Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Comment Re:OMG Yes it's gonna cost! (Score 5, Interesting) 384

by mystik (#58589462) Attached to: Making America Carbon Neutral Could Cost $1 Trillion a Year

But the point is that it's not a working system.

The currently "working" system is externalizing the costs of environmental harm and forcing other parties to deal with it.

These "Costs" that everyone complains about just forces them to pay for those non-obvious external costs, and internalize them, while creating a new market of opportunities for others to fix the issues.

And once that market exists, it can work to find efficient ways to keep environmental interests in order, and provide more job opportunities.

Comment OMG Yes it's gonna cost! (Score 5, Insightful) 384

by mystik (#58589244) Attached to: Making America Carbon Neutral Could Cost $1 Trillion a Year

Where is that money going to go? To the Sun? Is it just going to evaporate? It's going to to back into the economy!!! And maybe, just maybe those with capitol can loosen the purse strings and let the money flow to the folks actually doing the work, rather than sitting in their giant money bins.
Communications

Amazon's Home Security Company Is Turning Everyone Into Cops (vice.com) 256

Posted by BeauHD from the eye-witness-news dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Neighbors is not just a social media app: it's a service that's meant to be used with Ring security cameras, a Wi-Fi-powered home security company that was acquired by Amazon last February in a $1 billion deal. Neighbors was launched in May 2018, three months after the acquisition. If you have Ring security cameras, you can upload video content straight from your security camera to Neighbors. [...] Beyond creating a "new neighborhood watch," Amazon and Ring are normalizing the use of video surveillance and pitting neighbors against each other. Chris Gilliard, a professor of English at Macomb Community College who studies institutional tech policy, told Motherboard in a phone call that such a "crime and safety" focused platforms can actively reinforces racism.

In Amazon's version of a "new neighborhood watch," petty crimes are policed heavily, and racism is common. Video posts on Neighbors disproportionately depict people of color, and descriptions often use racist language or make racist assumptions about the people shown. In many ways, the Neighbors/Ring ecosystem is like a virtual gated community: people can opt themselves in by downloading the Neighbors app, and with a Ring camera, users can frame neighbors as a threat. Motherboard individually reviewed more than 100 user-submitted posts in the Neighbors app between December 6 and February 5, and the majority of people reported as "suspicious" were people of color. Motherboard placed the "home" address at the VICE offices in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and kept the default 5-mile neighborhood radius, meaning the neighborhood encompassed all of lower Manhattan, most of Brooklyn, and parts of Queens and Hoboken. According to the Ring Community Guidelines, the Neighbors app bans "direct threats against any individuals, bullying, harassment, and any posts that demean, defame, or discriminate," but it relies on Neighbors users to report posts that violate that rule. The guidelines also claim that only "crime and safety related content" is allowed. The guidelines do not define what qualifies as "safety," but they do encourage users to "consider the behavior that made you suspicious and whether such suspicion is reasonable."

When asked if Ring moderates content on Neighbors or reviews posts for racism, a company spokesperson said, "The Neighbors app by Ring is meant to facilitate this collaboration within communities by allowing users to easily share and communicate with their neighbors and in some cases, local law enforcement, about crime and safety in real-time."

Comment Re:Pi does it all (Score 3, Interesting) 96

by mystik (#56639018) Attached to: Rebuilding the PDP-11/70 with a Raspberry Pi

Before the Pi, you'd see all sorts of devices hacked to get new firmwares and new capabilities into them, that the original creator hadn't even dreamed of. Remember the Chumby? Hacking various routers?

The Pi platform lets you skip that sometimes difficult hacking phase, and onto the, "What could I do with this hardware?!"

Comment Windows 10 Fall Creators Update (Score 4, Interesting) 173

I had a machine I serviced that would not install the fall creator's update, with a non-specific error message.

I was both impressed and horrified to learn that that fall creators update would searched the *ENTIRE* hard drive for incompatible software. It was failing because it located an old copy of the Netware client Installer, in "C:\Old_Computer\Documents and Settings\User\Downloads\Novell". This software wasn't even installed on the computer; just present in that directory. The built-in updater failed w/ a general error, and the downloaded copy of the update claimed "You must uninstall this incompatible software", which, again, was not actually installed, just present on the hard drive.

Now I know *why* Windows takes forever to install updates :(

Comment FCC is Admin branch; Congress is legislative? (Score 4, Informative) 186

by mystik (#55795919) Attached to: Can the FCC's 'Net Neutrality' Decision Be Overturned in Congress?

Isn't this a basic US Government question?

The FCC's operates under the Administrative branch, and it's charter was created by an act of congress in 1934. The net neutrality repeal is just a application of it's authority to make rules, not laws.

Congress can enact laws to direct it's behavior, so long as those laws are constitutional. Which, I imagine would be a pretty straightforward application of the interstate commerce clause?

Comment Online Poker Turing test? (Score 4, Insightful) 164

by mystik (#53715629) Attached to: An AI Is Finally Trouncing The World's Best Poker Players

I've never used an online gambling site, but doesn't the existence of this AI kill off the fairness of these sites?

If a user is running this in his or her basement, wouldn't it pay more to just babysit the AI, acting on all the human-check capchas the sites deploy, and just doing what the AI decides?

This makes online poker effectively gold farming?

Comment Lets turn the dial to zero then (Score 5, Insightful) 158

How about we give him exactly what he wants.

And remove the regulations that forbid or make difficult municipal internet & Wifi?

And remove the regulations that make it harder for groups to even attempt to enter the last mile to compete?

I mean, if we're gonna roll back regulations, lets roll them back!

Slashdot Top Deals

The universe is an island, surrounded by whatever it is that surrounds universes.

Close