In regards to teledildonics, I wonder if paying someone to remotely stimulate your genitals will fall afoul of any prostitution laws. I... heard from a friend... that there are already some services like this, although they're positioned as live webcam services rather than 'telesex'.
Once the novelty wears off, who's going to stay committed to a relationship with a weak AI? Aside from providing sexy banter (repeated lines of dialogue will be a huge boner-kill though) I don't see what the long-term value could be. An AI (even specialist system) that trains the socially awkward to be able to interact with other people well enough to be able to form and maintain romantic relationships would be far more valuable.
it's also working on releasing a RealDoll with a robotic head
You can kill Silk Road, but you can't kill the IDEA of Silk Road. That's the real reason for the increase. Once people learn about the 'dark web' and how to use bitcoins to buy stuff on it, shutting down an individual site doesn't matter much, and every shutdown gets major publicity which turns more people on to the dark web.
The Blackphone 2 uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip. The maintainers (Silent Circle) released a patch a week ago that 'updates to the latest Qualcomm config files' but it's unclear if that fixes this specific vulnerability.
we do not want to take the risk of supplying our extremely secure service to the wrong people
Taking GhostMail at their word, that would mean that they think their service is TOO secure, and are deathly afraid that the evil terrists will do evil things with it, but are unwilling to compromise their own security. Therefore, only for-profit businesses and other organizations which are never corrupt and put society's welfare at the forefront (pshaw!) will be allowed to use it.
Wouldn't work. Paranoid people who fear the government will find out that they know the TRUTH about their extra-terrestrial conspiracy, or that they're hoarding distilled water so that the mind-control chemicals aren't affecting their family, or that they're melting down pennies, outnumber people to ACTUALLY be concerned about by 100 to 1, if not 100,000 to 1. There isn't enough manpower to check up on all of these people, and when the govt. tries, they are usually dismissed as "not a credible threat" even if they later go on killing sprees.
To be fair, that's what the TLA's WANT you to think: that you have nowhere to hide, therefore you might as well give up trying. Computer security is hard, but some significant progress has been made recently. Compare the security of the latest iPhones to Windows XP, for example.
Genetically-enhanced communist super-humans are going to seduce our undersexed Millennials! Sexually-transmitted retroviruses will modify their genome to make them more communist! Code Red! Code Red! *starts breathing into paper bag*
The EFF bloggedabout deliberately misleading UI design over 6 years ago, going with the name 'Evil Interfaces.' My favorite alternate name was 'confuser interface design', by the way. 'Dark patterns' is so vague as to be useless.
China is the only country I could see actually attempting this. Yes, I know they're only nominally Communist, but they pay enough lip-service to Communism they might not be afraid to try it. I know their govt. is obsessed with constantly trying to increase their GDP, at least.
If parents could eliminate the possibility of their child having any homosexual feelings, would they do it? Even in a tolerant society? Would "I can't help it, it's in my genes" be accepted as a reason for being different, when your parents modified their gametes and chose to leave that one in? What if parents modified their gametes so that their children would definitely be homosexual? I imagine these questions have been asked before, but the answer was always "it'll never happen; we're here, we're queer, deal with it." Now people will have to start to deal with a potential 'treatment'; I seem to recall X-men had something to say about this.
I wonder what the limitations of a genetic sex-change would be. Also, wouldn't women get the shaft (so to speak) given they (usually) lack a Y chromosome? *cue Clone of My Own quotation*
I seem to recall reading here about a study finding that ~90% of H1-B visas were given to people taking low-skilled entry-level positions. Are they really being paid $60k/year for that? Either entry-level IT positions pay way better than I remember, or something else is going on here.
With aircraft crashes, there is usually a large organization/corporation at least partially at fault: the airplane manufacturer, or an airline that hired the pilot or scheduled a flight through dangerous conditions. If a plane goes down and everyone inside dies, the organization still exists, and can be fined for their negligence.
In contrast, if a drunk driver swerves their car into an oncoming lane and dies, punishing the driver for DUI isn't an option, and does sadly little to deter others from drunk driving if he lived and were punished. People who get drunk are high on the Dunning-Kreuger scale in the first place, and intoxication doesn't help them any. Rules of the road are different in every state, and there's no procedure to notify drivers of changes in best-practices (I haven't been retested since I first got my license 15 years ago, so that's not happening). Almost all auto crashes are driver error, rather than mechanical failure; the few cases that ARE, the NTSB pounces on, with huge recalls for a relatively miniscule number of incidents compared to, say, those involving left-turns on the light changing to red. Most of the time, the NTSB just can't do anything because there's "no fix for stupid." I am kinda curious if alcoholism is self-selecting out of the gene pool due to drunk driving fatalities.
StarVR and OSVR? By the time they come out, the next-gen HMDs from Oculus/Valve will be on their way, and their current iterations will be dumped on ebay for cheaper than you can get one of those upstarts' headsets new.
The report suggests that Google is not as interested in competing directly with hardware from Facebook, Samsung, HTC and others
The Oculus Rift (Facebook/Oculus), Vive (HTC/Valve), and Gear VR (Samsung/Oculus), aren't 'standalone'. The former two require a gaming PC to connect to, and the latter requires a high-end Samsung smartphone be connected. Google's scrapped project ran its own OS, meaning the processing was done inside the headset. There are cheap Chinese standalone 'VR' headsets, but they for the most part only run personal theater/3d video/slideshow software. A few companies are working on real standalone VR but I've heard nothing of their recent progress; Google could quickly make them irrelevant.
I chuckle at the mention of deciding to use a smartphone rather than 'expensive hardware', as if a new $650 smartphone is cheap. Good luck doing VR on a smartphone that costs less than $300 (going price for a new unlocked Galaxy S6 on ebay, the minimum-specced phone that will work with a Gear VR). I shudder to think how many people are gonna get nauseous with their $99 phone that barely manages to run Android N.
This story is basically free advertising for T-Mobile. Pokemon GO is super popular at the moment, but it doesn't use much data. It uses up 2-8MB/hour, and the average player only plays it 43 minutes a day, meaning 1.5-6MB per day usage for an average player. That's ~120MB/month for the average player, not exactly pushing the limits of most people's data caps.
Adding in that it's probably the most popular mobile game at the moment anyhow, there shouldn't be a net neutrality problem; people who don't enjoy the game won't feel pressured to play it over other games merely due to the zero-rated data. If, say, one VPN were zero-rated while its competitors were not, there could be a serious problem; I could even see zero-rating being a problem with MMOs or livestreaming services where different services are essentially commodities. However, in this case the data usage of a game with effectively no competition in its genre isn't a significant contributor to people's choice to play it over other games.
Many websites have in their EULA somewhere that using someone else's account is prohibited, or that signing up for a second account, or new account if you've been banned, are prohibited. Doing any of these prohibited things could be legally considered 'unauthorized access', even for a normally public website that anyone is welcome to use (Facebook etc.) Conflating EULA violations on a public website, with accessing private computer systems containing confidential data, is one of the reasons the CFAA needs to be updated to reflect the realities of the current internet.
Instead of 'unauthorized access', the standard should be 'harm intentionally caused by access'. If you make it strict liability, then people will be legally liable for being part of a botnet, which is absurd considering the millions of machines currently part of botnets, and the penalties of the CFAA; it'd also make Tor exit nodes liable for hacking. A security researcher who finds a security hole in a system, causes no harm, and leaves, would also not be punishable. Harm would have to be significantly above the standard set by normal usage of the computer system; so, say, someone making a new account on a forum where they'd been banned wouldn't be punishable simply because they consumed bandwidth and server CPU time typical of other forum users, or because they took up space in the forum with posts. The CFAA only needs to exist in order to discourage crimes that civil law penalties can't: intentional sabotage of competitors' computer systems, or of infrastructure by domestic terrorists.
they asked whether the characters would be hugging, kissing, shaking hands or exchanging high-fives one second afterward. The computer's success rate was 43 percent.
I want this for an AR HUD so I can avoid those situations where she goes in for a handshake and I go in for a hug./sociallyawkwardpenguin
*facepalm* I expect the ransomware market to explode in the near future as more stories like this come out. Expect self-aware malware that asks for more money if the data is more important.
Oculus isn't 'allowing' anything, at least not directly. They simply removed a check for the Rift hardware in the DRM that checks if an account is allowed to play (i.e. paid for) a particular Oculus Home game. Oculus Home is their store/platform a la Steam. Many programs on Oculus Home don't support the HTC Vive natively, so someone made a program/hack called Revive that allows those to run on the Vive. Oculus' most recent act was to stop the check which blocked Revive from working in most cases. There is no guarantee on Oculus' end that Revive will work as advertised, or bug-free. The RoadToVR writeup is better
Slashdot Mirror
In regards to teledildonics, I wonder if paying someone to remotely stimulate your genitals will fall afoul of any prostitution laws. I... heard from a friend... that there are already some services like this, although they're positioned as live webcam services rather than 'telesex'.
Once the novelty wears off, who's going to stay committed to a relationship with a weak AI? Aside from providing sexy banter (repeated lines of dialogue will be a huge boner-kill though) I don't see what the long-term value could be. An AI (even specialist system) that trains the socially awkward to be able to interact with other people well enough to be able to form and maintain romantic relationships would be far more valuable.
it's also working on releasing a RealDoll with a robotic head
Which head?
Tell me more about the process of having a computer mind-control me.
You can kill Silk Road, but you can't kill the IDEA of Silk Road. That's the real reason for the increase. Once people learn about the 'dark web' and how to use bitcoins to buy stuff on it, shutting down an individual site doesn't matter much, and every shutdown gets major publicity which turns more people on to the dark web.
The Blackphone 2 uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip. The maintainers (Silent Circle) released a patch a week ago that 'updates to the latest Qualcomm config files' but it's unclear if that fixes this specific vulnerability.
we do not want to take the risk of supplying our extremely secure service to the wrong people
Taking GhostMail at their word, that would mean that they think their service is TOO secure, and are deathly afraid that the evil terrists will do evil things with it, but are unwilling to compromise their own security. Therefore, only for-profit businesses and other organizations which are never corrupt and put society's welfare at the forefront (pshaw!) will be allowed to use it.
Wouldn't work. Paranoid people who fear the government will find out that they know the TRUTH about their extra-terrestrial conspiracy, or that they're hoarding distilled water so that the mind-control chemicals aren't affecting their family, or that they're melting down pennies, outnumber people to ACTUALLY be concerned about by 100 to 1, if not 100,000 to 1. There isn't enough manpower to check up on all of these people, and when the govt. tries, they are usually dismissed as "not a credible threat" even if they later go on killing sprees.
To be fair, that's what the TLA's WANT you to think: that you have nowhere to hide, therefore you might as well give up trying. Computer security is hard, but some significant progress has been made recently. Compare the security of the latest iPhones to Windows XP, for example.
It's ok just sign up with Lavabit.
Oh...
Tesla's 'Autopilot' feature takes another person to the hospital. When will the carnage end?!
That's 2.55 grams for those who like sensible measurements.
Genetically-enhanced communist super-humans are going to seduce our undersexed Millennials! Sexually-transmitted retroviruses will modify their genome to make them more communist! Code Red! Code Red! *starts breathing into paper bag*
The EFF bloggedabout deliberately misleading UI design over 6 years ago, going with the name 'Evil Interfaces.' My favorite alternate name was 'confuser interface design', by the way. 'Dark patterns' is so vague as to be useless.
China is the only country I could see actually attempting this. Yes, I know they're only nominally Communist, but they pay enough lip-service to Communism they might not be afraid to try it. I know their govt. is obsessed with constantly trying to increase their GDP, at least.
If parents could eliminate the possibility of their child having any homosexual feelings, would they do it? Even in a tolerant society? Would "I can't help it, it's in my genes" be accepted as a reason for being different, when your parents modified their gametes and chose to leave that one in? What if parents modified their gametes so that their children would definitely be homosexual?
I imagine these questions have been asked before, but the answer was always "it'll never happen; we're here, we're queer, deal with it." Now people will have to start to deal with a potential 'treatment'; I seem to recall X-men had something to say about this.
I wonder what the limitations of a genetic sex-change would be. Also, wouldn't women get the shaft (so to speak) given they (usually) lack a Y chromosome?
*cue Clone of My Own quotation*
I seem to recall reading here about a study finding that ~90% of H1-B visas were given to people taking low-skilled entry-level positions. Are they really being paid $60k/year for that? Either entry-level IT positions pay way better than I remember, or something else is going on here.
With aircraft crashes, there is usually a large organization/corporation at least partially at fault: the airplane manufacturer, or an airline that hired the pilot or scheduled a flight through dangerous conditions. If a plane goes down and everyone inside dies, the organization still exists, and can be fined for their negligence.
In contrast, if a drunk driver swerves their car into an oncoming lane and dies, punishing the driver for DUI isn't an option, and does sadly little to deter others from drunk driving if he lived and were punished. People who get drunk are high on the Dunning-Kreuger scale in the first place, and intoxication doesn't help them any. Rules of the road are different in every state, and there's no procedure to notify drivers of changes in best-practices (I haven't been retested since I first got my license 15 years ago, so that's not happening). Almost all auto crashes are driver error, rather than mechanical failure; the few cases that ARE, the NTSB pounces on, with huge recalls for a relatively miniscule number of incidents compared to, say, those involving left-turns on the light changing to red. Most of the time, the NTSB just can't do anything because there's "no fix for stupid."
I am kinda curious if alcoholism is self-selecting out of the gene pool due to drunk driving fatalities.
StarVR and OSVR? By the time they come out, the next-gen HMDs from Oculus/Valve will be on their way, and their current iterations will be dumped on ebay for cheaper than you can get one of those upstarts' headsets new.
The report suggests that Google is not as interested in competing directly with hardware from Facebook, Samsung, HTC and others
The Oculus Rift (Facebook/Oculus), Vive (HTC/Valve), and Gear VR (Samsung/Oculus), aren't 'standalone'. The former two require a gaming PC to connect to, and the latter requires a high-end Samsung smartphone be connected. Google's scrapped project ran its own OS, meaning the processing was done inside the headset. There are cheap Chinese standalone 'VR' headsets, but they for the most part only run personal theater/3d video/slideshow software. A few companies are working on real standalone VR but I've heard nothing of their recent progress; Google could quickly make them irrelevant.
I chuckle at the mention of deciding to use a smartphone rather than 'expensive hardware', as if a new $650 smartphone is cheap. Good luck doing VR on a smartphone that costs less than $300 (going price for a new unlocked Galaxy S6 on ebay, the minimum-specced phone that will work with a Gear VR). I shudder to think how many people are gonna get nauseous with their $99 phone that barely manages to run Android N.
[emoji] can be joined to a male or female symbol with a ZWJ character to create emoji of either gender
AKA the SJW character.
Seriously though, why not just modify the emoji to be androgenous? They're abstract symbols anyhow, so they might as well be.
This story is basically free advertising for T-Mobile. Pokemon GO is super popular at the moment, but it doesn't use much data. It uses up 2-8MB/hour, and the average player only plays it 43 minutes a day, meaning 1.5-6MB per day usage for an average player. That's ~120MB/month for the average player, not exactly pushing the limits of most people's data caps.
Adding in that it's probably the most popular mobile game at the moment anyhow, there shouldn't be a net neutrality problem; people who don't enjoy the game won't feel pressured to play it over other games merely due to the zero-rated data. If, say, one VPN were zero-rated while its competitors were not, there could be a serious problem; I could even see zero-rating being a problem with MMOs or livestreaming services where different services are essentially commodities. However, in this case the data usage of a game with effectively no competition in its genre isn't a significant contributor to people's choice to play it over other games.
Many websites have in their EULA somewhere that using someone else's account is prohibited, or that signing up for a second account, or new account if you've been banned, are prohibited. Doing any of these prohibited things could be legally considered 'unauthorized access', even for a normally public website that anyone is welcome to use (Facebook etc.)
Conflating EULA violations on a public website, with accessing private computer systems containing confidential data, is one of the reasons the CFAA needs to be updated to reflect the realities of the current internet.
Instead of 'unauthorized access', the standard should be 'harm intentionally caused by access'. If you make it strict liability, then people will be legally liable for being part of a botnet, which is absurd considering the millions of machines currently part of botnets, and the penalties of the CFAA; it'd also make Tor exit nodes liable for hacking. A security researcher who finds a security hole in a system, causes no harm, and leaves, would also not be punishable. Harm would have to be significantly above the standard set by normal usage of the computer system; so, say, someone making a new account on a forum where they'd been banned wouldn't be punishable simply because they consumed bandwidth and server CPU time typical of other forum users, or because they took up space in the forum with posts. The CFAA only needs to exist in order to discourage crimes that civil law penalties can't: intentional sabotage of competitors' computer systems, or of infrastructure by domestic terrorists.
they asked whether the characters would be hugging, kissing, shaking hands or exchanging high-fives one second afterward. The computer's success rate was 43 percent.
I want this for an AR HUD so I can avoid those situations where she goes in for a handshake and I go in for a hug. /sociallyawkwardpenguin
crucial files worth nearly $2 million
would have taken 1,500 man-hours to replicate
the team had no backups of the crucial data
*facepalm*
I expect the ransomware market to explode in the near future as more stories like this come out. Expect self-aware malware that asks for more money if the data is more important.
Oculus isn't 'allowing' anything, at least not directly. They simply removed a check for the Rift hardware in the DRM that checks if an account is allowed to play (i.e. paid for) a particular Oculus Home game. Oculus Home is their store/platform a la Steam. Many programs on Oculus Home don't support the HTC Vive natively, so someone made a program/hack called Revive that allows those to run on the Vive. Oculus' most recent act was to stop the check which blocked Revive from working in most cases. There is no guarantee on Oculus' end that Revive will work as advertised, or bug-free.
The RoadToVR writeup is better