March 12, 2014

AI researcher says amoral robots pose a danger to humanity
Robots are only now beginning to act autonomously. A DARPA robotics challenge late last year showed just how much human control robots -- especially, humanoid robots -- still need. The same is true with weaponized autonomous robots, which the U.S. military has said need human controllers for big, and potentially lethal, decisions. But what happens in 10 or 20 years when robots have advanced exponentially and are working in homes as human aides and care givers? What happens when robots are fully at work in the military or law enforcement, or have control of a nation's missile defense system?


UK to help lead world fight against cyber crime
“To get access to those skills we have to look at how we can engage with industry through programmes which allow people to work with law enforcement on a part-time voluntary basis,” he said. Looking to the future, Archibald said the NCCU is investing a “considerable amount of money” in developing law enforcement officers from officers on the beat all the way up to the high-end skills. Finally, he admitted that in the past, engagement with industry had tended to be on the terms of law enforcement, which had made decisions on things like media coverage with little regard to reputational damage to the businesses involved.


Do-it-yourself corporate cloud with ownCloud 6 Enterprise Edition
The Enterprise Edition is designed to seamlessly integrate with your existing infrastructure. Designed from the ground up to be fully deployed on premises, it enables integration into existing user management tools, governance processes, and security, monitoring, and back-up tools. ... As you would expect, ownCloud Enterprise Edition is based on ownCloud Community Edition. With more than 1.3 million users, the Community Edition is one of the world’s most popular open source file sync and share software programs.


Aruba Announces 5 Software Tools for Optimizing Wi-Fi Networks
Several of the software improvements -- all free to existing customers -- are designed to help IT managers optimize their oversight of Wi-Fi networks, which can lower help desk complaints and improve worker efficiency. One of the new tools, Auto Sign-On, is focused on helping end users. Instead of signing in to each enterprise application, such as SalesForce.com, with a lengthy password that's hard to input on a small smartphone keyboard, the tool uses a worker's Wi-Fi login to automatically authenticate an employee with single sign-on.


25 years of the World Wide Web
The Web has changed the way we work, share our lives with family and friends and even play games. This one innovation has brought an astonishing level of change in a short amount of time. Today, the Web is marking its 25th anniversary. On March 12, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist, introduced the idea of the World Wide Web in a proposal for an information system. Here, technology leaders, including Vint Cerf, and executives from Intel and AOL, reflect on how the Web has affected the world we live in.


Twitter's Biz Stone is a humble 'Hallucinogenic optimist'
Biz Stone is way too humble. What’s the point in hitting the jackpot when you are too self conscious to use the money in a way that you weren’t able? Time to grow up and grow into your money. You are forty years old. You can live well and do well too. Money is more than philanthropy it is also a means of actively creating the future. Techno-optimists must also become techno-activists — to make sure we get the right future. It won’t come about by itself. We could easily end up in some nightmarish version of a tech-enabled North Korea.


Internet of things cannot be about products alone, warn experts
While they agree that the government funding is a huge opportunity for the UK technology industry, they believe that ongoing success is dependent on companies ensuring they can keep both personal and commercial data safe, and building security and privacy into products from the start. “The benefits that these intelligent, connected devices bring to our lives are almost too numerous to count. However, when we gift these things with intelligence and senses, we also fundamentally change their very nature,” said Marc Rogers, principal security researcher at Lookout.


eBook: The practical approach to Windows Phone 8 development.
The Windows Phone 8 operating system is closely tied to the hardware of Windows Phones, enabling the development of high-performance apps that provide excellent user experiences. With Windows Phone 8 Development Succinctly by Matteo Pagani, you’ll go from creating a “Hello World” app to managing network data usage, enabling users to talk to your application through speech APIs, and earning money through in-app purchases. Dozens of additional features are covered in the book, including launchers, choosers, and geolocation services, so you’ll have a place to start no matter what you want your app to do.


GPS tech built to find missing aircraft not always used
Aviation authorities around the world are starting to implement plans to supplement radar with GPS technologies, but that won't happen everywhere for another 10 years or so, he said. Eventually, all position data will come from the plane. "We're not there yet," Graham said. The major aircraft tracking technologies include Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B), said Ric Peri, vice president of government and industry affairs at the Aircraft Electronics Association. Rather than relying on a radar ping, ADS-B uses a GPS signal and an aircraft's navigation system to determine the position of a flight and then broadcast that information, he said.


Is Office 365 worth spending 3x more than on Google Apps?
Microsoft's messaging products (Exchange, Outlook) are ubiquitous. Microsoft and Google both know how to operate secure, cloud-scale operations. Office Web Apps and Google Docs are feature-equivalent. The advantage Microsoft has is the enormous, and universal capabilities of full, installed Office. The curious thing is that although you probably don't really need it, and by extension don't need to pay for it, it's sufficiently cheap that you might as well operate on the old maxim that it's easier just to pay for it, and forget about thinking about it.



Quote for the day:

"We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal and then leap in the dark to our success." -- Henry David Thoreau

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