Showing posts with label Technology News Today. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Technology News Today. Show all posts

Saturday, October 29, 2016

Bot Armies Boost Candidates' Popularity on Twitter

Internet bots have many useful online purposes, but they have a dark side, too, as three researchers demonstrated in their analysis of Twitter traffic during the first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Bots are used to automate functions on the Net. For example, if you belong to several social networks, you could use a bot to post a photo to all of them at once, saving the time of logging onto each network. What the researchers found was that bots also can be used to amplify support on Twitter.

Friday, October 28, 2016

Microsoft Open Sources AI Toolkit

Microsoft this week released an updated version of its Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit as an open source Beta. The deep learning system is used to speed advances in areas such as speech and image recognition and search relevance on CPUs and Nvidia GPUs. It also works with Microsoft's Azure GPU offering. The Microsoft computer scientists who developed the toolkit initially were looking for a tool to speed up and improve their own research. It morphed into an offering capable of taking on a wide variety of deep learning tasks.

Apple Brings a Surprising Touch to MacBook Event

Apple on Thursday unveiled two new MacBook Pro laptops, adding a touch more power to the line. Both the new 13-inch and 15-inch models will be offered in silver and space gray. They have a Touch Bar that replaces the row of function keys found on laptops, as well as a Touch ID fingerprint scanner incorporated into the power button. They sport a Force Touch trackpad that's twice the size of the trackpad in previous models. The new 13-inch MacBook Pro is 17 percent thinner than its predecessor. It's also smaller, and it weighs half a pound less than the previous version.

Conspiracy Theories in the Information Age, Part 1

One of the most volatile conspiracy theories in recent times ended with a whimper last month, when Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump made the terse statement, "President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period." Though birthers may be with us always, it seems that many have turned their attention to other potentially scandalous topics -- and they need look no further than the place most conspiracy theories are born these days, the Internet.

Thursday, October 27, 2016

Tech on TV: A Little Realism Goes a Long Way

Watching TV shows often requires the suspension of disbelief -- that is, a willingness to press pause on one's critical faculties in order to believe the unbelievable. Realism often must be secondary to story, in other words. This very often is necessary when computers are used to advance plot lines, when programmers and hackers alike can bang away on their keyboards and produce tremendous results in seconds. One need look no further than the keyboard cowboys on such shows as The Blacklist or Scorpion.

Wednesday, October 26, 2016

Gadget Ogling: Magnificent Mics, Intriguing E-Ink, and Compact Computers

I've tried dipping my toes into the world of podcasting with a friend this year. We haven't found it easy to get together to record, but for the two trial runs we've had, I bought a Blue Snowball mic. I'm very pleased with the sound quality, so I'm fairly certain I'd be happy to have Blue's latest microphone, Raspberry. It's a gorgeous, portable little thing, which you can connect to a PC or Mac using a USB cable. Its Mini USB to Lightning cable makes it easy to capture quality audio using an iPhone or iPad too.

Social Media Analytics, Meet Big Brother

The American Civil Liberties Union recently uncovered evidence that led Twitter, Facebook and its Instagram subsidiary to stop sharing data with Geofeedia, a firm accused of improperly collecting social media data on protest groups, and sharing that information with numerous law enforcement agencies. Geofeedia, a developer of location-based analytics, had been marketing its technology to law enforcement agencies. It was used for such purposes as monitoring Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland.

Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Antique Kernel Flaw Opens Door to New Dirty Cow Exploit

A Linux security vulnerability first discovered more than a decade ago once again poses a threat, Red Hat warned last week, as an exploit that could allow attackers to gain enhanced privileges on affected computers has turned up in the wild. Users need to take steps to patch their systems to prevent the exploit, known as "Dirty Cow," from granting access to unprivileged attackers. "What's changed isn't the vulnerability itself, but rather the manner in which it's being exploited," said Josh Bressers, a security strategist at Red Hat.

Battlefield 1: Big, Bombastic and Very Loosely Based

If filmmaker Michael Bay -- known for the Transformers and other over-the-top films -- were to decide to make a World War I movie, and if he chose to rely on comic books as his research materials, the result would be very much like Electronic Arts' newly released video game Battlefield 1. This latest entry in the popular series -- somewhat confusing given the "1" in its moniker -- moves the action from recent modern settings to the Great War, taking the action back in time 100 years, highlighting lumbering tanks and biplanes.

New MacBook Will Headline Apple's Thursday Show

A refresh of Apple's flagship laptop, the MacBook Pro, likely will be the highlight of an event scheduled for this Thursday at the company's headquarters in Cupertino, California. The update to its flagship MacBook line couldn't come at a more critical time. "Apple has been under increasing pressure from Dell, Lenovo and others in this space and needs to up its game considerably lest it be accused of neglecting notebook users and customers," said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.

Saturday, October 22, 2016

DDoS Attack Causes Waves of Internet Outages

Hundreds of websites -- including those of biggies such as Netflix, Twitter and Spotify -- on Friday fell prey to massive DDoS attacks that cut off access to Internet users on the East Coast and elsewhere across the United States. Three attacks were launched over a period of hours against Internet performance management company Dyn, which provides support to eight of the top 10 Internet service and retail companies and six of the top 10 entertainment companies listed in the Fortune 500.

Friday, October 21, 2016

Linux Foundation Spurs JavaScript Development

The Linux Foundation earlier this week announced the addition of the JS Foundation as a Linux Foundation project. The move is an effort to inject new energy into the JavaScript developer community. By rebranding the former JQuery foundation as the JS Foundation and bringing it under the Linux umbrella, officials hope to create some stability and build critical mass. The goal is to spark greater interest in pursuing open source collaboration by intermingling some promising new players with some venerable stalwarts.

Rez Infinite Rocks Worlds

Rez Infinite, one of the first virtual reality games for Sony's new PlaystationVR, this week earned praise from early reviewers for its graphics and immersing qualities. Sony announced the game -- an update of a remake -- last year. Featuring support for 1080p resolution graphics, along with 3D audio sound, Rez Infinite is designed for the PSVR, but it's also compatible with the regular PlayStation 4. Sega introduced the original Rez for the Dreamcast in 2001 and the PlayStation 2 a year later. It was a huge hit.

Tesla: Everyone Gets a Self-Driving Car

Tesla has announced plans to install hardware that will allow all of its cars to become driverless. The equipment will enable self-driving at a safety level substantially greater than human-driven cars, according to the company. The hardware includes eight cameras to provide 360-degree visibility; 12 ultrasonic sensors to detect hard and soft objects; and forward-facing radar capable of seeing through rain, fog, dust and other vehicles. Tesla also will install a new onboard computer with 40 times the computing power of previous Tesla models.

Thursday, October 20, 2016

Nintendo Switches It Up

After months of speculation and buildup, Nintendo on Thursday officially unveiled its new gaming system, the Nintendo Switch. Previously known only by the codename "NX," rumors about this latest video game console began last year with a hint from Satoru Iwata, the company's late president. At the time Iwata suggested only that Nintendo was working on a new video game system, and few details have leaked since then. The Switch is Nintendo's first home gaming system since it launched the Wii U in 2012.

Microsoft AI Beats Humans at Speech Recognition

Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence and Research Unit earlier this week reported that its speech recognition technology had surpassed the performance of human transcriptionists. The team last month published a paper describing its system's accuracy, said to be superior to that of IBM's famed Watson artificial intelligence. The error rate for humans on the widely used NIST 2000 test set is 5.9 percent for the Switchboard portion of the data, and 11.3 percent for the CallHome portion, the team said.

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

New Tag Helps Google News Readers Unearth Facts

Google last week launched a Fact Check tag to help readers find fact-checking in major news stories published in the United States and the UK. Readers will see tagged articles in the expanded story box on news.google.com and in the Google News & Weather apps for iOS and Android. One factor the Google News algorithms consider in determining whether an article might contain fact checks is the Schema.org ClaimReview markup. Another is whether sites follow commonly accepted criteria for fact checks.

Assange Lives to Leak Another Day

The status of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange grew a bit murky on Tuesday after the group accused the U.S. State Department of pressuring Ecuadorian officials to block him from posting additional emails linked to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. The Ecuadorian foreign ministry on Tuesday acknowledged placing temporary restrictions on Assange's access, saying in a statement that it did not wish to interfere in a foreign election. It also said that it was acting on its own and not in response to any outside pressures.

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Apple Downshifts Driverless Vehicle Plans

Apple appears to be shifting its driverless car ambitions into a lower gear. Changes in the company's automotive strategy reportedly have resulted in hundreds of job cuts and the shelving of plans to build a car of its own. "Project Titan" -- Apple's internal name for the automotive initiative -- has a new focus. It will develop an autonomous driving system that will give the company the option of partnering with an established auto maker or producing a robo car of its own.

Monday, October 17, 2016

This Election May Be Scarier Than You Think

Not that it isn't scary enough -- but if you look at both candidates, who have had their images destroyed largely by technology, i.e., tapes and emails -- there is a huge warning inherent in the process. Email really wasn't a big thing until the late 1990s and even having your own email server wouldn't have been likely before 2005, let alone thinking through the security aspects. The Trump tape, which wasn't indexed based on the off-air segment, would have been nearly impossible to find before it was digitized and indexed.
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