Friday, January 31, 2014

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Coppers can switch off your car

Posted: 31 Jan 2014 01:45 AM PST

The days of a speedy get away could become a thing of the past if a top secret EU body allows new technology to be adopted in the EU.

The EU is deciding whether to adopt technology which will allow coppers to remotely immobilise cars. It would require that all cars in the bloc are fitted with the device.

Dubbed 'remote stopping' technology could be activated by a switch in a control room, shutting off the fuel and cutting the ignition.

It will take ten years before the gear is being used and it will also allow police to track a vehicle's movements as well as immobilise it.

According to The Daily Telegraph a group of senior EU officials, including several Home Office mandarins, have signed off the proposal at a secret meeting in Brussels.

Papers claim that cars on the run can be dangerous for citizens and criminals will take risks to escape after a crime. At the moment there is no way for police are unable to chase the criminal due to a lack of efficient means to stop the vehicle safely.

'The project will work on a technological solution that can be a "build in standard" for all cars that enter the European market.'

The European Network of Law Enforcement Technologies (Enlets) has proposed a timetable to ensure the technology is fully developed by 2020.

Of course there are some who think that this is all an EU plot to take away British sovereignty. While we can see a problem with the tracking thing, we are not sure that turning off a car speeding away from the scene of an armed robbery is such a bad idea.

Conservative David Davis told the Daily Wail : 'I would be fascinated to know what the state's liability will be if they put these devices in all vehicles and one went off by accident whilst a car was doing 70mph on a motorway with a truck behind it resulting in loss of life.'

He is apparently less concerned about the risk of a stolen car driving through a school crossing. In any event his party installed  ground to air rocket launchers to screen the Olympics without being that concerned.

UKIP leader Nigel Farage claimed that it was an incredible power grab by the EU. It is appalling they are even thinking of it. Then his party is full of sluts so he probably has other things to worry about.

The Home Office said Enlets is not funded by them are carrying out a 'wide range' of 'research projects'. 

Your AI will live on after you

Posted: 31 Jan 2014 12:58 AM PST

A startup called Eterni.me is working out a way to create an AI version of you based on your internet interactions.

The idea is that you can create a persona which can let you chat, see, and interact with the digitised dearly departed. It means that the ancient idea of living with the dead spirits of your family will be a reality.

Marius Ursache, the startup's chief executive said that the idea of the technology is to allow people to communicate with their lost loved one just like we chat with our living.

The main difficulty in creating an AI is that it is based on private data which is collected over years.

Rather than talking to the dead person, you are really communicating with the vast amounts of information people generate throughout their life, and allowing others to make sense of it.

In the good old days the dead left journals and diaries, private personal narratives that provide this kind of connection.

These days we generate so much more information, unfiltered GChat, GMail, and Facebook archives are almost too much to make sense. And so enter the idea of an AI based avatar to communicate with it.

Eterni.me claims it will "launch soon," but its prototype is still primitive and builds off existing adaptive algorithms. The idea could be years away from being properly released.

However, the team also insists the elements are more or less in place as all you need are email logs, location data and the necessary tools to synthesise them. 

Obama names naval top spook

Posted: 31 Jan 2014 12:28 AM PST

US President Barack Obama has named US Navy officer, Vice Admiral Michael Rogers to spy on everyone in his glorious empire.

Rogers, by name and Rogers by profession will take over as head of the National Security Agency.

The department is under unprecedented pressure after leaks from ex-intelligence contractor Edward Snowden showed that it was carrying out electronic surveillance on an unprecedented scale.

Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel, who recommended Rogers for the post, said that Vice Admiral Rogers would bring extraordinary and unique qualifications to this position as the agency continues its vital mission and implements President Obama's reforms.

Rogers would also take over as head of the military's cyber warfare command.

It is a moot point how sympathetic Rogers would be to any reforms of the NSA. He started out life as an intelligence cryptologist and heads the US Fleet Cyber Command, overseeing the navy's cyber warfare specialists. For the last 30-year he has has worked in cryptology and eavesdropping, or "signals intelligence".

It is not clear then how he will respond when he is face to face with civil liberties and privacy questions under an intense public spotlight.

Hagel said he was "confident that Admiral Rogers has the wisdom to help balance the demands of security, privacy and liberty in our digital age",

The president rejected calls to name a civilian as NSA director. However, the new NSA deputy director would be Richard Leggett, making him the agency's senior ranking civilian, acting as a chief operating officer.

Leggett has managed the NSA's media leaks task force, which evaluated the effect of Snowden's disclosures.

In December Leggett said he would be open to "having a conversation" with Snowden about a possible amnesty in return for a full accounting of what the ex-contractor took and where the files are now. We somehow do not think that will happen. 

Nadella set to replace Ballmer

Posted: 31 Jan 2014 12:25 AM PST

Software king of the world Microsoft is about to announce Satya Nadella as the replacement for the shy and soon to be retiring Steve Ballmer.

Nadella is Vole's top cloud expert and had been a bookie's favourite for the top post. He is a rising star in the Volehill and hails from Hyderabad. He was promoted to run the company's  cloud computing initiatives in July last year as part of  CEO Steve "There's a kind of Hush"  Ballmer's radical re-organisation of the company.

Reuters claims that its deep throat has named Nadella and hinted that Bill Gates might even step aside as chairman. If Gates goes he will be replaced by lead independent director John Thompson. He will remain a director. While Gates has been doing less at Microsoft of late, his stepping down, along with the appointment of a new chairman would mean a major shake-up of the Volehill.

Nadella was born in 1967 and educated in India and the United States. He started at Sun Microsystems and joined Microsoft in 1992. Nadella had leading roles in the Office and Bling search engine teams.

He was promoted to run the company's server and tools unit in 2011 and his unit forms the backbone of Microsoft's cloud-computing platform. Nadella's official title is executive vice president, cloud and enterprise.

However there are some questions here. With Steve and perhaps Bill gone, Microsoft is starting to look more like IBM every day. Some investors had been hoping for someone who might be more likely to shake up the company and reward shareholders with greater dividends and share buybacks. Nadella, while being seen as a solid choice backed by John Thompson is just... well... dull.

Nadella has little experience of working with Wall Street and Ballmer and Gates did not prioritize it. Gates would likely focus on technical innovation in any new role, the source said.

Ballmer was reelected to the board in November, but it is not clear how long he will remain there after retirement, the source said.In fact when the rumour was made clear we misheard it and thought Nigella had been appointed, which would certainly have been a lot more interesting.

Patent troll sues movie distributors

Posted: 31 Jan 2014 12:23 AM PST

It seems that the patent trolls are not going away despite some concerted political action to shove them back under their bridges.

The latest daft orchestral manoeuvre in the dark comes from an outfit called Red Pine Point which is suing Apple, Amazon and Mark Cuban's Magnolia Pictures for distributing movies over mobile networks to mobile phones.

But Mark Cuban points out that the patent is specific and illogical. He said that if Magnolia, which distributes movies decides to make movies available for download via cellular to mobile devices, it has not violated the patent. But if they then decide to show that flick in a theatre it has violated the patent. Huh?

Writing in his bog , Cuban said that in the movie business you have to own the rights to the movie before you can decide its distribution strategy. It is also difficult to sell a movie before its theatrical release simply because none of the big theatre chains will release a movie that has already been released on other platforms. Only some independent theatres that will do it and it these that the troll is going for.

Basically if a film is put onto VOD, PPV or on Amazon or ITunes and see "Before it's in theatres" movies for sale or rent or PPV the patent troll thinks that is his idea.

"This patent is not protecting a business the Troll came up with. It is not protecting an invention they created. They were not operating in this business in any way shape that I can find," Cuban moaned.

Cuban said that Red Pine Point took the obvious idea that if movies can be downloaded and released via the internet, the same thing will happen via mobile data.

Cuban said in his blog that they probably noticed what his company was doing back in 2004 and decided to try to patent it. What is fairly dumb is that they got the patent.

However they appear to have picked the wrong person. Cuban hates patent trolls so much that he created the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents. 

Symantec revenues fall

Posted: 30 Jan 2014 05:43 AM PST

It seems that no one these days wants to protect their computers with security software. Symantec reported a five percent fall in quarterly revenue claiming that a decline in sales of personal computers hurt demand for its security software.

The outfit, which makes the super clunky Norton anti-virus software, saw its shares fall by three percent after it made the announcement.

Chief Executive Steve Bennett said he was pleased with the result, which was much better than previous quarters. He said he will not rest easy until it is out of the woods.

Symantec is mostly a PC business and worldwide PC shipments fell about 10 percent in 2013 and are expect to do so again this year by another four percent in 2014.

Symantec's revenue fell to $1.71 billion in the third quarter from $1.79 billion a year earlier.

The company has been reorganising its sales force to create specialists for each product group instead of having everyone sell everything, leading to a temporary shortfall in cash.

All this sounds a bit daft but it is designed to stimulate demand and drive better licenses from a new and improved sales force.

Symantec used to make shedloads of cash by bundling its software with PCs as the company has distribution partnerships with manufacturers. 
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