Qcloud puts quantum chip in the cloud for coders to experiment

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The team behind the project believes that the limited availability of quantum computers would deter extensive research and there would be shortage of skilled quantum researchers, engineers and programmers once quantum computers actually make it to the main stream. Through Qcloud the team is keen to open up quantum computing research and make it available to as many researchers, engineers, entrepreneurs and engineers as possible.

via Qcloud puts quantum chip in the cloud for coders to experiment.

Inside News Corp’s $540 Million Bet on American Classrooms

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The company plans to cash in on education with custom-made tablet computers and curricula, as American classrooms move ever closer to complete digital integration. It began by purchasing a company called Wireless Generation, rebranding it as Amplify and pouring in more than half a billion dollars.

via Inside News Corp’s $540 Million Bet on American Classrooms.

IPv6 To Complicate Threat-Intelligence Landscape

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Yet with the gradual — some would say “glacial” — move to the Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) address scheme, the Internet’s address space will grow from merely big to nearly infinite. The vastness of the address space will cause problems for many threat-intelligence firms, from allowing attackers to use a new address for every attack to causing a rapid expansion in the size of the database needed to track the data on various sources, says Tommy Stiansen, chief technology officer for Norse, a real-time threat intelligence provider.

via IPv6 To Complicate Threat-Intelligence Landscape — Dark Reading.

About Wireless Leiden

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The Wireless Leiden Foundation has established an open, inexpensive, fast wireless network for Leiden and surrounding villages. It is an independent network, which technically links up seamlessly to the Internet, but can also be used for free local communication within the Leiden region. Wireless Leiden is a non-profit organisation, operating completely with professional volunteers and aiming at infrastructure and not services. All our software, technological and organisational knowledge is freely available to others under an open source license.

via About Wireless Leiden | Stichting Wireless Leiden.

Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.’s

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The government pays AT&T to place its employees in drug-fighting units around the country. Those employees sit alongside Drug Enforcement Administration agents and local detectives and supply them with the phone data from as far back as 1987.

via Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.’s – NYTimes.com.

The program was started in 2007, according to the slides, and has been carried out in great secrecy.

There once was a time, back when the old AT&T existed,  when all  phone companies viewed customer privacy sacrosanct.

The STEM Crisis Is a Myth

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To parse the simultaneous claims of both a shortage and a surplus of STEM workers, we’ll need to delve into the data behind the debate, how it got going more than a half century ago, and the societal, economic, and nationalistic biases that have perpetuated it. And what that dissection reveals is that there is indeed a STEM crisis—just not the one everyone’s been talking about. The real STEM crisis is one of literacy: the fact that today’s students are not receiving a solid grounding in science, math, and engineering.

via The STEM Crisis Is a Myth – IEEE Spectrum.

‘Patent trolls’ put brakes on S.F. transit app

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As far as anyone on the outside can tell, this is their sole business model: leveraging patents not to build competitive products, but simply to strong-arm others into forking over money when they create something that stumbles into the broadly worded language of the intellectual property protections.

via ‘Patent trolls’ put brakes on S.F. transit app – SFGate.

He was confident the patents in question were bogus, loose legalese describing obvious ideas. Moreover, the service that he received his data from, NextBus, already had a license to use those patents.

I Flirt and Tweet. Follow Me at #Socialbot.

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For some, the goal is increasing popularity. Last month, computer scientists from the Federal University of Ouro Preto in Brazil revealed that Carina Santos, a much-followed journalist on Twitter, was actually not a real person but a bot that they had created. Based on the circulation of her tweets, a commonly used ranking site, Twitalyzer, ranked Ms. Santos as having more online “influence” than Oprah Winfrey.

via I Flirt and Tweet. Follow Me at #Socialbot. – NYTimes.com.

Socialbots are tapping into an ever-expanding universe of social media. Last year, the number of Twitter accounts topped 500 million. Some researchers estimate that only 35 percent of the average Twitter user’s followers are real people. In fact, more than half of Internet traffic already comes from nonhuman sources like bots or other types of algorithms. Within two years, about 10 percent of the activity occurring on social online networks will be masquerading bots, according to technology researchers.

After patent loss, Apple tweaks FaceTime—and logs 500,000 complaints

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Before the VirnetX case, nearly all FaceTime calls were done through a system of direct communication. Essentially, Apple would verify that both parties had valid FaceTime accounts and then allow their two devices to speak directly to each other over the Internet, without any intermediary or “relay” servers. However, a small number of calls—5 to 10 percent, according to an Apple engineer who testified at trial—were routed through “relay servers.”

Both sides in the litigation admit that if Apple routes its FaceTime calls through relay servers, it will avoid infringing the VirnetX patents. Once Apple was found to be infringing—and realized it could end up paying an ongoing royalty for using FaceTime—the company redesigned the system so that all FaceTime calls would rely on relay servers. Lease believes the switch happened in April.

via Report: After patent loss, Apple tweaks FaceTime—and logs 500,000 complaints | Ars Technica.