Saturday, 9. July 2016

Japan’s first VR porn festival closed down due to overcrowding


Japan's first festival of VR porn was reportedly prematurely evacuated due to overcrowding. Adult VR Fest, which was held in the Akihabara district of Tokyo last month, drew a crowd of hundreds—but according to reports from the ground, just a few dozen people were allowed into the event before the organisers decided to close it down. It seems that the organisers simply weren't prepared for so many visitors—and indeed, the venue itself looks like it was much too small to legally or safely accommodate the throngs.

arstechnica.co.uk

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Hidden Voice Commands Embedded in YouTube Videos Can Hijack Your Smartphone


A series of distorted voice commands surreptitiously hidden in YouTube videos can force unprotected Android or iOS smartphones to carry out malicious operations, researchers have discovered. Controlling smartphones with voice commands was already done last year when two security researchers from French agency ANSSI have used radio waves to send hidden commands to smartphones running Siri or Google Now. The attack was possible only if the phone had its headphones plugged in.

softpedia.com

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I'm a black ex-cop, and this is the real truth about race and policing


On any given day, in any police department in the nation, 15 percent of officers will do the right thing no matter what is happening. Fifteen percent of officers will abuse their authority at every opportunity. The remaining 70 percent could go either way depending on whom they are working with.

vox.com

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Friday, 8. July 2016

Dallas Police Used Robot Bomb to Take Out Cop Killer


Dallas police used a robot bomb to take out the suspected shooter behind the ambush attack in which five officers were killed, Police Chief David Brown said Friday. Dallas police chief: we used a robot to detonate a bomb next to the suspect, killing him. He did NOT shoot himself. — Jamie Grierson (@JamieGrierson) July 8, 2016 Dallas Police Chief gives an update on what happened in Dallas: "the suspect is deceased" and did not kill himself — Sky News (@SkyNews) July 8, 2016

heatst.com npr.org How the Dallas Police Used an Improvised Killer Robot to Take Down the Gunman Everything we know about the bomb robot used by Dallas police Are Police Allowed to Robot-Bomb Suspects? The Dallas Shooting and the Advent of Killer Police Robots Using a Bomb Robot to Kill a Suspect Is an Unprecedented Shift in Policing Everything We Know About Dallas Shooter Micah X. Johnson

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NSA classifies Linux Journal readers, Tor and Tails Linux users as "extremists"


Are you a Linux Journal reader or use software such as Tor and Tails Linux? If so, you've probably been flagged as an "extremist" by the NSA. Leaked documents related to the XKeyscore snooping program reveal that the agency is targeting anyone who is interested in online privacy, specifically those who use the aforementioned software and visit the Linux user community website. XKeyscore is a collection and analysis software that was among a number of surveillance programs revealed by Edward Snowden last year. Its source code (basically a rule file), which has been obtained and analyzed by members of the Tor project and security specialists for German broadcasters NDR and WDR, identifies two German Tor Directory Authority servers as being under surveillance by the NSA. The code also cites a number of specific IP addresses of the Tor Directory Authority.

n.techspot.com

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Police, Prosecutors and Judges Rely on a Flawed $2 Drug Test That Puts Innocent People Behind Bars


Amy Albritton can’t remember if her boyfriend signaled when he changed lanes late that August afternoon in 2010. But suddenly the lights on the Houston Police patrol car were flashing behind them, and Anthony Wilson was navigating Albritton’s white Chrysler Concorde to a stop in a strip-mall parking lot. It was an especially unwelcome hassle. Wilson was in Houston to see about an oil-rig job; Albritton, volunteering her car, had come along for what she imagined would be a vacation of sorts. She managed an apartment complex back in Monroe, La., and the younger of her two sons — Landon, 16, who had been disabled from birth by cerebral palsy — was with his father for the week. After five hours of driving through the monotony of flat woodland, the couple had checked into a motel, carted their luggage to the room and returned to the car, too hungry to rest but too drained to seek out anything more than fast food. Now two officers stepped out of their patrol car and approached.

propublica.org

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Silicon Valley Investors Are Finally Getting Marijuana Religion


When three Colorado marijuana entrepreneurs made a presentation to 40 Silicon Valley investors last year, it was as though they were discussing something dirty. “There was an uncomfortable chuckle in the room, kind of like you’re talking about porn,” says Fulton Connor, the Sand Hill Angels Inc. member who arranged the meeting. His fellow venture capitalists just couldn’t get past the fact that marijuana remains prohibited under federal law. They’re way more chill now, he says. In May, Connor’s firm, which typically invests in mainstream startups like the taxi-hailing app Flywheel, steered $200,000 to Tradiv, an online marketplace for wholesale cannabis. “They understand it more as a business and the direction of the market,” Connor says. “And they see where it’s becoming more acceptable.”

bloomberg.com

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Thursday, 7. July 2016

Russia’s State Duma just approved some of the most repressive laws in post-Soviet history


On Friday, June 24, Russia's State Duma approved a final draft of several anti-terrorist laws spearheaded by deputy Irina Yarovaya. Though lawmakers removed many of the legislation's most odious amendments at the last minute (which, in part, would have made it possible to revoke convicts' Russian citizenship and their right to travel abroad), the bill still revises dozens of existing laws in ways that could have profound consequences for people living in Russia. For “Yarovaya's legislation” to become law, the Federation Council must next approve the legislation, and then President Putin needs to sign it. There is no doubt that this will happen. Meduza offers a brief summary of what the State Duma just set into motion.

meduza.io

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Initiative to legalize marijuana heading for Arizona vote


PHOENIX - Advocates for legalizing marijuana in Arizona filed 260,000 petition signatures Thursday with the secretary of state. That total is at least 100,000 more than is needed to qualify for a statewide vote in November.

The Arizona marijuana initiative -- officially known as the "Regulation and Taxation of Marijuana Act" -- would treat pot much the same way as alcohol.

12news.com

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Erstes Ergebnis steht


Erstes Ergebnis steht

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Analysing NLP publication patterns


Recently, I got curious about finding out how much different institutions publish in my area. Does Google publish more than Microsoft? Which university has the strongest publication record in NLP? And are there any interesting trends that can be seen in the recent years? Quantity does not necessarily equal quality, but the number of publications is still a reasonable indicator of general activity in the field, how big the research group is, and how outward-facing are the research projects. My approach was to crawl papers from the 6 biggest conferences that are relevant to my research: ACL, EACL, NAACL, EMNLP, NIPS, ICML. The first 4 focus on NLP applications regardless of methods, and the latter 2 on machine learning algorithms regardless of tasks. The time window was restricted to 2012-2016, as I’m more interested in current publications.

marekrei.com

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The Mesmerizing Architecture of Mosques


When we walk into a beautiful, ornate cathedral or mosque our necks reflexively whip upward. The body senses the eerieness of a vast indoor space, and the eyes are rewarded with intricate and gorgeous architecture. But our gaze can only see part of the artwork at a time, and the blood rushing from our heads limits our ability to stare. Iranian photographer Mohammad Reza Domiri gives us an opportunity to see the entirety of these incredible spaces all at once. His fully panoramic, expansive photographs of centuries-old mosques reveal the genius of their geometries and complexity. The effect is dizzying in a different way, like some kind of fractalized religious hallucination.

Mesmerizing Architecture of Mosques

medium.com

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