Extenuating Circumstances

This is an auto-posted collection of public links I’ve either posted to, or favourites from Twitter, my Instapaper bookmarks and my public links posted to Pinboard.in for August 14th from 13:46 to 18:27:

• Living Dinosaurs of Computing that Handle Highly Sensitive Information are Being Blithely Hooked Up to the Internet | MIT Technology Review – The login screen presented by a mainframe computer freely accessible over the Internet; mainframes handle critical data but receive much less scrutiny from…
• Inside Facebook’s Quest for Software That Understands You | MIT Technology Review –
• Security Software Uses Friendly Phishing to Probe Human Weaknesses That Leave Data Exposed | MIT Technology Review – Data breaches like the one that hit the Pentagon’s e-mail system this week often start when one person makes a simple mistake like opening a phishing message.…
• Five Novels with Different Cosmological Outlooks – One of the things that’s different about human beings is that we alone, as far as we know, tell ourselves stories about how the universe came to be. Other…
• Read the Query Letter That Paved the Way For Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice – Want to see a successful query letter? After hanging out with a writers’ critique circle recently, author Ann Leckie decided to share her original query letter…
• Chinese ‘Unmanned Factory’ Replaces 600 Humans With 60 Robots – According to an article in the People’s Daily, the “official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party” (so emphasis on that “according to”), the Changying…
• British Highway Will Recharge Your Batteries as You Drive – Smart roads can be smart in many ways—say by anticipating traffic jams or by conversing with a car’s autopilot to improve safety.
  They can also converse with…
• 4-D Light Field Displays Are Exactly What Virtual Reality Needs – Ever since our first experience with a prototype of the Oculus Rift, we’ve been getting more and more excited about high quality consumer virtual reality…
• New Study: China’s Air Pollution Is Killing 4,000 People Per Day – Over the past 10 years of living in and then writing about China, I’ve struck these big three recurring themes: On this last front, a study out just now from…
• Move over, Turing — Medium – Let Rorschach have a turn.
  The field of artificial intelligence is moving quickly, and computers seem to be getting smarter every day. To track their progress,…
• Beacon Project Cracks the Door for Genomic Data Sharing – Bio-IT World – By Aaron Krol
  August 14, 2015 | The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health, or GA4GH, has attracted over 350 member organizations since it was formed just over…
• Fortitude (TV series) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – Fortitude is a British psychological thriller television series created and written by Simon Donald. A 12-episode series was commissioned by Sky Atlantic in…
• No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons (Re-reloaded) » “Humans”? They Weren’t Kidding. – Spoilers. Duh.
  Honestly, I can’t see much difference from the staff they’ve already got at Home Depot…
  So that was Humans. Eight hours of carefully-arced,…
• The US digital service | Hacker News – One thing I’ll say about government work — you’re not really breaking new ground, from a technology perspective. (Unless you’re at DARPA I suppose.) Don’t come…
• The U.S. Digital Service – A lot of us complain about how the government is not very good at technology. TheU.S. Digital Service is actually trying to do something about it, by applying…