Cody Taylor

nandemoari alerts us to news over at DSLReports that Cablevision will be offering subscribers 101-Mbps download service, a new US record. That’s fast enough to download an HD movie in less than 10 minutes. The package, known as “Ultra,” will launch on May 11 and will cost .95 a month. Upload speed is 15 Mbps and there are no monthly limits. Cablevision is also doubling the speed of its Wi-Fi service, which is available free to subscribers using hotspots across the Northeast. “…the company will be launching a new ‘Ultra’ tier on May 11. The new tier features speeds of 101Mbps downstream and 15Mbps upstream for .95 a month. That’s an unprecedented amount of speed at an unprecedented price, suggesting that Cablevision just took the gloves off in their fight against Verizon FiOS. … Cablevision spokesman Jim Maiella confirmed for me that the .95 price is unbundled, and the new tier does not come with any kind of a usage cap or overage fees.”

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Miracle Jones writes “In an interview with Professor (and former Microsoft employee) James Grimmelmann at the New York Law School, who is both setting up an online clearinghouse to discuss the Google book settlement and drafting an amicus brief to inform the court about the antitrust factors surrounding “orphan books,” he revealed that Google will be able to moderate the content of its book scans in the same way that they moderate their YouTube videos, leaving out works that Google deems “inappropriate” from the 7 million library books it has scanned. The Fiction Circus has called for a two-year long rights auction that will ensure that these “inappropriate” titles do not get left behind in the digital era, and that other people who are willing to host and display these books will be able to do so. There is only one week left for authors and publishers to “opt out” of the settlement class and retain their rights or raise objections, and Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive has been stopped from jumping on board Google’s settlement as a party defendant and receiving the same legal protections that Google will get. A group of authors, including Philip K. Dick’s estate, has tried to delay the settlement for four more months until they get their minds around the issue.” In related news, Google is seeking a 60-day extension to the period in which it’s attempting to contact authors to inform them of their right to opt-out of the terms of the settlement.

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yahyamf writes “I have a lot of free educational content in the form of audio lectures and text, which I’d like to translate into as many languages as possible. I would also want to transcribe the audio and create audiobooks from the text. There are already several volunteers willing to contribute, but I need some web based software to manage all the work. Facebook is already doing something like this, but it is only for their content. I’ve also looked at Damned Lies, which is part of the Gnome project, but it doesn’t seem to handle audio. Are there any other open source translation projects out there that I can customize and build upon?”

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marpot writes “Does your school/university check your homeworks/theses for plagiarism? Nowadays, probably Yes, but are they doing it properly? Little is known about plagiarism detection accuracy, which is why we conduct a competition on plagiarism detection, sponsored by Yahoo! We have set up a corpus of artificial plagiarism which contains plagiarism with varying degrees of obfuscation, and translation plagiarism from Spanish or German source documents. A random plagiarist was employed who attempts to obfuscate his plagiarism with random sequences of text operations, e.g., shuffling, deleting, inserting, or replacing a word. Translated plagiarism is created using machine translation.”

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When it comes to critical national infrastructure, the highly distributed and ultra-interconnected U.S. power grid is, hands down, the most vulnerable to cyberattack.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Facebook regularly attracts more than 200 million people to its website, but the company is now looking for ways to permeate the lives of its users without the need to check-in to the Facebook site. The Palo Alto,…

Apple has quietly signaled a new emphasis on graphics by hiring an influential graphics chipset designer from AMD. The former CTO for the company’s ATI graphics product group, Bob Drebin, has indicated on his LinkedIn profile that he is now a Senior Director for an unnamed group within Apple.