By BeauHD from
Slashdot's fair-warning department:
According to Microsoft's new Terms of Services agreement, you could get banned for "offensive language," resulting in the termination of your Gold Membership and/or any Microsoft account balances. The changes go into effect on May 1. CSO Online reports: [I]f you and a significant other are getting hot and heavy via Skype, you better watch your language and any nudity because that, too, can get you banned. The ban hammer could also fall if Cortana is listening at the wrong moment or if documents and files hosted on Microsoft services violate Microsoft's amended terms. But how would Microsoft even know if you had truly been "offensive?" Well, that part falls under Code of Conduct Enforcement, which states, "When investigating alleged violations of these Terms, Microsoft reserves the right to review Your Content in order to resolve the issue." Microsoft did add, "However, we cannot monitor the entire Services and make no attempt to do so." I'm not sure that will make you feel better, as another portion states that Microsoft "may also block delivery of a communication (like email, file sharing or instant message) to or from the Services in an effort to enforce these Terms or we may remove or refuse to publish Your Content for any reason."
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By msmash from
Slashdot's security-woes department:
Catalin Cimpanu, writing for BleepingComputer: macOS High Sierra users are once again impacted by a major APFS bug after two other major vulnerabilities affected Apple's new filesystem format in the last five months. This time around, according to a report from Mac forensics expert Sarah Edwards, recent versions of macOS High Sierra are logging encryption passwords for APFS-formatted external drives in plaintext, and storing this information in non-volatile (on-disk) log files. The issue, if exploited, could allow an attacker easy access to the encryption password of encrypted APFS external volumes, such as USB thumb drives, portable hard drives, and other external storage mediums. This bug goes against all well-established Apple development and security rules, according to which apps and utilities should use the Keychain app to store valuable information, and should definitely avoid storing passwords in cleartext. Video 1, and 2.
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By msmash from
Slashdot's stranger-things department:
The small city of Elk Grove, California received more than 2,000 erroneous 911 calls from Apple devices at an Apple repair facility. The months-long issue is yet to be resolved. From a report: Between October 20, 2017 and February 23, 2018, the police department in Elk Grove, California received 2,028 calls on its 911 lines originating from the Apple facility -- an average of 16 calls per day. At one point in January, the calls from the Apple factory were so frequent that they tied up every single one of Elk Grove's six 911 lines, according to public documents reviewed by Business Insider. "They lit us up like a Christmas tree," one dispatcher wrote in in an email to other dispatchers. It was obvious to Elk Grove police that the 911 calls were not real emergencies, but rather, the equivalent of accidental "butt dials," mysteriously ringing the city's hotline on an assembly-line scale. For whatever reason, many of the iPhones being repaired at the Apple facility were going rogue and dialing 911. But for city officials trying to stop the nuisance and to ensure that a critical emergency resource was not overburdened, fixing the problem has not been easy. Despite crediting Apple for being responsive to their pleas for help, Elk Grove officials have been frustrated by the company's inability to fix the problem. At one point, officials even discussed the possibility of getting the state government involved and sending police to the factory.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's plan-of-action department:
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A lobby group that represents AT&T, Verizon, and other telcos plans to sue states and cities that try to enforce net neutrality rules. USTelecom, the lobby group, made its intentions clear yesterday in a blog post titled, "All Americans Deserve Equal Rights Online." "Broadband providers have worked hard over the past 20 years to deploy ever more sophisticated, faster and higher-capacity networks, and uphold net neutrality protections for all," USTelecom CEO Jonathan Spalter wrote. "To continue this important work, there is no question we will aggressively challenge state or municipal attempts to fracture the federal regulatory structure that made all this progress possible." The USTelecom board of directors includes AT&T, Verizon, Frontier, CenturyLink, Windstream, and other telcos. The group's membership "ranges from the nation's largest telecom companies to small rural cooperatives."
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By msmash from
Slashdot's closer-look department:
The National Fair Housing Alliance, along with three other nonprofit housing advocacy organizations around the country, has filed a lawsuit against Facebook over its alleged discriminatory advertisements. From a report: The nonprofits, over the last few months, created a fake real estate company and used the Facebook ad platform to place housing ads. According to the lawsuit, the NFHA was able to place advertisements that "[excluded] families with children and women from receiving advertisements, as well as users with interests based on disability and national origin." In the NFHA's press release, the organization writes that "Facebook's advertising platform enables landlords and real estate brokers to exclude families with children, women, and other protected classes of people from receiving housing ads." The lawsuit follows extensive reporting from ProPublica that investigated these potentially discriminatory practices. For over a year, the journalism outlet tested various ways that landlords could place ads for housing, and found that the targeting allowed for many people to be kept out of the loop. Given Facebook's massive user base of over 2 billion users, the group believes that the social network is in violation of the Fair Housing Act.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's come-to-terms-with department:
PolygamousRanchKid shares a report from TechCrunch: So much for "We are accountable"; Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has declined a summons from a UK parliamentary committee that's investigating how social media data is being used, and -- as recent revelations suggest misused -- for political ad targeting. The DCMS committee wrote to Zuckerberg on March 20 -- following newspaper reports based on interviews with a former employee of UK political consultancy, Cambridge Analytica, who revealed the company obtained Facebook data on 50 million users -- calling for him to give oral evidence. Facebook's policy staff, Simon Milner, previously told the committee the consultancy did not have Facebook data. In a statement a Facebook spokesperson said it will be offering its CTO or chief product officer to answer questions. Today, CNN reports that Mark Zuckerberg has decided to testify before Congress within a matter of weeks, and Facebook is currently planning the strategy for his testimony. "The Facebook sources believe Zuckerberg's willingness to testify will also put pressure on Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to do the same," reports CNN. "Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley has officially invited all three CEOs to a hearing on data privacy on April 10. That means Washington, not London, will be the stage for the trial of big tech."
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's new-and-improved department:
At its education event in Chicago today, Apple introduced a refreshed 9.7-inch iPad with Apple Pencil support. "The updated iPad will be available in Apple stores today, in silver, space gray, and a new gold finish," reports The Verge. "The tablet will include Touch ID, an HD FaceTime camera, 10 hours of battery life, an 8-megapixel rear camera, LTE option, and Apple's A10 Fusion chip." From the report: Apple previously lowered the price of its 9.7-inch iPad last year, with a base model starting at $329, but today it's going a step further for students. Apple is offering the new iPad to schools priced at $299 and to consumers for $329. The optional Apple Pencil will be priced at $89 for schools and the regular $99 price for consumers. This is obviously not the $259 budget iPad pricing that was rumored, but it does make it a little more affordable to students and teachers. This new iPad will be a key addition to Apple's lineup as it seeks to fight back against Google's Chromebooks. Apple's iPads and Mac laptops reigned supreme in U.S. classrooms only five years ago, accounting for half of all mobile devices shipped to schools in 2013. Apple has now slipped behind both Google and Microsoft in U.S. schools, and Chromebooks are dominating classrooms with nearly 60 percent of shipments in the U.S. Apple had some other non-hardware, education-themed announcements at its event today. "Apple demonstrated Smart Annotation, which allows teachers to mark up reports in Pages directly, and the company promised new versions of its iWork apps like Pages, Numbers, and Keynote that support the Apple Pencil," reports The Verge. "Teachers will also be able to use Macs to create digital books for their classrooms, and Apple is building a books creator into the Pages app." The company also announced a new augmented reality app called Froggipedia that lets students virtually dissect frogs using an Apple Pencil. The free iCloud offering for students has also been bumped up from 5GB to 200GB.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's rule-breaking department:
An anonymous reader quotes a report from South China Morning Post: Traffic police in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen have always had a reputation for strict enforcement of those flouting road rules in the metropolis of 12 million people. Now with the help of artificial intelligence and facial recognition technology, jaywalkers will not only be publicly named and shamed, they will be notified of their wrongdoing via instant messaging -- along with the fine. Intellifusion, a Shenzhen-based AI firm that provides technology to the city's police to display the faces of jaywalkers on large LED screens at intersections, is now talking with local mobile phone carriers and social media platforms such as WeChat and Sina Weibo to develop a system where offenders will receive personal text messages as soon as they violate the rules, according to Wang Jun, the company's director of marketing solutions. For the current system installed in Shenzhen, Intellifusion installed cameras with 7 million pixels of resolution to capture photos of pedestrians crossing the road against traffic lights. Facial recognition technology identifies the individual from a database and displays a photo of the jaywalking offense, the family name of the offender and part of their government identification number on large LED screens above the pavement. In the 10 months to February this year, as many as 13,930 jaywalking offenders were recorded and displayed on the LED screen at one busy intersection in Futian district, the Shenzhen traffic police announced last month. Taking it a step further, in March the traffic police launched a webpage which displays photos, names and partial ID numbers of jaywalkers. These measures have effectively reduced the number of repeat offenders, according to Wang. The next step -- informing the errant pedestrians by text or Weibo instant messaging -- could have the added benefit of eliminating the cost of erecting large LED screens across the cities, he said.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's law-and-order department:
After failing to meet an expectation that it would prioritize public safety as it tested its self-driving technology, Uber has been ordered to take its self-driving cars off Arizona roads (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). "The incident that took place on March 18 is an unquestionable failure to comply with this expectation," Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona wrote in a letter sent to Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber's chief executive. "Arizona must take action now." The New York Times reports: Uber had already suspended all testing of its cars in Arizona, San Francisco, Pittsburgh and Toronto. "We proactively suspended self-driving operations in all cities immediately following the tragic incident last week. We continue to help investigators in any way we can, and we'll keep a dialogue open with the governor's office to address any concerns they have," said Matt Kallman, an Uber spokesman. The rebuke from the governor is a reversal from what has been an open-arms policy by the state, heralding its lack of regulation as an asset to lure autonomous vehicle testing -- and tech jobs. Waymo, the self-driving car company spun out from Google, and General Motors-owned Cruise are also testing cars in the state. Mr. Ducey said he was troubled by a video released from the Tempe Police Department that seemed to show that neither the Uber safety driver nor the autonomous vehicle detected the presence of a pedestrian in the road in the moments before the crash.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's tag-team department:
An anonymous reader writes: The Guardian reports of a recent paper, published in the journal Energy and Environmental Science, that helps explain how wind and solar energy can power most of the United States: "The authors analyzed 36 years of hourly weather data (1980-2015) in the U.S. They calculated the available wind and solar power over this time period and also included the electrical demand in the U.S. and its variation throughout the year. With this information, the researchers considered two scenarios. In scenario 1, they imagined wind and solar installations that would be sufficient to supply 100% of the U.S. electrical needs. In the second scenario, the installations would be over-designed; capable of providing 150% of the total U.S. electrical need. But the authors recognize that just because a solar panel or a wind turbine can provide all our energy, it doesn't mean that will happen in reality. It goes back to the prior discussion that sometimes the wind just doesn't blow, and sometimes the sun isn't shining. With these two scenarios, the authors then considered different mixes of power, from all solar to all wind. They also included the effect of aggregation area, that is, what sized regions are used to generate power. Is your power coming from wind and solar in your neighborhood, your city, your state or your region?
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's few-and-far-between department:
hackingbear writes from a report via Quartz: According to Chinese venture capitalist and former Google China president Kai-Fu Lee, the list of countries well-positioned to embrace a future powered by artificial intelligence is exceedingly short: United States and China. "The countries that are not in good shape are the countries that have perhaps a large population, but no AI, no technologies, no Google, no Tencent, no Baidu, no Alibaba, no Facebook, no Amazon," Lee says. "These people will basically be data points to countries whose software is dominant in their country. If a country in Africa uses largely Facebook and Google, they will be providing their data to help Facebook and Google make more money, but their jobs will still be replaced nevertheless." Originally, China's low labor costs might have helped the country modernize, Lee says, but as AI-driven automation takes hold in manufacturing, other countries that want to follow China's blueprint for economic growth probably wouldn't be able to rely on cheap labor alone.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's reuse-recycle department:
Elon Musk says his Boring Company will sell "interlocking bricks" made from the rock that its tunnel-creating machines excavate from the ground. In other words, think Lego, he says, except giant, heavy, and made of Earth. The Verge reports: Musk says that the Boring Company will sell "kits" of bricks, starting with one that makes it easy to build things from "ancient Egypt," like replicas of the pyramids, the Sphinx, or the Temple of Horus. The bricks will be "lifesize," though it's not clear what that actually means. And they'll be bored through the middle, to save some weight, but still rated to withstand California's earthquakes. (As is typical, Musk announced the idea in freewheeling fashion on Twitter.) t's unclear when these bricks, or the kits, will be available or how much they'll cost. The Boring Company is currently only digging short, preliminary tunnels in California and Maryland, so there's presumably not enough to start selling any of this upturned rock just yet. But the small company has big plans for tunnels around the country meant to facilitate debatably futuristic modes of transportation, so there will be plenty of newly removed earth if even half of those ever come to fruition.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's explain-like-I'm-five department:
dryriver writes: There are occasions where multiple big tech manufacturers all announce the exact same innovation at the same time -- e.g. 4K UHD TVs. Everybody in broadcasting and audiovisual content creation knew that 4K/8K UHD and high dynamic range (HDR) were coming years in advance, and that all the big TV and screen manufacturers were preparing 4K UHD HDR product lines because FHD was beginning to bore consumers. It came as no surprise when everybody had a 4K UHD product announcement and demo ready at the same time. Something very unusual happened this year at GDC 2018 however. Multiple graphics and GPU companies, like Microsoft, Nvidia, and AMD, as well as other game developers and game engine makers, all announced that real-time ray tracing is coming to their mass-market products, and by extension, to computer games, VR content and other realtime 3D applications.
Why is this odd? Because for many years any mention of 30+ FPS real-time ray tracing was thought to be utterly impossible with today's hardware technology. It was deemed far too computationally intensive for today's GPU technology and far too expensive for anything mass market. Gamers weren't screaming for the technology. Technologists didn't think it was doable at this point in time. Raster 3D graphics -- what we have in DirectX, OpenGL and game consoles today -- was very, very profitable and could easily have evolved further the way it has for another 7 to 8 years. And suddenly there it was: everybody announced at the same time that real-time ray tracing is not only technically possible, but also coming to your home gaming PC much sooner than anybody thought. Working tech demos were shown. What happened? How did real-time ray tracing, which only a few 3D graphics nerds and researchers in the field talked about until recently, suddenly become so technically possible, economically feasible, and so guaranteed-to-be-profitable that everybody announced this year that they are doing it?
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