Researchers at UW have been able to take videos of Obama doing his speechifying thing and make it appear that he's saying something entirely different.
Using this technique, it's possible to make "Photoshopped videos". And relatively easily. Even Orwell would be impressed.
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Since many internet sites are privately-owned, you need to abide by their terms of service or risk finding yourself banned from the platform. Most of us understand that, but some don't; they get taken out. If you want freedom of speech on the web, where you can say anything you want to - no matter how outrageous - you have to build your own site. And pay for it.
The First Amendment is not universal.
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Microsoft President Brad Smith says in a blog post that he plans to unveil details about the initiative at a Tuesday event in Washington, D.C.
Smith says the strategy would use TV white spaces, which are unlicensed and unused airwaves. He says the powerful bandwidth will allow wireless signals to travel over hills and through buildings and trees.
The company has no plans to become an ISP itself, but will partner with service providers in 12 states, assuming FCC approval. That's far from a given, as broadcast television stations have been raising concerns about bandwidth bleed that might interfere with their transmissions. That concern seems unfounded, as stations have gone to digital narrowcasting, but you never know what a lifer bureaucrat's going to decide.
If approved and deployed, this would bring broadband capability to at least 2 million additional people with the reliability of current Wi-Fi setups but with considerably lower power requirements. Microsoft is working on a white space receiver/transmitter that they hope to bring to market for under $200.
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Or your grapes, or...? Well, one answer is coming from the town of Pendleton, in eastern Oregon. The site of an Unmanned Aircraft Systems test range, one of the guys working on UAS came up with an idea for something entirely different: Digital Harvest.
Digital Harvest CEO Young Kim has found a way to mesh virtual reality with robotics to delicately pick the fruit. Kim wants to address the dire labor shortage viticulturists and the apple and cherry industries face at harvest time.
As has been mentioned here on a number of occasions, illegal aliens are not needed to harvest fruits and vegetables; farms will become more automated. Already there are autonomous robots capable of detecting whether, say, strawberries are ripe and selectively harvesting them. Similar robots can work in lettuce fields.
One problem with that approach is that autonomous robots are expensive. Kim's idea is much less so; it basically involves a modified golf cart equipped with the daVinci ARM, which has been used for several years in minor surgical procedures. By tagging the cart and ARM into a virtual reality network, there is no need to have actual people on the site to do the picking - it can be done from anywhere, and could easily provide work for wounded war veterans without the need for them to leave their homes, for example.
Pendleton stands to overtake Portland Metropolitan Area as a center for tech innovation. And the robotics don't need Porta-Potties.
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Finally, the FCC is getting around to doing something - like enforcing our law.
The agency on Thursday proposed a $120 million fine against Adrian Abramovich of Miami, Fla., alleging his operation, doing business as Marketing Strategy Leaders, made 96 million spoofed robocalls during the period in which the FCC investigated. Of those calls, about 90% were made to wireless phones, with 10% to landline phones. The calls used "neighborhood spoofing" technology to include local area codes and the first three numbers of the recipient's own phone number to encourage people to answer the calls.
There's been a marked uptick in this sort of thing from jerks like Abramovich, who use VOIP to hide where they're coming from. Let it go to voicemail; if it's a real call, they'll leave a message. Robocallers never do.
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Dad's a big Cubs fan, so my brother got him a subscription to MLB, then thought a big flat-screen TV would be a great addition. I sent him some cash, he got the TV, and trundled it over to install it yesterday. Dad was really happy, but today, he couldn't get a picture on the screen. I suggested to brother that Dad had probably hit the source key on the remote and thereby disconnected the HDMI input. He tried walking Dad by phone through fixing that.
This is why I'm glad that we live 3000 miles apart. Well, brother mentioned that he might as well be telling Dad how to build a nuclear reactor. Yes, that sort of happens.
I told my brother to tell Dad to be sure that the cable from the hypersonic overthruster was firmly seated in the slot on the lower-left back side of the panel. He got a good laugh out of that one.
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Microsoft "Modern Keyboard". Kind of spendy, at about $130, but it has a built-in fingerprint sensor (a "hidden key" on the right side of the keyboard), sturdy aluminum frame, and can work either wirelessly or cabled. Looks interesting, but $130 is kind of steep for something that basically gives you fingerprint ID for access. You can buy readers for less than $50.
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Prior to the 1920s, roads - such as they were - predominantly served horse-travel, pedestrians, and the occasional cyclist. With the advent of the auto came schemes to remove such impediments to motorized travel, or at least to mitigate them. "Jaywalking" became an offense, and to this day it is not uncommon for offenders to be cited for what was, prior to the 1920s, common behavior. In something reminiscent of the push to remove impediments to motorized travel on roadways, manufacturers of autonomous vehicles would like cyclists and pedestrians off the roads entirely:
The advent of driverless cars will mean an end to the 100-year-old carnage on the road, with pedestrians and cyclists now safe on the streets thanks to tech. Another view of the future is that in a city where driverless cars are programmed to avoid cyclists and pedestrians these cars wouldn't be able to move for all of the cyclists and pedestrians riding and walking in front of them.
It's this second view that is clearly exercising the patience of Renault chief executive, Carlos Ghosn. Introducing a concept driverless car he told CBNC that the arrival of the technology could be delayed by pesky cyclists who, he said, "don't respect any rules usually."
"One of the biggest problems is people with bicycles. The car is confused by [cyclists] because from time-to-time they behave like pedestrians and from time-to-time they behave like cars."
Therein lies a huge problem: people are inconsistent in their behavior, and robots don't deal well with inconsistency.
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Even though this site is banned in China, Vietnam, and a few other places, every now and then someone from there manages to sneak in, as happened 40 minutes ago. Hope they can manage it more often.
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Patch it.
Microsoft took what it called the "highly unusual" step of patching older Windows versions like XP against the WannaCrypt ransomware virus. It's doing the same in June to protect against attacks that are potentially even more sinister. "This month, some vulnerabilities were identified that pose elevated risk of cyber attacks by government organizations, sometimes referred to as nation-state actors or other copycat organizations," security manager Adrienne Hall wrote in a blog.
You'll have to download and install the patch manually for XP, Windows 8, Windows Vista, and other older platforms that are no longer supported. It's very likely worth the time and effort. Microsoft never goes out of its way like this.
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