Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

"Ringing Bells also plans to sell other more expensive handsets - ranging in price up to about $100 (£75) - at a profit. But, with just over a week to go until Freedom 251's launch, critics remain unconvinced. "I find it difficult to believe that any sort of phone can be manufactured for 251 rupees, so it's difficult to see what kind of business model they have," says Pranav Dixit, a tech expert at the news site Factor Daily."

"The error saw over 800 links on the nhs.uk website send visitors to websites serving advertising and malware unrelated with the NHS. "We can confirm that this problem has arisen due to an internal coding error and that NHS Choices has not been maliciously attacked," said a HSCIC spokeswoman on behalf of NHS Choices."

"Turkey's brutal new Internet law grants the Turkish Telecommunications Directorate the power to arbitrarily censor Web-pages to the individual URL level, much like the Great Firewall of China -- meaning that specific articles that are critical of the state can be censored while leaving the remainder of the site intact."

Huge chunks of the Internet will be effectively unreachable, and which sites go into the censorship bucket will be decided upon in secret, by unelected employees of big corporations, like China's Huawei. Sure, you can untick the box if you want, but as David Cameron's advisors will tell you, defaults are powerful and most users never change them.

"A digital 'wallet' containing 7,500 Bitcoins that James Howells generated on his laptop is buried under four feet of rubbish"

"The National Small Business Administration found in 2013 that roughly 20 percent of small businesses are lacking a mobile-friendly website, and 18 percent have no web presence at all. Falling further down the search result hierarchy affects both the business itself and the costumers looking for the business."

"MafiaLeaks uses the encrypted anonymising browser Tor to enable informants to securely share their secrets with the site. Currently, the recipients are limited by MafiaLeaks to the Fatto Quotidiano newspaper, the Sicilian TV station Telejato and Antonella Beccaria, an independent investigative journalist. All are known for their anti-mafia activities."

"Turkey has finally restored access to YouTube, 67 days after the government blocked the video-sharing website. The Turkey's telecommunications authority (TIB) lifted the ban on Tuesday, removing YouTube from the "blocked sites" listed on its website. The move came four days after the country's Constitutional Court ruled that the ban violated Turks' free speech rights and ordered the ban be lifted."

"Google has accused Hollywood of attempting to "secretly censor the internet" by reviving the failed Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) to enable wholesale site-blocking."

"Unskilled manual laborers have felt the pressure of automation for a long time - but, increasingly, they're not alone. The last few years have been a bonanza of advances in artificial intelligence. As our software gets smarter, it can tackle harder problems, which means white-collar and pink-collar workers are at risk as well. Here are eight jobs expected to be automated (partially or entirely) in the coming decades. Call Center Employees call-center Telemarketing used to happen in a crowded call center, with a group of representatives cold-calling hundreds of prospects every day. Of those, maybe a few dozen could be persuaded to buy the product in question. Today, the idea is largely the same, but the methods are far more efficient. Many of today's telemarketers are not human. In some cases, as you've probably experienced, there's nothing but a recording on the other end of the line. It may prompt you to "press '1' for more information," but nothing you say has any impact on the call - and, usually, that's clear to you. But in other cases, you may get a sales call and have no idea that you're actually speaking to a computer. Everything you say gets an appropriate response - the voice may even laugh. How is that possible? Well, in some cases, there is a human being on the other side, and they're just pressing buttons on a keyboard to walk you through a pre-recorded but highly interactive marketing pitch. It's a more practical version of those funny soundboards that used to be all the rage for prank calls. Using soundboard-assisted calling - regardless of what it says about the state of human interaction - has the potential to make individual call center employees far more productive: in some cases, a single worker will run two or even three calls at the same time. In the not too distant future, computers will be able to man the phones by themselves. At the intersection of big data, artificial intelligence, and advanced

"A story on the site of the Japanese broadcaster NHK shows how this is playing out in the world of social networks. Online criticism of the behavior of the President of South Korea following the sinking of the ferry MV Sewol prompted the government to set up a team to monitor online activity. That, in its turn, has led people to seek what the NHK article calls "cyber-asylum" -- online safety through the use of foreign mobile messaging services, which aren't spied on so easily by the South Korean authorities. According to the NHK article: Many users have switched [from the hugely-popular home-grown product KakaoTalk] to a German chat app called Telegram. It had 50,000 users in early September. Now 2 million people have signed up."

"Durumeric leads a team of researchers at the University of Michigan that has developed scanning software called ZMap. This tool can probe the whole public Internet in under an hour, revealing information about the roughly four billion devices online. The scan results can show which sites are vulnerable to particular security flaws. In the case of FREAK, a scan was used to measure the scale of the threat before the bug was publicly announced."

"Petya ransomware victims can now unlock infected computers without paying. An unidentified programmer has produced a tool that exploits shortfalls in the way the malware encrypts a file that allows Windows to start up. In notes put on code-sharing site Github, he said he had produced the key generator to help his father-in-law unlock his Petya-encrypted computer."

"About two years ago the retail team lost another key task: negotiating with major brands and manufacturers the terms of popular sales on the site called "Lightning Deals." Common during the holidays as well as Mother's Day and Father's Day, they help move lots of inventory in a short period. Now, instead of calling their vendor manager at Amazon, the makers of handbags, smartphone accessories and other products simply logged into an Amazon portal that would determine if Amazon liked the deal being offered and the quantity it was willing to buy. No small talk. No give and take. Thousands of Amazon man hours spent forecasting demand, planning marketing strategies and negotiating deals was now handled by software, a major leap in efficiency."