The Snowbot: how Edward @Snowden gets around his exile
http://www.theGuardian.com/us-news/shortcuts/2016/jun/27/snowbot-edward-snowden-telepresence-robot An iPad stuck to a lawnmower (w/o the blades)
QT:{{”
“Right. So it really is an iPad stuck to a lawnmower, then? A remote-controlled, battery-powered lawnmower without the blades, yes.” “}}
WikiLeaks Shows How the CIA Can Hack a Mac
https://www.wired.com/2017/03/wikileaks-shows-cia-can-hack-macs-hidden-code/ Modifying the firmware of Thunderbolt adapters to make spyware implanters
QT:{{”
“The CIA’s documents describe a series of tools that agents can use to install “implants” on target machines, capable of silently monitoring everything that occurs within its operating system and transmitting it to a remote operator. One manual explains how to modify the firmware of a standard Apple Thunderbolt-to-ethernet adapter, turniing it into an spyware-planting tool the CIA calls “Sonic Screwdriver.” When plugged in, the altered adapter can trick a Mac into thinking it’s booting its operating from a spoofed network source that the adapter impersonates, allowing tweaks to its firmware even in the rare cases when the user has set a password for any changes to that deep-seated code.”
“}}
See how old $AMZN’s AI thinks you are
http://www.theVerge.com/2017/2/10/14582192/amazon-ai-rekognition-age-guess-software Free via image Rekognition platform, in the dev toolkit part of @AWScloud
QT:{{”
“Amazon’s latest artificial intelligence tool is a piece of image recognition software that can learn to guess a human’s age. The feature is powered by Amazon’s Rekognition platform, which is a developer toolkit that exists as part of the company’s AWS cloud computing service. So long as you’re willing to go through the process of signing up for a basic AWS account — that entails putting in credit card info but Amazon won’t charge you — you can try the age-guessing software for yourself.”
“}}
From #Gdrive To…Office By Converting Your Files w. Takeout
http://fieldguide.gizmodo.com/go-from-google-drive-to-ms-office-by-converting-your-fi-1641164077 Useful tool supporting standard DOC, XLS & PPT formats
Also supports iCal, vcard+CSV (contacts), JPEG (photos), HTML (keep), massive mbox (mail)!, MPEG (voice)…
With #AlphaGo researchers are learning how an algorithm thinks
https://qz.com/897498/by-sparring-with-alphago-researchers-are-learning-how-an-algorithm-thinks What images #NNs conjure up for a classification term
QT:[{”
-“Tyka was part of the Google team that first published work on DeepDream, a computer-vision experiment that went viral in 2015. The team trained a deep neural network to classify images, i.e. show the network a picture, it tells you what the image depicts. Except instead of asking it to look at pictures, they programmed the network to look at a word and produce what it thought would be an image that represents the word. The deep neural network would then supply its visual “idea” of different words.
And it worked. The team gave the network the word “banana,” for example, and it produced a dizzying fractal of banana-shaped objects. But the experiment also provided insight into how the machine thought about objects. When asked to produce dumbbells, the network generated gray dumbbell shapes with beige protrusions—arms. The neural net correlated arms and dumbbells so highly that they were seen as almost one object.”
“}}
No assembler required
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21660077-how-teach-computer-science-nursery-school-no-assembler-required KIBO, Dash, Vortex & Hackaball provide a playful way to learn #programming
Blocky? Scratch Jr?
QT:{{”
Dr Umaschi Bers is not alone in that quest. KIBO, made by KinderLab Robotics (of which she is chief science officer when she is not doing her day job), is unusual only in that its instruction set is so tied to physical objects.
…
Some, like Vortex (a wheeled device that resembles a flattened motorcycle helmet) and Dash (a tetrahedron of spheres which, besides moving around at its programmer’s command, can also play tunes on a glockenspiel), …
“Toys like Vortex, Dash and Hackaball use a variety of programming languages to encode the instructions that control them. These include Scratch, Blockly, Hopscotch and WeDo. Some of these languages are proprietary (WeDo, for instance, belongs to Lego).
…
Scratch Jr, which has been given a restricted set of subroutines and uses only positive integers for counting (because young children have difficulty with the concept of negative numbers) has proved
particularly popular. In the 12 months since its release, 1m copies of it have been downloaded. But Hopscotch (which also has a restricted set of subroutines) and Blockly (which, unlike Scratch, is fully open-source, and can thus have its underlying code tweaked by more advanced programmers) are also doing well.”
“}}
Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich
http://www.NewYorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich Holing up in New Zealand & the survival condo; a bit validating for normal worriers
QT:{{”
“The tech preppers do not necessarily think a collapse is likely. They consider it a remote event, but one with a very severe downside, so, given how much money they have, spending a fraction of their net worth to hedge against this . . . is a logical thing to do.”
…
You’re basically seeing that the people who’ve been the best at reading the tea leaves—the ones with the most resources, because that’s how they made their money—are now the ones most preparing to pull the rip cord and jump out of the plane.”
…
Every year since 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a magazine founded by members of the Manhattan Project, has gathered a group of Nobel laureates and other luminaries to update the Doomsday Clock, a symbolic gauge of our risk of wrecking civilization. In 1991, as the Cold War was ending, the scientists set the clock to its safest point ever—seventeen minutes to “midnight.”
“}}
The Man Who Kicked Off…#Biotech by @CarlZimmer
http://nautil.us/issue/44/luck/the-man-who-kicked-off-the-biotech-revolution H Smith for discovering restriction enzymes + a history of the term
QT:{{”
“Trying to make sense of the failure, Wilcox suggested to Smith that the bacteria were destroying the viral DNA. He based his suggestion on a hypothesis proposed a few years earlier by Werner Arber, a microbiologist at the University of Geneva. Arber speculated that enzymes could restrict the growth of viruses by chopping up their DNA, and dubbed these hypothetical molecules “restriction enzymes.”” “}}
A Bigger Problem Than ISIS?
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/02/a-bigger-problem-than-isis The #MosulDam is failing. A breach would cause a wave killing >1M. Infrastructure woes
linkstream2 microblog 