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Week 2 [12-18.10.2015] Technology, Entertainment and Arts

Read an article at http://www.bbc.com/news/technology  or at http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment_and_arts and present it here. Encourage its discussion.

Comments

Unknown said…
"Uber error leaks US-based drivers' data"
This is something terrible! Again this large company have problem with security. One small bug can be woth some milions of dolars.
We can use this software everyday, we can think that we safety do something, we trust these companies. I think if company goes to large scale, global app they should employ army of testers and make some heavy audits.
Some other companies like Google pay big money if someone find issue in his aplications. I think this is good practice and this should be best practice of all global companies.
Unknown said…
I chose an article about the anti racist graffiti in a series called "Homeland". I haven't watched the show but I've heard good opinions about it. Artists hired to write graffiti on set wrote anti Homeland messages like "Homeland is racist" because it allegedly shows stereotypical descriptions of Arabs and Muslims. Have anyone of you seen Homeland? Are the allegations true?

Anyway I don't think anyone would notice because the messages were in Arabic and only briefly shown in a couple of scenes but the artists came forward and told everybody about what they wrote and why. I wonder if the producers could sue them?

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34536434
Unknown said…
"14 October: R2-D2 plane unveiled; May the air force be with you"

Wow, that's amazing! I love STAR WARS so i must comment this topic :) I think this situation is associated with the premiere of Star Wars to be held in December. Recently in Warsaw I saw a tram with stickers from Star Wars and I took a photo.
"League of Legends: Bidding war over e-sports team"
The article concerns huge amounts of money paid to buy professional e-sports teams. For example, bids for one of League of Legends teams have gone far beyond $500,000! Expert says that e-sports field is growing very fast at the moment - there are millionaires (and billionaires!) looking to buy teams.

I like playing League of Legends for fun, but my skills are nothing compared to professionals'. I'll think of that article next time I watch professional LoL match!
Pity you didn't post the link to that article, but I googled it and it looks amazing! I'm very excited for the SW premiere :)
Unknown said…
The article that was interesting to me and the one I have chosen is this one:
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34359936

The title is "'Too hot to be an engineer' - women mark Ada Lovelace Day"

I have chosen it because nowadays there is a big problem with women in IT industry. There are big corporations with IT sections, and where is almost no women at all!

The article descibes a history of four female engineers from around the world, who share their experiences of working in male-dominated professions on Ada Lovelace Day (Ada Lovelace was the world's first computer programmer in 1850s).

So the first women – Isis Anchalee – shared (actually a company shared a photo, as an ad) a photo with her portrait and paper she hold, that says that she is a programmer. There was a big storm in Social Media, and some didn't even believe that she really is a programmer! She wrote a blog post and encouraged other people (not only girls) to share their photos with hashtag #ilooklikeanengineer. She wanted to break stereotypes, and wanted to show the "truth" about the industry.

Another woman - Sovita Dahal - share quite different story. She said that all of her family and community were against when they found out that she wants to connnect her future with technology. She says that it was "against traditional things", because girls should get married, set a family and raise kids, but she wanted to do it differently. And she was stubborn, so she got into IT and succeed :)

Third woman - Roma Agrawal – gets upset when people say that women are worse in math and science that men, because in her opinion it's not true.

Last woman – Dolphin Guan – is observing a nice trend. There are more and more women who are getting into the tech/engineering jobs.

--

In my opinion it is quite a big problem, and sometimes I wonder how it happened that it is just like that. Is it true that man are better in maths/science? How happens that in classes in high school there are always more men in math classes, and more women in language/humanistic classes? I think this is our own decision. I remember that I was in math-physics-german class and we had only 8 girls out of 30 people in class! That's big disproportion.
What do you think? What is this disproportion connected to?
The most interesting article for me is :
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34452756
"Pay by ring? The tech changing how we make purchases"

Since few years we can observe how technology world is evolving. One of the biggest achievement in my opinion is Near Field Communication technology. We know this technology mainly from our credit or debit cards that have paypass option. The evolution went further offering using our phones to pay for purchases.

Besides great ease of payments method without using PIN to authorise transactions we have to be aware of disadvantages. The most important one is danger of loosing out money. When we lose out card thief can charge our account for many transactions, each of them of 50zł without any problem. Of course it depends on our daily limit or moment that we figure out that card is stolen. However using phone or ring as it is proposed in article is much more problematic. As long as we keep card in a wallet it is harder to perform contactless transaction. Many people have devices to charge our account, and wearing ring or anything so easily accessible is nothing else that great opportunity for thief to stole out money.
Unknown said…
„The dangerous art of the ultimate selfie”

Selfie evolving.
In 2015, the network appeared variation of this type of pictures called dangerous selfie. This shows us how crazy ideas people can have, only for somehow exist on the network.

Unfortunately, some people do not use the brain before they plan the execution of such pictures which ends in death for them. For example, in Russia the scale of this phenomenon is so serious that involved the Interior Ministry. They organizing a campaign to make people aware of the consequences of such irresponsibility.

On the web there is a video that shows the 25 most dangerous selfie in history, you can watch it below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_aPgPq6hMM
So I open the link and first thing that catches my eye is the big headline "Apple ordered to pay huge damages". http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34559232

"This is gonna good" I think since I'm not a big fan of the brand, to say the least...

Apparently Apple was ordered to pay over $234m for patent infringement. Serves them right for all the ridiculous patents, anyone remembers rounded rectangle patent? http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/1701443/USD670286S1.pdf

The lawsuit concened microchip technology used in iPhone 5s, 6 and 6 plus (and additional one concerning 6S Plus has also been filed).

The sum Apple was ordered to pay got lowered because "the judge ruled that Apple had not wilfully infringed the patent".

What's interesting the University of Wisconsin, where the work over microchip technology took place, also sued Intel over the same patent just a few years back - in 2008.

Personally I think it's great that in the end the researchers work is recognized. Big concerns would get nowhere without those dedicated people.
Unknown said…
I found very interesting article titled “Being controlled by electric shocks”. It’s about researches about controlling people by means of electrical nerve stimulation. Max
Pfeiffer combined electrical nerve stimulation machine with a smartphone app. His goal is to take control of someone’s legs and force him or she to move in a particular direction. The system can be used to navigate you in an area which you don’t know. There is a video with explanation how all this stuff work. Do you think we will be controlled by this kind of machines in a future?
Aleksander M said…
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34565631

Might not seems like big news but I'm happy to know Amazon is finally trying to do something about those fake reviews. Amazon Book reviews for instance used to be absolutely useless - there are countless stories about authors trying to release their work on, say, Kindle, getting their chances absolutely ruined by bots posting fake reviews and Amazon promoting poorly written books instead, only due to their impossibly high ratings.

If you are interested in further reading about this subject take a look at:
http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2015/03/fake-amazon-book-reviews-are-hurting-my-book.html
Aleksander M said…
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34565631

Might not seems like big news but I'm happy to know Amazon is finally trying to do something about those fake reviews. Amazon Book reviews for instance used to be absolutely useless - there are countless stories about authors trying to release their work on, say, Kindle, getting their chances absolutely ruined by bots posting fake reviews and Amazon promoting poorly written books instead, only due to their impossibly high ratings.

If you are interested in further reading about this subject take a look at:
http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2015/03/fake-amazon-book-reviews-are-hurting-my-book.html
Unknown said…
I chose to read "Star Citizen space game has 'a million players" http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34548609

I checked this mainly because I've spent a few dollars to back this project myself and I was curious what popular media says about it. This seems to be only a short summary, general information with no mention of the storm that was raging around SC not so long ago. By storm I mean accusing Star Citizen of being a vaporware and calling the whole project a scam.

You can look at this article ( http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/features/14695-Star-Citizen-Controversy-Reaches-a-Boiling-Point ) if you'd like to learn some details. It mentions the developers alleged shady activities.

As for me, I'm not very worried because my financial input into this game isn't that big. Actually it's insignificant comparing to people who have spent over 10k dollars on Star Citizen in-game goods already. Things that don't even exist yet! If it turns out to be a hoax, my personal loss won't be painful, but it will be too bad for the gaming community in general. ;D So far it seems that the company managed to defend itself. I wonder how the situation will evolve.
Unknown said…
I picked an article "The cars chasing the Sun" about the unusual race - all vehicles must be sun powered only (they can have a small batteries, but most of the eneregy must come from the sun). The team that arrives first to the finish line wins, but this event isn't about winning. Its more like developing car, that in the future might be present on the road.
For me it is a great idea. Looking for alternatives, renewable source of energy is really interesting and in my opinion mankind should consider going that way for future generations.

link to the article: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34528753
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34527439

Currently cyber crime is evolving just like the internet banking industry. There is no answer to stopping all cyber crimes except for vigilant security and experience provided by NCA.
Diversification of several bank account is the only answer to internet banking crime fraud.
Thanks for your presentation, it was very interesting. I was in french/humanistic class myself and we had 28 girls and 2 boys in our class, some classes didn't have boys at all. I think that this may be because people are afraid of being laughed at and it is not new to me that boys in "girly" class type are often being called gay or feminine and girls majoring in some technical subjects are being called lesbians and laughed for not shaving their legs or something. It may really hurt. But in my opinion people should do whatever works best for them and not worry about what the others say.
Oh, I have heard about three cases regarding this subject. One of them was a girl that tried to make a selfie in Norway and she fell off a cliff (Preikestolen). Second was a Polish couple in Portugal who also fell off a cliff and their children witnessed it. The last one was before AC/DC concert in Warsaw - a guy who thought that jumping off a bridge and taking a selfie during the jump would be great but he drowned. I understand that many of these cases were accidents but people have really lost their minds trying to show their life on Facebook and they do some absurd things to get more and more likes. We should like ourselves and not depend on this crazy fashion.
If you're interested in eco cars maybe you know about these lanes in England that are supposed to be charging cars that drive on them. If you haven't heard about that I reccomend reading this article: http://mashable.com/2015/08/17/electric-car-charging-uk/#emn2BwyiO8kC
Unknown said…
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34565631
Choose that one. Probably not that terrible crime, but at the same time is pretty interesting topic. From my personal perspective it is in some way looks like a witch-hunt from the side of Amazon, I mean I am not sure how really those fake reviews affect the overall sale rating, but definitely it is not that important in global terms. Instead of fighting the result, it is better to fight the reasons: amazon lets some of the people to put product of poor quality for sale and I think this is the problem of those fake reviews. In those terms - Amazon has time to look for fake reviews (and actually I am pretty interested how they are going to prove that those reviews are 100% fake), but has no time to watch for quality. And lets be honest, I don't know a single person who would read a review on Amazon and will base his or her opinion on it.
Strange things are going on with Amazon, really strange things that probably could harm its reputation, especially if among those people there will be innocents.
This comment has been removed by the author.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34565631

I have chosen an article about how Amazon is dealing with fake customer reviews.

Over 1,000 people are being sued by Amazon for selling fake reviews. Amazon does that because fake reviews undermine the trust of their customers and may result in drop in sales. The investigation focuses on a website Fiverr.com that offers fictional reviews for $5.

I think that this is a real problem these days. We search for answers online and we rely on the knowledge obtained from various, often untrustwothy sites. I often check customer reviews for many different products, mostly for cosmetics. I have read so many reviews that I am able to decide whether a certain opinion is fake or not, but I am sure that many users believe in good intentions of other users and may get problems from that.

On the other hand I recommend reading this sugarfree gummy bears review, it is funny:) http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3FTHSH0UNRHOH/ref=cm_cr_pr_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B008JELLCA
Unknown said…
For me the most interesting article was: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33291119.
These days many women are under stain. Most of them is not just housewifes (i know it's a really hard work) but also work in a full-time job,
so it's harder to get pregnant than it was ten or fifteen years ago. Such mobile applications could be really useful for them. Thing which is quite worrying me is privacy.
We know that these days we are totally invigilated by such giants as Google or Apple. I don't think anybody wants to share his sexual activity. I'm afraid of leak of this informations
when it's store in cloud services(remember leak of nude photos of celebrities from ICloud?). Anyway i think such solutions are future of planning family and contextualise future of whole medicine.
Unknown said…
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34565631

Amazon has started to sue fake reviewers. It is said that over 1000 people were involved in the case of reviewing products either with good comments (to improve the sale) or bad comments (to decrease sales of competitive products).

The procedure is unbelievably easy. You you can just choose an offer from available offers on a website for just 5$.

The lawsuit says that the Amazon is bringing this action to protect its customs from misconduct while choosing a product online.
Unknown said…
The most absorbed the headline for me was: "Pay by ring? The tech changing how we make purchases" Article talks about payment technology and the newest trend in this branch. Article consists of the text and the short film, which show "magical" ring. Kate Russel is talking about new structure whereby people will can pay for their shopping. Ring consists of special micro chip which has a contact with the bank.
It is realy great- inconspicuous jewelry replace older methods of payment.
I don't know what else people can create? ;)
Film show more possibility of payment, for example the finger pay system, it is as interesting and great as ring pay system.
I recomend it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0351dyn
Unknown said…
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34549065

This article announces on the Elaboration of an algorithm that helps robots to fall delicately to protect them from damage. There is a video that shows these lows. It's great that robotics is increasingly being developed. I hope that we will see in the future robots whitch will help us in little things and could communicate by voice with them.
Unknown said…
I choose the "Pay by ring? The tech changing how we make purchases" article.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34452756

I find it fascinating how banks and retail lobbies are making it easier and easier for us to spend money. Especially easier to spend money witout us feeling like we are doing it. That's partially why debit cards were invented - to make us feel more disconected from spending. Soon all we'll need to do to get rid of our money will be thinking about it.

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