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Submission + - Youth Arrested for "Killing Pet Dinosaur"

Rambo Tribble writes: In South Carolina a 16-year old boy, Alex Stone, was arrested and charged with creating a disturbance at his school, as well as suspended, for choosing to write: "I killed my neighbor's pet dinosaur. I bought the gun to take care of the business," in response to a class writing assignment. The story has attracted international attention.

Submission + - Police warn sharing James Foley killing video is a crime (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Scotland Yard has warned internet users they could be arrested under terrorism legislation if they viewed or shared the video of James Foley's murder, as Twitter and YouTube attempted to remove all trace of the footage from the web.

Twitter suspended dozens of accounts that published the graphic footage while YouTube tried to remove several copies of the video, which was first uploaded on Tuesday night.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo tweeted: "We have been and are actively suspending accounts as we discover them related to this graphic imagery. Thank you."

The unprecedented social media clampdown came as the Metropolitan police warned that even viewing the video could constitute a criminal offence in the UK.

The force said in a statement: "The MPS counter-terrorism command (SO15) is investigating the contents of the video that was posted online in relation to the alleged murder of James Foley. We would like to remind the public that viewing, downloading or disseminating extremist material within the UK may constitute an offence under terrorism legislation."

Submission + - Putin government moves to take control of Energia 1

schwit1 writes: Vitaly Lopota, the president of Russia’s largest space company Energia, was suspended Friday by the company’s board of directors.

The move appears to be part of an effort by Russia’s government to obtain majority control over Energia, of which it owns a 38-percent share. The directors elected Igor Komarov as its new chairman of the board. Komarov is chief of the Russian United Rocket and Space Corporation (URSC), the government-owned company tasked with consolidating Russia’s sprawling space sector.

The government is also conducting a criminal investigation of Lopota, which might be justified but appears to be a power play designed to both eliminate him from the game as well as make sure everyone else tows the line so that URSC can take complete control.

Submission + - UK Government Report Recommends Ending Online Anonymity (techdirt.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Every so often, people who don't really understand the importance of anonymity or how it enables free speech (especially among marginalized people), think they have a brilliant idea: "just end real anonymity online." They don't seem to understand just how shortsighted such an idea is. It's one that stems from the privilege of being in power. And who knows that particular privilege better than members of the House of Lords in the UK — a group that is more or less defined by excess privilege? The Communications Committee of the House of Lords has now issued a report concerning "social media and criminal offenses" in which they basically recommend scrapping anonymity online.

Comment Re:AI is always "right around the corner". (Score 4, Insightful) 564

The chess programs had the rules of chess programmed into them, and the move to play was calculated by rating different moves in the search space using an algorithm that was programmed by the developers of the AI system. This means that it is only specialised to chess.

To be the AI in movies like The Terminator, the program will need to be able to learn the rules and strategies of chess itself, and adapt its algorithm over time. To simplify the problem of recognising the elements on the board (machine vision), you could represent the board as an 8x8 array of Unicode characters.

Teaching the rules is difficult because you need a way of communicating those rules, which means that the program will need to understand language and the meaning behind the language (or enough meaning to understand rules to a particular game). Also, chess has a lot of rules that can be complex (en passant, castling, etc.) so it would be better to start with a simple game like tic tac toe or connect 4.

The real threat is not in a generic AI that deems humans as a threat, but a specially tasked program or AI that miscalculates: allowing machines to control drones or military aircraft to perform air strikes, or similar things. There, if a machine gets things wrong it can cause untold destruction. Think SkyNet/The Terminator, but here the machines do not know what they are doing (they don't have independent thought or understanding like humans and animals), they just classify humans (or buildings) as a threat -- that is, this can be via a decision tree like in the chess games and the best "move" is to attack any building.

Submission + - Oklahoma's Earthquakes Linked To Fracking (vox.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Oklahoma has already experienced about 240 minor earthquakes this year, roughly double the rate at which California has had them. A recent study (abstract) has now tied those earthquakes to fracking. From the article: "Fracking itself doesn't seem to be causing many earthquakes at all. However, after the well is fracked, all that wastewater needs to be pumped back out and disposed of somewhere. Since it's often laced with chemicals and difficult to treat, companies will often pump the wastewater back underground into separate disposal wells. Wastewater injection comes with a catch, however: The process both pushes the crust in the region downward and increases pressure in cracks along the faults. That makes the faults more prone to slippages and earthquakes. ... More specifically, the researchers concluded that 89 wells were likely responsible for most of the seismic activity. And just four wells located southeast of Oklahoma City were likely responsible for about one-fifth of seismic activity in the state between 2008 and 2013."

Feed Google News Sci Tech: Google tells UK media which of their stories it is hiding from search results - (google.com)


Times of India

Google tells UK media which of their stories it is hiding from search results
PCWorld
Google has informed several U.K. media which of their news articles it is hiding in search results shown to European Union users as a consequence of a recent EU court ruling that gives people the “right to be forgotten” by search engines under certain...
Google right to be forgotten 'to get messy' after BBC story disappearsCNET
Censorship claimed as Google cuts search resultsSalt Lake Tribune
Google 'forgets' BBC man's blog post: We saw what you did thereRegister
Wall Street Journal (blog)-Businessweek-PC Magazine
all 164 news articles

Submission + - TrueCrypt is dead? What now? 7

Archeron writes: A colleague visited Truecrypt.org today and brought this to my attention. All the links are gone and the front page contains the message:
"The development of TrueCrypt was ended in 5/2014 after Microsoft terminated support of Windows XP." It goes on to list migration instructions. Is this the end for our beloved open source, multi-platform crypto solution? The question is what now? Planned forks? Any recommendations for freely available, open and multi-platform solutions that will allow for moving storage devices from Linux -> Windows -> Mac?

Submission + - Google Starts Blocking Extensions Not In The Chrome Web Store

An anonymous reader writes: Google has begun blocking local Chrome extensions to protect Windows users. This means that as of today, extensions can be installed in Chrome for Windows only if they’re hosted on the Chrome Web Store. Furthermore, Google says extensions that were previously installed “may be automatically disabled and cannot be re-enabled or re-installed until they’re hosted in the Chrome Web Store.” The company didn’t specify what exactly qualifies the “may” clause, though we expect it may make exceptions for certain popular extensions for a limited time. Google is asking developers to reach out to it if they run into problems or if they “think an extension was disabled incorrectly.”

Submission + - Parenting Rewires the Male Brain (sciencemag.org) 1

sciencehabit writes: Cultures around the world have long assumed that women are hardwired to be mothers. But a new study suggests that caring for children awakens a parenting network in the brain—even turning on some of the same circuits in men as it does in women. The research implies that the neural underpinnings of the so-called maternal instinct aren't unique to women, or activated solely by hormones, but can be developed by anyone who chooses to be a parent.

Submission + - Uk to end net neutrality (dailydot.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The uk government is planning on vetoing the EU legislation that enforces net neutrality under the guise of "won't anyone think of the child pornography blocking?" again.

Comment Re:Fuzz Testing. Next! (Score 1) 116

They are all tools that can be applied to improve the quality of the code. No one thing is "The Solution".

* Test Driven Development (TDD) is a good approach to ensure that the code you write is testable. This will not work for things like UI code, but other code will benefit.

* Unit Tests can either be developed via a TDD-like approach (easier to do), or after the code is written (harder to do).

* Automated Regression Tests (a superset of Unit Tests) provide good coverage for ensuring code works as expected without involving a large manual testing team. These will only detect the things covered by the automated tests.

* Static Code Analysis tools can pick up a lot of problem areas, but will not detect every problem. These results can be used to identify what tests need to be created to prevent future regression.

* Fuzz testing is good at providing strange data to e.g. a protocol or file format parser. These are intended to be soak tests -- e.g. "does my regular expression parser handle all these strange and possibly invalid constructs". Fuzz testing would have most likely found the heartbleed bug (because it would have permutated the length of data to request). Any failures here should be converted to Unit/Regression tests to ensure that the problem is (a) fixed by any code changes made and (b) does not occur in the future. Fuzz testing will typically find hard to identify bugs (e.g. data races) that are not easy to identify from manually constructed tests or static analysis.

* Manual/ad hoc testing is important as it can uncover bugs that the developers are not aware of.

* Code and Security Reviews help identify potential issues (e.g. if you have someone knowledgeable about SQL injection, they can assess whether some code is vulnerable to that attack).

None of these is a silver bullet, but the more you have the better the code will be.

Submission + - UK ISPs to send non-threatening letters to pirates (bbc.co.uk)

echo-e writes: A deal has been made between groups representing content creators and ISPs in the UK concerning how the ISPs should respond to suspected illegal file sharers. In short, the ISPs will send letters or emails with an "educational" rather than threatening tone, alerting users to legal alternatives. The rights holders will be notified of the number of such alerts that have been sent out, but only the ISPs will know the identity of the offenders. Only four of the UKs ISPs have agreed to the "Voluntary Copyright Alert Programme" so far, but the remaining ISPs are expected to join the programme at a later stage. The debate between rights holders and ISPs has raged on for years. This agreement falls short of the of the proposals put forward by the rights holders groups, but the ISPs have argued that it is not their responsibility to police users and that a legal process already exists for going after individuals.

Submission + - McAfee accused of McSlurping Open Source Vulnerability Database (theregister.co.uk)

mask.of.sanity writes: Intel security subsidiary McAfee may be in hot water after it allegedly scraped thousands of records from the Open Source Vulnerability Database instead of paying for them. The slurp was said to be conducted using fast scripts that rapidly changed the user agent, and was launched after McAfee formally inquired about purchasing a license to the data. Law experts say site's copyright could be breached by individuals merely downloading the information in contravention to the site's policies, and did not require the data to be subsequently disseminated.

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