Adblock Plus is launching a new service that... uh, puts more ads on your screen. Rather than stripping all ads from the internet forever, Adblock Plus is hoping to replace the bad ads — anything it deems too big, too ugly, or too intrusive — with good ads, ones that are smaller, subtler, and theoretically much less annoying.

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Submitted on September 13th 2016 by gladsdotter with 19 comments

Apple has officially announced the iPhone 7 today. The new iPhone features a design that's very similar to last year's iPhone 6S (and the year prior's iPhone 6), with a rounded aluminum body. But...

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Submitted on September 7th 2016 by montyHall with 16 comments and with 1 Related Links:

1. iPhone 7 about 'courage,' but is it truly innovative? Added by bkool on September 8th 2016.

Google’s DeepMind unit, which is working to develop super-intelligent computers, has created a system for machine-generated speech that it says outperforms existing technology by 50 percent.

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Submitted on September 10th 2016 by drunkenninja with 1 comments

The $55 USB Killer exploits a widespread vulnerability that manufacturers haven’t bothered fixing.

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Submitted on September 10th 2016 by ckshenn

A complete breakdown of Google’s new “My Activity” dashboard. Everyone knows that Google collects your information. It’s how they make billions of dollars every year, and it’s not going to stop any time soon. What many people don’t know is that you can put a stop to Google’s information mining with a few simple steps. …

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Submitted on September 12th 2016 by kxh

“Coal rollers” alter their diesel trucks so they spew thick black smoke, sometimes in the direction of joggers, cyclists and hybrid cars. By Hiroko Tabuchi.

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Submitted on September 7th 2016 by AdelleChattre with 1 comments

WikiLeaks denies withholding any documents it received as part of its 'Syria Files' release.

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Submitted on September 9th 2016 by ubthejudge

"Transhumanism is becoming more respectable, and transhumanism, with a small t, is rapidly emerging through conventional mainstream avenues," Eve Herold reports in her astute new book, Beyond Human. While big-T Transhumanism is the activist movement that advocates the use of technology to expand human capacities, small-t transhumanism is the belief or theory that the human race will evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of deliberate technological interventions.

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Submitted on September 10th 2016 by drunkenninja with 4 comments

“Our lightest product ever,” the page announces. Lithe and sleek like all Apple’s wares, the Apple Plug is a small, aluminum stopper meant to seal up the “archaic headphone connector” in your iPhone 6 or 6s. Machine-rounded at the end to match the device’s curve, it comes in gold, rose gold, and space gray to match every iPhone finish. Once installed, the Apple Plug is eternal, permanently barring access to the 3.5mm port—which Apple just “courageously” removed from the new iPhone 7. Until you can get your hands on one, what better way to prepare for that bold future than to stop-up the temptation to live in the past?

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Submitted on September 9th 2016 by drunkenninja with 1 comments

CGI is moving fast, very fast. Not just for added effects in movies, but also for creating completely lifelike 3D models. The biggest problem facing the animation community is an effect called the ‘uncanny valley’. We’re confronted with this when we see something that looks nearly human, but just not quite. A new era of tech events …

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Submitted on September 12th 2016 by Chubros with 1 comments

I used to argue passionately that video games were art. Then I stopped arguing about it, because why bother? Of COURSE video games are art. Now I see that it's a waste of time thinking of video games as art. Why would we game designers ever aim that low? I Don't Want Art. I Want Transportation.

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Submitted on September 8th 2016 by grandtheftsoul with 1 comments

In the last couple of years, deep learning techniques have transformed the world of artificial intelligence. One by one, the abilities and techniques that humans once imagined were uniquely our own have begun to fall to the onslaught of ever more powerful machines. Deep neural networks are now better than humans at tasks such as face recognition and object recognition. They’ve mastered the ancient game of Go and thrashed the best human players.

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Submitted on September 10th 2016 by kong88

Facebook has made a u-turn over its decision to censor an iconic image of a child victim of the Vietnam War after it was removed from the social media platform under nudity guidelines.

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Submitted on September 9th 2016 by KingLin

It's no secret that copyright holders are trying to take down as much pirated content as they can, but targeting open source software is not something we see every day. Paramount Pictures recently sent a DMCA takedown to Google, listing a copy of the popular operating system Ubuntu. An honest mistake, perhaps, but a worrying one.

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Submitted on September 10th 2016 by Gozzin

Apple turned many heads this week when it announced it’s scrapping the headphone jack in the iPhone 7. The jack, that little socket you plug your headphones into and sometimes the word for the plug itself, has had a good run: It’s a durable bit of technology dating back to the 19th century. But why we call it a jack is much, much older.

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Submitted on September 9th 2016 by gladsdotter

When Randy Bilyeu disappeared, he was hunting for the Fenn Treasure, a chest allegedly filled with gold, precious stones, and jewelry, supposedly hidden in the Rocky Mountains north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 2010, millionaire art dealer (and former Vietnam fighter pilot) 79-year-old Forrest Fenn filled a bronze chest with rare metals, jewels, and artifacts, and then hid it in the mountains. Later that year, he published his autobiography, The Thrill of the Chase, which included a 24-line poem that he says...

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Submitted on September 12th 2016 by timex

Over the past year or two, someone has been probing the defenses of the companies that run critical pieces of the Internet. These probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down. We don't know who is doing this, but it feels like a large a large nation state.

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Submitted on September 13th 2016 by spaceghoti with 1 comments

“Gene drives,” a technology for controlling genetic traits, could revolutionize disease prevention. But nature has a way of thwarting scientific meddling.

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Submitted on September 12th 2016 by gladsdotter

Nearly 800,000 emails, passwords and usernames attributed to accounts on the Brazzers porn site forum have been leaked. Originally reported to Motherboard by vigilante.pw, a breach monitoring watchdog, the hack contained over 900,000 individual records. Aside from inactive or duplicate accounts, that meant some 790,724 unique email addresses, usernames and plaintext passwords are now out in the ether.

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Submitted on September 7th 2016 by socialiguana with 1 comments

They say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but a new imaging system from MIT can see right through the cover and read the book while it's still closed.

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Submitted on September 9th 2016 by jcscher with 1 comments and with 1 Related Links:

1. Terahertz time-gated spectral imaging for content extraction through layered structures Added by jcscher on September 9th 2016.