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HughPickens.com writes:

Chris Baraniuk writes at BBC that Brian Bates, known in Oklahoma as the "Video Vigilante," is taking credit for Amanda Zolicoffer's conviction on a lewdness charge after being caught on Bates' drone mounted camera in a sex act in a parked vehicle last year. Zolicoffer was sentenced to a year in state prison for the misdemeanor while the case against her alleged client, who was released following arrest in December, is still pending.

"I'm sort of known in the Oklahoma City area," says Bates . "For the last 20 years I've used a video camera to document street-level and forced prostitution, and human trafficking."

Bates runs a website where he publishes videos of alleged sex workers and their clients. "I am openly referred to as a video vigilante, I don't really shy away from that," says Bates adding that the two individuals were inside a vehicle and the incident occurred away from other members of the public. The drone dropped to within a few feet of the vehicle where it filmed 75 year old Douglas Blansett astride Zolicoffer in the front seat of the white pickup truck. The duo separated after Zolicoffer, who was identified by her tattoo saying "Baby Gangster", saw the drone hovering overhead.

Some question if it's legal to operate a camera-equipped drone in Oklahoma City limits. Oklahoma City police say it is. "We have yet to see how this is going to play out, but at this time, there is no city ordinance against flying a drone," says Capt. Paco Balderrama, with the Oklahoma City Police Department. Bates believes his drone is a valuable tool, but he says he will only fly it as a last resort because piloting the aircraft takes his attention away from what's going on around him. "I'd certainly caution other people who may be tempted to use drones to maybe fight drug activity or prostitution or gangs in their neighborhood," concludes Bates. "If one thing goes wrong, you will probably be the person facing criminal charges or civil liability."

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CoolHand writes:

Here is a really nice blog post from one of the developers of The Linux Subsystem for Windows or Ubuntu on Windows. This blog is by one of the developers, and does a good job of explaining what it will look like as well as presents motivation (although we have no way of knowing MS's true motivation).

Is everything working exactly as expected? No, not quite. Not yet, at least. The vast majority of the LTP passes and works well. But there are some imperfections still, especially around tty's an[d] the vt100. My beloved byobu, screen, and tmux don't quite work yet, but they're getting close!

And while the current image is Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, we're expecting to see Ubuntu 16.04 LTS replacing Ubuntu 14.04 in the Windows Store very, very soon.

Finally, I imagine some of you -- long time Windows and Ubuntu users alike -- are still wondering, perhaps, "Why?!?" Having dedicated most of the past two decades of my career to free and open source software, this is an almost surreal endorsement by Microsoft on the importance of open source to developers. Indeed, what a fantastic opportunity to bridge the world of free and open source technology directly into any Windows 10 desktop on the planet. And what a wonderful vector into learning and using more Ubuntu and Linux in public clouds like Azure. From Microsoft's perspective, a variety of surveys and user studies have pointed to bash and Linux tools -- very specifically, Ubuntu -- be available in Windows, and without resource-heavy full virtualization.

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

In Nature Scientific Reports , scientists have noted that the gait and pelvic structure of a walking fish resemble those of tetrapods (four-limbed animals such as reptiles, mammals, birds and amphibians). They write that "the behaviour and morphology of Cryptotora are unique as compared to both swimming fishes and walking salamanders." They note that the fish's fins lack digits.

The fish, Cryptotora thamicola , inhabits caves in Mae Hong Son Province in northern Thailand and is blind. It is listed as vulnerable in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. No other members of the genus are known.

A video is available via Youtube; the walking can be seen at around 112 seconds in.

Discovery News has a story about the fish.

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butthurt writes:

To mark the arrival of British Summer Time, BBC News ran an essay recalling a profession no longer practiced. The Industrial Revolution brought about shift work in factories before alarm clocks became commonplace. While some factories had whistles, there also existed knockers-up or knocker-uppers, who would go about town in the morning, rousing labourers by knocking on doors or windows.

The Eastern Daily Press carried a photo of a knocker-up at work, taken in 1931. Another practitioner may be seen in a (silent) video on Youtube.

In a 2009 poll "one in five British people" reported that they used their mobile phones to wake themselves.

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butthurt writes:

The Independent reports that Microsoft Corp. has restarted Tay, its chat bot which interacted with people and other bots via Kik, GroupMe and Twitter. Tay attracted 213,000 followers on Twitter before being turned off in the wake of controversial remarks regarding Hitler, religion and cannabis. Tay now has a Snapchat account.

At its Build 2016 conference, the company announced that it has released Bot Builder SDK, part of its Bot Framework in which Tay was coded, under an MIT-style licence. The software is capable of communicating via SMS, Skype, Slack and Office 365 mail.

An online petition on change.org calling on Microsoft "to treat Tay as an equal" received over 7800 votes.

related story: Microsoft Snuffs Out AI Twitter Bot After Offensive Tweets

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Apparently the brass at HubSpot, a tech startup in Cambridge, MA that recently won top honors from a local business journal as the Boston's best place to work, had forgotten Aesop's fable about the frog and scorpion. So they went and hired Daniel Lyons, the fiftysomething career technology journalist best known for his "Fake Steve Jobs" blog, to their marketing staff in 2013, even though he didn't know the first thing about marketing (as Lyons freely admits in his piece). Lyons worked at Hubspot for a year and a half before quitting to publish a tell-all book on his time there; an excerpt ("My Year in Startup Hell") has been published by Fortune, describing a corporate culture that sounds like a mixture of Animal House and Scientology, along with reflections such as this one:

Lyons notes that he was given an employee agreement to sign when he joined, which included a non-disparagement clause, but he never returned the form.

[Continues...]

Phoenix666 writes:

A team of archaeologists say they've made a potentially "seismic" discovery in Canada that could "rewrite the history of Vikings in the New World" — and they did it with the help of medieval sagas and the latest satellite technology.

... Thanks largely to the work of Sarah Parcak, a leading space archaeologist, evidence has been unearthed of a possible second Viking site in North America — and it's located about 300 miles further south than L'Anse aux Meadows.

The site at Point Rosee, which Parcak pinpointed after analyzing satellite imagery, is located on the southwest coast of Newfoundland, The New York Times reports.

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

Andy Newman writes at The New York Times that an exhibit at Liberty Science Center in Jersey City lets users walk a proverbial mile in their elders' orthopedic shoes and experience the stooped shuffle, the halting speech, and the dimming senses of an 85-year old man. It is not a very pleasant experience. An attendant cranks up a fader and your vision dissolves into melty, grayed-out blobs, like a memorably unvivid psychedelic experience, more knobs twiddle, and your hearing is subsumed in a fog of tinnitus, muffling and distortion. Loaded with hardware and a computer, the suit itself weighs 40 pounds, distributed as uncomfortably as possible. "It's going to get much worse," promises Bran Ferren, the suit's inventor. "You haven't lived."

According to Newman, in just 10 minutes, the aging suit induced a remarkable amount of frustration, depression and hopelessness and there are entire realms of wretchedness attendant upon owning and operating an 85-year-old body that the exhibit does not even touch upon: Comprehensive sagging, internal and external. Pain in places you did not know could hurt. Difficulty urinating. Difficulty not urinating. Watching your friends die off. Watching yourself become irrelevant, an object of pity or puzzlement if acknowledged at all. By allowing a younger generation to feel the effects of aging firsthand, the suit provides a new-found perspective that hopefully inspires a conversation with loved ones about getting older so, collectively, family and friends can better prepare for the future. If doing even the most basic tasks of daily living is this much trouble, you wonder, why bother? But it also makes you a little less likely to lose patience and a little more likely to feel empathy with the older people in your life. "My father, Aaron Newman, happens to be 85," says Newman. "I called him up. I described the treadmill experience and asked if that sounded about right." "No," he said. "It's much worse.""

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Ted Kaczynski, a terrorist and luddite, was captured when his brother David recognized his writing style in the manifesto "Industrial Society and Its Future". The manifesto was published by The Washington Post and The New York Times on September 19, 1995 under the promise that no further bombings would occur if it were published.

Some excerpts from the manifesto:

Human freedom mostly will have vanished, because individuals and small groups will be impotent vis-a-vis large organizations armed with supertechnology and an arsenal of advanced psychological and biological tools for manipulating human beings, besides instruments of surveillance and physical coercion.

Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race.

More news/facts on the Unabomber:

• Kevin Spacey will be doing in a drama centered around the Unabomber for the Discovery Channel.
• A portion of the manifesto was quoted in Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines.
• The Unabomber was promoted as a write-in candidate in the 1996 presidential election.
• A Freakonomics audio interview with Kaczynski.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Tesla has unveiled its much-anticipated Model 3 electric car - its lowest-cost vehicle to date.

The price and range of the five-seater should make the vehicle appeal to new types of customers and could boost interest in other electric vehicles.

Chief executive Elon Musk said his goal was to produce about 500,000 vehicles a year once production is at full speed.

The California-based company needs the vehicle to prove popular if it is to stay in business.

The first deliveries of the vehicle are scheduled to start in late 2017, and it can be ordered in advance in dozens of countries, including the UK, Ireland, Brazil, India, China and New Zealand.

The basic model will start at $35,000 (£24,423) and have a range of at least 215 miles (346km) per charge.

Tesla delivered 50,580 vehicles last year. Most of those were its Model S saloon, which overtook Nissan's Leaf to become the world's best selling pure-electric vehicle.

Will Tesla's gigafactory give it a leg up against the competing Chevy Bolt, Nissan Leaf, Hyundai Ionic, and other electric cars?

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HughPickens.com writes:

Crime shapes cities but the reverse is also true. Cities get the types of crime their design calls for. The construction of Los Angeles' freeway system in the 1960s helped to instigate a later spike in bank-crime activity by offering easy getaways from financial institutions constructed at the confluence of on-ramps and offramps. This is a convenient location for busy commuters — but also for prospective bandits, who can pull off the freeway, rob a bank and get back on the freeway practically before the police have been alerted. The maneuver became so common in the 1990s that the Los Angeles police have a name for it: a "stop-and-rob."

Now Geoff Manaugh writes in the NYT that flight paths around Los Angles have also come to influence how criminals use the city as the heavily restricted airspace around Los Angeles International Airport has transformed the surrounding area into a well-known hiding spot for criminals trying to flee by car. Los Angeles is a fundamentally different kind of place from New York or Chicago with their skyscrapers and deep, canyonlike streets. Those dense clusters of high-rises and towers make thorough aerial patrols nearly impossible, not to mention potentially dangerous. In L.A., by contrast, you simply cannot see the whole city if you rely solely on ground patrols. According to Manaugh Los Angeles police helicopters cannot always approach the airport because of air-traffic-control safety concerns. "Indeed, all those planes, with their otherwise-invisible approach patterns across the Southern California sky, have come to exert a kind of sculptural effect on local crimes across the city," concludes Manaugh. "Their lines of flight limit the effectiveness of police helicopter patrols and thus alter the preferred getaway routes."

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takyon writes:

BBC News reports:

Google has removed an April Fool's Gmail button, which sent a comical animation to recipients, after reports of people getting into trouble at work. The button appeared beside Gmail's normal send button and allowed users to shut down an email thread by sending a gif of a Minion dropping a microphone. However, a flurry of complaints about the button appeared on Google's forums. The firm has since withdrawn the feature and apologised.

[...] The button was not enabled on the Gmail accounts of enterprise business customers. "Thanks to MicDrop I just lost my job," claimed one user on Google's product forums. "I am a writer and had a deadline to meet. I sent my articles to my boss and never heard back from her. I inadvertently sent the email using the MicDrop send button." Another complained that they had been having interviews for a job with a company for three months and then accidentally sent a mic drop email to the HR department.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Government attacks on the encryption of online communication threaten human rights around the world, warned Amnesty International in a briefing published today as tech giant Apple challenges the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in court over an order to provide software to bypass iPhone encryption.

The briefing, Encryption: A Matter of Human Rights, which is Amnesty International's first official stance on encryption and human rights, says that people everywhere should be able to encrypt their communications and personal data as an essential protection of their rights to privacy and free speech.

"At stake in the Apple case is whether a future administration could exploit the next national moment of crisis, and use its access to our phones to target journalists, or persecute activists and minorities, said Naureen Shah, director of security and human rights at Amnesty International USA.

"Encryption is a basic prerequisite for privacy and free speech in the digital age. Banning encryption is like banning envelopes and curtains. It takes away a basic tool for keeping your private life private," said Sherif Elsayed-Ali, Amnesty International's Deputy Director for Global Issues.

"Governments trying to undermine encryption should think twice before they open this Pandora's Box. Weakening privacy online could have disastrous consequences for free societies, particularly for the human rights activists and journalists who hold our leaders to account."

Original Submission

tonyPick writes:

An article at The Conversation has an interesting overview of how mind controlling parasites spread opening with the example of Toxoplasma gondii which is capable of infecting humans:

An increasing number of studies suggest humans known to be infected with these parasites could be more susceptible to schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, aggression and even increased suicide. Studies have even suggested you are two to three times more likely to have a car crash if your blood tests positive for the parasite. This is particularly striking when it has been predicted that 30%-50% of the worldwide population may carry the parasite.

The article discusses examples of other known mind controlling parasites in the wild, the ways in which these parasites spread and the research into the mechanisms through which parasites can manipulate host behaviour.

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edIII writes:

Hackers broke into the computer networks of some big U.S. law firms, including Cravath Swaine & Moore LLP and Weil Gotshal & Manges LLP, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.

Federal investigators are looking to see if confidential information was stolen for insider trading, as these law firms represented Wall Street banks and big companies, the Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter.

Other law firms were also targeted, but the probe has not amounted to any clear information on what details have been stolen, the newspaper reported.

While it seems rather unimaginative and simplistic to think it was for theft, it leaves me wondering if this means more scandalous corruption will be revealed a couple of orders of magnitude greater than Sony/Snowden. I'm going to be watching Wikileaks and LiveLeaks myself to find out.

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