The Technology Thread - Part 1

Several drones build rope bridges strong enough for humans to cross.

 
Neat. I miss the 90's VR things they used to have. It just up and vanished for 20 years and now it's back with the tech to make it awesome.
 
Peeple lets you leave Yelp-like one-star reviews for bad friends, dates

If this thing actually goes off and becomes popular it will definitely be abused and misused to troll people and get revenge as well as be yet another way for potential employers to screen employees or fire them (you just know there will be bosses who will fire employees if they are rated poorly).

And in general it will be another tool to rate popularity. So it's a popularity contest just like Facebook likes or Twitter followers, Yelp, etc.

Our dystopian not-so-distant future may soon include concerns about receiving Yelp-like one-star reviews from dissatisfied dates, or just about anyone who has your phone number. Possibly launching as soon as November, the upcoming Peeple app, which will launch on iOS first, is essentially Yelp for human beings.

According to The Washington Post, Peeple's current system does not include an opt-out service. So long as your name is present within the database, your reviews, good or bad, will remain open to public viewing. That said, the creators seem conscious of the risk of abuse, and have devised methods for mitigating the possibility. For example, in order to submit a review, a user will need to be above 21, have an established Facebook, and create the listing under their real name. It appears as though only positive ratings will be posted immediately, while negative comments will sit in queue for 48 hours, allowing their recipient to negotiate absolution.

Additionally, the Peeple website claims that the app will have no tolerance for “profanity, bullying, health references, disability references, confidential information, mentioning other people in a rating you’re not currently writing a rating for, name calling, degrading comments, derogatory comments, sexual references, mention of confidential information, racism, legal references, hateful content, and other parameters.” Whether Peeple can enforce its regulations, however, is an entirely different question. Even social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook have had trouble responding quickly enough to online abuse.

Peeple, which calls itself a “positivity app," has ostensibly noble ideals. The mission is to “find the good in you.” It even allows you to search for people within a certain rating, enabling you to surround yourself with the “best of the best.” Unfortunately, human beings are naturally contentious, emotional creatures. It’s hard to imagine Peeple only being used for the forces of good. While the idea of a two-star rating from an ex-colleague might seem trivial, it could have horrifying, long-reaching repercussions. Employers already use social media to investigate prospective employees, with some purportedly demanding access to personal accounts. Peeple will just make it easier.

At the same time, Peeple could also be seen as a more transparent take on existing social media. Likes, follower counts, and even MySpace’s Top 8 feature are all ways we calculate the value of an individual—so why shouldn't there be a service that allows us to blatantly participate in a global popularity contest?
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Ars Technica
 
That sounds like an all-round bad idea!
 
And speaking of all around bad ideas...

Amazon to ban sales of Apple TV, Google Chromecast to boost Prime Video

Starting on October 29, the Apple TV and Google Chromecast will no longer be available from Amazon.

Bloomberg reports that the online retailer sent an e-mail to its marketplace sellers telling them that it is not allowing any new postings of the devices, and the company will remove existing listings at the end of October.

"Over the last three years, Prime Video has become an important part of Prime," Amazon said in a statement explaining the change. "It's important that the streaming media players we sell interact well with Prime Video in order to avoid customer confusion. Roku, XBOX, PlayStation, and Fire TV are excellent choices."

With the new Apple TV including an app store and third-party apps, there's no obvious reason why the Apple TV could not support Prime Video if Amazon wanted. But the current model doesn't offer this kind of third-party extensibility, and as such, it has no support for Prime Video.
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Ars Technica
 
And another even more wreckless idea, let's make it easier for people to have their identities stolen.

RFID chips in driver’s licenses. What could go wrong?
It's a "dream come true" for identity thieves and a "civil liberties nightmare."

Radio frequency identification chips are everywhere—in passports, library and payment cards, school ID cards, and even in NFL players' uniforms.

So why not put RFID chips in driver's licenses? California Gov. Jerry Brown has a bill awaiting his veto or signature that would do just that. The states of Washington, New York, Michigan, and Vermont already have adopted the spy-friendly, voluntary program that links your license with the Department of Homeland Security. For the moment, the cards are designed to be used instead of passports at US land borders in a bid to speed up the entrance lines from Mexico and Canada.

But the more states that sign on, the more likely such cards could become mandatory across the country. That's why privacy advocates are urging the governor to veto the measure. The American Civil Liberties Union, for instance, is decrying the move to RFID chips in driver's licenses as a "civil liberties nightmare."

According to the ACLU:
Experts warned that this technology was insecure ten years ago, when the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under President Bush first introduced these licenses. Back then, DHS admitted that the personal information stored in these chips could be read from a distance of up to 30 feet.

In fact, a security researcher built a reader with $250 in spare parts, drove around downtown San Francisco, and proved how easy it is to read and copy these documents—without anyone ever knowing or even suspecting their information was being skimmed.

Sound creepy? That’s because it is. This technology is a dream come true for identity thieves and stalkers, and a civil liberties nightmare for Californians concerned about government intrusion and tracking.
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Jim Harper, of the Cato Institute, has been beating the drum against this program for years. He views it as an offspring of the 2009 Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, and Harper said it's "not difficult" to imagine a time when this so-called Enhanced Driver's License (EDL) program "ceases to be optional."

For its part, Homeland Security says the RFID chips do not store personal identifying information. The chip contains a unique number linked to a motorist and is stored in a DHS database.

Setting aside the Orwellian, slippery slope argument that the RFID tags one day could become mandatory nationwide, researchers say the chips are highly susceptible to forgery. University of Washington researchers have concluded that there is "no encryption of any kind and they can be read by anyone," and that "reading and cloning" of them "is possible." The American Electronics Association has warned that hackers could read the chips from a distance and "easily create a duplicate." Even the DHS Office of the Inspector General issued similar warnings.

History has shown that government-issued cards mutate for other purposes. For example, buying health insurance or even a mobile phone often requires providing a Social Security number. The Social Security card was designed to track Americans' federal retirement accounts.
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Ars Technica
 
Facing a strong backlash, person-rating app Peeple seemingly vanishes

So much for that app, if it really existed, to which there is now doubt it was ever real to begin with.

The online presence of the widely lampooned purported app Peeple, which apparently allows people to rate individuals, has been pulled from the Internet. As of Monday, its website has been removed, as have its Facebook and Twitter accounts. Meanwhile, the company’s Instagram account has been set to private as of Sunday.

Its previous YouTube videos have also been yanked except for one, released on Saturday, entitled “Peeple Watching Ep11 - Viral & Global in 24 Hours.” It features the company’s cofounder, Julia Cordray, essentially congratulating herself on garnering so much media attention. Cordray did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment.

The app that The Washington Post famously dubbed “Yelp for People” has not actually materialized—its purported release date is “November 2015.” No one has seen or used the app outside of a few alleged screenshots. The app development studio that Peeple reportedly has contracted with, Y Media Labs, did not immediately respond to Ars' request for comment.

Various press accounts have only had the vaguest of references to its details, even including a claimed market capitalization. The Post reported that “As of Monday [September 28], the company’s shares put its value at $7.6 million,” a figure that seems oddly specific for a privately held firm with no way to independently verify it. Earlier last month, the Calgary Herald reported that the company claimed to have taken in $270,000 in "private capital funding." The company’s investors, if they are real, have not been named.

Cordray also declined to respond to an October 2 question posed by Motherboard asking about a $50,000 “business grant from the Government of Canada” that was referred to in a YouTube video, which has also since been deleted.

All that seems to be left of the self-proclaimed app is a short blog entry posted on Sunday to LinkedIn, where cofounder Julia Cordray doubled down on the app:

Except, there is one thing I must tell you; this has always been a positivity app.

Peeple will not be a tool to tell other humans how horrible they are. Actually, it’s the exact opposite.

Peeple is a POSITIVE ONLY APP. We want to bring positivity and kindness to the world.

And now I’m going to use myself as an example for what can happen when negative comments can be made about you without your approval.
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However, according to Snopes, in "Peeple Watching Ep4" (since removed) Cordray spoke this line on August 27 2015: "I think this app does really help to know and find the best in each of us and the good in each of us, but it would be pointless if it was all positive."

In the company's LinkedIn post, Cordray seemed to deny that the app is a hoax. "The answer is: It’s real but not in the way it's currently being portrayed. We are in fact creating an app called Peeple and have every intention of releasing it at the end of November," she wrote.

On Monday, TechCrunch reminded the world that a very earnest attempt at such an app was previously tried—five years ago. It failed.
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Ars Technica
 
There is an elementary playground feeling to it like they are taking their ball and going home because the other kids aren't playing fair.
 
It's like the ISPs in the USA trying to rip apart Netflix because people don't want to pay $200 a month for **** cable tv.
 
I don't even watch live television much anymore. If I could cut down the number of channels I actually did watch it would cut the bill by like 75%.
 
Appeals court rules that Google book-scanning is fair use

This is a big win for fair rights use.

It's legal to scan books—even if you don't own the copyright—the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit held today.

The Authors' Guild sued Google, saying that serving up search results from scanned books infringes on publishers' copyrights, even though the search giant shows only restricted snippets of the work. The authors' group said Google's book search isn't transformative; that the snippets provide an illegal free substitute for their work; and that Google Books infringes their "derivative rights" in revenue they could gain from a "licensed search" market.

In its opinion (PDF), a three-judge panel rejected all of the Authors' Guild claims in a decision that will broaden the scope of fair use in the digital age. The immediate effect means that Google Books won't have to close up shop or ask book publishers for permission to scan. In the long run, the ruling could inspire other large-scale digitization projects.

Google's digital copies make public "information about Plaintiffs' books," the judges point out, but do not provide a "substantial substitute" for them. As for the licensing market, the authors' group misconstrues how it works. An author's copyright does not include "an exclusive right to supply information... about her works."

The opinion begins with a brief description of Google's book scanning project, which started in 2004. Working with major libraries like Stanford, Columbia, the University of California, and the New York Public Library, Google has scanned and made machine-readable more than 20 million books. Most of them are non-fiction and out of print.

That allows the public to search for particular terms that might appear in a book (or not appear). That has enabled new forms of research, as tens of millions of books can be searched to learn more about word frequencies, nomenclature, linguistic usage, and other topics. Unlike other forms of Google search, Google does not display advertising to book searchers, nor does it receive payment if a searcher uses Google's link to buy a copy.

Four factors

The court then goes into considering the four fair use factors. Google's use is indeed transformative, they held, citing caselaw involving other "full-text searchable database" as a "quintessentially transformative use." The court points to Google's "ngrams" tool that allows searches for frequency of usage of selected words—something that couldn't be done in a lifetime of manual searching, even given access to the millions of books in the libraries working with Google. The "snippet view" that Google provides is also transformative, "identifying books of interest to the searcher" without replacing them.

Judges gave little weight to the second factor, which is "the nature of the copyrighted work," a quality that "rarely play a significant role" in deciding fair use.

The third factor was Google's mountain to climb: amount of the copyrighted work that's used. Google scanned the entire book. But that didn't kill its argument. Courts have rejected any "categorical rule" that a whole copy can't be a fair use. "While Google makes an unauthorized digital copy of the entire book, it does not reveal that digital copy to the public," the opinion states. "The copy is made to enable the search functions to reveal limited, important information about the books."

The judges also carefully analyzed Google's use of "snippet view." The snippets are small, normally an eighth of a page; no more than three snippets are shown for any searched term, and no more than one per page; and google "blacklists" some parts of each page, and one full page out of each ten, excluding them from snippet view entirely. Finally, snippet view isn't available in cases where a snippet might entirely satisfy a reader's needs, such as dictionaries or cookbooks.

The fourth factor is the effect on the market for the copyrighted work, and here again the judges ruled in favor of Google. The snippet function "can cause some loss of sales," the judges acknowledge. If a searcher's need is satisfied by the small snippet, they might not make a purchase or create demand at a library (thus spurring additional library purchases.) "But the possibility, or even the probability or certainty, of some loss of sales does not suffice to make the copy an effectively competing substitute that would tilt the weighty fourth factor in favor of the rights holder in the original," the judges conclude.

No right to a "licensed search" market

A second argument of the authors is that a market for licensing their digital works exists "or would have existed" and is being unfairly grabbed by Google. In part, they make that argument by citing the original (rejected) settlement, in which Google would have paid authors for use of their digitized copies.

The court notes those earlier arrangements would have allowed users "to read substantial portions of the book," and "have no bearing on Google's present programs."

They also point to their "unpaid market in licenses" (emphasis in decision), like licenses granted to Amazon for its "Search Inside the Book" feature. Again, the appeals judges don't accept the comparison. Google is disseminating information "about the original works, which falls outside the protection of copyright."

Finally, the Authors' Guild made the intriguing argument that the Google Books project puts them at risk of a hack attack that could steal their digitized books and disseminate them, "thus destroying the value of their copyrights." The judges found that Google's security measures, including keeping the digital scans on computers "walled off from public Internet access," was good enough.

The case was originally filed in 2005 as a class action. The parties reached a settlement, but the judge rejected it in 2011. Instead, the fair use issue was litigated, and Google won at the district court in 2013. That win has now been upheld by the appeals court. Given the importance of the Google Books case, the next and final stop may be the Supreme Court.

The fair use result should please some critics of the earlier settlement who saw it as edging towards giving Google a monopoly on digitized books. With no licensing requirement, any competitor who can muster sufficient resources and relationships with libraries could create an alternative to Google Books.

Google didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the decision. The Authors' Guild published a statement saying that the decision leaves writers "high and dry," and saying that they will appeal to the Supreme Court.

"The Authors Guild is disappointed that the Court has failed to reverse the District Court’s flawed interpretation of the fair use doctrine,” said Authors Guild Executive Director Mary Rasenberger. "Most full-time authors live on the edge of being able to keep writing as a profession, as our recent income survey showed; a loss of licensing revenue can tip the balance... We are very disheartened that the court was unable to understand the grave impact that this decision, if left standing, could have on copyright incentives and, ultimately, our literary heritage.
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Ars Technica
 
Who wants to have the nicest background ever?

So, yeah. This image is pretty big. Astronomers have stitched together a high-resolution view of the Milky Way, which measures an astonishing 46 billion pixels and comes in at 194 gigabytes. Yikes.

Fortunately, you don’t need to download the whole thing to observe it. A handy online tool lets you browse and scan the entire image to your heart’s content, which includes the entire ribbon of our galaxy as seen from Earth. The image, created by observations taken over five years, spans a 1,323-square-degree area of the sky, which is 6,500 times bigger than the full Moon appears in the sky.

The image was created by a team of astronomers from the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany and described in a paper in Astronomical Notes. They used an observatory in the Atacama Desert in Chile to create the image, stitching together multiple images of the night sky as part of the Galactic Disk Survey (GDS). The image itself had to be divided into 268 sections.

If it seems slightly less rich in color compared to some other images of space, this is because the astronomers used a narrowband filter, which doesn’t let many colors through. This allowed the team to more easily find variable objects, ones fluctuating in brightness, which was the goal of the survey.

From their observations, the team were able to discover more than 50,000 variable objects, which includes things like variable stars. This could be the result of planets passing in front, or stars orbiting and obscuring one another.
Click to expand...

Only 194 gigabytes. :o
 
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