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User: pointybits

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  1. Re:Autonomous on A Software Malfunction Is Throwing Riders Off of Lime Scooters (qz.com) · · Score: 1
  2. Re:what a stupid design on A Software Malfunction Is Throwing Riders Off of Lime Scooters (qz.com) · · Score: 1

    That exploit was for a Xiaomi scooter, but the Limes are not Xiaomis. I expect Lime have slightly better security, although they definitely do have a Bluetooth interface to the app and their software quality is generally diabolical so perhaps not.

  3. Re: what a stupid design on A Software Malfunction Is Throwing Riders Off of Lime Scooters (qz.com) · · Score: 1

    They also have cable-actuated drum brakes on the rear wheel. They are terribly weak and usually badly adjusted though.

  4. Electric cars on Hacked Water Heaters Could Trigger Mass Blackouts Someday (wired.com) · · Score: 2

    Electric cars plugged in to high-current outlets waiting to charge off-peak, which also have remote controls to run the heater from the mains to pre-heat the car, would be another very high-demand load, though hopefully harder to exploit.

  5. Re:Shocked, shocked to find, user data is being so on Mozilla Pulls Advertising from Facebook (betanews.com) · · Score: 1
    Oh look, it's on Snopes now:

    Attempts at "whataboutism" with a scandal involving social media and psychographics fail to acknowledge that Cambridge Analytica obtained data by misleading people.

    ... In the case of Cambridge Analytica, information was gathered from users and given to a third party under false pretenses. According to Facebook, University of Cambridge psychologist Aleksandr Kogan created a personality quiz which users could download in an app called “thisisyourdigitallife.” Kogan presented the app as a tool that would be used for academic research — but the work was paid for by Cambridge Analytica. Facebook users were not informed that their data (and that of their friends) would be deployed by a political firm hired by the Trump campaign for psychographic profiling in the upcoming election.

    Rayid Ghani, chief data scientist for Obama’s 2012 campaign, wrote: We did not build any complex (certainly not the so-called psychographic) models of facebook users using their facebook data. Most of the models we built were using the publicly available “voter file” that contains information people typically provide when filling out their voter registrations forms. We did build models to understand which of a supporter’s friends we want to ask to register to vote, or to get them to vote and how likely the friend was to take action based on the ask.

    We only contacted the people who had given us access and permission to get their own email address. We did not get any contact information for their friend and did not (and could not ) contact any of their friends directly. All we could do was ask our “primary” supporters to contact their friends and we would recommend who those friends were based on the data they allowed us to access.

  6. Re:Shocked, shocked to find, user data is being so on Mozilla Pulls Advertising from Facebook (betanews.com) · · Score: 2
    No, Obama didn't employ the same strategies as Cambridge Analytica

    Every time an individual volunteers to help out – for instance by offering to host a fundraising party for the president – he or she will be asked to log onto the re-election website with their Facebook credentials. That in turn will engage Facebook Connect, the digital interface that shares a user’s personal information with a third party.

    Notice that this was an invitation that came directly from the Obama campaign, which the volunteer could either chose to accept or reject. From there, the information went into a central database.

    ...

    In other words, the Obama campaign used Facebook as a community organizing tool, which is pretty much the opposite of stealing data in order to engage in psychological warfare.

  7. Re:mozilla + rust = servo on AskSlashdot: How Do You See Your Life After Firefox 52 ESR? (mozilla.org) · · Score: 1

    Greasemonkey is being worked on but it required a rewrite from scratch, so it may be a while.

  8. This figure is itemised on the Apple site. Basically they're claiming every job that touches Apple in some way, e.g. the workers at Caterpillar that make the generators used in Apple's data centers. 1.5 million of them are "jobs created and supported by the App store", which is sourced from a report that uses a really broad definition of an App Economy worker and includes support workers and "spillover" jobs.

  9. Re:Is the production of new vehicles accounted for on France Set To Ban Sale of Petrol and Diesel Vehicles By 2040 (bbc.com) · · Score: 1
  10. Re:Not a particularly unique problem. on Fitness Trackers Out of Step When Measuring Calories, Research Shows (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    The price is falling these days, you can get a 4iii for $400, or a Powerpod (kind-of-a-power-meter) for $260.

  11. Re:Money in the banana stand? on Amazon's 1.7 Million Free Bananas 'Disrupting' Local Fruit Economy (consumerist.com) · · Score: 1

    Was expecting this to be closer to the top.

  12. Re:I smell BS on Apple Pledges $1 Billion Toward Creating Manufacturing Jobs In US (cnbc.com) · · Score: 3, Informative

    This figure is itemised on the Apple site . Basically they're claiming every job that touches Apple in some way, e.g. the workers at Caterpillar that make the generators used in Apple's data centers. 1.5 million of them are "jobs created and supported by the App store", which is sourced from a report that uses a really broad definition of an App Economy worker and includes support workers and "spillover" jobs.

  13. Re:Science versus politics on Arctic Ice Loss Driven By Natural Swings, Not Just Mankind, Says Study (reuters.com) · · Score: 2

    Point 1: Scott Adams pointed out that when asked the question "how much of global warming is caused by humans, and how much is natural" in debates and televised interviews, no scientist had an answer.

    The answer is 50-70% according to this latest research.

    Don't confuse the effects on Arctic ice with global warming. This research is saying that 50-70% of the ice melt is caused by the temperature increase from global warming. Our current best estimate is that 100% of global warming is caused by human activity.

  14. Re:Science versus politics on Arctic Ice Loss Driven By Natural Swings, Not Just Mankind, Says Study (reuters.com) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Point 1: Scott Adams pointed out that when asked the question "how much of global warming is caused by humans, and how much is natural" in debates and televised interviews, no scientist had an answer.

    Getting your climate science from people yelling at each other on TV (or Scott Adams for that matter) is a bad idea.

    From IPCC AR5, back in 2013: It is extremely likely that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together. The best estimate of the human-induced contribution to warming is similar to the observed warming over this period.

  15. Re:Is it good for a thousand cycles? on Li-Ion Battery Inventor Creates Breakthrough Solid-State Battery, Holds 3X Charge (fossbytes.com) · · Score: 2
    Answered in TFA:

    The UT Austin battery formulation also allows for a greater number of charging and discharging cycles, which equates to longer-lasting batteries, as well as a faster rate of recharge (minutes rather than hours).... The use of an alkali-metal anode (lithium, sodium or potassium) — which isn’t possible with conventional batteries — increases the energy density of a cathode and delivers a long cycle life. In experiments, the researchers’ cells have demonstrated more than 1,200 cycles with low cell resistance.

  16. TFS is not very good on Health Apps Could Be Doing More Harm Than Good, Warn Scientists (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    The "snake oil" quote is about mental health apps, not physical health trackers.

    Personally I have tried and discarded Google Fit, but Strava is fantastic and has helped me lose huge amounts of weight and get fitter than I have ever been. For me it succeeds because it's much better at gamifying fitness and making it a little competitive, without having to front up to an actual race.

  17. Re:Retribution on Wikipedia Bans Daily Mail As 'Unreliable' Source (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1
    Well the data set in question (ERSST) is an anomaly product, not an absolute product. Here, Zeke Hausfather explains they buoys issue really well: https://andthentheresphysics.w...

    The baseline is indeed the average temperature for a pre-defined interval. However, it is the average for the dataset being considered. In other words, you produce the baseline average after you’ve done the adjustment. The anomalies are then relative to that baseline. Therefore, it doesn’t matter if you shift the buoys up to the ships, or the ships down to the buoys. Once you’ve done the shift, you then calculate the average for the pre-defined interval and present your data as anomalies relative to that baseline.

  18. Re:Retribution on Wikipedia Bans Daily Mail As 'Unreliable' Source (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    Do you understand what an "anomaly product" is? If you apply a consistent adjustment across the whole series, the mean temperature changes to match across the whole series so the anomaly from the mean, and the trend of that anomaly, is the same regardless of the direction of the adjustment. So your claim that this biases the anomaly higher is false, which is confirmed by the HadSST3 test run and the buoy-only series I linked to earlier.

  19. Re:Retribution on Wikipedia Bans Daily Mail As 'Unreliable' Source (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    Gosh, I thought it was all about "the pause".

  20. Re:Retribution on Wikipedia Bans Daily Mail As 'Unreliable' Source (theguardian.com) · · Score: 2

    The direction of the adjustment makes no difference to the trend (this has been tested by running it both ways) and the new NOAA series puts 7x more weight on the Argo buoy data where available. It's been further tested by constructing an unadjusted buoy-only record which shows the same trend (see https://skepticalscience.com/b...).

  21. Re:Retribution on Wikipedia Bans Daily Mail As 'Unreliable' Source (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    The baseline is a constant offset, so nothing was "adjusted to fit" anything, just translated down. Look, animated gif. If you did it the other way around the lower graph would just move up. Here's more detail on the baselines, and more graphs.

  22. Re:Retribution on Wikipedia Bans Daily Mail As 'Unreliable' Source (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    I don't see how graphing the data correctly with both sets using the same baseline is "adjusting" anything.

  23. Re:Retribution on Wikipedia Bans Daily Mail As 'Unreliable' Source (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    No, it was proposed and voted in January, before David Rose's nonsense was published.

  24. Re:Frank Yu doesn't know what he's talking about. on China Cancels Over 100 Coal-Fired Power Plants (reuters.com) · · Score: 1

    The French total generation capacity is indeed around 130GW but that includes everything (nuclear, solar, hydro, some gas and even coal and oil), and includes the reactors that are currently shutdown. The "renewable" part of the quote was either a misquote or misstatement.