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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Digital Trends: Data is the new oil, or so the saying goes. So why are we giving it away for nothing more than ostensibly free email, better movie recommendations, and more accurate search results? It's an important question to ask in a world where the accumulation and scraping of data is worth billions of dollars -- and even a money-losing company with enough data about its users can be worth well into the eight-figure region. The essential bargain that's driven by today's tech giants is the purest form of cognitive capitalism: users feed in their brains -- whether this means solving a CAPTCHA to train AI systems or clicking links on Google to help it learn which websites are more important than others. In exchange for this, we get access to ostensibly "free" services, while simultaneously helping to train new technologies which may one day put large numbers of us out of business.

In an age in which concepts like universal basic income are increasingly widely discussed, one of the most intriguing solutions is one first put forward by virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier. In his book Who Owns the Future?, Lanier suggests that users should receive a micropayment every time their data is used to earn a company money. For example, consider the user who signs up to an online dating service. Here, the user provides data that the dating company uses to match them with a potential data. This matching process is, itself, based on algorithms honed by the data coming from previous users. The data resulting from the new user will further perfect the algorithms for later users of the service. In the case that your data somehow matches someone else successfully in a relationship, Lanier says you would be entitled to a micropayment.

The Verge reports the death at age 79 of former Intel CEO, Andy Grove, one of the best-known names in Silicon Valley, and in fact one of the people who are behind the fecund technological and business climate that made Silicon Valley a household name. Grove's professional life at Intel spanned five decades, beginning as a day-one, number-one hire, as director of engineering; he went on to serve as president, CEO, and chairman of the board, managing to write several books along the way; "Only the Paranoid Survive" is probably the best known. From The Verge's story: During Groves' tenure as CEO, Intel produced chips including the 386 and Pentium, which became name brands unto themselves and laid the groundwork for much of the personal computing era. "Andy approached corporate strategy and leadership in ways that continue to influence prominent thinkers and companies around the world," Intel Chairman Andy Bryant said in a statement. "He combined the analytic approach of a scientist with an ability to engage others in honest and deep conversation, which sustained Intel's success over a period that saw the rise of the personal computer, the Internet and Silicon Valley."

schwit1 writes Last week, a trio of Google researchers published a paper on a new artificial intelligence system dubbed FaceNet that it claims represents the most accurate approach yet to recognizing human faces. FaceNet achieved nearly 100-percent accuracy on a popular facial-recognition dataset called Labeled Faces in the Wild, which includes more than 13,000 pictures of faces from across the web. Trained on a massive 260-million-image dataset, FaceNet performed with better than 86 percent accuracy.

The approach Google's researchers took goes beyond simply verifying whether two faces are the same. Its system can also put a name to a face—classic facial recognition—and even present collections of faces that look the most similar or the most distinct. Every advance in facial recognition makes me think of Paul Theroux's dystopian Ozone.

HughPickens.com writes: Sara Stewart reports at the NY Post that the new sci-fi movie Predestination, opening January 9, is "loopier than Spielberg's [Minority Report]; its plot twists and turns 'like a snake eating its tail,' one character remarks, until you're not sure whether its developments are even plausible in a fictional universe." It's based on Robert A. Heinlein's science fiction classic All You Zombies, first published in 1959. The story involves a number of paradoxes caused by time travel, further developing themes explored by Heinlein in a previous work, By His Bootstraps, published some 18 years earlier. Predestination's plot concerns the intersection of a time-traveling assassin and an androgynous young writer

StartsWithABang writes: The next great leap in human spaceflight is a manned mission to a world within our Solar System: most likely Mars. But if something went wrong along the journey — at launch, close to Earth, or en route — whether biological or mechanical, would there be any way to return to Earth? This article is a fun (and sobering) look at what the limits of physics and technology allow at present. If you're interested in a hard sci-fi, near-future look at how a catastrophic Mars mission might go, you should read an excellent novel called The Martian by Andy Weir.

Ender's Game is the quintessential classic military sci-fi book. It ranks near the top of virtually every list of good sci-fi novels. When Hollywood decided to finally go forward with a movie adaptation, the initial reaction from most fans was one of skepticism. (After all, we saw what they did to I, Robot.) But there was reason to hope, as well, because Ender's Game is more action-friendly than many sci-fi stories, and the filmmakers had a big budget with which to make it. The movie was finally released last week; read on for our review. In short: the film tries too hard to straddle the line between assuming viewers are familiar with the details and bringing new viewers up to speed. The cuts to the story were both too much and not enough. It left us with only brief glimpses at too many characters, and introduced themes without fleshing them out enough to be interesting.

Note: in the lead-up to this film's release, a boycott was organized in response to Orson Scott Card's efforts as an anti-gay-marriage activist. If you find your desire to see one of your favorite stories clashing with a desire not to support Card's political views, an organization called the Equality Initiative has offered an alternative. They suggest going to see the movie, if you want, and then simply donating the ticket price to any of several related charities.

First, let's get the obvious out of the way: they cut a lot from the novel. Really, quite a lot. As a book, Ender's Game is not terribly long, and it's a very quick read. That makes it sound ideal for a movie interpretation at first blush. But part of the reason it's such a quick read is that it's dense with plot, character development, and internal narratives. The movie is dense as well, but mostly with events. What makes the book great is not so much what the characters do, but why they do it and how. So while the movie conveys the majority of what happened in the book, it fails to convey the reasons behind the facts. I don't know that they could have done any better within a two-hour time limit, but it leaves us with a question: is this film for people who have read the book, or for people who haven't?

Since the book has been out since 1985, I'm going to assume most of you are familiar with the story. I won't reveal the major plot twists, but minor and intermediate spoilers may follow. If you aren't familiar with it, then here's the bottom line: go read the book! It's good.

Right from the beginning we see how deep the cuts go. Central to Ender's time at home is the whirlwind of conflicting emotions running through him about his monitor, his family, and his status as a Third. The film rushes through these, hitting each only briefly enough to show the viewer that there exists something deeper. Ender mentions being a Third, but doesn't explain what a Third is, or why it's a point of shame and embarrassment. They introduce Peter, but fail to show that their relationship is more complex than your typical sibling rivalry. In the book, Peter is brilliant, sadistic, intuitive, and a hell of an actor when adults are around. In the movie, he's just a jerk for a few seconds before Ender rockets off toward the plot.

Even Ender's early fight with Stilson loses much of its impact. In the book, it really isn't much of a fight; Ender immediately has Stilson at his mercy. The point of the scene was to show Ender's deliberate use of brutality and intimidation to secure safety from the larger group of enemies. He's reluctant, but not hesitant. In the movie, this is distilled down to a command for Stilson to "stay down" before the fight has concluded and a shaky warning to the others.

So, even just 10 minutes into the film, we see the film is not taking the time to illustrate these characters to a new audience. That trend continues: most of the minor characters are cardboard cutouts of their literary counterparts. Bean is somehow in the same initial launch group as Ender, and simply serves as an ally. Peter and Valentine just serve as occasional spurs for Ender's development. (Yes, that means the entire secondary plot was scrapped. I'm not too sad about that; there's no way they could have given it enough time to do it justice. And it was always the least believable thing, for me, in a novel about space battles and insectoid aliens.) Alai makes mention of peace, but he doesn't have a role as a peacemaker. The contrast between his connection with Ender and the constant violence surrounding them is lost. Petra has more interaction with Ender than most, but it has some bizarre romantic overtones.

Well, then, what about the scenery? If the movie is for fans of the book, it should at least be awesome to see expensive CGI of the scenes we imagined in our heads when reading it, right? And it is.. sometimes. The space battle sequences are impressive, and seeing the students fly around in zero-g was neat. But it was also jarring, at times. Take the Battleroom at the school, for example. In my head, it was an approximation of space, with a dark background interrupted only by the simple "stars" and the gates. In the movie, there's an awful lot going on, visually. The walls are windows dominated by a view of Earth. Everything's polished and shiny. The light pistols shoot bright, Star-Wars-like laser bolts that flash dramatically when they hit something. All the ships in the battlefleet look fancy and brand new, instead of hastily constructed and out of date. Ender's interface in command school is far more graphical and pretty than is sensible. It's cool to see, and I suspect viewers who are unfamiliar with the book won't think twice about it. But it's clear that this interpretation is not straining to be as faithful to the book as possible, which is mildly disappointing.

The movie's acting was decent. There won't be any Oscar nominations, but they didn't have a whole lot to work with. As I mentioned earlier, most characters had their subtleties stripped away. Asa Butterfield does a respectable job with Ender, using glances and body language to supplement some of the situations where the story was simplified from an internal narrative. The casting director definitely made the right decision going with kids in their early teens rather than the much-younger ages from the book. Harrison Ford played Graff well enough, but it'd be more accurate to say he played Harrison Ford. If you tend to like his characters, you'll enjoy the role. If not, you might like Viola Davis, who played a surprisingly good Major Anderson. Those two characters were tweaked a bit in order to separate out their conflicting emotions about training Ender, and they pull it off. Ben Kingsley does a fine job in his abbreviated role as Ender's adversarial mentor.

A few other random notes:

• They gave up the biggest plot twist ahead of time; there were at least two obvious references to what was going to happen. Ender is kept in the dark, but the audience is not, which is too bad for new viewers.
• The fantasy game was represented pretty well. Like most other plot elements, it was stripped down to its essentials, but I was surprised by how well they integrated it into the story. I was expecting it to be cut altogether.
• Due to the trimming and simplifying of the story, the movie's dialogue was largely original. It mostly paraphrased the book. However, they occasionally threw in direct quotes from some of the more stylized lines. It happened infrequently enough that it broke immersion.

It's inevitable that a successful book won't fit within the confines of a movie script. We knew this going in. Nevertheless, some adaptations have succeeded by being as faithful as possible to the ideas behind the book. Ender's Game doesn't manage this. Other adaptations have been successful by reimagining the work for a new medium, thus drawing in new fans. Ender's Game doesn't quite manage this, either. It straddles the line, and in doing so, leaves us with a sequence of events that seems entirely arbitrary, when it should instead seem inevitable. If you're thrilled about the possibility of seeing expensive CGI for one of your favorite stories, go see it. Otherwise, give it a pass.

Her bio says, "Esther Schindler has been writing about computers – with a particular focus on software development and open source – since the early 1990s. You’ve seen Esther’s byline in prominent IT publications, such as CIO.com, IT World, and IEEE Spectrum. She's written dozens of analyst reports for Evans Data about software development trends. Her name is on the cover of about a dozen books, including most recently The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Twitter Marketing. Esther is editor of a site for software developers, these days, while still freelancing occasionally for IT World (most recently The developer's guide to future car technology) and she writes a blog about project management." She submits her own work to Slashdot, and submits work for other writers, too. She may or may not be the most successful Slashdot submitter of all time, based on the percentage of her submissions that show up on the front page, but she is absolutely in the top 10. In this interview, she shares some of her secrets. Maybe Esther's thoughts will help you submit more successfully. (So will reading the Slashdot FAQ.)

Hugh Pickens writes "John Markoff writes that an unsuccessful campaign against the Vatican by Anonymous, which did not receive wide attention at the time, provides a rare glimpse into the recruiting, reconnaissance, and warfare tactics used by the shadowy hacking collective and may be the first end-to-end record of a full Anonymous attack. The attack, called Operation Pharisee in a reference to the sect that Jesus called hypocrites, was initially organized by hackers in South America and Mexico and was designed to disrupt Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Madrid in August 2011 for World Youth Day and draw attention to child sexual abuse by priests. First the hackers spent weeks spreading their message through their own website and social sites like Twitter and Flickr calling on volunteers to download free attack software and imploring them to 'stop child abuse' by joining the cause. It took the hackers 18 days to recruit enough people, then a core group of roughly a dozen skilled hackers spent three days poking around the church's World Youth Day site looking for common security holes that could let them inside. In this case, the scanning software failed to turn up any gaps so the hackers turned to a brute-force approach of a distributed denial-of-service, On the first day, the denial-of-service attack resulted in 28 times the normal traffic to the church site, rising to 34 times the next day but did not crash the site. 'Anonymous is a handful of geniuses surrounded by a legion of idiots,' says Cole Stryker, an author who has researched the movement. 'You have four or five guys who really know what they're doing and are able to pull off some of the more serious hacks, and then thousands of people spreading the word, or turning their computers over to participate in a DDoS attack.'"

Michael J. Ross writes "Of all the content management systems (CMSs) that a Web developer could use for creating a new site, the best ones allow the developer to extend the chosen CMS's capabilities, by adding new functionality, in the form of third-party modules. This is one of many reasons why Drupal is growing in popularity: Developers can choose from hundreds of Drupal modules but not all functionality that a developer might want has been captured in a module, and many of the modules are unfinished or otherwise limited in capabilities. Fortunately, PHP programmers can create their own modules, and one way to get up to speed is Learning Drupal 6 Module Development, authored by Matt Butcher." Learning Drupal 6 Module Development author Matt Butcher pages 328 publisher Packt Publishing rating 9/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 1847194443 summary A step-by-step guide to creating new Drupal 6 modules Published on 10 May 2008 by Packt Publishing, under the ISBNs 1847194443 and 978-1847194442, the book is intended as a tutorial for developing your first Drupal 6 module; yet it also explains how to create themes and custom content types, how to use external XML APIs, and how to add AJAX functionality to your Drupal site using jQuery.

The book spans 328 pages, grouped into nine chapters, each devoted to a major topic of Drupal module development: Drupal's architecture and primary concepts (nodes, users, blocks, menus, etc.); an introduction to building a new module; Drupal's theme system, and how to create a custom one; module theming; using JavaScript, AJAX, and JSON; creating a custom administration module; creating a new content type, using the CCK; filters, input formats, hooks, actions, and triggers; installation profiles, how to develop one, and how to package a distribution. Throughout the book, the author illustrates key ideas by applying them to a sample Web site, named the Philosopher Bios. The material assumes that the reader has a solid understanding of the essentials of PHP and SQL, and familiarity with Drupal's administration area. But no advanced PHP or MySQL knowledge is required, nor prior experience creating Drupal modules and themes.

Packt Publishing has made available a Web page for the book, where visitors can order the book (print and electronic copies), download the book's sample code, provide feedback to the publisher, send in a question, read a summary of the book or the table of contents, and obtain a sample chapter (Chapter 2 — "Creating Our First Module"). One would expect to find a link to errata reported for this specific book, but this page does not have such a link. In fact, none of the book profile pages on Packt Publishing's site appear to have links to their respective errata. Instead, the visitor must go to their support page, specify the book of interest (the drop-down list should default to the last book review, but it does not), and finally click on the errata link, which should have been on the individual book's page. After clicking a link, a small and non-resizable browser window pops up, listing the known errata.

To Web developers unversed in Drupal's architecture and the use of modules to extend Drupal's core capabilities, the first chapter of this book should be quite valuable, because the author explains how Drupal's functionality has been logically organized into modules. For developers unfamiliar with CMS modules, the author sums it up nicely: "A module is a bundle of PHP code and supporting files that use Drupal's APIs and architecture to integrate new functional components into the Drupal framework." As noted earlier, the author presents overviews of the most critical Drupal concepts, including core modules, hooks, themes, nodes, comments, users, blocks, page rendering, menus, and forms. Unlike what is found in far too many programming books, the explanations in this chapter are generally quite complete, authoritative, and clear — with the exception of the last note on page 8 pertaining to system modules. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the demonstration site created in the book, as well as some developer tools recommended by the author.

In the second chapter, readers learn the basics of creating a module — in this case, one that accesses a philosophy reading list from Goodreads. Anyone who does not yet own a copy of the book, can quickly see the overall style of the book's information and presentation, by downloading the aforementioned sample chapter. There are few blemishes in this chapter: A short (and apparently non-facetious) phrase in one of the notes, "Drupal is meticulously documented..." (page 30), should come as a surprise to anyone who has stumbled into one of the gaps in Drupal's online documentation. The reader should beware that the code for the two private functions used in the sample module, differs between the book's code and that in the download archive, with no indication to the reader from either source as to which is to be preferred, if any. The book's code has other problems, as described in the errata. Also, tags such as "<channel/>" and "<item/>" may give the reader a false impression that those are empty tags (i.e., single tags, and not paired open/close tags). Unfortunately, this nonstandard and confusing notation is used throughout the book.

Theming a Web site is an important part of making it attractive and more usable to site visitors, and Drupal, like any solid CMS, has built-in support for applying themes to a site. In the third chapter, the author explores Drupal's theme system and theme engines, as well as how to create a new theme, and how to use Drupal's hook system for overriding a template function. The discussion is better than that seen in any other book, but could be further strengthened if the author were to explain the reasoning behind some of the suggested practices, such as making redundant copies of a parent theme's images for a sub-theme. Any readers implementing the "descartes" sub-theme should note that template.php, in the download code, begins with "<?" and not "<?php," which will cause problems if their PHP has short_open_tag set to Off. Chapter 5 extends the ideas presented earlier, and shows the reader how to create a new module with a default theme. The discussion of how to register a theme and, more specifically, the naming conventions, is in some places rather turgid — not due only to the writing, but partly Drupal's overriding scheme. But it does not help to have array keys such as "theme_function_name" mentioned in the text but not in the code (should it be "<theme function name>," following his earlier naming convention?). Partway through the fourth chapter, the author acknowledges that the reader may be getting lost in the terminology, and clarifies it. This is a worthy practice that could have been employed in several other places in the book (and by the authors of other programming books).

In the fifth chapter, readers will find a detailed discussion of how to leverage the power of AJAX, jQuery, and JSON to allow modules to refresh with changed content, without requiring Drupal to reload the entire Web page. Chapter 6 explains how to create a module with an administration interface, as well as how to use the powerful Forms API (FAPI), and the Mail API, among other Drupal capabilities available to the programmer. Creating a nontrivial content type that incorporate specialized fields, is the subject of Chapter 7. It is accomplished by building a new module, rather than the more common approach of using the Content Construction Kit (CCK). Readers will also benefit from an introduction to the Schema API, which is valuable for generating database-neutral SQL code. In Chapter 8, the author explains how to create content filters, actions, and hooks, as well as how to assign a trigger to an action. Like the previous two chapters, this one is fairly long and takes some work to fully digest, but doing so is essential for learning how to make the most of hooks, among the other topics. The author also shows how to indicate that your new module depends upon others. The final chapter covers installation profiles and packages, which allow the developer to put together a customized version of Drupal containing the new modules he or she has created, in addition to any dependent non-core modules.

Overall, Learning Drupal 6 Module Development accomplishes its primary goals, and provides information that would even be of interest to Drupal developers who may have no intention of ever creating their own modules and themes, but who would like to learn a lot more about Drupal's underlying architecture, and some of the differences between versions 5 and 6. The author tackled a difficult subject area, and presents enough explanations that would allow any experienced PHP programmer to work through the examples and learn from them. There are plenty of screenshots and diagrams, all of which are helpful. However, a few of the screenshots are intended to show color changes, which makes no sense because all of the screenshots are grayscale only. Rather than choosing orange and pink and other colors, distinct shades of gray would probably have been a better approach.

The book's remaining flaws — aside from those noted above — are relatively minor. The chapter summaries are of no value, and could be dropped in the interests of making the book leaner. Some of the paragraphs are overly short, and should be combined with adjacent ones (e.g., "Here is one very good reason."; page 111). Some of the phrasing is weak (e.g., "has got better and better"; page 18), confusing (e.g., "a typical template work"; page 60), or incorrect (e.g., "uninspiring"; should read "uninspired"; page 70). Other similar problems are identified in the book's errata. The author misses many opportunities to use commas to improve the text's readability, and even uses them incorrectly with parentheses (page 64). Some proper names do not have correct title case, such as "Windows explorer" (page 35). Throughout the manuscript, "hookname" should instead read "hook name." The possessive term "its" should contain no apostrophe (page 185, for example). Occasionally, a (non-critical) word is missing, such as in "content is main content" (page 33). Yet in none of these instances should the alert reader be unable to determine what the author is stating.

None of the weaknesses identified above detract from the overall value of the book. As of this writing, Learning Drupal 6 Module Development is the most promising and information-rich resource for Drupal developers interested in creating their own modules and themes.

Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, writer, and freelance editor."

You can purchase Learning Drupal 6 Module Development from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.