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An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Algorithms are increasingly being used to make ethical decisions. They are built to pursue a single mathematical goal, such as maximizing the number of soldiers' lives saved or minimizing the number of civilian deaths. When you start dealing with multiple, often competing, objectives or try to account for intangibles like "freedom" and "well-being," a satisfactory mathematical solution doesn't always exist. "We as humans want multiple incompatible things," says Peter Eckersley, the director of research for the Partnership on AI, who recently released a paper that explores this issue. "There are many high-stakes situations where it's actually inappropriate -- perhaps dangerous -- to program in a single objective function that tries to describe your ethics." These solutionless dilemmas aren't specific to algorithms. Ethicists have studied them for decades and refer to them as impossibility theorems. So when Eckersley first recognized their applications to artificial intelligence, he borrowed an idea directly from the field of ethics to propose a solution: what if we built uncertainty into our algorithms? Eckersley puts forth two possible techniques to express this idea mathematically. He begins with the premise that algorithms are typically programmed with clear rules about human preferences. We'd have to tell it, for example, that we definitely prefer friendly soldiers over friendly civilians, and friendly civilians over enemy soldiers -- even if we weren't actually sure or didn't think that should always be the case. The algorithm's design leaves little room for uncertainty. The first technique, known as partial ordering, begins to introduce just the slightest bit of uncertainty. You could program the algorithm to prefer friendly soldiers over enemy soldiers and friendly civilians over enemy soldiers, but you wouldn't specify a preference between friendly soldiers and friendly civilians. In the second technique, known as uncertain ordering, you have several lists of absolute preferences, but each one has a probability attached to it. Three-quarters of the time you might prefer friendly soldiers over friendly civilians over enemy soldiers. A quarter of the time you might prefer friendly civilians over friendly soldiers over enemy soldiers. The algorithm could handle this uncertainty by computing multiple solutions and then giving humans a menu of options with their associated trade-offs, Eckersley says.

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Windows 10 Mobile devices will be officially unsupported starting on December 10, 2019. As a result, Microsoft is recommending users move to an Android or iOS device instead. Mac Rumors reports: Microsoft made the recommendation in a Windows 10 Mobile support document (via Thurrott) explaining its plans to stop offering security updates and patches for Windows 10 Mobile: "With the Windows 10 Mobile OS end of support, we recommend that customers move to a supported Android or iOS device. Microsoft's mission statement to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, compels us to support our Mobile apps on those platforms and devices." All customers who have a Windows 10 Mobile device will be able to keep using it after December 10, 2019, but no further updates will be available.

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced today that the company would cut 7% of its workforce in order to cut costs as the company prepares to ramp up production and boost margins as they get closer to releasing the long-awaited $35,000 version of the Model 3. CNBC reports: Musk says Tesla faces "an extremely difficult challenge" in making their products a competitive alternative to traditional vehicles, adding that he expects Q4 profit to come in significantly lower than Q3. Five experts weigh in on whether it's a challenge Musk and Tesla can overcome: - Oppenheimer managing director Colin Rusch agrees with Jed Dorsheimer on Tesla's job cuts, but isn't bullish on what they'll accomplish. - Canaccord Genuity's Jed Dorsheimer thinks the workforce cut is just fine, calling it "clean-up" after the company's latest push to ramp up Model 3 production came with a wealth of new hires. - "They're certainly in a better position than they were eight or nine months ago," says ROTH Capital's Craig Irwin. "Where we're going to see pressure on the stock today is the 'copy-paste' expectations of Q3 going through 2019 need to be reset." - Needham's Raji Gil thinks that Tesla may have overestimated how many people can actually afford a high-end electric vehicle. "Clearly, in my mind, they have an issue with demand," says Rusch, " If you do the math, you have to conclude that 90 percent of the reservations that have been built up over the past couple of years are folks that wanted the standard battery version of the vehicle, which is $35,000." - Westly Group founder Steve Westly loves where Elon Musk's company is right now, calling Tesla "the iPhone of electric vehicles," and saying they're well ahead of the game when it comes to a quickly-changing auto market.

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eWEEK: Red Hat's competitive effort to Docker containers hits a major milestone with the release of Podman 1.0, which looks to provide improved performance and security for containers.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: Russian hackers attempted to breach Democratic National Committee email addresses in a spear-phishing campaign just after the 2018 midterms, according to a DNC court document filed Thursday night. "The content of these emails and their timestamps were consistent with a spear-phishing campaign that leading cybersecurity experts have tied to Russian intelligence," reads the complaint. "Therefore, it is probable that Russian intelligence again attempted to unlawfully infiltrate DNC computers in November 2018." The complaint [...] said there is no evidence that the attempted hack in Nov. 2018 was successful. Spear-phishing campaigns involve sending emails that appear to be from a trusted source in order to gain confidential information. According to CNN, the emails in question appeared to have been sent from a State Department official and contained a PDF attachment that, if opened, would allow the hacker access to the recipient's computer. The timing and content of these emails were consistent with the practices of the Russian hacking group known as Cozy Bear, one of the two groups that hacked the DNC prior to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. According to the cybersecurity firm FireEye, Cozy Bear attempted to hack over 20 entities in Nov. 2018, including clients in local government, transportation, defense, law enforcement, and military.

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Microsoft Wants Cortana to Play Nicely With Amazon and Google  WIRED

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says the company's Cortana digital assistant should be available on smart speakers made by rivals like Amazon and Google.

ON Semiconductor Increases Support for Idaho State University Department of Electrical Engineering  Idaho State University

January 18, 2019. Donation of design workstations, funding for design software and curriculum development collaboration underline the company's support for ...

Documents released by the Department of Defense reveal some of what its infamous Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was working on. From a report: The Department of Defense funded research on wormholes, invisibility cloaking, and "the manipulation of extra dimensions" under its shadowy Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, first described in 2017 by the New York Times and the Washington Post. On Wednesday, the Defense Intelligence Agency released a list of 38 research titles pursued by the program in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy. The list provides one of the best looks at the Pentagon's covert UFO operation or study of "anomalous aerospace threats." According to Aftergood's FOIA request, the document marked "For Official Use Only" was sent to Congress on January 2018. One such research topic, "Traversable Wormholes, Stargates, and Negative Energy," was led by Eric W. Davis of EarthTech International Inc, which describes itself as a facility "exploring the forefront reaches of science and engineering," with an interest in theories of spacetime, studies of the quantum vacuum, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

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Ostechnix:  GameHub is free, open source gaming platform written in Vala using GTK+3 for GNU/Linux operating systems.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Thanks to such acts as Britney Spears, Twenty One Pilots and Guns N' Roses, along with soundtracks from the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise -- which boasts the year's top two sellers -- and Netflix's Stranger Things series, cassette tape album sales in the U.S. grew by 23 percent in 2018. According to Nielsen Music, cassette album sales climbed from 178,000 in 2017 to 219,000 copies in 2018. While that's a small number compared to the overall album market (141 million copies sold in 2018), that's a sizable number for a once-dead format. In 2014, for example, cassette album sales numbered just 50,000. But, 20 years before that, back in 1994, when cassettes were still very much a hot-selling format, there were 246 million cassette albums sold that year, of an overall 615 million albums.

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LinuxUprising: Firefox Send is a file sharing experiment by Mozilla, which allows sending encrypted files to other users.