Daily Archives: January 10, 2018

Nissan’s Car of the Future Will Read Your Brain Waves

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The Japanese company will unveil and test its “brain-to-vehicle” technology at next week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The “B2V” system requires a driver to wear a skullcap that measures brain-wave activity and transmits its readings to steering, acceleration and braking systems that can start responding before the driver initiates the action.The driver still turns the wheel or hits the gas pedal, but the car anticipates those movements and begins the actions 0.2 seconds to 0.5 seconds sooner, said Lucian Gheorghe, a senior innovation researcher at Nissan overseeing the project. The earlier response should be imperceptible to drivers, he said.“We imagine a future where manual driving is still a value of society,” said Gheorghe, 40, who earned a doctorate in applied neural technology. “Driving pleasure is something as humans we should not lose.”

Source: Nissan’s Car of the Future Will Read Your Brain Waves – Bloomberg

Unitek USB 3.0 to SATA Adapter Cable for 2.5″ SSD or HDD – Hard Drive Adapter: turns your hard disk into portable storage

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Supports 2.5″ SATA I/II/III hard drive/solid state drive. USB 3.0 supports data transfer speeds up to 5Gbps. Backwards compatible with USB2.0/USB1.0
Efficient UASP Transfer Protocol. An Equipped Cover provides better dust protecting SATA connector from dust.
Portable and lightweight design make it is easy to carry. LED light shows Power and Activity status.
Support hot swapping, easy and tool-free installation. No drivers or software needed
What We Offer – Unitek USB 3.0 to SATA 6G Adapter x1, 2-year warranty quality guarantee, 24h friendly customer service and email support

Man’s YouTube Video of White Noise Hit With Five Copyright Claims

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On Thursday, Tomczak tweeted a screenshot of the complaints that have been lodged against his video, “10 Hours of Low Level White Noise.” The clip is exactly what its title advertises, and the absurdity of someone claiming ownership of a bunch of frequencies with equal intensity playing simultaneously—that’s all white noise is—clearly illustrates just how beyond broken YouTube’s automated copyright system really is.
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What’s most egregious about the situation is that the claimants aren’t just disputing Tomczak’s right to upload the video—they’ve elected to monetize it and leave it up. Tomczak isn’t missing out on any big profits (the video only has 1,485 views), but running around YouTube monetizing white noise has plenty of opportunities to be a moneymaker. A simple search pulls up millions of white noise videos and many of them have millions of views. A lot of the offerings are relaxing sounds like rain or a fan, but there’s plenty of good, old-fashioned TV static that’s quite popular.

Source: Man’s YouTube Video of White Noise Hit With Five Copyright Claims

Yahooooo! says! its! email! is! scrahoooo-ed!

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Yahoo! Mail – yes, amazingly it is still a thing – is today taking a break from business as usual norms with the service down for almost the past seven hours.Since circa 9am, the email service has received hundreds of complaints an hour on downdetector.co.uk, with users moaning about persistant “error 15” messages, and others telling of short periods of functionality before being kicked out of their accounts.Yahoo’s customer care Twitter account belatedly acknowledged the outage after 2pm, saying it had “received reports that users are seeing temporary access errors when accessing #YahooMail”, and that it was “working to fix this as quickly as possible.”More than a full hour later, the social media ninjas at Yahoo updated the customer base to say it still didn’t know when it would be able to make things better.

Source: Yahooooo! says! its! email! is! scrahoooo-ed! • The Register

The joys of the cloud…

How a Reddit Email Vulnerability Led to Thousands in Stolen Bitcoin Cash

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The exploit allowed hackers to request a password reset for a target account and then click the generated link without opening the email it had been sent in. How was this possible? Theories circulated, buoyed by posts on Hacker Noon and The Next Web. It was the r/bitcoin users out to cause trouble; Or was it a Reddit admin gone rogue?But this attack had incentive beyond ideology. What made the users of r/btc such a rich target was the deployment of a bot account called Tippr, which was used, among other things, to reward a particularly funny or insightful comment. By tagging someone and designating an amount, Tippr withdrew some BCH from your hotwallet and allocated it to the recipient. Given that Tippr is active on both Reddit and Twitter (where it provides its donation service for such heavyweights as the Tor Project), there was easy money to be had.

Source: How a Reddit Email Vulnerability Led to Thousands in Stolen Bitcoin Cash

This Ex-NSA Hacker Is Building an AI to Find Hate Symbols on Twitter

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NEMESIS, according to Crose, can help spot symbols that have been co-opted by hate groups to signal to each other in plain sight. At a glance, the way NEMESIS works is relatively simple. There’s an “inference graph,” which is a mathematical representation of trained images, classified as Nazi or white supremacist symbols. This inference graph trains the system with machine learning to identify the symbols in the wild, whether they are in pictures or videos.

Source: This Ex-NSA Hacker Is Building an AI to Find Hate Symbols on Twitter – Motherboard

Auto like Instagram pics Bot

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Bot to automatically like your friends’ Instagram posts, and notify you on your Slack channel.

This script runs Instagram API every 15mins (cronjob) and checks for any new Instagram post for a paticular user_id. If a new a post is found it likes the post and sends a notification to your configured Slack channel using Slack Webhooks.

Github

Western Digital ‘My Cloud’ devices have a hardcoded backdoor — stop using these NAS drives NOW!

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Today, yet another security blunder becomes publicized, and it is really bad. You see, many Western Digital My Cloud NAS drives have a hardcoded backdoor, meaning anyone can access them — your files could be at risk. It isn’t even hard to take advantage of it — the username is “mydlinkBRionyg” and the password is “abc12345cba” (without quotes). To make matters worse, it was disclosed to Western Digital six months ago and the company apparently did nothing until November 2017. Let’s be realistic — not everyone stays on top of updates, and a backdoor never should have existed in the first place.

Source: Western Digital ‘My Cloud’ devices have a hardcoded backdoor — stop using these NAS drives NOW!

Rs 500, 10 minutes, and you have access to billion Aadhaar (Indian social security) details

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It took just Rs 500, paid through Paytm, and 10 minutes in which an “agent” of the group running the racket created a “gateway” for this correspondent and gave a login ID and password. Lo and behold, you could enter any Aadhaar number in the portal, and instantly get all particulars that an individual may have submitted to the UIDAI (Unique Identification Authority of India), including name, address, postal code (PIN), photo, phone number and email.

What is more, The Tribune team paid another Rs 300, for which the agent provided “software” that could facilitate the printing of the Aadhaar card after entering the Aadhaar number of any individual.

Source: Rs 500, 10 minutes, and you have access to billion Aadhaar details

Ridiculously, the reporters of this news are now facing governmental investigation, instead of getting the recognition they deserve.
Snowden on Twitter

Major Cryptocurrency Index Excludes Korean Prices Without Warning, creates apparent drop in prices

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CoinMarketCap, arguably the most prominent global index of cryptocurrency prices, triggered a wave of anxiety and anger this morning when it removed a group of Korean cryptocurency exchanges from its price calculations.Though the change was apparently made at midnight Sunday U.S. EST, CoinMarketCap did not publicize it until midday on Monday, saying that the Korean exchanges showed “extreme divergence in prices from the rest of the world and limited arbitrage opportunity.” This morning we excluded some Korean exchanges in price calculations due to the extreme divergence in prices from the rest of the world and limited arbitrage opportunity. We are working on better tools to provide users with the averages that are most relevant to them. — CoinMarketCap (@CoinMarketCap) January 8, 2018The move resulted in a sharp drop in CoinMarketCap’s measurement of nearly all cryptocurrencies. That gave the impression that a broad market decline, already in progress, had become even more dramatic overnight. As news of the cause for the sharp drop spread Monday, most cryptocurrency prices began recovering losses.

Source: Major Cryptocurrency Index Excludes Korean Prices Without Warning | Fortune

Our Solar System is an exception: most planets have more regular spacing and sizing

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They found that planets in the same planetary system have correlated sizes. “Each planet is more likely to be the size of its neighbor than a size drawn at random from the distribution of observed planet sizes,” the paper said. If the system contains three or more planets, the planets are also more likely to be spaced regularly. Smaller planets seem to sit closer together than larger planets, leading scientists to believe that the patterns developed early during their formation.
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This is at odds with our Solar System, Weiss explained to The Register. “Unlike these exoplanetary systems, the solar system has incredible size diversity. Earth is more than twice the radius of Mercury, Neptune is four times the radius of Earth, and Jupiter is ten times the radius of Earth. Also, the terrestrial planets are very widely spaced.”

The authors suggested the complex gravitational interactions between Jupiter and Saturn are to blame. When the terrestrial planets were still forming, Jupiter and Saturn scattered the protoplanets and increased the number of collisions among them.

Source: Astroboffins say our Solar System is a dark, violent, cosmic weirdo • The Register

SteelSeries’ Dual-Sensor Mouse Could Be the King of Precision

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The Rival 600 even has its own CPU and storage tucked inside, so that once you get everything configured just the way you like, you can save those settings directly in the mouse, so you won’t need to re-download the SteelSeries app if you play with it on a different machine.

Source: SteelSeries’ Dual-Sensor Mouse Could Be the King of Precision

What I really really dislike about Razer’s offering is that their control panel requires an online account and connection. The settings and who knows what else is stored in their ‘cloud’. For a mouse or keyboard driver, this seems to me to be totally unnecessary and an invasion of privacy. This looks like a good alternative.

AI System Sorts News Articles By Whether or Not They Contain Actual Information

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In a recent paper published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, computer scientists Ani Nenkova and Yinfei Yang, of Google and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively, describe a new machine learning approach to classifying written journalism according to a formalized idea of “content density.” With an average accuracy of around 80 percent, their system was able to accurately classify news stories across a wide range of domains, spanning from international relations and business to sports and science journalism, when evaluated against a ground truth dataset of already correctly classified news articles.

Source: AI System Sorts News Articles By Whether or Not They Contain Actual Information – Motherboard