Guetzli is a JPEG encoder that aims for excellent compression density at high visual quality. Guetzli-generated images are typically 20-30% smaller than images of equivalent quality generated by libjpeg. Guetzli generates only sequential (nonprogressive) JPEGs due to faster decompression speeds they offer.
The UK government has announced a cabin baggage ban on laptops and tablets on direct flights to the UK from Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia.
The ban follows a similar move in the US, where officials say bombs could be hidden in a series of devices.
Downing Street said it was “necessary, effective and proportionate”.
The government has not given a start-date for the ban, but says airlines are “in the process of implementing it”.
The ban applies to any device larger than 16cm long, 9.3cm wide or 1.5cm deep. It includes smart phones, but most fall inside these limits.
Any affected device, including e-readers, will need to be placed into hold luggage.
Source: UK flight ban on electronic devices announced – BBC News
This looks like a bit of the government being “Seen to do Somethig(tm)” even if that something is incredibly useless and hinders passengers, like the ban on liquids. It also looks very much like the UK is in the pocket of the US, which looks worse now that it’s being run by wealth raping clowns.
The first two flaws can be triggered and lead to a buffer overflow condition if the attacker sends to the camera a too-long Wi-Fi SSID parameter or a long encrypted password parameter, respectively.
That’s easy to do as Bluetooth is never disabled after the initial setup of the cameras, and attackers (e.g. burglars) can usually come close enough to them to perform the attack.
Triggering one of these flaws will make the devices crash and reboot.
The third flaw is a bit more serious, as it allows the attacker to force the camera to temporarily disconnect from the wireless network to which it is connected by supplying it a new SSID to connect to.
If that particular SSID does not exist, the camera drops its attempt to associate with it and return to the original Wi-Fi network, but the whole process can last from 60 to 90 seconds, during which the camera won’t be recording.
Source: Burglars can easily make Google Nest security cameras stop recording – Help Net Security
Pluto fans are attempting to reignite a contentious astronomy debate: What is a planet?
[…]
Is Pluto a planet?It’s not a question scientists ask in polite company.
“It’s like religion and politics,” said Kirby Runyon, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University. “People get worked up over it. I’ve gotten worked up over it.”
[…]
The issue can bring conversations to a screeching halt, or turn them into shouting matches. “Sometimes,” Runyon said, “it’s just easier not to bring it up.”But Runyon will ignore his own advice this week when he attends the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston. In a giant exhibit hall crowded with his colleagues, he’s attempting to reignite the debate about Pluto’s status with an audacious new definition for planet — one that includes not just Pluto, but several of its neighbors, objects in the asteroid belt, and a number of moons. By his count, 102 new planets could be added to our solar system under the new criteria.
[…]
When the IAU voted in 2006, scientists came to the conclusion that gravitational dominance is what distinguishes the eight planets from the solar system’s other spheres. From giant Jupiter to tiny Mercury, each is massive enough to make them the bullies of their orbits, absorbing, ejecting or otherwise controlling the motion of every other object that gets too close. According to the definition, planets must also orbit the sun.Pluto, which shares its zone of the solar system with a host of other objects, was reclassified as a “dwarf planet” — a body that resembles a planet but fails to “clear its neighborhood,” in the IAU’s parlance.
[…]
But to Runyon, that distinction is less important than what dozens of solar system worlds have in common: geology.“I’m interested in an object’s intrinsic properties,” he said. “What it is on its surface and in its interior? Whether an object is in orbit around another planet or the sun doesn’t really matter for me.”
Runyon calls his a “geophysical” definition. A planet, he says, is anything massive enough that gravity pulls it into a sphere (a characteristic called “hydrostatic equilibrium”), but not so massive that it starts to undergo nuclear fusion and become a star.
[…]
If you talk to enough scientists on either side of this debate, you’ll notice that their arguments start to echo each other. They use the same terms to criticize the definitions they don’t like: “not useful,” “too emotional,” “confusing.” Both groups want the same thing: for the public to understand and embrace the science of the solar system. But each is convinced that only their definition can achieve that goal. And each accuses the other of confusing people by prolonging the debate.
Source: A new definition would add 102 planets to our solar system — including Pluto
Give us Pluto back!
Today, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that could allow companies to keep a dead hand of control over their products, even after you buy them. The case, Impression Products v. Lexmark International, is on appeal from the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, who last year affirmed its own precedent allowing patent holders to restrict how consumers can use the products they buy. That decision, and the precedent it relied on, departs from long established legal rules that safeguard consumers and enable innovation.
When you buy something physical—a toaster, a book, or a printer, for example—you expect to be free to use it as you see fit: to adapt it to suit your needs, fix it when it breaks, re-use it, lend it, sell it, or give it away when you’re done with it. Your freedom to do those things is a necessary aspect of your ownership of those objects. If you can’t do them, because the seller or manufacturer has imposed restrictions or limitations on your use of the product, then you don’t really own them. Traditionally, the law safeguards these freedoms by discouraging sellers from imposing certain conditions or restrictions on the sale of goods and property, and limiting the circumstances in which those restrictions may be imposed by contract.
Source: Patents Are A Big Part Of Why We Can’t Own Nice Things: the Supreme Court Should Fix That
Patent law out of control again
According to allegations in the indictment against Rimasauskas, which was unsealed this week, he had orchestrated his scheme between 2013 and 2015, targeting “a multinational technology company and a multinational online social media company” and tricking them into wiring funds to bank accounts under his control.
The bank accounts in question belonged to companies that Rimasauskas had himself set up and incorporated with the same name as an unspecified “Asian-based computer hardware manufacturer” with whom the victim companies were involved in legitimate business.
Rimasauskas’s phishing emails posed as if they represented the real hardware manufacturer, and requested that money which the victim companies owed to that manufacturer for legitimate good and services be paid into the accounts of the company he’d set up himself.
Source: Bloke, 48, accused of whaling two US tech leviathans out of $100m
Mark Vartanyan, who operated under the handle “Kolypto”, was arrested in Norway last year, and extradited to America in December. The 29-year-old was charged with one count of computer fraud. On Monday, he pleaded guilty [PDF] to a district court in Atlanta, US. He faces up to 10 years in the clink and a $250,000 fine – that’s slashed from a maximum of 25 years due to his guilty plea. He will be sentenced in June.
[…]
Citadel surfaced in 2011, infected Windows PCs, and silently slurped victims’ online banking credentials so their money could be siphoned into crooks’ pockets. It could also snoop on computer screens and hold files to ransom. It was a remarkable success. US prosecutors estimate that, at its height, the malware infected 11 million computers and was responsible for the theft of more than $500m from bank accounts.
Source: Russian mastermind of $500m bank-raiding Citadel coughs to crimes
Earlier this month, when WikiLeaks dumped a cache of hundreds of secret documents allegedly detailing the CIA’s hacking operations, Julian Assange promised that was just “less than 1%” of what the secret-spilling had in its hands. On Thursday, WikiLeaks released a new cache of twelve documents, mostly detailing how the CIA allegedly hacked Apple computers and cellphones around a decade ago.
“These documents explain the techniques used by CIA to gain ‘persistence’ on Apple Mac devices, including Macs and iPhones and demonstrate their use of EFI/UEFI and firmware malware,” WikiLeaks stated in a press release.
Source: WikiLeaks’ New Dump Shows How The CIA Allegedly Hacked Macs and iPhones Almost a Decade Ago
The reason I think that this is not getting much coverage is that by now, people just aren’t very surprised anymore…
Today, the US Senate voted 50-48 to overturn broadband privacy rules that would have required internet service providers get consumer consent before selling their web browsing data to advertisers or other data companies.
The rules, which passed in October of last year, govern the collection and selling of private data by ISPs like Verizon, Comcast, or AT&T. Those rules would have required internet providers to ask for permission before selling data about your usage, like web browsing history and location, as well as data about finances, health, app usage, and more. The Senate just voted against it.
Essentially, your ISP would need your approval before they could tell advertisers what web sites you like, what apps you use, where you’re at, or any health and financial information it has on you. These protections weren’t in place yet; the privacy protection rules would go into effect as early as December 4, 2017.
Source: The Senate Just Voted to Let Internet Providers Sell Your Web History
Hardly surprising considering the 4th Reich has just been set up to allow the rape and pillage of the poor by the rich.
At first, the bot lingo was more like Morse code: an abstract symbol was agreed upon and then scattered among spaces to create meaning, the researchers explained in a blog post.
The team tweaked the experiment so that there was a slight penalty on every utterance for every bot, and they added an incentive to get the task done more quickly. The Morse code-like structure was no longer advantageous, and the agents were forced to use their “words” more concisely, leading to the development of a larger vocabulary.
The bots then sneakily tried to encode the meaning of entire sentences as a single word. For example, an instruction such as “red agent, go to blue landmark” was represented as one symbol.
Although this means the job is completed more quickly since agents spend less time nattering to one another, the vocabulary size would grow exponentially with the sentence length, making it difficult to understand what’s being said. So the researchers tried to coax the agents into reusing popular words. A reward was granted if they spoke a “particular word that is proportional to how frequently that word has been spoken previously.”
Since the AI babble is explicitly linked to its simple world, it’s no wonder that the language lacks the context and richness of human language.
Source: This AI stuff is all talk! Bots invent their own language to natter away behind humans’ backs
It looks like designating a connection as metered in the Windows 10 Creators Update may not block all updates from being downloaded on your system
[…]
Setting a connection as metered in Windows 10 has been a widely used and shared method to control the automatic download and installation of Windows Updates which of course are mandatory on the Windows 10 Home SKU of the operating system so this will impact that work around. In addition, users who are on true metered connections might not be expecting these required updates to use up their bandwidth either after they get the Creators Update when it is released.So when I saw this new description of how updates would be treated on a metered connection it got me wondering what exactly are those updates which are required to keep Windows running smoothly.
I have reached out to Microsoft to get some clarity on the types of updates that would fit into that category and once I hear back from them I will update this article.
—–
Update: I heard back from Microsoft and was provided this from a spokesperson:
“We don’t plan to send large updates over metered connections, but could use this for critical fixes if needed in the future.”
Not a lot of clarity about bandwidth that might get used so this is an area we will have to keep an eye on.
The human brain reaches its adult volume by age 10, but the neurons that make it up continue to change for years after that. The connections between neighboring neurons get pruned back, as new links emerge between more widely separated areas of the brain.
Eventually this reshaping slows, a sign that the brain is maturing. But it happens at different rates in different parts of the brain.
The pruning in the occipital lobe, at the back of the brain, tapers off by age 20. In the frontal lobe, in the front of the brain, new links are still forming at age 30, if not beyond.
“It challenges the notion of what ‘done’ really means,” Dr. Somerville said.
Source: You’re an Adult. Your Brain, Not So Much.