Month: July 2016

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PSN Mid-Year Sale: Week 1: PS4, PS3, PS Vita & PSP Games up to 80% off (or 90% off with PS Plus)

PSN Mid-Year Sale: Week 1: PS4, PS3, PS Vita & PSP Games up to 80% off (or 90% off with PS Plus)

Thumb Score: +16
The sale just went live for this week, and it looks like there are some nice deals again.

https://store.playstatihttp://ift.tt/29vSjx4

Prices below are with PS Plus:

PS4:
God of War III Remastered, $8: https://store.playstatihttp://ift.tt/1SQfXo6
Borderlands: The Handsome Collection, $15: https://store.playstatihttp://ift.tt/29u8f5G

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Solar road technology comes to Route 66

Solar Roadways’ dreams of sunlight-gathering paths are one step closer to taking shape. Missouri’s Department of Transportation is aiming to install a test version of the startup’s solar road tiles in a sidewalk at the Historic Route 66 Welcome Center in Conway. Okay, it won’t be on Route 66 just yet, but that’s not the point — the goal is to see whether or not the technology is viable enough that it could safely be used on regular streets. You should see it in action toward the end of the year.

The tiles will be familiar if you’ve followed Solar Roadways before. Each one combines a solar cell with LED lighting, a heating element and tempered glass that’s strong enough to support the weight of a semi-trailer truck. If successful, the panels will feed the electrical grid (ideally paying for themselves) and make the roads safer by both lighting the way as well as keeping the roads free of rain and snow. They should be easier to repair than asphalt, too, since you don’t need to take out whole patches of road to fix small cracks.

Of course, "if successful" is the operative term here. The real litmus test comes if and when Solar Roadways subjects the tiles to the legions of cars traveling on Route 66 and beyond. Missouri has a strong incentive to make that happen, though. As the Transportation Department’s Tom Blair observes, it would be odd to push self-driving cars in the state’s Road to Tomorrow initiative when the streets aren’t as smart as the vehicles using them.

Via: Inhabitat, CleanTechnica, The Verge

Source: Kansas City Star, News Tribune

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Soon Facebook Will Instantly Translate Your Posts Into 44 Languages

More than 1.5 billion people use Facebook. And only half speak English. The rest speak so many dozens of other languages, effectively silo’d off from the English speakers and, in many cases, from each other. It’s a case of social media being rather asocial.

But that’s changing. If you stumble onto a Facebook post in a foreign language, Facebook lets you instantly translate it—in a semi-effective way. And beginning today, millions of people will have the option of instantly translating their own posts into any one of 44 other languages, so that they will automatically show up in your News Feed in your native tongue. For the first time across the social network’s general population, Facebook is testing its “multilingual composer,” and though the initial test is limited, the aim is reach that far off point where everyone in the world can readily talk to everyone else. “That’s why I came to Facebook,” says Fazil Ayan, who oversees the company’s translation efforts and grew up in Turkey. “That’s my personal agenda.”

Businesses and celebrity types could already use this multilingual composer through Facebook’s Pages service. Each day, about 5,000 businesses and celebs publish nearly 10,000 posts in multiple languages. These are viewed about 70 million times a day, and more than a third of the time, they’re viewed in a foreign language. Ayan follows international footballers like Ronaldinho, a Brazilian star who uses composer to post not only in Portuguese, but Spanish and English. “I only see the English,” Ayan says. Now, millions of others can post in the same way.

Ayan and team designed the composer specifically for people with a multilingual audience. It also lets them edit the machine’s translation or even provide their own. But the ultimate goal is to automate the entire process, for everyone.

Machine translation is hardly perfect, but it’s improving. Today, Facebook will automatically translate among 45 languages, and it handles this task largely with traditional algorithmic models that rely on language statistics (essentially how often words and phrases appear in natural language). But when translating from English to German, the company is now leaning heavily on deep neural networks—networks of hardware and software inspired by the web of neurons in the brain—and this, Ayan says, provides a noticeable improvement. In recent years, deep neural nets have proven enormously adept at learning certain tasks—like recognizing faces in photos or identifying spoken words—by analyzing vast amounts digital data. Now, they’re also improving machine translation and natural language understanding, where a machine truly grasps the meaning of the words and sentences it translates. The plan is to push this tech across Facebook’s entire machine translation engine.

The same transformation is happening across the net. Microsoft’s Skype translation service leans on neural networks, and according Joseph Sirosh, who oversees Microsoft cloud computing services related to data and machine learning, the tech is moving into other Microsoft translation services as well. Certainly, neural nets are still a long way from mastering machine translation, even in tandem with other tech. But many researchers see a path toward that goal.

To reach this future, we need more and better data. That’s what neural nets thrive on. And Facebook’s multilingual composer plays a role here as well. Because people can edit translation and add their own, it generates additional data. This will be particularly helpful, Ayal says, with all the languages outside the 45 where the company already does translation. “From Catalan to Turkish? We don’t have enough data,” he says. “So this too will help with our overall mission: breaking language barriers.”

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Watch This Salamander Robot Slither Like The Real Thing

Salamanders were among the first creatures to walk on land. The wriggly amphibians, with stubby legs and moist bodies, are adept at swimming and just okay at crawling. In their defense, hardly anything else made the transition from water to land, so when they arrived, few could witness their awkward gangly steps, but many creatures that evolved afterwards adapted from the salamander’s humble origins.

To better grasp the evolution of locomotion, researchers at Switzerland’s Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) built a salamander robot from 3D printed parts. And just for kicks, they made it look like a skeleton.

Here we can see how the robomander’s walk is like that of its living inspiration.

They named their robomander Pleurobot, after the salamander species Pleurodeles waltl. From the EPFL:

The researchers designed Pleurobot with fewer bones and joints than the real-life creature. The robot features only 27 motors and 11 segments along its spine, while the amphibian has 40 vertebrae and multiple joints, some of which can even rotate freely and move side-to-side or up and down.

In the design process, the researchers identified the minimum number of motorized segments required, as well as the optimal placement along the robot’s body. As a result, it could replicate many of the salamander’s types of movement.

"Animal locomotion is an inherently complex process," says Kostas Karakasilliotis who designed the first versions of the Pleurobot. "Modern tools like cineradiography, 3D printing, and fast computing help us draw closer and closer to understanding and replicating it."

Specifically, the researchers are looking at the why spinal cord stimulation changes the creature’s movement. Both the robot and real salamanders can walk, run, or swim. In living creatures, the intensity of electrical stimulation of the spine changes walking to a run, or running to a swimming motion in water.

Watch below:

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Scientists Are Planting False Experiences Into Peoples’ Brains, Inception-Style

In the future, we might be able to go to a doctor and have new memories or experiences incepted into our brains.

Researchers set out to explore induced associative learning by planting simple subliminal messages in participants’ minds. Without knowing what they were being trained to do, the subjects were taught to see red when presented with pictures of black and white stripes, and to see red more often than green whenever they looked at these slatted lines.

While lying in an MRI machine, they were told to “try to somehow regulate your brain activity." Only that. Not to imagine anything specific. Using neurofeedback and a higher paycheck whenever their brains lit up in "red" activity, the test subjects consistently saw red — without any idea that this is what they were trained to do. After 500 rounds of this, the effect lasted for three to five months after the experiment.

The researchers think this type of neurofeedback inception could one day help treat disorders such as depression and autism.

[h/t Stat]

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Google: Symantec antivirus flaws are ‘as bad as it gets’

Products from Symantec that are supposed to protect users have made them much more open to attack, according to Google. Researcher Tavis Ormandy has spotted numerous vulnerabilities in 25 Norton and Symantec products that are "as bad as it gets," he says. "Just emailing a file to a victim or sending them a link to an exploit is enough to trigger it — the victim does not need to open the file or interact with it in any way." Symantec has already published fixes for the exploits, so users would do well to install them immediately.

Google’s Project Zero team searches for "zero-day" code flaws and gives companies 90 days (plus a two week grace period) to fix them. In this case, Ormandy published the blog post shortly after Symantec pushed the fixes, saying the antivirus company did resolve the bugs "quickly."

However, he excoriated Symantec for the danger of the errors and its incompetence in allowing them. In one case, he found a buffer overflow flaw in the company’s "unpacker," which searches for hidden trojans and worms. "Because no interaction is necessary to exploit it, this is a wormable vulnerability with potentially devastating consequences," he says. "An attacker could easily compromise an entire enterprise fleet." He added that the unpackers have kernel access, which is "maybe not the best idea."

Norton anti-virus on display at the Commart Next-Gen 2014 in

LightRocket via Getty Images

The researcher built and released his own exploit to help Symantec develop an effective fix. He calls it a "100 percent reliable exploit, effective against the default configuration in Norton Antivirus and Symantec Endpoint [and] exploitable just from email or the web."

He reserved his harshest criticism for Symantec’s vulnerability management, which it’s supposed to use to check for published flaws and ensure it has the latest open-source updates. "Symantec dropped the ball here. A quick look at the decomposer library shipped by Symantec showed that they were using code derived from open source libraries … but hadn’t updated them in at least 7 years."

Symantec dropped the ball here. A quick look at the decomposer library shipped by Symantec showed that they were using code derived from open source libraries … but hadn’t updated them in at least 7 years

Symantec isn’t the only antivirus company with issues, as the prolific Ormandy has also flagged Trend Micro, McAfee and others. He even questioned the wisdom of using antivirus software in the first place, calling it "a significant tradeoff in terms of increasing [the] attack surface."

The bugs affect Norton Antivirus on Mac and Windows, Endpoint and numerous other Symantec products. As mentioned, the fixes have already been patched, and in most cases, you’ll get the updates automatically. As noted in the blog, however, "some of these products cannot be automatically updated, and administrators must take immediate action to protect their networks."

Via: Tavis Ormandy (Twitter)

Source: Google Project Zero, Symantec

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