Group items tagged

"For now, however, Hammond tries to reassure journalists that he's not trying to kick them when they're down. He tells a story about a party he attended with his wife, who's the marketing director at Chicago's fabled Second City improv club. He found himself in conversation with a well-known local theater critic, who asked about Hammond's business. As Hammond explained what he did, the critic became agitated. Times are tough enough in journalism, he said, and now you're going to replace writers with robots? "I just looked at him," Hammond recalls, "and asked him: Have you ever seen a reporter at a Little League game? That's the most important thing about us. Nobody has lost a single job because of us.""

"The significance of the attack on Krebs is that it looks as though many of the attacks on him came from large numbers of enslaved devices - routers, cameras, networked TVs and the like. "Someone has a botnet with capabilities we haven't seen before," says Martin McKeay, Akamai's senior security expert. The DDoS arms race has just moved up a gear."

"But when you dive into the code of Meitu, that's where things get interesting. Security researchers have jumped in to assess the photo editing app and found that it was indeed collecting information, including a phone's IMEI number (a handset's unique ID number), and sending it back to remote servers:"

""The human can provide the robot with intuition, expertise and cognitive abilities. The robot can do things in areas too dangerous for a human, while the human is still there," he told Stanford News last week."

Interesting to see the censorship of such a controlled system as iOS - is it a good or bad thing?

"We're tempted to file this one under "the more things change, the more they stay the same." A wristband, called Nymi, that taps the user's heartbeat as a biometric marker, will also double as a bitcoin wallet."

"That is, when you are continuously surveilled, when your every word - even your private conversations, even your personal journals - are subject to continuous monitoring, you never have the space in which to think things through. If you doubt a piece of popular wisdom and want to hash it out, your ability to carry on that discussion is limited the knowledge that your testing of the day's received ideas is on the record forever and may be held against you."

"Schools in the UK have experimented with fingerprinting pupils then using that data for tasks including library books and lunch payments. However, the European Commission has questioned the practice, including whether schools can make it compulsory and whether parents can challenge it in court."

"Here's the thing about privacy: It's tedious. Rather than dwell on Google being accused of illegal wiretapping with Street View, or whether Facebook got explicit consent from users before a recent update in privacy practices, we need to evolve the conversation around the monetization of our data in the digital realm toward identity. "

"RECHO DOES ONE very simple, little thing: It lets you leave a voice message tied to a location. When other people using the app hit those coordinates, Recho will tell them there's something to listen to. You can use the app to discover different "rechoes" around you, if you actively want to listen in on someone's location-aware thoughts. You can also share interesting soundbytes with your Recho followers. It's a little weird and novel, but ultimately a new way to think about digital exploring a place."

The access point itself will allow multiple devices to hook up to it so they can all share files with each other on a private little network. Then, for fun, the whole thing is shrunk down and stuffed inside a small notebook so you can stealthily share files anywhere. It's a little over the top, but fun nonetheless. Head over to Node for the full guide.

"While Keenan emphasised the capability was not a centralised biometric database, and was simply an improved way to share information already collected by different Australian jurisdictions, Gregory questioned how these images of Australians will be employed by law enforcement. "It's subtle changes in the way that things are used that need to be debated the most," he said. "In this case, we're talking about using our passport photos for a purpose for which we never gave permission.""

A cool bit of tech that should help educated young brits on coding and other things to help them in jobs later in life although this could put the younger people at an advantage due to the inequality between older students and younger ones

Take a watch, Mr.Ballmer says some interesting things =D

Apparently all games (and who knows what else) for computers will only be available by downloads by the year 2011. If this is a good thing, we shall have to find out in a year's time.

Well it has happened - and all with such ignorance no wonder the UK has so many problems when things are decided in such a poor and misunderstood way.

"If you were born around the turn of the 21st century, you've probably had to endure someone calling you a "digital native" at least once. At first, this kind of sounds like a good thing to be-raised without the taint of the offline world, and so imbued with a kind of mystic sixth sense about how the Internet should be."

"A leaked MPAA document discloses the studios' lobbyists' plan to force ISPs to give it control over DNS (one of the key goals in SOPA), by using the arguments raised in the decade-old Brand X case, where the ISPs said that they were more than a "telecommunications service" and were, instead, an "information service" because they provided DNS (among other things)."