Can you hear the difference between a human voice and a computer’s? Maybe not.
It turns out that the infamous Nigerian Prince actually lives in Louisiana, and that Facebook’s Hate speech policies don’t work. How should we interact with our tech? And what is the truth about Apple’s iPhone battery?
Join the geeks for these stories, and many more, on this week’s Geek Speak.
A research paper published by Google this month—which has not been peer reviewed—details a text-to-speech system called Tacotron 2, which claims near-human accuracy at imitating audio of a person speaking from text.
Oh – and this motivated me to switch the Show site to HTTPS.
Most of you reading this have probably at some point been contacted by someone claiming you are the beneficiary in a will of a Nigerian prince. As the scam goes, all you have to do is submit your personal information and Western Union some funds to process the necessary paperwork, and in return you will receive hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. One of the people behind the popular scam, Michael Neu, has been arrested by police in Slidell, Louisiana.
Greylisting is a method of defending e-mail users against spam. A mail transfer agent (MTA) using greylisting will “temporarily reject” any email from a sender it does not recognize. If the mail is legitimate the originating server will try again after a delay, and if sufficient time has elapsed the email will be accepted.
We asked Facebook about its handling of 49 posts that might be deemed offensive. The company acknowledged that its content reviewers had made the wrong call on 22 of them.
I’m an expert on how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities. That’s why I spent the last three years as a Design Ethicist at Google caring about how to design things in a way that defends a billion people’s minds from getting hijacked.
A decade after he stayed up all night coding a prototype of what was then called an “awesome” button, Rosenstein belongs to a small but growing band of Silicon Valley heretics who complain about the rise of the so-called “attention economy”: an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising economy.
In fact, mobile computers, he says, have turned out to be mind-numbing consumption devices—sophisticated televisions—rather than the wheels for the mind that Steve Jobs envisioned.
Reddit users have noticed that Apple appears to be slowing down old iPhones that have low-capacity batteries. While many iPhone users have experienced perceived slowdowns due to iOS updates over the years, it appears that there’s now proof Apple is throttling processor speeds when a battery capacity deteriorates over time.
Interesting. I know this is true for some of the older MacBooks. When the battery is faulty/dead or removed from the computer, the cpu is under clocked. Even though i just kept it plugged in, I noticed quite a big performance difference when I put in a new replacement battery.
bq. Heres how I found out about this. Turns out the battery is an integral part the the power management of the macbook. It made me go buy a new battery right away.
When my iPhone 6+ started getting really slow, I wondered how much of it was real and how much was false nostalgia. I couldn’t answer this without seeing how it worked when it was new. I can’t go back in time to see that, but I can do the next best thing: record my devices now, and keep a record for the future.
