Slashdot Mirror

Thank you, anonymous coward Chinese troll, for your delightful fake facts.

AP News: "China bars millions from travel for ‘social credit’ offenses". ref

Business Insider: "China has already started punishing people [with low social credit] by restricting their travel. Nine million people with low scores have been blocked from buying tickets for domestic flights, Channel News Asia reported in March, citing official statistics." Ref: https://www.businessinsider.com/china-social-credit-system-punishments-and-rewards-explained-2018-4

Wikipedia: "Travel ban. By the end of 2018, 5.5 million high-speed rail trips and 17.5 million flights had been denied to prospective travellers who were on a blacklist." ref

And the "social credit" system is also used, yes, to enforce politics. Wired: "If solving problems was the real goal, the CCP would not need social credit to do it," she says. "China’s social credit system is a state-driven program designed to do one thing, to uphold and expand the Chinese Communist Party’s power." (Ref: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-social-credit-system-explained

For example, I am not aware of a single "verified account" ie celebrity who was banned for calling on people to violently assault the Covington teens.

Please post a single link to a verified account calling for violent assault on the Covington teens. Not merely disagreement, actual violent assault.

I'm going to guess that the lack of arrests made (you know that encouraging violence is illegal, right?) means you're another stupid right winger who has no idea what's going on in Twitter (clue: it's more white supremacist friendly these days than left wing friendly) but believes it must be discriminating against you because... uh, everyone is! Yeah, right wing white men are the most oppressed people in history!

An actual article with some proper research:
https://www.wired.co.uk/articl...

If you read to the bottom of the current article, and cross-reference with other articles, you can see the point is that some people who have defaulted on their taxes or other debts can be barred by a court-order from buying first-class train tickets or booking flights. They're still able to travel economy-class. This is a power wielded by lower-level local courts and doesn't actually have much if any actual connection with the *social* credit system or score whatsoever. TL;DR: the level of reporting on this matter is below terrible, creating a massive confusion about what is and isn't even the social-credit system. There is no social-credit scoring used in these current decision *whatsoever*, merely that you've been declared in default of your existing financial obligations by a court.

Yes. But not by accurately representing details from the unblurred original. Rather by creating fictitious but believable un-blurred details that may or may not have been there. https://www.fastcompany.com/90... https://www.wired.co.uk/articl...

Fetal bovine serum is on its way out:
https://www.wired.co.uk/articl...

If you think you can keep it out you are living in an imaginary world. âBetter living through chemicals!â

That's the spirit! Give up before you've even started! Better living through inaction and Luddism!

Meanwhile, Google's mass surveillance of western society continues unabated.

Another potential issue is that China plays a lot faster and looser around ethics than most Western nations. Want to do human genetic experimentation with minimal oversight? How about accelerate your AI research with even looser data privacy and controls than the already weak protections by American tech companies?

Britain's propaganda machine:

https://www.wired.co.uk/articl...

"a UK-based psyop to create a "large-scale information secret service" in Europe in order to combat "Russian propaganda" - which has been blamed for everything from Brexit to US President Trump winning the 2016 US election"

https://www.zerohedge.com/news...

https://www.wired.co.uk/articl...

The mosquito-killing laser turret!

Watch the video, it's highly satisfying.

Citizens with their own passports who pay their tax on time can enjoy international travel AC. A criminal, an illegal migrant, a person with fake ID, a person who claimed protection going back to the nation they escaped will be detected.

Plus a bunch of completely innocent people who have been unnecessarily detained and harassed after being misidentified. I believe Bayes theorem will have something to say about this.

https://www.wired.co.uk/articl...

Apple have previous:
https://www.theguardian.com/bo...

On hardware too:
https://www.wired.co.uk/articl...

Does anyone remember the "elevated bus" project, which was supposed to drive on existing roads "over" existing traffic? That turned out to be an investment scam ( https://www.wired.co.uk/articl... ). The key element is something "futuristic/high technology" that (and this is the main element here) involves raising a lot of money. Once that is done it's already a success, they don't actually have to do more than make some kind of show of building something.

I don't think hyper loops are real-world feasible. Even if the technology works, any aggrieved destructive fool - and these exist everywhere in the world, China included - can put the entire system at risk in a way that aircraft are not threatened by. It's easier to guard an airport in such a way that man-portable missiles are out of range of aircraft taking off/landing, than it is to guard the entire length of some long-distance piped network that basically needs to maintain vacuum sealing in its entirety. "Normal" high speed rail is going to be less dangerous/easier to guard than hyper loops, unless they are going to bury the entire thing underground, which will drive costs up, which makes aircraft more competitive.

One thing about design that gets overlooked is, you don't just look at "is it good if it works?", you also need to look at "what happens when something goes wrong?". There are more failure modes for hyper loops where "everybody dies" than there are for aircraft and trains. Even if it exists, you're going to be taking a much greater risk getting in one than alternative transportation methods.

It's largely why Finland recently abandoned a basic-income plan after a small test.

The above is incorrect and they didn't: http://www.wired.co.uk/article...

We've seen it with SIM-locking. Voting with your wallet doesn't work in an oligopoly case. There are very few carriers and they all lock their phones.

No it isn't like SIM locking for exactly the reason you point out: there are very few carriers, but in the case of smartphones there are a vast array of manufacturers, it isn't an oligopoly, in fact you can even build your own phone.

We get it, you're old. Good news though! Nokia re-released the 3310 so you can stop whining about phones you don't want to buy and get back to telling kids to get off your lawn.

This? http://www.wired.co.uk/article...

Thanks for tracking down that Open Source Minecraft "promise" from Notch. I remembered reading it but couldn't remember where.

Yeah, I guess everyone found what it took for Notch to sell out his values: $2.5 Billion. (It's almost as if when Microsoft asked Notch how much he wanted for Mojang he probably jokingly said: 2^31. MS thought about it and replied "How about we round it up for an cool $2.5B?" But again MS is a dumb-ass company that paid $8.5 Billion for Skype.)

Ironically, Notch is not sleeping fine -- probably because he recognizes he's a sell out -- he lived the American (software) dream: Started a company and got bought out by a bigger one for an ungodly amount of money. And now he realizes that materialism is shallow. Go figure.

http://www.wired.co.uk/article...

"Hanging out in ibiza with a bunch of friends and partying with famous people, able to do whatever I want, and I've never felt more isolated,"

The sad part is Minecraft has only scratched 1% of its potential yet Mojang doesn't really seem to understand what the community wants:

* A modding API (people are sick and tired of de-compiling the Minecraft source code that breaks mods *every* version)
* Depth of items and crafting. It is ironic that Terraria (pardon the pun) has way more depth, both literally, and figuratively with crafting then Minecraft.

/sarcasm "But, hey, we get tridents in 1.13!"

Big Fucking Deal.

Where is the ability to have different colored wooden chests? Or barrels?

I'm surprised someone hasn't made a Terraria + Minecraft clone yet.

Original post by Puffin Fitness: https://np.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/85p30j/deletefacebook_movement_gains_steam_after_50/dvz4y6o/

* * *

In 2009, Russian social-media mogul Yuri Milner invested $200 million into Facebook at a valuation of $10 billion dollars without voting rights or a seat on the board. To understand this investment, at the time the world was going through a global recession and Facebook's general valuation had dropped from the $15 billion from the year prior to $4-$6 billion in 2009.

https://www.cnet.com/news/facebooks-valuation-the-cheat-sheet/

One company did offer a valuation of $8 billion, but with a seat on the board, which Zuckerberg was strongly against. In other words, Yuri Milner invested in Facebook when they were strapped for cash and at an inflated price without voting rights or a seat on the board. That's an amazing deal for Zuckerberg!

Here's Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg hanging out for an interview: https://techcrunch.com/2009/05/26/mark-zuckerberg-and-yuri-milner-talk-about-facebooks-new-investment-video/

The deal was coordinated by Alisher B. Usmanov, a Russian oligarch that earned his fortune managing steel mill subsidiaries for Gazprom.

Usmanov spent six years in prison for fraud and embezzlement in the 80's.

In 2008, Usmanov fired a publisher and editor at one of Russia's most respected news paper after it published detailed accounts of Russian election fraud.

It is said, "His ties to the Kremlin and Facebook have stirred concerns that he might influence the companyâ(TM)s policies in subtle ways to appease governments in markets where Facebook is also an important tool of political dissent, such as Russia." This was in 2009.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/16/technology/a-russian-facebook-bet-pays-off-big.html

Usmanov is close friends with Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alisher_Usmanov

Ivanka Trump and Wendi Deng are good friends with Abramovich's then wife, Dasha Zhoukova. Here they are watching a tennis match.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3784716/Ivanka-Trump-Karlie-Kloss-Wendi-Deng-Murdoch-watch-Open.html

The leak of the Paradise Papers revealed the money Yuri Milner used to invest into Facebook came from Gazprom, a US sanctioned Russian oil and gas company, at one point owning 9% of the company.

http://www.wired.co.uk/article/what-is-the-paradise-papers-leak-facebook-yuri-milner-facebook-twitter-russia

Soon after, Zuckerberg and Milner became friends, meeting monthly:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/zuckerberg-got-early-business-advice-194957335.html

And even spoke together in November 2015 at the 2016 Breakthrough Prize Ceremony.

http://www.wired.co.uk/article/what-is-the-paradise-papers-leak-facebook-yuri-milner-facebook-twitter-russia

In May 2012, Milner attended Zuckerberg's wedding. In 2014, Milner moved to California home he paid 100% above value on.

http://time.com/5011000/paradise-papers-tax-ha

Original post by Puffin Fitness: https://np.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/85p30j/deletefacebook_movement_gains_steam_after_50/dvz4y6o/

* * *

In 2009, Russian social-media mogul Yuri Milner invested $200 million into Facebook at a valuation of $10 billion dollars without voting rights or a seat on the board. To understand this investment, at the time the world was going through a global recession and Facebook's general valuation had dropped from the $15 billion from the year prior to $4-$6 billion in 2009.

https://www.cnet.com/news/facebooks-valuation-the-cheat-sheet/

One company did offer a valuation of $8 billion, but with a seat on the board, which Zuckerberg was strongly against. In other words, Yuri Milner invested in Facebook when they were strapped for cash and at an inflated price without voting rights or a seat on the board. That's an amazing deal for Zuckerberg!

Here's Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg hanging out for an interview: https://techcrunch.com/2009/05/26/mark-zuckerberg-and-yuri-milner-talk-about-facebooks-new-investment-video/

The deal was coordinated by Alisher B. Usmanov, a Russian oligarch that earned his fortune managing steel mill subsidiaries for Gazprom.

Usmanov spent six years in prison for fraud and embezzlement in the 80's.

In 2008, Usmanov fired a publisher and editor at one of Russia's most respected news paper after it published detailed accounts of Russian election fraud.

It is said, "His ties to the Kremlin and Facebook have stirred concerns that he might influence the companyâ(TM)s policies in subtle ways to appease governments in markets where Facebook is also an important tool of political dissent, such as Russia." This was in 2009.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/16/technology/a-russian-facebook-bet-pays-off-big.html

Usmanov is close friends with Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alisher_Usmanov

Ivanka Trump and Wendi Deng are good friends with Abramovich's then wife, Dasha Zhoukova. Here they are watching a tennis match.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3784716/Ivanka-Trump-Karlie-Kloss-Wendi-Deng-Murdoch-watch-Open.html

The leak of the Paradise Papers revealed the money Yuri Milner used to invest into Facebook came from Gazprom, a US sanctioned Russian oil and gas company, at one point owning 9% of the company.

http://www.wired.co.uk/article/what-is-the-paradise-papers-leak-facebook-yuri-milner-facebook-twitter-russia

Soon after, Zuckerberg and Milner became friends, meeting monthly:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/zuckerberg-got-early-business-advice-194957335.html

And even spoke together in November 2015 at the 2016 Breakthrough Prize Ceremony.

http://www.wired.co.uk/article/what-is-the-paradise-papers-leak-facebook-yuri-milner-facebook-twitter-russia

In May 2012, Milner attended Zuckerberg's wedding. In 2014, Milner moved to California home he paid 100% above value on.

http://time.com/5011000/paradise-papers-tax-ha

It's an interesting question. Alexa must sample sound from the microphone and send it back to the servers for analysis. Then either a series of encoded syllables are sent back to be replayed using a speech synthesiser or sampled audio. The other option is somebody hacks into the unit and sends out audio files. This has been done in the past:

http://www.wired.co.uk/article...

I'd call the made-for-VR movie, "Do Androids evolve to become veterinarians specializing in sheep?"

is another's protecting the psychologically vulnerable. Half of mobile game revenue comes from just 0.19% of players. When you've got numbers like that something is very, very wrong.

At the end of the day, DDG is a free service: where the hell do you think they generate revenues from?

You need a history lesson.

How does it make money?

While many websites and search engines collect data on you to sell to advertisers, DuckDuckGo takes a different approach – keywords.

"If you type in 'car' you get a car ad, if you type in 'mortgage' you get a mortgage ad," Weinberg said. "We don't need to know about you or your search history to deliver a lucrative ad." Weinberg added tht DuckDuckGo doesn't need "a lot of adverts" to make money and keywords are all it needs.

With a whooping 45 employees, it doesn't take much money to keep the site going.

http://www.wired.co.uk/article... (7 May 2017)
"Wikileaks' latest batch of Vault 7 documents focuses on the CIA's anti-forensics tools"
" ... creating malware to set their spoken language as being ... Korean,.. , CIA created malware could potentially be developed to appear as if it was emanating from another country. "

All the people who find malware have to go is ip range, time of day, staging server and code litter. The code litter can now be just as fake as the ip, server, time of day.
It just has to be that nation because "language"...

Actually, Google used machine learning to bake better cookies: http://www.wired.co.uk/article...

Perhaps with a million trials we could have really out-of-this-world cookies...

Wrong.

As customers flock to these new offerings, companies have to hire more people.

Only if the new offerings are not produced by robots. That's where the breakdown happens, why the advent and adoption of general-use robotics and algorithms isn't another example of historical automation.

Buggy whips went out of demand, so the people went to build cars. Cars started to get automated, so people went to build the increasingly-intricate car parts. But now car parts can crafted wholly by robots (or, for a continuously-expanding class of parts in general, "printed"). Automation in the past was about very specific processes for very specific outputs; you couldn't take a line used to make cars and easily change it to one that makes bicycles (or soup.) But soon we'll have a robot chef that works mostly by mimicking human actions, so if it can cook it can assemble.

The "creative" jobs will hold out longer, but algorithms will replace many of these, too: IBM's Watson has made a movie trailer. A lot of marketing these days are applying set rules to things (certain colors evoke certain responses in certain demographics, etc.) A lot of music is based around similar setups. Hell, Japan has a popular singer who's not even a real person.

The only question I see is: how fast will this happen? If it's extremely slow then make-busy work might fill in the gap as robots and "AI" take over most regular production. If it's very fast then we'll have a lot of robots producing things that most people can't afford to purchase, and "things" will eventually include food.

which even the authors of the studies he cited called his conclusions wrong

I saw that article, too. You should read it. It doesn't draw the conclusion you think it does, nor what the headline would seem to imply:

Schmitt told WIRED that while this isn't his area of expertise, the assumptions made by Damore were unwise. "We should rely on rigorous evidence for making claims in this area. And I believe there is good evidence of both sexism (including sex stereotypes) and real psychological sex differences (some of which may be evolved) to be causes of the gender gaps across occupations," he said.

GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1060 DirectX 12 GV-N1060G1 GAMING-3GD 2.0 3GB 192-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 ATX Video Card
https://www.newegg.com/Product...
$245

But according to several sites a 1050ti would be fine too if you accept running with lower settings..

For $210 you can get a cheap base system.
Case $33 - https://www.newegg.com/Product...
MB $45 - https://www.newegg.com/Product...
CPU $70 - https://www.newegg.com/Product...
RAM $53 - https://www.newegg.com/Product...
HDD $6 - https://www.newegg.com/Product...
Total: $207
Total including the GTX1060 - $452

This was just a really quick search .. You can get lower with same or better spec's if you shop around..

But you also need to consider comparing systems on an equal level... 4k gaming on XBox/PS4 is not always "real".. PS4 Pro does some sort of upscaling to make it look better.. XBox has other issues.. Feel free to have a look at the links below.
https://www.extremetech.com/ga...
http://www.wired.co.uk/article...
http://wccftech.com/elite-dang...

So... It's a huge difference in comparing 4k gaming on a console and a PC.

There is no coddling here. Anousheh earned that money herself. She is a hands-on director of the X-Prize, and trained just as hard as any other astronaut for her trip into space. I know this first-hand as she's friends with my wife who is also muslim.

What have you done with your life, you pathetic little panty-waste?

there are electric trucks.. https://nikolamotor.com/one http://www.wired.co.uk/article... http://www.emoss.biz/electric-...

google road to evil begins
http://techland.time.com/2012/...
http://www.infoworld.com/artic...

google secretly embraces evil
http://time.com/4060575/alphab...

google realizes full power of the dark side
http://www.npr.org/sections/th...
http://www.wired.co.uk/article...
http://www.computerworld.com/a...

RIP google privacy,ethics,trust
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It was on wired a while ago:

According to analysis by Horan, Uber passengers are only paying 41 per cent of the actual cost of a trip, with Uber using subsidies to undercut rivals and potentially achieve a monopoly.

http://www.wired.co.uk/article...

You can also check on bloomberg, they discussed financials with Uber.

They are using human cells because they want to be able to grow a human kidney, lung, heart, pancreas, etc. and transplant them into people that need them.

But there's already plenty of progress with doing that with human stem cells. There's no need to make pig-human hybrids (other than for publicity and publishing papers).

http://www.nature.com/ncb/jour...
http://www.nbcnews.com/health/...
http://www.wired.co.uk/article...
http://www.stemcellresearchfac...
http://www.nephrologynews.com/...

Basically there are plenty of other technologies which are actually closer to real-world solutions than this "hybrid" stuff. And this hybrid stuff has lots more ethical and legal issues.

So the disadvantages of making such hybrids outweigh the benefits.

You mean, something like this?

Nintendo share prices dropped 5% with the release of Super Mario Run. While critically praised Nintendo's lack of understanding in the mobile market has killed it before it could get its legs.

Source
http://www.wired.co.uk/article...

Nintendo, like many Japanese video game makers is a dinosaur in the marketplace - only financially functional thanks to its massive cash reserves from decades long successes. Not unlike Microsoft they are going to have to work harder to meet the needs of today's market, they can sustain only so many repeated failures.

I give them maybe 5 years to figure out mobile gaming, if they can't adapt within that time they will likely have to drop hardware entirely and fall back to software dev and IP licensing (aww yeah Wand of Gamelon 2 baby)

... independent ones, and independent journalists.

So this was a headline neglecting to mention her white nationalism. If Facebook asks a black person whether the headline is misleading, they're generally going to get a very different answer from a white person. Also, does Facebook actually know if it's asking a black person?

Here's the Philly article:
http://www.philly.com/philly/b...

Here's the version from bleeding heart liberal progressive magazine, Sports Illustrated:
http://www.si.com/mlb/2016/12/...

It's notable that Google has hired/funded Full Fact, a facts-only organisation in the UK I can personally vouch for.
http://www.wired.co.uk/article...

TalkTalk. Consistently the worst-rated major ISP in the UK. If you're feeling some deja-vu, it might be because of this incident reported in February, when a 17 year old script kiddie totally pwned them, that's how good they are. Yes, they are cheap, but I'm surprised people haven't wised up by now, I wouldn't use them even if their service was free.

Rapid changes in global temperatures can absolutely cause mass extinctions.

Rising sea levels are "easy" to adapt to for us - but not cheap. We have a lot of valuable property on low-lying coastal areas, and billion-dollar floods from storm surges will only get more common, until we either build massive levees (where possible) or start relocating vast amounts of city infrastructure. Who gets stuck with that bill, the taxpayers? Owners of private homes who can no longer insure them? And that's assuming it doesn't turn out to be a lot worse than we expected.

Rising sea levels are not so easy to adapt to for the hundreds of millions in less-developed countries, where e.g. tens of millions of people depend on river delta farmland that will get flooded with salt water. (BTW, claiming there's no evidence of that is simple denial).

As for food production, the research shows both positives and negatives up until about 3K warming - and then highly likely to be negative after 3 degrees. It also shows that again, developing countries are least able to adapt and will experience more of the negatives (in part due to lower latitudes).

it is going to happen no matter what policies we adopt

Citation certainly needed for that. Sure we're stuck at 400ppm and probably higher, but we can still avoid far larger increases by phasing out fossil carbon as soon as practical. We're locked in to significant warming and we'll have to deal with that, but it will certainly get far worse (and far more expensive) if we stick our heads in the sand. The business-as-usual case is likely to see 3.7 to 4.5 degrees this century - much higher than the 2.0-2.5 we're hoping we can keep it to.

DNA gives biological age, not chronological age ; at best, (within 5 years), DNA gives an aging order of magnitude, but for someone that old it's likely to be very inacurrate.

Pretty much. The only reason BlackBerry exists in India, for example, is because they gave the Indian government a backdoor into all BlackBerry devices. If they'd do it for India, why wouldn't they be happy to do it elsewhere? A company like that isn't trustworthy and it's no wonder their brand has tanked. Apple isn't going to go down the same moronic path.

AVG used to work fine, even when it became somewhat bloated. I recommended it quite a few times over other products and was generally thanked for my suggestion. I stopped using or recommending it last year when they changed their privacy policy and stated they'd sell whatever data they can gather from AVG anti virus installs. Back then, I thought that this wasn't just a bad move, but that they also might get swallowed up by a competitor pretty soon. Go figure.

Judging murder with an MRI
http://www.wired.co.uk/magazin...

This has been known already for some time: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...

Well, given that is about 1/3 of all androids in the wild, everyone should be checking.

https://developer.android.com/...

Also, other places say all versions of Android 2.2 & above are affected, which is ~95%

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...

I don't think you do. Dude looks rough.

Why do you say that?

http://cdni.wired.co.uk/620x41...

I used to use AVG but dropped it like a lead balloon because they changed their terms and conditions to spy on the web browsing habits to sell to advertisers http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar... http://www.techeye.net/news/av...

Thanks to well placed news like this users, people, city and state law enforcement will still have faith in US brands.
A flood of sock puppets to contain the topics surrounding the ability of a US company to look after its brand more than follow the color of US telco laws.
Keep using that cell phone, sending images with gps, carrying a live mic with a battery thats built in.
All the brand can secure is the transit from a user level in the phone to another user.
All other hardware and software functions are open to federal law enforcement, mil as sold in the US or UK.
The security services now like voice prints as been one of the few low cost ways to get total coverage of a city to look of people they have on file.

No telco or company is going to get to lock out data recovery or a malware push down or a national hunt for voice prints due to its branding.
"Superspy in the sky could soon be patrolling over British cities to search for hidden terror cells" (26 April 2010 )
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
"The aircraft are able to identify suspects using 'voice-prints' ... "
Leaked catalogue details US surveillance hardware ( 18 December 15 ) has more on the dirt boxes.. and other devices
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...
"sound files" ..."SMS data", "pictures", calendar ... "into one report"
Would any US brand be able to block collect it all?

http://www.parliament.uk/busin... is the background.
UK mass surveillance 'totalitarian' and will 'cost lives', warns ex-NSA tech boss (06 Jan 16 )
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar... has some more background with the pdf:
Re link to the draft bill https://www.gov.uk/government/...

Yes it was bespoke, agricultural solution that worked just in time.
"How Nasa brought the monstrous F-1 'moon rocket' engine back to life" (16 APRIL 13 )
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...
".. these were hand-made machines. They were sewn together with arc welders .. " The other political issue at the time was the attempts to block another Dora Trial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... that could have finally exposed the number and crimes of the Operation Paperclip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... German space experts and staff to a wider public.
The number of German staff given total freedom, their past crimes had to stay hidden for more years.