Daily Archives: May 15, 2016

Swarm A.I. Correctly Predicts the Kentucky Derby, Accurately Picking all Four Horses of the Superfecta at 540 to 1 Odds – showing that humans can swarm

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Until recently, the human species has been unable to take advantage of this fundamental biological technique, for we didn’t evolve the ability to swarm. Enter Unanimous A.I., a Silicon Valley startup founded in 2014 by serial entrepreneur and researcher Dr. Louis Rosenberg. The core question Rosenberg set out to answer was: Can humans swarm, and if so can we amplify our intelligence beyond the ability of individuals? The answer appears to be a resounding yes.

Unanimous spent the last two years building a swarm intelligence platform called UNU that enables groups to get together as online swarms — combining their thoughts, opinions, and intuitions in real-time to answer questions, make predictions, reach decisions, and even play games as a unified collective intelligence. To quantify how smart these UNU swarms really are, researchers at Unanimous regularly convene swarms and ask them to make predictions on high profile events, testing whether or not many minds are truly better than one.

UNU has made headlines in recent months by predicting the Oscars better than the experts, even besting the renowned forecasters at FiveThirtyEight. UNU also surprised the sports world by predicting the NCAA college bowl games with 70% accuracy against the spread, earning +34% return on Vegas odds. But still, the fact that average people could use UNU to amplify their collective intelligence so dramatically was met with cautious resistance.

Enter Hope Reese, a reporter from TechRepublic. Two weeks ago, she challenged Unanimous A.I. to use UNU to predict the winners of the Kentucky Derby.

Source: Swarm A.I. Correctly Predicts the Kentucky Derby, Accurately Picking all Four Horses of the Superfecta at 540 to 1 Odds – Yahoo Finance

Italian Military to Save Up to 29 Million Euro by Migrating to LibreOffice

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Following on last year’s bold announcement that they will attempt to migrate from proprietary Microsoft Office products to an open-source alternative like LibreOffice, Italy’s Ministry of Defense now expects to save up to 29 million Euro with this move.

We said it before, and we’ll say it again, this is the smartest choice a government institution can do. And to back up this statement, the Italian Ministry of Defense announced that they expect to save between 26 and 29 million Euro over the next few years by migrating to the LibreOffice open-source software for productivity and adopting the Open Document Format (ODF).

“Taking into account the deadlines set by our current Microsoft Office licenses, we will have 75,000 (70%) LibreOffice users by 2017, and an additional 25,000 by 2020,” said General Camillo Sileo, Deputy Chief of Department VI, Systems Department C4I, for the Transformation of Defence and General Staff, for ISA (Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations).
“5,000 workstations have been migrated until now”

In the initial report, they said that the entire transition process from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice is expected to be completed by the end of the year 2016, and now the Italian Ministry of Defense brags about the fact that they’ve successfully migrated a total of 5,000 workstations, and they’re now working with LibreItalia on an e-learning course to teach the military staff how to use the LibreOffice office suite.

Source: Italian Military to Save Up to 29 Million Euro by Migrating to LibreOffice

Unfortunately, the guys at LibreOffice won’t see any of these savings go to their pockets. They will continue to slave away underpaid at their beautiful product with nothing to show for it. This is because the FOSS (Free Open Source Software) community is so hard core in their principles that they allow companies to wander all over them. What a world we live in, eh.

36 firms at risk from that unpatched 2010 SAP vuln? Try 500+

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ERPScan, the ERP security specialist firm which originally discovered the misconfiguration flaw (research pdf here), said that Onapsis’s figures on exposure to the vulnerability are optimistic by more than an order of magnitude.

Alexander Polyakov, CTO at ERPScan, told El Reg that its research suggests as many as 533 organisations are at risk.

“Onapsis said that 36 organizations were actually breached,” Polyakov told El Reg. “Our assumption is that all of them were just examples of vulnerable systems which white-hats publish on their forum.”

“Onapsis’ assumption that those publications on Chinese forum are examples of cyberattacks is wrong. I agree with them is that there are many vulnerably systems (533 at least) and some people probably hacked them for real profit. Not just published a screenshot of potential deface but really performed [a} cyberattack.”

Source: 36 firms at risk from that unpatched 2010 SAP vuln? Try 500+

Linksys WRT routers won’t block open source firmware despite FCC rules

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Linksys has been collaborating with chipmaker Marvell and the makers of OpenWrt to make sure its latest WRT routers can comply with the new rules without blocking open source firmware, company officials told Ars.

Linksys’s effort stands in contrast with TP-Link, which said it would entirely prevent loading of open source firmware on its routers to satisfy the new Federal Communications Commission requirements.

Blocking third-party firmware is the easiest way to comply with the FCC rules, which aim to limit interference with other devices by preventing user modifications that cause radios to operate outside their licensed RF (radio frequency) parameters.

Source: Linksys WRT routers won’t block open source firmware despite FCC rules

France Is Getting Closer To Banning After-Work Emails

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The bill would make businesses come up with hours during which employees cannot check or send emails.

And it comes as workers are finding it increasingly difficult to detach themselves from work, Socialist MP Benoit Hamon told BBC News.

“Employees physically leave the office, but they do not leave their work,” he said.

“They remain attached by a kind of electronic leash — like a dog. The texts, the messages, the emails — they colonize the life of the individual to the point where he or she eventually breaks down.”

[…]

A 2015 study from the Center for Creative Leadership, an executive education firm, Center for Creative Leadershipfound that employees who use smartphones end up working as much as 13.5 hours every day — and as many as 72 hours every week when you include weekends.

The research also found that people are only spending about three hours every day on activities such as working out and family time.

But subjects in that study didn’t blame technology for their extra work hours — they blamed their employers’ lousy time and people management.

“While technology may be a logical scapegoat, it is actually just a new-age mask for an age-old problem: poor management and poor leadership,” the report said.

Source: France Is Getting Closer To Banning After-Work Emails

Runkeeper is secretly tracking you around the clock and sending your data to advertisers

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The NCC, a consumer rights watchdog, is conducting an investigation into 20 apps’ terms and conditions to see if the apps do what their permissions say they do and to monitor data flows. Tinder has already been reported to the Norwegian data protection authority for similar breaches of privacy laws. The NCC’s investigation into Runkeeper discovered that user location data is tracked around the clock and gets transmitted to a third party advertiser in the U.S. called Kiip.me.

Source: Runkeeper is secretly tracking you around the clock and sending your data to advertisers

Apple says it doesn’t know why iTunes users are losing their music files

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In an extremely small number of cases users have reported that music files saved on their computer were removed without their permission. We’re taking these reports seriously as we know how important music is to our customers and our teams are focused on identifying the cause. We have not been able to reproduce this issue, however, we’re releasing an update to iTunes early next week which includes additional safeguards. If a user experiences this issue they should contact AppleCare.

Source: Apple says it doesn’t know why iTunes users are losing their music files | The Verge

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