The holiday hasn’t always been about shopping. Five years ago, only about two dozen companies were offering discounts on Singles’ Day, also known as “Double 11.”
Then Alibaba entered the game in 2009 and within three years, Singles’ Day had become the biggest 24-hour shopping event in the world.
via Singles’ Day Is China’s Cyber Monday – Business Insider.
He said after the application is released, they don’t learn from the complaints nearly as much as they learn from watching the employees use the application on the job and see where the issues are. It’s much easier to observe the problem than trying to tease it out of the users.
The user’s guide for one of Aruba’s recent software products states: “The wireless network has a wealth of information about unassociated and associated devices.” That software includes “a location engine that calculates associated and unassociated device location every 30 seconds by default… The last 1,000 historical locations are stored for each MAC address.”
For now, Seattle’s mesh network is concentrated in the downtown area. But the SPD has indicated in PowerPoint presentations—also acquired by The Stranger—that it hopes to eventually have “citywide deployment” of the system that, again, has potential surveillance capabilities that the SPD declined to answer questions about. That could give a whole new meaning to the phrase “real-time situational awareness.”
This is why you should always have wifi disabled, in “airplane mode,” turned off when not in use. Only turn on wifi for your device manually when you need to use a network. Doing this also extends battery life because running the radio interface uses a lot of juice. This network they built in Seattle would have great public benefit if it were open for all to use and there’s few engineering reasons why it can’t be. Since emergencies are rare may as well utilize it and then kick people off indiscriminately when the network truly is needed. I suspect however it’s not open for use by the rabble. Another blurb from the article:
It’s reasonable to assume that locally gleaned information will be shared with other organizations, including federal ones. An SPD diagram of the mesh network, for example, shows its information heading to institutions large and small, including the King County Sheriff’s Office, the US Coast Guard, and our local fusion center.
Fusion centers, if you’re unfamiliar with the term, are information-sharing hubs, defined by the Department of Homeland Security as “focal points” for the “receipt, analysis, gathering, and sharing” of surveillance information.
At least if they’re going to spy provide some value to the spied upon “user.”
Recent advances in chemically bonding metal particles allowed the researchers to use silver nanoparticle ink to print the circuits and avoid thermal bonding, or sintering, a time-consuming and potentially damaging technique due to the heat. Printing the circuits on resin-coated paper, PET film and glossy photo paper worked best. Researchers also made a list of materials to avoid, such as canvas cloths and magnet sheets.
via Georgia Tech develops inkjet-based circuits at fraction of time and cost.
From: Ink-Jet Printing Custom-Designed Micro Circuits
Initial reports of the technique, which the team demonstrated at a meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery in Zurich Sept. 10, described the result as a “paper computer,” though the best researchers could do was print a WiFi antenna, circuits for an LED and a 3D-printed flashlight. They also produced circuits containing microprocessors and memory-chip connectors that could potentially become components of an actual device, but the printing, ink and materials are still far too basic to allow that, according to Matt Johnson of conductive-ink manufacturer Bare Conductive, who was quoted in a New Scientist story about the demonstration.
To keep the balance between the integrity of our trademarks and the ability to to use and promote Ubuntu, we’ve tried to define a reasonable Intellectual Property Policy. You can read the full policy at http://www.canonical.com/intellectual-property-policy. As you can see from our policy, to use the Ubuntu trademarks and and Ubuntu word in a domain name would require approval from Canonical.
via Canonical shouldn’t abuse trademark law to silence critics of its privacy decisions | micah.f.lee.
Update: From Canonical Blog.
In the case of fixubuntu.com, we were concerned that the use of the trademark implied a connection with and endorsement from the Ubuntu project which didn’t exist. The site owner has already agreed to remove the Ubuntu logo and clarified that there is no connection; from our perspective the situation has been resolved, and we have no issue with the site or the criticism it includes. In fact, far from an trying to silence critics, our trademark policy actually calls out parody and criticism and other uses as being allowed when the marks are used appropriately. (Please make the parodies funny – we need a good laugh as much as anyone!)
From Mark Shuttleworth:
This was a bit silly on our part, sorry. Our trademark guidelines specifically allow satire and critique (‘sucks sites’) and we should at most have asked him to state that his use of the logo was subject to those guidelines.
What we see is a hardware architecture that’s both simple and powerful. With longtime game designer Mark Cerny leading the way, lending his software-minded expertise to Ootori and the rest of the hardware engineering team, Sony abandoned the overly complex Cell microprocessor that drove the PlayStation 3, building the PS4 around an “x86″ chip similar to the processors that have driven most of our personal computers for the last three decades. The idea was to make it that much easier for developers to build games for the new console, to create the things that will ultimately capture our attention.
via See What’s Inside the PlayStation 4 With These Exclusive Photos | Game|Life | Wired.com.
Patch antennas focus the radio beam within a specific area. (A couple of vendors, Ruckus Wireless and Xirrus, have developed their own built-in “smart” antennas that adjust and focus Wi-Fi signals on clients.) Depending on the beamwidth, the effect can be that of a floodlight or a spotlight, says Jeff Lime, Ventev’s vice president. Ventev’s newest TerraWave High-Density products focus the radio beam within narrower ranges than some competing products, and offer higher gain (in effect putting more oomph into the signal to drive it further), he says.
via High-gain patch antennas boost Wi-Fi capacity for Georgia Tech – Network World.
At Georgia Tech, each antenna focused the Wi-Fi signal from a specific overhead access point to cover a section of seats below it. Fewer users associate with each access point. The result is a kind of virtuous circle. “It gives more capacity per user, so more bandwidth, so a better user experience,” says Lime.
In this research we develop a janken (rock-paper-scissors) robot with 100% winning rate as one example of human-machine cooperation systems. Human being plays one of rock, paper and scissors at the timing of one, two, three. According to the timing, the robot hand plays one of three kinds so as to beat the human being.
Recognition of human hand can be performed at 1ms with a high-speed vision, and the position and the shape of the human hand are recognized. The wrist joint angle of the robot hand is controlled based on the position of the human hand. The vision recognizes one of rock, paper and scissors based on the shape of the human hand. After that, the robot hand plays one of rock, paper and scissors so as to beat the human being in 1ms.
It’s understandable why the company would decline to comment: Inside the plain text archive apparently stolen from the firm are more than 850,000 credit card numbers, expiry dates and associated names and addresses. More than one-quarter (241,000) of all compromised card numbers were high- or no-limit American Express accounts, card numbers that have very high resale value in the cybercrime underground.
via Hackers Take Limo Service Firm for a Ride — Krebs on Security.
This afternoon, that stockpile was finally used for what pretty much everyone suspected it would be used for—launching an all-out patent attack on Google and Android. The smartphone patent wars have been underway for a few years now, and the eight lawsuits filed in federal court today by Rockstar Consortium mean that the conflict just hit DEFCON 1.
Google probably knew this was coming. When it lost out in the Nortel auction, the company’s top lawyer, David Drummond, complained that the Microsoft-Apple patent alliance was part of a “hostile, organized campaign against Android.” Google’s failure to get patents in the Nortel auction was seen as one of the driving factors in its $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola in 2011.
via Patent war goes nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-owned “Rockstar” sues Google | Ars Technica.