nature of crowdsourcing) and the code, as always,
will be under an open licence. The manifests of images, with
descriptions of the works that they were taken from, are available on
github
and are also released under a public-domain ‘licence’. This set
of metadata being on github should indicate that we fully intend
people to work with it, to adapt it, and to push back improvements
that should help others work with this release. There are very few
datasets of this nature free for any use and by putting it online we
hope to stimulate and support research concerning printed
illustrations, maps and other material not currently studied. Given
that the images are derived from just 65,000 volumes and that the
library holds many millions of items.”
I've told many students
that their “excuses” would make a great movie. Now I can give
them a tool to make that a reality!
– is a minimal,
distraction-free environment for the most important part of
screenwriting – the writing part. Slugline automatically formats
your writing to precise industry standards. It’s everything you
need to create a submission-quality screenplay, and nothing you
don’t. With Slugline, you do everything with text, from changing
the format of a paragraph, to adding a new section in your integrated
outline.
An Infographic to make
me feel even older.
Learning
Alphabets The Obsolete Way
Not only can children
learn the alphabet with this handy chart, but they’ll also pick up
a bit of history! Isn’t it awesome?
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