The largest pool of data is that harvested by Vigilant from commercial sources, most notably, Vigilant’s subsidiary, DRN (Digital Recognition Network). This pool of LPR data totals over 1.8 billion detections and grows at a rate of almost 70 million per month. This data is available via an annual subscription and greatly enhances an agency’s investigative reach.
Author Archives: mea
Microsoft demos breakthrough in real-time translated conversations
Skype Translator results from decades of work by the industry, years of work by our researchers, and now is being developed jointly by the Skype and Microsoft Translator teams. The demo showed near real-time audio translation from English to German and vice versa, combining Skype voice and IM technologies with Microsoft Translator, and neural network-based speech recognition.
EU Set to Probe Ireland’s Tax Arrangements with Apple
Ireland’s taxation laws allow multinationals to set up subsidiaries that effectively turn them into stateless entities whose revenues are subject to no jurisdiction. It’s the definition of entirely legal tax avoidance, and Apple has been among the most successful companies in routing much of its international revenues and earnings through its Irish subsidiaries.
via EU Set to Probe Ireland’s Tax Arrangements with Apple – The Mac Observer.
How Amazon got a patent on white-background photography
The problem is not with the examiners, but with the law that governs that examination. That law makes it possible to get patents on ideas that any ordinary person would find old, well-known, and obvious.
via How Amazon got a patent on white-background photography | Ars Technica.
The result in Hear-Wear explains the result in the Studio Arrangement patent application. In both cases, the inventive idea, embodied in the independent claim, was shown to be old and well-known by a prior art reference. And in both cases, a seemingly trivial add-on feature in a dependent claim ended up being the feature that tipped the balance from obvious to nonobvious—a multi-pronged plug in one, and a distance ratio in the other. Because in both cases, that trivial feature was so ordinary that no one would have taken the time to describe it in a printed publication, but without such a publication, according to the Federal Circuit’s rules, obviousness cannot be proved.
This, in my view, is why the examiner did not even attempt to reject claim 3. A distance ratio may seem trivial, unimportant, or uninventive, but absent a written prior art reference, that distance ratio can sustain a whole patent claim. However obvious such an element may sound, it remains nonobvious according to the letter of the law, and that is all that is needed for the patent application to leave the examiner’s desk and move to allowance.
NASA Beams “Hello, World!” Video from Space via Laser
Optical communication tools like OPALS use focused laser energy to reach data rates between 10 and 1,000 times higher than current space communications, which rely on radio portions of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Because the space station orbits Earth at 17,500 mph, transmitting data from the space station to Earth requires extremely precise targeting. The process can be equated to a person aiming a laser pointer at the end of a human hair 30 feet away and keeping it there while walking.
via NASA Beams “Hello, World!” Video from Space via Laser | NASA.
Dan Farmer Presents Research on IPMI Vulnerabilities
IPMI runs regardless of the underlying operating system and operates on UDP port 623 through a server’s network port or its own Ethernet port. It runs continuously, Farmer said, unless the plug is literally pulled. Moore’s scan pulled up 230,000 responses over port 623, an admittedly tiny slice of the overall number of implementations. Yet Farmer concludes that 90 percent of BMCs running IPMI could be compromised because of default or weak passwords or weaknesses in the protocol, not only implicating the host server but others in the same management group because, as he discovered, some vendors share common passwords.
via Dan Farmer Presents Research on IPMI Vulnerabilities | Threatpost | The first stop for security news.
BMC = Baseboard Management Controller, a separate device attached to motherboards for management purposes. This isn’t the first article to point out vulnerabilities in IPMI. It has been noted that IPMI should run on its own intranet and not the public internet. Providing another layer of security to this interface may mitigate any problems. IPMI can’t be any less secure than SNMP.
How to add or remove a static ARP entry on Linux
sudo arp -s 10.0.0.2 00:0c:29:c0:94:bfThis commands tells local ARP table that the host with IP address 10.0.0.2 has MAC address 00:0c:29:c0:94:bf. Once you have configured a static ARP entry, you can verify that.
via How to add or remove a static ARP entry on Linux – Linux FAQ.
Startup Has a New Way to Make Rare Earths and Other Metals
The ceramic material Powell showed me—which is made of zirconium oxide—replaces the carbon electrode and eliminates those emissions. Researchers have been trying to replace carbon for many years, but the molten salts have corroded the alternatives. The key advance for Infinium was developing alternative molten salts that don’t react with the zirconium oxide, so that it can last long enough to be practical.
via Startup Has a New Way to Make Rare Earths and Other Metals | MIT Technology Review.
Finding an alternative to carbon has long been the “dream” of the metals industry, says Donald Sadoway, a professor of materials science at MIT who is not involved with the company. “I believe [Infinium’s] technology is sound. It’s real,” he says. Whether the company succeeds “is all about the economics,” he says. “No one cares about the flow chart for the process. You care about the prices. If it produces a good metal at a lower cost, people will be interested.”
Instrumental Variables Methods
Estimating causal impacts is fraught with difficulty. Even randomized trials are imperfect, in part because we can seldom, if ever, conduct true experiments (though experimental design is still the gold standard of statistical research). IV is one of the more compelling quasi-experimental methods of estimating impacts, largely because the assumptions needed to justify the IV method are often more plausible than those needed to justify other methods, such as regression.
via The Urban Institute | Toolkit | Data Methods | Instrumental Variables Methods.
Hundreds of Cities Are Wired With Fiber—But Telecom Lobbying Keeps It Unused
Throughout the country, companies like Comcast, Time Warner Cable, CenturyLink, and Verizon have signed agreements with cities that prohibit local governments from becoming internet service providers and prohibit municipalities from selling or leasing their fiber to local startups who would compete with these huge corporations.
via Hundreds of Cities Are Wired With Fiber—But Telecom Lobbying Keeps It Unused | Motherboard.