Un equipo se ha inspirado en la mítica máquina Wimshurst y la ha convertido en una versión microfluídica que, si se incorporara en una bota, podría generar energía a cada paso a un nivel suficiente como para alimentar pequeñas baterías de móviles y sensores de internet de las cosas
Source: MIT
Kaggle, de Alphabet, premiará con 80.000 euros a los algoritmos de aprendizaje automático que mejores apuestan realicen en la liga universitaria de baloncesto. Pero las máquinas se enfrentan a un problema: el torneo incluye muchos factores que no se pueden medir
Source: MIT
Los archivos secretos de la Santa Sede son tan extensos que ni sus responsables saben con certeza toda la información que contienen. Como transcribirlos a mano sería imposible, un equipo de investigación ha echado mano de la inteligencia artificial para automatizar el proceso
Source: MIT
Facebook’s latest public controversy may have claimed its first major casualty. According to reporting from The New York Times, the social media giant is poised to part ways with its high-profile chief security officer, Alex Stamos. That story suggests that Stamos created friction within Facebook by pushing for an aggressive approach to exploring and disclosing to the public the platform’s role in disseminating Russian state-sponsored disinformation to users. Stamos apparently initiated his exit in December 2017 but was convinced to stay on through August to avoid the hit to public perception, The New York Times reports.
Stamos weighed in over the weekend, arguing that Facebook’s revelations around the Trump campaign-linked data analytics firm did not qualify as a “breach” in the technical sense. That term generally connotes hacking or a technical compromise of some kind, though the Cambridge Analytica situation involves a since-deprecated lax API and a business model that revolves around collecting massive troves of personal data and doling it out in ways often far from transparent to the average user.
Stamos, who joined the company in June 2015 after spending nearly a year-and-a-half wrestling with privacy woes at Yahoo, is generally well-respected within the security community. According to a story from Reuters in 2016, Stamos reportedly left his position as the top security officer at Yahoo after the company complied with a secret U.S. intelligence directive that allowed the government to search Yahoo user emails via purpose-built software.
Stamos’s presence at Facebook — and his at-times candid explanations of the internal workings and reasoning of the often opaque social network — projected the sense that the company was taking user privacy seriously. Depending on what happens next, the security officer’s absence at Facebook is likely to speak volumes, too.
Update: In a tweet, Stamos contradicted reporting that he is on the way out at Facebook, claiming that his role has shifted. TechCrunch has reached out to Facebook for clarification on Stamos’s role.
Source: TechCrunch
Like the gaming world itself, the annual developer conference stands at a crossroads.
Source: Wired
During CES, the single piece of electronics I spent the most time with, apart from my laptop and camera, was a Mattel Dungeons & Dragons Computer Fantasy Game handheld. This decades-old device held the attention of John Biggs and myself through quite a few drinks as we navigated its arcane interface (eventually slaying the dragon, thank you). These cheap handhelds, sold as impulse buys at drug stores and Toys ‘R Us (RIP), are the latest thing to be collected and emulated in full by MAME and the Internet Archive.
At first when I heard this, I was happy but not particularly impressed. They’re great little devices — mostly terrible games, albeit a nostalgic kind of terrible — but how complicated can they be?
Oh, quite complicated, it turns out.
Unlike, say, an NES ROM, these little gadgets don’t have their graphics palettized, their logic isolated, etc. No, each one of these things is a strange and unique little machine. They must be carefully taken apart and their logic teased out by experts.
For one thing, the graphics aren’t pixels accounted for digitally. They’re etched into the liquid crystal system, to be activated when a charge runs through them. In other words, all the graphics are right there on the same screen, arranged like puzzle pieces.
So you may remember Space Jam looking like this:
But the LCD layer looks like this:
All that is hard-wired into the electronic part, where the logic resides telling which pieces to light up and when.
I won’t go into the details — read the interesting Internet Archive post if you’re curious. Basically it was a ton of hard work by a bunch of dedicated folks on the MAME crew. Incidentally, thanks to them and everyone else who’s kept that project going for years and years.
The only thing that’s missing is the interface — that is, the plastic. These things were great not because they were actually great games, but because they cost like $10 and would keep your kid occupied on a road trip for a few hours while they got beaten over and over again by the first three enemies. The cheap plastic enclosures and gaudy decorations are part of the fun.
No one wants to play this:
But this?
I’d definitely bug my mom to get me that. In fact, I think I did.
You can check out the scores of games the teams have already digitized at the Handheld History page, and if you’re in an emulatin’ mood, check out the other gazillion systems you can play in the browser in Archive’s Internet Arcade and Console Living Room.
Source: TechCrunch
With features like quantum dots, a massive 1440p display, and a deep curve, the Samsung CF791 aims to impress. Getting a price cut down to $750, this ultrawide monitor is an even sweeter deal. Even still, it’s an expensive monitor to invest in. Is it really worth it?
The post Samsung CF791 ultrawide curved gaming monitor review appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
You give Facebook all of your data in exchange for using their service—an exchange that seems increasingly out of whack.
Source: Wired
The U.S. executive branch issued an executive order prohibiting the use or purchase of Venezuela’s Petro cryptocurrency, claiming it was issued unlawfully in an effort to circumvent U.S. sanctions against Venezuela.
The post First U.S. cryptocurrency ban outlaws Venezuela’s ‘Petro’ coin appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
It was no secret that Cambridge Analytica was manipulating people with big data. But it took a former employee’s reckoning to provoke outrage.
Source: Wired