Cloning Zwift on #ios Part 2: Reverse Engineering a Workout
▻https://hackernoon.com/cloning-zwift-on-ios-part-2-reverse-engineering-a-workout-9d4ffabc29e8?s
Last time, on “Making an iOS Zwift Clone to Save $15 a Month” I wrote about learning Core Bluetooth to connect to my exercise bike and get…Continue reading on Hacker Noon »
Organized crime in Nigeria - Wikipedia
▻https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organized_crime_in_Nigeria
An example of this are the highly organized confraternities/campus gangs that operate worldwide, for example the Neo Black Movement of Africa. In its own words, the Neo Black Movement of Africa is a “registered non-partisan, non-religious and non-tribal organisation that sincerely seek to revive, retain and modify where necessary those aspects of African culture that would provide vehicles of progress for Africa and her peoples”.
The current worldwide head of the Neo Black Movement is Augustus Bemigho-Oyeoyibo. A representative of the Neo Black Movement of Africa has claimed to be separate from the Black Axe groups and has engaged in charitable giving.
Behind the welfare facade of the Neo Black Movement hides indeed the most dreaded Nigerian campus cult, the Black Axe confraternity. NBM usually state that they are not identical with Black Axe for propaganda purposes. While the atrocities committed by campus cult members are well-known, very little is known about other activities of the Neo Black Movement. Offiong claims that the group’s initial goal of promoting black consciousness and fighting for the dignity of Africans and their freedom from neo-colonialism has deteriorated into self-serving behaviour that is “notoriously and brutally violent”. He maintains that violence has in fact become the cult’s official policy.
Apart from the atrocities in the orbit of NBM, most members of the confraternity are involved in fraud and cyber crime. The main reason to join the confraternity is (besides the pressure and intimidation that is applied to students to join) the fact that the confraternity has infiltrated all spheres of Nigerian society and serves the main purpose of helping its members climb the career ladder and going unpunished for their crimes by means of their nepotistic structure.
Investigations and a number of arrests of members of NBM by the Italian police brought to light various crimes committed by members of NBM. NBM and other cults were found guilty of smuggling of drugs, extortion, 419 fraud, prostitution, passport falsification, and cloning of credit cards.
In 2011, eight more members of NBM were arrested in Italy for the same offenses mentioned above. They are referred to as an international criminal organisation and Nigerian Mafia. According to internal documents, the confraternity helps members to immigrate illegally to Europe. Nigerian fraud rings have been exported to Europe, America, and Asia (see external links section). In 2015 a sophisticated car theft ring run by the Black Axe organized crime ring was busted in Toronto, Canada. The ring had stolen more than 500 luxury cars in one year, valued at 30 million US dollars.
Token Sale: How to Protect Yourself Against Scams and Hackers
▻https://hackernoon.com/token-sale-how-to-protect-yourself-against-scams-and-hackers-a85edaa5e37
Due to the booming cryptocurrency market, many genuine projects are being impersonated by scammers and hackers looking to take advantage of unsuspecting investors. Here, we take a look at some of the most common scams, and how to protect yourself against them.Brought to you by Namahe1. Make sure you are on the right websitePhishing is becoming more common as scammers become increasingly sophisticated, and arm themselves with new tools to fool unsuspecting investors.One of the major ways scammers are now targeting #ico investors is by cloning the official website. Often, these scammers will also purchase paid advertising on Google, and other search engines to increase their search ranking. As such, be sure to double check the URL when clicking through from a search engine or anywhere (...)
#common-token-scams #weekly-sponsor #against-token-scams #blockchain
Baidu’s new A.I. can mimic your voice after listening to it for just one minute
▻https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/baidu-ai-emulate-your-voice
Researchers at Chinese search giant Baidu say they have developed an artificial intelligence that can learn to precisely mimic a person’s voice based on less than 60 seconds’ worth of listening to it. They note this milestone uses Baidu’s text-to-speech synthesis system Deep Voice, which was trained on more than 800 hours of audio from 2,400 speakers. The team says Deep Voice requires only 100 five-second segments of vocal training data to sound its best, but a version trained on only 10 five-second samples was able to deceive a voice-recognition system more than 95 percent of the time. “We see many great use cases or applications for this technology,” says Baidu’s Leo Zou. “For example, voice cloning could help patients who lost their voices. This is also an important breakthrough in the direction of personalized human-machine interfaces.” Zou also thinks the technique could advance the creation of original digital content.
De mieux en mieux. Et la reconnaissance vocale, elle peut se rhabiller !
[1802.06006] Neural Voice Cloning with a Few Samples
▻https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.06006
Voice cloning is a highly desired feature for personalized speech interfaces. Neural network based speech synthesis has been shown to generate high quality speech for a large number of speakers. In this paper, we introduce a neural voice cloning system that takes a few audio samples as input. We study two approaches: speaker adaptation and speaker encoding. Speaker adaptation is based on fine-tuning a multi-speaker generative model with a few cloning samples. Speaker encoding is based on training a separate model to directly infer a new speaker embedding from cloning audios and to be used with a multi-speaker generative model. In terms of naturalness of the speech and its similarity to original speaker, both approaches can achieve good performance, even with very few cloning audios. While speaker adaptation can achieve better naturalness and similarity, the cloning time or required memory for the speaker encoding approach is significantly less, making it favorable for low-resource deployment.
First monkey clones created in Chinese laboratory - BBC News
▻http://www.bbc.com/news/health-42809445
Two monkeys have been cloned using the technique that produced Dolly the sheep.
Identical long-tailed macaques Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua were born several weeks ago at a laboratory in China.
Scientists say populations of monkeys that are genetically identical will be useful for research into human diseases.
But critics say the work raises ethical concerns by bringing the world closer to human cloning.
How Dirt Could Save Us From Antibiotic-Resistant Superbugs | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/how-dirt-could-save-humanity-from-an-infectious-apocalypse
Brady is creating drugs from dirt. He’s certain that the world’s topsoils contain incredible, practically inexhaustible reservoirs of undiscovered antibiotics, the chemical weapons bacteria use to fend off other microorganisms. He’s not alone in this thinking, but the problem is that the vast majority of bacteria cannot be grown in the lab—a necessary step in cultivating antibiotics.
Brady has found a way around this roadblock, which opens the door to all those untapped bacteria that live in dirt. By cloning DNA out of a kind of bacteria-laden mud soup, and reinstalling these foreign gene sequences into microorganisms that can be grown in the lab, he’s devised a method for discovering antibiotics that could soon treat infectious diseases and fight drug-resistant superbugs. In early 2016, Brady launched a company called Lodo Therapeutics (lodo means mud in Spanish and Portuguese) to scale up production and ultimately help humanity outrun infectious diseases nipping at our heels. Some colleagues call his approach “a walk in the park.” Indeed, his lab recently dispatched two groups of student volunteers to collect bags full of dirt at 275 locations around New York City.
Tackling mobile’s « game cloning » issue
▻http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-07-14-tackling-mobiles-game-cloning-issue
Riot Games is trying to prevent League of Legends being ripped off by a cloning outfit, but is there more that store operators could do to protect creators?
When Pseudosex Is Better Than the Real Thing - Issue 42: Fakes
▻http://nautil.us/issue/42/fakes/when-pseudosex-is-better-than-the-real-thing
Decades ago, behavioral neurobiologist David Crews read a strange report about the desert grassland whiptail, a small, slender lizard that lives in the sagebrush of the American Southwest. The paper claimed that the species was entirely female, and reproduced by cloning. It tested the limits of what Crews felt to be biologically plausible in higher vertebrates. “I didn’t believe that such a thing existed,” he says. But he was curious, and a friend who was going to New Mexico offered to collect some from the wild. Crews, who at the time was at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, installed a half-dozen whiptail lizards in glass tanks in his animal room. One day, he noticed a lizard biting at her cagemate’s rear legs and tail, and soon after that, riding atop her. Crews instantly (...)
The Philosopher Who Says We Should Play God - Issue 28: 2050
▻http://nautil.us/issue/28/2050/the-philosopher-who-says-we-should-play-god
Australian bioethicist Julian Savulescu has a knack for provocation. Take human cloning. He says most of us would readily accept it if it benefited us. As for eugenics—creating smarter, stronger, more beautiful babies—he believes we have an ethical obligation to use advanced technology to select the best possible children. A protégé of the philosopher Peter Singer, Savulescu is a prominent moral philosopher at the University of Oxford, where he directs the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. He also edits the Journal of Medical Ethics. Savulescu isn’t shy about stepping onto ethical minefields. He sees nothing wrong with doping to help cyclists climb those steep mountains in the Tour de France. Some elite athletes will always cheat to boost their performance, so instead of trying to (...)
Clone It Already : Scientists Find Liquid Mammoth Blood | Geekologie
▻http://geekologie.com/2013/05/clone-it-already-scientists-find-liquid.php
In potentially exciting cloning news, scientists have successfully drawn liquid wooly mammoth blood from a carcass found in Siberia. Fingers crossed by this time next year they’re inexpensive enough to hire for a kid’s birthday party.
About 15,000 years ago, an old female wooly mammoth plunged through the ice as she was being chased by predators. Her remains have now been uncovered by scientists working in Siberia. And remarkably, as they were digging it out, blood began to stream out. Which is weird given that it was 10° below freezing.
“It can be assumed that the blood of mammoths had some cryo-protective properties,” noted Grigoriev. Mammoth blood, it would appear, contains a kind of anti-freeze.
Scientists create human stem cells through cloning | Reuters
▻http://in.reuters.com/article/2013/05/15/science-stemcells-idINDEE94E0DN20130515
... the achievement could also revive fears of reproductive cloning, or producing genetic copies of living (or dead) individuals.
Even before the study was published, a British watchdog group called Human Genetics Alert protested the research.
“Scientists have finally delivered the baby that would-be human cloners have been waiting for: a method for reliably creating cloned human embryos,” said Dr. David King, the group’s director. “This makes it imperative that we create an international legal ban on human cloning before any more research like this takes place. It is irresponsible in the extreme to have published this research.”
Among scientists, however, the accomplishment is being hailed as “a tour de force,” as stem cell biologist George Daley of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute put it. “This represents an unparalleled achievement. They succeeded where many other groups failed, including mine.”
Tennessee ‘monkey bill’ becomes law
►http://www.nature.com/news/tennessee-monkey-bill-becomes-law-1.10423
Nicknamed after the ‘monkey trial’ of 1925, in which Tennessee prosecuted high-school science teacher John Scopes for violating a state law against teaching evolution, the new measure allows public-school teachers to “help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories”. Biological evolution, global warming, the chemical origins of life and human cloning are listed as examples of such theories.
Attack of the #Clones: Scientists Make Self-Replicating Reptiles | Death and Taxes
►http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/85990/attack-of-the-clones-scientists-make-self-replicating-reptiles
Turns out self-cloning females are not only real, but replicable in a lab.