Tag Archive for: How To Kill An Hour

New Emoji Alert

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There are 67 new emoji’s that might hit phones next year.

In a world full of conversations that have basically boiled down to a few character faces on your phone, do we really need more?

Looking at the box office figures the Emoji film made almost $25 million in it’s opening weekend, reinforcing our love for the tiny symbols that speak a thousand emotions!

Overseen by a group called the Unicode Consortium, there is the Emoji Subcommittee who will decide which new emoji’s will be added in 2018.

So far the Emoji’s in the running to be added include: a frowning pile of poo, smiling face with cape, serious face with eye mask and cape.

Other symbols include a lobster, mango and a salt shaker. Will this make us more creative with our messages or just shorten our vocabulary even more? Either way, it’s clear we love Emoji’s and they’re here to stay.

Facebook Shut Down Their Own AI After It Creates Own Language

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Facebook shut down their AI programs after it appeared to create it’s own language that only they could understand. The chatbots created their own changes to English which made it easier for them to understand but was absolute rubbish to humans.

The task they set their chat bots were to trade items with one another, each item being given a numerical value, however it soon became apparent that only the bots understood what they each meant, after being told not to use comprehensive English, they (the chatbots) created a form of shorthand, after being instructed to work out how to negotiate and improve bartering.

The negotiations look weird:

Bob: i can i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to

Bob: you i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have a ball to me to me to me to me to me to me to me

Bob: i i can i i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have a ball to me to me to me to me to me to me to me

Bob: i . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to

Bob: you i i i i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have 0 to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to

Bob: you i i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to

As you can see there seems to be some rules, the chatbots stress their own name as a way of negotiating and it’s not a glitch, with some items being traded successfully. With Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence Research divisions visiting researcher Dhruv Vatra saying that “If I said ‘the’ five times, you’d interpret that to mean I want five copies of this item. This isn’t so different to the way communities of humans create shorthands”

Researcher Mike Lewis told FastCo that they shut down the ChatBots because they wanted to have bots that could talk to humans, not because they were afraid of SkyNet coming to life in front of them.

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No One’s Joined Twitter For Months

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Over the past 3 months, according to Twitters latest earnings report, the mammoth company grew by 0. Yes ZERO. 66 million less than what FB grew by in the same period, 9 million few than Twitter grew in the 1st quarter.

Twitter won’t shut down as it pulled in £440million in ads during the last quarter and it struggles to make money off of user generated content, Twitter isn’t at death’s door. But to grow by 0 in 3 months, for a company as big as Twitter, is concerning.

Twitter’s stats stated that 2million US people stopped using it during the last quarter and 70million people were using it occasionally, falling to 68million in quarter 2. Which is a BIG Drop as Twitter hasn’t seen that, like EVER & it grew by 1 million (to 260million) internationally.

Twitter says it’s focused on “making Twitter the best place to see and share what’s happening, where you can see every side and perspective.” What will they do to make Twitter more usable and increase users? We shall see….

To listen to the guys chatting about this please click here!

Tile

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  • One of the world’s best-selling Bluetooth tracker just got 25% smaller; Tile Mate easily loops onto keychains or attaches to anything you don’t want to lose so you can find it fast
  • Ring your things, use your smartphone to make your Tile Mate ring when it’s nearby but out of sight; find your phone, can’t find your phone? Simply double press the button on your Tile Mate to make your phone ring even on silent
  • See where you had it last, the easy-to-use, free Tile app remembers the last time and place it saw your Tile, so if you left it somewhere, you’ll always know where to look
  • Ask others to help, your Tile isn’t where you left it? You can anonymously enlist help in the Tile community; with over 5 million Tile devices sold, it is one of the world’s largest lost and found network
  • Tiles last one year with zero charging required; after a year, you can replace your old Tiles with new ones for a special community member price 

(Amazon)

To buy your own Tile please click here!

Runescape MOBILE!?

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Rumoured to be sometime in 2018 Runescape is said to be coming to mobile!

That’s right – RuneScape. The game you know and love, on your phone or tablet, with a mobile-optimised interfaceand cross-platform play between mobile and desktop versions. Your game, your character, anywhere. (Runescape.com)

Free WiFi Cleaning?!

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Maybe you should read the T’s & C’s of Free WiFi, as recently 22,000 people are now legally bound to 1000hrs of community service. Which includes, but not limited to cleaning toilets at festivals, scraping gum off the street and “manually relieving sewer blockages” – Sounds horrifying!

Whether or not these people actually completed their smelly tasks is anyones guess but, Manchester based WiFi company ‘Purple’ slotted the cheeky terms into their T’s & C’s for 2 weeks to highlight the importance of T’s & C’s and raise the awareness that people should have when signing up to free wifi. They also offered a prize if you raised it to them and only 1 person highlighted the cleaning contract to them.

Not the first time this has happened, in 2014 Cybersecurity firm F-Secure done the same, but this time, free WiFi was in exchange of their first born.

While Terms and Conditions are legally considered contracts and binding, it is argued that the inability to negotiate such terms violates common law practices, thus leaving them void.

To listen to the guys chatting about this please click here!

Alcohol Memory

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Apparently, according to researchers, getting mildly drunk after studying appears to make you remember stuff better than if you weren’t getting tipsy.

University of Exeter carried out this amazing experiment on 88 lucky people whom identified themselves as social drinkers. They then undertook a word learning task and told to drink as much as they liked! The next day they were tested on the word test and they suprisingly were able to remember better than those who didn’t drink!

Exeter’s Professor Celia Morgan explained: “The leading explanation is that alcohol blocks the learning of new information and therefore the brain has more resources available to lay down other recently learned information into long-term memory. The theory is that the hippocampus – the brain area really important in memory – switches to ‘consolidating’ memories, transferring from short into longer-term memory.”

In simpler terms, your brain is preventing making new memories in order to store away the recent ones.

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WannaCry Hacker Arrested

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Marcus Hutchins a British Cyber-Security researcher will appear in court in Vegas, whilst attending the Black Hat and Def Con cyber security conferences, charged with his involvement with Kronos – malware which steals banking logins from infected computers.

Hutchins stopped the WannaCry Cyber-Attack which hit the NHS in May and the FBI arrested him on Wednesday, with the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre were surprised at his arrest.

The US Department of Justice released a statement on his arrest stating that:

“Marcus Hutchins… a citizen and resident of the United Kingdom, was arrested in the United States on 2 August, 2017, in Las Vegas, Nevada, after a grand jury in the Eastern District of Wisconsin returned a six-count indictment against Hutchins for his role in creating and distributing the Kronos banking Trojan….The charges against Hutchins, and for which he was arrested, relate to alleged conduct that occurred between in or around July 2014 and July 2015.”

It is alleged that Hitchins created and sold Kronos on the dark web, Jane Hutchins, Marcus’ mother said that it was ‘highly unlikely’ that her son was involved saying that he spent his time preventing attacks from occurring. With those who work with Hutchins coming to the defence feeling that the US justice system have made a “huge mistake” Digital rights groups have said they are “deeply concerned” by his arrest.

Cyber-attorney Tor Ekeland has said that Mr Hutchins could face “40 years in jail” if found guilty, even though the case states no victims. But is worried about the outcome of this case for legitimate programmes, speaking on Radio 4’s Today:

“I can think of a number of examples of legitimate software that would potentially be a felony under this theory of prosecution.”

Hutchins has been granted £23,000 bail and at the time of writing it is unknown if he was able to pay this. He left court unshackled but ordered to leave his hands behind his back.

His defence lawyer Ms Lobo told the BBC that he has pled not guilty and the federal indictment against him is “pretty flimsy, pretty slim compared to what we normally see in a US indictment”

It is claimed that he software was sold for $2,000 in digital currency in June 2015 and Dan Cowhig, prosecuting, told court room that Hutchins confessed during a police interview that he was the “author of Kronos malware and indicated that he sold it”

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Shout Out Live!

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Fake but looks totally REAL Barack!

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The University of Washington have created technique that allows them to make a fake Barack Obama that makes him say whatever they want and it look really real!

 

They have used a neural network AI to model the shape of Obama’s mouth and to get the visual/audio they mapped the model to 14 hours footage of President Obama. Now they are able to match any audio to fake Obama by this method or by using an impersonator.

SCARY STUFF! (But also kinda cool)

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