«Che cos'è quella sensazione quando ci si allontana dalle persone e loro restano indietro sulla pianura finché le si vede appena come macchioline che si disperdono?... È il mondo troppo vasto che ci sovrasta, ed è l'addio. Ma noi puntiamo avanti verso la prossima pazzesca avventura sotto i cieli.» -- Jack Kerouac /Colonna sonora: ``Crash Worship - Pyru''/ ``Internet shutdowns cost countries $2.4 billion last year'', Darrell M. West -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- «In this paper, I analyze the economic impact of temporary internet shutdowns. I examine 81 short-term shutdowns in 19 countries over the past year (see Appendix for news stories describing these shutdowns); identify their duration, scope, and the population affected; and estimate their impact on Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Based upon this analysis, I find that between July 1, 2015 and June 30, 2016, these shutdowns cost at least US$2.4 billion in GDP globally.» ``Fixing the IoT isn't going to be easy'', Matthew Garrett ---------------------------------------------------------- «A large part of the internet became inaccessible today after a botnet made up of IP cameras and digital video recorders was used to DoS a major DNS provider. This highlighted a bunch of things including how maybe having all your DNS handled by a single provider is not the best of plans, but in the long run there's no real amount of diversification that can fix this - malicious actors have control of a sufficiently large number of hosts that they could easily take out multiple providers simultaneously.» ``Database Decay and What To Do About It'', Michael Stonebraker et al. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- «We term this divergence of reality from 3rd normal form principles [due DBAs not changing the schema and so having ER and UML model (if it ever existed) diverging from reality] database decay.» ``Could Google influence the presidential election?'', David Shultz ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- «Even if you don't believe lizard people and the Illuminati secretly run our planet, the world really is filled with unseen influences. The languid music in the grocery store makes us walk slower and spend more money, and product placements in TV and movies leave us inexplicably craving things like Coca-Cola and Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos. Most people treat these subliminal messages as an unavoidable part of daily life, maybe even as a tool that we might ourselves exploit at some point. But what if these invisible forces were doing more than leaving our wallets a few dollars lighter? What if they are shaping some voters' choices? With the presidential election around the corner, Science asked experts in computer science, business, and law to weigh in on how companies like Google and Facebook, which function as the primary gateway to online information for millions of voters, could influence the outcome.» ``1984 - George Orwell never dreamed of advertising as invasive as Yahoo's proposal'', David Kravets ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- «Yahoo wants to take advertising to the next level - that is, the Orwellian level - bombarding people in public places with targeted advertising served up by the surveillance society. That's according to a Yahoo patent application recently published by the US Patent and Trademark Office. According to Yahoo, the time has come to move outdoor and public-facing advertising into the digital age - and get there by deploying more intrusive techniques than how it's now done online. Introducing "Smart Billboards," as Yahoo calls them. These digital billboards - which Yahoo envisions being placed along freeways and in bars, airports, planes, ferries, buses, trains, and other public spaces - might rely on video cameras, satellites, drones, microphones, motion detectors, and "biometric sensors" such as fingerprint, retinal, and facial recognition devices. Combined, these "sensor systems," as Yahoo calls them, analyze their surroundings to determine a common theme to serve up ads, in what Yahoo describes as "grouplization."» ``Supercharging Style Transfer'', Vincent Dumoulin, Jonathon Shlens and Manjunath Kudlur ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Pastiche" generati da reti neurali (ce ne sono molti altri nell'appendice dell'articolo `A Learned Representation for Artistic Style' di Vincent Dumoulin, Jonathon Shlens, Manjunath Kudlur ()).