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"gewg_" writes:

AlterNet reports

This week it was announced that Oregon will be expunging the old records of marijuana offenders, along with their new legalization plan. This measure is the farthest that a state has gone to date in regards to applying the new laws to old cases. However, for people who remain in jail for having a plant, the legalization plan does not go far enough.

According to the New York Times (paywall), people who have low-level felony or misdemeanor marijuana charges on their record that are at least ten years old will be eligible for expungement.

While the transition in Oregon is nowhere near what is needed for the hundreds of thousands who are still incarcerated, the aspect that allows for old cases to be expunged is at least a step in the right direction, and is helping people clear their records so they can avoid discrimination.

"Oregon is one of the first states to really grapple with the issue of what do you do with a record of something that used to be a crime and no longer is", law professor Jenny M. Roberts told the New York Times.

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tt0071360 writes:

Google's new advertising product, called Customer Match, lets advertisers upload their customer and promotional email address lists into AdWords. The new targeting capability extends beyond search to include both YouTube Trueview ads and the newly launched native ads in Gmail.

Customer Match marks the first time Google has allowed advertisers to target ads against customer-owned data in Adwords. Google matches the email addresses against those of signed-in users on Google. Individual addresses are hashed and are supposedly anonymized. Advertisers will be able to set bids and create ads specifically geared to audiences built from their email lists.

This new functionality seems to make de-anonymization of google's supposedly proprietary customer data just a hop, skip and jump away. If you can specify the list of addresses that get served an ad, and the criteria like what search terms will trigger that ad, you can detect if and when your target searches for specific terms. For example, create an email list that contains your target and 100 invalid email addresses that no one uses (just in case google gets wise to single-entry email lists). Then apply that list to searches for the word "herpes" - set the bid crazy high, like $100 and you are guaranteed to find out if your target searches for herpes which would be a strong indicator that they have herpes. Repeat as necessary for as many keywords and as many email addresses that you wish to monitor.

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tt0075314 writes:

Japan's cabinet office, Kanagawa prefecture and Robot Taxi Inc. on Thursday said they will start experimenting with unmanned taxi service beginning in 2016. The service will be offered for approximately 50 people in Kanagawa prefecture, just south of Tokyo, with the auto-driving car carrying them from their homes to local grocery stores.

According to the project organizers, the cabs will drive a distance of about three kilometers (two miles), and part of the course will be on major avenues in the city. Crew members will be aboard the car during the experiment in case there is a need to avoid accidents.

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"gewg_" writes:

El Reg reports

Soylent, which produces liquid food for techies who hate chewing, has stopped shipping its gloop after some of it was contaminated with mold.

The firm started flogging version 2.0 of its formula in August, and has produced 400,000 bottles of the strange substance. It has since learned that 11 of the bottles had mold inside or on the outside by the time they reached customers.

That's a tiny proportion, however, on Friday the biz confirmed it's halting operations.

"During our record review process we did discover that the conveyor guardrail settings were not optimized, causing some bottles to move erratically on the conveyor, which resulted in small splashes on the external surface of the bottle, thereby allowing mold from the environment to grow on the bottle," it said in a statement.

"To verify that these findings were indeed isolated, we conducted physical and visual inspections, along with microbial tests, of 2,000 bottles in our distribution center and found only two bottles with the same defect. We have since optimized the line settings to minimize any recurrence of this issue."

[...] Soylent says that the problem has now been sorted and shipments will begin on October 8.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Until last week, Microsoft supported Outlook.com users on Android with a bare-bones but functional client, Outlook.com. Because the Outlook.com client exposed the calendars to the Android system, any Android calendar app or widget could read and write to them.

Last December though, Microsoft acquired a startup called Acompli, figuring it was quicker than writing its own Outlook client, and Acompli was rebranded as Outlook. Last week, Microsoft finally shut down the older Outlook.com app, leaving consumers to use the rebranded Acompli.

But Outlook has never exposed the calendars to the Android system, so the effect of the change was sandboxing Outlook.com users into the new client.
...
Business users don't get Tasks support, despite very rich Task support in Exchange. After Evernote became a hit, OneNote became the preferred Tasks "experience", winning out the internal turf war. (Tasks isn't even supported in the Outlook.com consumer service).

Window Phone dumps Exchange Tasks as a huge alphabetical list. The mobile clients don't support them at all. Exchange users can find excellent third-party PIM tools on iOS and Android to access Exchange PIM services, but none from Microsoft.

Nadella is leading Microsoft into a new Golden Age.

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HughPickens.com writes:

Margot Sanger-Katz reports in the NYT that soda consumption is experiencing a serious and sustained decline as sales of full-calorie soda in the United States have plummeted by more than 25 percent over the past twenty years. Nearly two-thirds of Americans say they are actively trying to avoid the drinks that have been a mainstay of American culture and bottled water is now on track to overtake soda as the largest beverage category in two years. The changing patterns of soda drinking appear to come thanks, in part, to a loud campaign to eradicate sodas. School cafeterias and vending machines no longer contain regular sodas. Many workplaces and government offices have similarly prohibited their sale.

For many public health advocates, soda has become the new tobacco — a toxic product to be banned, taxed and stigmatized. "There will always be soda, but I think the era of it being acceptable for kids to drink soda all day long is passing, slowly," says Marion Nestle. "In some socioeconomic groups, it's over." Soda represents nearly 25% of the U.S. beverage market and its massive scale have guaranteed profit margins for decades. Historically, beverage preferences are set in adolescence, the first time that most people begin choosing and buying a favorite brand. But the declines in soda drinking appear to be sharpest among young Americans. "Kids these days are growing up with all of these other options, and there are some parents who say, 'I really want my kids to drink juice or a bottled water,' " says Gary A. Hemphill. "If kids grow up without carbonated soft drinks, the likelihood that they are going to grow up and, when they are 35, start drinking is very low."

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Arthur T Knackerbracket found the following story while walking around his virtual world:

The Oculus Rift VR headset will cost more than $350 (~£230), according to company founder Palmer Luckey, putting its price at the very top of early estimates. Earlier this year, Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe hinted that a complete Rift system, including a suitably powerful computer, would cost about $1,500 (~£1,000). Obviously, the UK prices are just estimates; electronics tend to be more expensive in Europe than in the US, after various taxes and import levies are figured in.

In an interview with Road To VR at the Oculus Connect conference, Luckey responded to a query about whether the Rift's price would be in line with its $350 developer kits, a ballpark target that had been initially discussed by the company.

"You know, I’m going to be perfectly honest with you. We’re roughly in that ballpark…” said Luckey, "but it’s going to cost more than that. And the reason for that is that we’ve added a lot of technology to this thing beyond what existed in the DK1 and DK2 days."

Luckey went on to explain that the company wasn't interested in hitting a lower price point, but was instead interested in making "no compromises...in terms of quality." The Rift's custom hardware, which contains amongst other things custom displays and lenses, costs more to produce, according to Luckey, and that even small adjustments to lower the price are not worth the trade off in terms of quality.

"The reality that when you make this thing you have to decide what trade offs you’re going to make; are you going to optimise for absolute lowest price possible, even if it’s going to be a lower quality experience? Or do you try to say 'you know what, this is the first consumer VR headset that we're going to be pushing out to people. We need to put a stake in the ground and say: this is the best possible experience that we were able to make."

"It would really suck if you put something out there and people were like 'ah man...the Rift is good, but it’s not quite there,' you know? I can't tell you that it’s going to be $350, and I would say I think people are going to be happy with what they get for the price because I really do think it’s going to be that best VR headset you can buy."

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

A massive energy kite being developed in California could be deployed for testing near Waimea by early next year.

Before the experimental devise can begin spinning 1,100 feet above the ground, the Google-owned development company behind the initiative must receive clearance from the Federal Aviation Administration and a building permit from Hawaii County. Following a year of flight and testing, representatives of the R&D company Makani are hopeful that they'll be closer to having a commercially viable product that is up to 50 percent more efficient at generating electricity than a conventional wind turbine.

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Yog-Yogguth writes:

The full story in English from the newspaper (no scripts required unless you want to use the global interactive map).

A partial global outline consisting of some of the networks trading in child abuse files is the focus of the first article in a series from Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang (Wikipedia link). The newspaper has gained access to information about 36 million downloads across the globe and singled out nearly half a milliion (430177) files alleged to be at least partially confirmed to show sexual abuse of children. These files in turn have been downloaded by close to a hundred thousand (94989) IP addresses.

In each case they claim to have "indications" (their choice of word) of the user name and email of the downloader as well as IP address and file information.

During the last ten months they say they've specifically looked at Norwegian destinations, mapping and identifying 78 Norwegian individuals they feel fairly confident has downloaded files with images or videos of child abuse. However in addition they have far more information available for the downloads of the same files across rest of the world: 18107 in Germany, 13630 in the US, 11118 in Russia, 3743 in the UK, 3393 in France, 3336 in Japan, and so on.

They also say they have contacted and confronted some of the specific Norwegians, at least some of which have privately admitted and commented upon their actions.

Another claim being made is that most of the downloaders are likely to have paid to access the material. No details are given as to why this is deemed likely such as who they have suposedly paid, whether they're including paying the download service as paying for the files, or whether those are ordinary download services that offer free downloads.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A 'smart glove' that translates sign language from hand gestures to visual text on a screen and audible dialogue has been developed by a Goldsmiths, University of London student. She's now working on an app to enable real-time translation of the text into other languages.

Her first experimental prototype translated sign language gestures into visual letters on a screen. The glove's circuit comprised of flex sensors, an accelerometer, a microcontroller board, and a four digit graphic numerical display.

Five flex sensors were attached to the glove corresponding to the five fingers, detecting bends and curvatures then reporting the values to a serial monitor. An accelerometer was attached to detect the orientation of the hand.

Hadeel also developed a computer programme that identifies the output values of the sensors and accelerometer and matches them with a series of statements which determine what letters to display on a screen.

Her second prototype was better, faster and more durable, with smaller hardware and more efficient software. She incorporated a smaller microcontroller and smaller flex sensors and redesigned the software to allow text to scroll on a screen, deleting the old and adding the new.

The third and latest prototype – which now incorporates a text-to-speech chip - went on display at the Goldsmiths MA/MFA Computational Arts end-of-degree show earlier this month. Much of the glove's hardware is now sewn into a lining:

"I didn't want all the wires to intimidate users, making them feel the glove will be complicated to use or really fragile," Hadeel explains. "People tend to lean to the cautious side when approached with new high-tech products which contradicts the main purpose of this glove, which is to help make lives easier."

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AnonTechie writes in with a story from Slate:

Jamelle Bouie writes that, everyday gun violence in black communities kills many more Americans. Why do we keep ignoring it ?

There are two truths about gun homicide in America. The first is that we have a mass shooting problem. On Thursday, 26-year-old Chris Harper Mercer opened fire on a community college campus in Roseburg, Oregon. He killed 9 people and wounded 7 others—allegedly singling out Christian students—before he was killed in a shootout with police. "Roseburg" joins "Charleston, "Isla Vista," "Newtown," "Aurora," and "Oak Creek" on the long list of small towns and quiet cities marred by horrific gun violence.

Highly visible, these shootings are the focal point for most of our national conversation on gun control. The last serious legislation for universal background checks came just after the murder of 20 6- and 7-year-olds and six adult staff members at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, which resulted in national calls for new action. (It died in the Senate at the hands of a GOP-led and blue-dog Democrat–supported filibuster.) But as much as the attention makes sense, it also obscures that second truth about gun homicides in America: Ending mass shootings won't solve the problem.

Between 2009 and 2013, 44,077 people were murdered with guns, according to the FBI. Just a fraction of those came from Roseburg-style incidents. Many more were domestic violence against women. But the large majority involved the deaths of men, and of those, most involved poor black Americans in inner cities and other marginalized areas. "From 1980 to 2013, 262,000 black males were killed in America," writes Jeffrey Goldberg for the Atlantic. In general, when we talk about gun homicide in the United States, we are largely talking about violence between poor black men.

What does SN think could be the solution to this issue?

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Arthur T Knackerbracket 'lifted' this story from noted security researcher Bruce Schneier's blog which was originally published on Motherboard:

Bruce Schneier notes recent electronic break-ins and some ramifications of the different kinds of data that have been obtained. He notes there are three types of information that need to be considered.

There are authentication credentials like passwords, Social Security Numbers, and driver's license numbers which can allow an attacker to claim they are the affected person and permit them to, say, open fraudulent credit cards. When these are compromised, there is at least the conceptual possibility that a user can contact the relevant organization, have the originals revoked, and have new credentials issued.

Then there are bits of personal information such as were divulged in breakins to the Ashley Madison web site and the US Office of Personnel Management which describe one's relationships and personal history that one would generally not want publicized. This includes things like trysts with a married person or having difficulties with substance abuse. These are things that, once revealed, cannot be retrieved.

The last type of data pertains to biometric information which includes fingerprints and iris scans. These are things that you are and once compromised, there is no way to revoke them. Though increasingly used as a means of authentication to access, say, a cell phone, there is a real danger in using biometric information for this purpose. In the United States, one can be compelled to provide a fingerprint (something you are) as part of a criminal investigation, but one generally cannot be compelled to provide a password (something you know) as that would violate the fifth amendment against being compelled to testify against oneself.

Not every use of biometrics requires the biometric data to be stored in a central server somewhere. Apple's system, for example, only stores the data locally: on your phone. That way there's no central repository to be hacked. And many systems don't store the biometric data at all, only a mathematical function of the data that can be used for authentication but can't be used to reconstruct the actual biometric. Unfortunately, OPM stored copies of actual fingerprints.

Ashley Madison has taught us all the dangers of entrusting our intimate secrets to a company's computers and networks, because once that data is out there's no getting it back. All biometric data, whether it be fingerprints, retinal scans, voiceprints, or something else, has that same property. We should be skeptical of any attempts to store this data en masse, whether by governments or by corporations. We need our biometrics for authentication, and we can't afford to lose them to hackers.

How many Soylentils use fingerprint readers versus entering a (strong) passcode? How many use ******* or maybe something stronger?

[Update: as pointed out in the comments, one can only rarely have a new SSN assigned. Have updated the story to emphasize that there is a conceptual possibility of revoking credentials — not that one can actually do so in every case. The salient part from Bruce's blog:

It's a huge illegal business, but we know how to deal with it when it happens. We detect these hacks as quickly as possible, and update our account credentials as soon as we detect an attack. (We also need to stop treating Social Security numbers as if they were secret.)

Thanks to mrsam and an Anonymous Coward for pointing this out. -Ed.]

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AnonTechie writes in with a story from Bruce Schneier's Blog:

AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky coined Moore's Law of Mad Science: "Every eighteen months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy the world drops by one point."

One of the commenters quipped:

If IQ drops one point every 18 months. Considering the modern day technology is about 30 years old, and the typical person has an IQ of about 114, then in about 30 more years, a dog will be smart enough to destroy the world...

A very interesting conjecture worthy of SN discussion. What is SN's take on this. Is there a Moore's Law for Stupidity?

[Updated: elided part of quote. -Ed.]

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Phoenix666 writes:

Everyone knows that exercise improves health, and ongoing research continues to uncover increasingly detailed information on its benefits for metabolism, circulation, and improved functioning of organs such as the heart, brain, and liver. With this knowledge in hand, scientists may be better equipped to develop "exercise pills" that could mimic at least some of the beneficial effects of physical exercise on the body. But a review of current development efforts, publishing October 2 in Trends in Pharmacological Sciences, ponders whether such pills will achieve their potential therapeutic impact, at least in the near future.

"We have recognized the need for exercise pills for some time, and this is an achievable goal based on our improved understanding of the molecular targets of physical exercise," says coauthor Ismail Laher, of the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Several laboratories are developing exercise pills, which at this early stage are being tested in animals to primarily target skeletal muscle performance and improve strength and energy use—essentially producing stronger and faster muscles. But of course the benefits of exercise are far greater than its effects on only muscles.

Couch potatoes would rejoice, of course, but exercise pills could also benefit the bed-ridden or astronauts who spend extended periods in microgravity.

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takyon writes in with this story from http://www.vice.com/read/colombia-corruption-ai-819:

Eduardo was paid by the Colombian government to uncover organized crime. This was no easy task in a country with a long history of ingrained corruption, sparked in part by Pablo Escobar in the mid to late 1980s. Eduardo was faced with witnesses being murdered before he could speak to them and the daunting task of unraveling the web of corruption that allowed individual paramilitary commanders to orchestrate literally thousands of assassinations.

To help unravel that web, he created computer software that uses complex AI to map connections between legitimate authorities and organized crime groups. His technique has achieved some impressive results, and he's been labelled a rising star of crime fighting. I got in touch with him to find out how his methods could be used in Britain, and how he coped with the risks involved in investigating corruption in Colombia.

Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán: [...] Since the end of the 90s, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia [a Colombian drug trafficking and paramilitary group] supported local campaigns and even created local political parties. In 2002 they supported around 35 to 40 percent of the elected legislators at the National Congress of Colombia, as well as several mayors, governors, and municipal legislators. The legislators who were supported by them actually legislated between 2002 and 2006. You can imagine the perverse effects when laws are proposed and approved by people who were supported by a criminal group.

How has your system helped to bring serious corruption like this to light?

Some types of crime are really complex, especially cases involving hundreds or thousands of people interacting. Understanding those situations requires computational tools, because it's impossible for the human brain to make sense of thousands of names, dates, places, and facts. That's why, at Vortex Foundation, the anti-corruption organization I founded, we created protocols, tools, and processes to analyze high volumes of information and understand the structure of complex criminal networks.

http://www.scivortex.com/vortex/showcase.html

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