ClaRAN is the brainchild of big data specialist Dr. Chen Wu and astronomer Dr. Ivy Wong, both from The University of Western Australia node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR).
Dr. Wong said black holes are found at the centre of most, if not all, galaxies.
“These supermassive black holes occasionally burp out jets that can be seen with a radio telescope,” she said.
“Over time, the jets can stretch a long way from their host galaxies, making it difficult for traditional computer programs to figure out where the galaxy is.
“That’s what we’re trying to teach ClaRAN to do.”
Dr. Wu said ClaRAN grew out of an open source version of Microsoft and Facebook’s object detection software.
He said the program was completely overhauled and trained to recognise galaxies instead of people.
ClaRAN itself is also open source and publicly available on GitHub.
Energy is already stored, of course, in batteries or various other technologies. Even reservoirs can act as huge stores of energy. However nothing that exists or is in development can store energy as well, and as cheaply, as compressed air.
The concept seems simple: you just suck in some air from the atmosphere, compress it using electrically-driven compressors and store the energy in the form of pressurised air. When you need that energy you just let the air out and pass it through a machine that takes the energy from the air and turns an electrical generator.
Compressed air energy storage (or CAES), to give it its full name, can involve storing air in steel tanks or in much less expensive containments deep underwater. In some cases, high pressure air can be stored in caverns deep underground, either excavated directly out of hard rock or formed in large salt deposits by so-called “solution mining”, where water is pumped in and salty water comes out. Such salt caverns are often used to store natural gas.
Salt caverns are ideal for storing air as they are impermeable and don’t react with oxygen.Maria Avvakumova / shutterstock
Compressed air could easily deliver the required scale of storage, but it remains grossly undervalued by policymakers, funding bodies and the energy industry itself. This has stunted the development of the technology and means it is likely that much more expensive and less effective solutions will instead be adopted. At present, three key problems stand in the way of compressed air:
1. It’s not a single technology
The above description of how it works is an over-simplification. CAES is, in fact, not a single technology but a wide family that includes compression machinery, expansion machinery, heat exchangers, the design of air stores and the design of thermal stores. These all require meticulous engineering to get right.
An artist’s sketch of a proposed CAES plant above a disused limestone mine in Ohio.US Department of Energy
2. It’s better for longer-term storage
At the moment, wind and solar still make up only a small proportion of the overall sector. As electricity generated from fossil fuels can cover the overcast or wind-free days, renewable energy is often used straight away and only needs to be stored for short amounts of time. For these situations, batteries work quite well and can be economically viable.
Large-scale decarbonisation will require us to store energy for much longer periods, however, for instance from a sunny day to use on a cloudy day. CAES is especially suited for storage durations of some hours through to several days.
All affordable energy storage involves converting energy from the form of electricity to some other form and storing it in that other form. For pumped-hydro storage, for instance, the other form is water that has been lifted up to a great height. For CAES, that other form includes both heat and high-pressure air.
The UK’s largest pumped storage station is in Snowdonia, Wales. Water is pumped from a low level reservoir to a high one (seen here) during off peak hours, then released downhill to generate energy during peak hours.Hefin Owen, CC BY-SA
For such systems, there are separate costs for the equipment that does the conversion and for the storage itself. Systems like CAES and pumped-hydro involve relatively expensive equipment for the power conversion but very inexpensive provisions for the storage of energy. These systems, where small amounts of power can fill up very large amounts of storage, are therefore very economical for storing energy over a long period.
3. CAES lasts a lifetime
Private investment requires high rates of return. An indirect effect of this is that investors place less value on what utility may be left in an asset in the longer term.
In most CAES systems, costs are concentrated in things that naturally have very long lifetimes. For example, a solution-mined cavern in a salt deposit might reasonably be expected to operate for at least 100 years, while high power machines for compressing and expanding air can typically operate for 50 years or more. With returns over such a long timescale, there is a strong argument that at least some large-scale compressed air installations should be treated as national infrastructure projects financed by governments.
Two large compressed air plants were built decades ago, one in Huntorf, Germany and the other in McIntosh, Alabama. Both are still working extremely well. Many refer to these two plants to draw conclusions about how efficient CAES can be and how much or little it can cost.
But this is misleading and pointless. Both plants were designed with very different priorities from those relevant today. It is imperative that we now think again about compressed air energy storage and evaluate it properly in light of what can be achieved by exploiting modern methods and knowledge.
AI can help chemists crack the molecular structure of crystals much faster than traditional modelling methods, according to research published in Nature Communications on Monday.
Scientists from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), a research institute in Switzerland, have built a machine learning programme called SwiftML to predict how the atoms in molecules shift when exposed to a magnetic field.
Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is commonly used to work out the structure of compounds. Groups of atoms oscillate at a specific frequencies, providing a tell-tale sign of the number and location of electrons each contains. But the technique is not good enough to reveal the full chemical structure of molecules, especially complex ones that can contain thousands of different atoms.
Another technique known as Density functional theory (DFT) is needed. It uses complex quantum chemistry calculations to map the density of electrons in a given area, and requires heavy computation. SwiftML, however, can do the job at a much quicker rate and can perform as accurately as DFT programmes in some cases.
“Even for relatively simple molecules, this model is almost 10,000 times faster than existing methods, and the advantage grows tremendously when considering more complex compounds,” said Michele Ceriotti, co-author of the paper and an assistant professor at the EPFL.
“To predict the NMR signature of a crystal with nearly 1,600 atoms, our technique – ShiftML – requires about six minutes; the same feat would have taken 16 years with conventional techniques.”
The researchers trained the system on the Cambridge Structural Database, a dataset containing calculated DFT chemical shifts for thousands of compounds. Each one is made up less than 200 atoms including carbon and hydrogen paired with oxygen or nitrogen. 2,000 structures were used for training and validation, and 500 were held back for testing.
SwiftML managed to calculate the chemical shifts for a molecule that had 86 atoms and the same chemical elements as cocaine, but arranged in a different crystal structure. The process took less than a minute of CPU time, compared around 62 to 150 CPU hours typically needed to calculate the chemical shift of a molecule containing 86 atoms using DFT.
The team hopes that SwiftML can be used to supplement NMR experiments to design new drugs. “This is really exciting because the massive acceleration in computation times will allow us to cover much larger conformational spaces and correctly determine structures where it was just not previously possible. This puts most of the complex contemporary drug molecules within reach,” says Lyndon Emsley, co-author of the study and a chemistry professor at EPFL.
Car personalization has been popular ever since. In which level it was applied depended on many factors like the availability of options from the car manufacturer itself or the artistic skills of some of its customers.
Today, car manufacturers already offer a wide range of pre-defined options. In the end though, options are limited to colors, finnishes and interior materials. This widely known car-configuration is already adapted within the automotive industry.
Beyond full-option
To stand out from the competition car brands are emerging towards more complex customization options. With new technologies like 3D printing and legacy manufacturing technologies like lasercutting and CNC, car parts can get personalized on a more advanced level.
MINI decided to tap into this, and became a pioneer in offering next level car individualization through an online platform where the end-consumer can personalize and design car parts for their own vehicle.
In order to enable personalized production at scale, the MINI yours customised experience runs on Twikit’s Twikbot platform technology. Our universal software supports the full customization journey, from product input, where all personalization assets are created, to front-end customer experience and the right output for production.
Qualcomm Inc. says its fight with Apple Inc. over how much the chipmaker can charge for essential patented technology used in iPhones and iPads is getting pricey.
“They’re trying to destroy our business,” Qualcomm lawyer Evan Chesler said at a hearing Friday in federal court in San Diego. “They’re now $7 billion dollars behind in royalties. The house is on fire and there is $7 billion of property damage right now.”
Qualcomm wants as many as 56 patent-related claims and counterclaims cut from a lawsuit with Apple and its Asian manufacturers, arguing that these are just a sideshow to the broader licensing dispute between the companies. Apple, through its manufacturers, halted royalty payments to Qualcomm last year and the tech giants’ showdown has escalated into some 100 legal proceedings around the world.
Apple argues that Qualcomm is using its intellectual property to bully customers into paying excessive royalties even as it tries to duck scrutiny over whether its patents are valid. “You can’t just let Qualcomm walk away from this,” Apple’s lawyer, Ruffin Cordell, told the judge at Friday’s hearing.
Microsoft’s Office 365 has been giving some users cold sweats. No matter how hard they try to log in, they simply can’t access the service and haven’t been able to for hours – others say it has wobbled for days.
Sporadic reports of unrest began to emerge on Down Detector on Friday (26 October) in the UK and across the pond, stopped over the weekend and started again prior to 0800 GMT today. Office 365’s web woes have still not been resolved at the time of writing.
The first complaint was spotted on Twitter just after 0700 GMT.
Microsoft, at least initially, seemed to know nothing of the activation worries to which admin Tom Ruben referred, but he was backed up by others.
Admins raised support tickets with Microsoft but complained they’d only received acknowledgement of the outage early on in the screw-up and had precious else since.
Microsoft has said it is “investigating issues related to repeated credential prompts and users being unable to log in using the Outlook client under EX152471”. It asked admins to “please check the admin centre for more details”.
“Red Dead Redemption 2” broke records in its first three days on sale, pulling in more than $725 million in worldwide retail sales and achieving the biggest opening weekend in the history of entertainment, developer Rockstar Games announced.
That tops the highest-grossing movie in history, “Avengers: Infinity Wars,” which earned more than $640 million during its opening weekend earlier this year. But “Red Dead Redemption 2” still isn’t the highest grossing entertainment launch of all time. That honor also goes to Rockstar Games for “Grand Theft Auto V,” which earned more than $1 billion in sell-through in its first three days. Because “Grand Theft Auto V” launched on a Tuesday, it left the door open for “Red Dead Redemption 2’s” — which launched on a Friday — record-setting weekend.
Rockstar also reports that according to Sony Interactive Entertainment, “Red Dead Redemption 2” set records for highest ever pre-orders, highest day one sales and highest sales for the first three days in market on the PlayStation Network.
“Red Dead Redemption 2” is currently the highest critically reviewed game on the PlayStation 4, with an average score of 97 on Metacritic, and the top game on Xbox One, also with an average score of 97 on Metacritic.
The U.S. Justice Department has charged two Chinese intelligence officers, six hackers, and two aerospace company insiders in a sweeping conspiracy to steal confidential aerospace technology from U.S. and French companies.
For more than five years, two Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) spies are said to have run a team of hackers focusing on the theft of designs for a turbofan engine used in U.S. and European commercial airliners, according to an unsealed indictment (below) dated October 25. In a statement, the DOJ said a Chinese state-owned aerospace company was simultaneously working to develop a comparable engine.
“The threat posed by Chinese government-sponsored hacking activity is real and relentless,” FBI Special Agent in Charge John Brown of San Diego said in a statement. “Today, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with the assistance of our private sector, international and U.S. government partners, is sending a strong message to the Chinese government and other foreign governments involved in hacking activities.”
The MSS officers involved were identified as Zha Rong, a division director in the Jiangsu Province regional department (JSSD), and Chai Meng, a JSSD section chief.
At the direction of the MSS officers, the hackers allegedly infiltrated a number of U.S. aerospace companies, including California-based Capstone Turbine, among others in Arizona, Massachusetts, and Oregon, the DOJ said. The officers are also said to have recruited at least two Chinese employees of a French aerospace manufacturer—insiders who allegedly aided the conspiracy by, among other criminal acts, installing the remote access trojan Sakula onto company computers.
A research team from Tsinghua University in Beijing has developed a fibre they say is so strong it could even be used to build an elevator to space.
They say just 1 cubic centimetre of the fibre – made from carbon nanotube – would not break under the weight of 160 elephants, or more than 800 tonnes. And that tiny piece of cable would weigh just 1.6 grams.
“This is a breakthrough,” said Wang Changqing, a scientist at a key space elevator research centre at Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xian who was not involved in the Tsinghua study.
The Chinese team has developed a new “ultralong” fibre from carbon nanotube that they say is stronger than anything seen before, patenting the technology and publishing part of their research in the journal Nature Nanotechnology earlier this year.
“It is evident that the tensile strength of carbon nanotube bundles is at least 9 to 45 times that of other materials,” the team said in the paper.
They said the material would be “in great demand in many high-end fields such as sports equipment, ballistic armour, aeronautics, astronautics and even space elevators”.
[…]
Those cables would need to have tensile strength – to withstand stretching – of no less than 7 gigapascals, according to Nasa. In fact, the US space agency launched a global competition in 2005 to develop such a material, with a US$2 million prize attached. No one claimed the prize.
Now, the Tsinghua team, led by Wei Fei, a professor with the Department of Chemical Engineering, says their latest carbon nanotube fibre has tensile strength of 80 gigapascals.
Carbon nanotubes are cylindrical molecules made up of carbon atoms that are linked in hexagonal shapes with diameters as small as 1 nanometre. They have the highest known tensile strength of any material – theoretically up to 300 gigapascals.
But for practical purposes, these carbon nanotubes must be bonded together in cable form, a process which is difficult and can affect the overall strength of the final product.
According to Wang, the space lift researcher, the transport system would need more than 30,000km of cable, and it would also need other structures such as a rail and a shield to protect against space debris and other environmental hazards.
[…]
Japan launched two satellites last month in an experiment to study elevator movement in space – the first time this has been done – involving a mini-lift travelling along a cable from one satellite to another. It has yet to report the results of the experiment. China has also conducted space tethering tests but the details were classified.
[…]
Song Liwei, who studies mechanical batteries at the Harbin Institute of Technology in Heilongjiang, said if the carbon nanotube fibre could be mass-produced and if it significantly increased the energy density of mechanical batteries, it “would kill fossil fuel engines”.
TimeTree is a public knowledge-base for information on the evolutionary timescale of life. Data from thousands of published studies are assembled into a searchable tree of life scaled to time. Three search modes are possible: Node Time – to find the divergence time of two species or higher taxa Timeline – to drill back through time and find evolutionary branches from the perspective of a single species Timetree – to build a timetree of a group of species or custom listTimepanels showing events in geological time and astronomical history are provided for comparison with timelines and timetrees. Results can be exported in different formats for additional analyses and publication.
Like fingerprints, no 3D printer is exactly the same. That’s the takeaway from a new study that describes what’s believed to be the first accurate method for tracing a 3D-printed object to the machine it came from. The advancement could help law enforcement and intelligence agencies track the origin of 3D-printed guns, counterfeit products and other goods.
[…]
“3D printers are built to be the same. But there are slight variations in their hardware created during the manufacturing process that lead to unique, inevitable and unchangeable patterns in every object they print,” Xu says.
To test PrinTracker, the research team created five door keys each from 14 common 3D printers — 10 fused deposition modeling (FDM) printers and four stereolithography (SLA) printers.
With a common scanner, the researchers created digital images of each key. From there, they enhanced and filtered each image, identifying elements of the in-fill pattern. They then developed an algorithm to align and calculate the variations of each key to verify the authenticity of the fingerprint.
Having created a fingerprint database of the 14 3D printers, the researchers were able to match the key to its printer 99.8 percent of the time. They ran a separate series of tests 10 months later to determine if additional use of the printers would affect PrinTracker’s ability to match objects to their machine of origin. The results were the same.
The team also ran experiments involving keys damaged in various ways to obscure their identity. PrinTracker was 92 percent accurate in these tests.
For at least three years, hackers have abused a zero-day in one of the most popular jQuery plugins to plant web shells and take over vulnerable web servers, ZDNet has learned.
The vulnerability impacts the jQuery File Upload plugin authored by prodigious German developer Sebastian Tschan, most commonly known as Blueimp.
The plugin is the second most starred jQuery project on GitHub, after the jQuery framework itself. It is immensely popular, has been forked over 7,800 times, and has been integrated into hundreds, if not thousands, of other projects, such as CMSs, CRMs, Intranet solutions, WordPress plugins, Drupal add-ons, Joomla components, and so on.
A vulnerability in this plugin would be devastating, as it could open gaping security holes in a lot of platforms installed in a lot of sensitive places.
This worse case scenario is exactly what happened. Earlier this year, Larry Cashdollar, a security researcher for Akamai’s SIRT (Security Intelligence Response Team), has discovered a vulnerability in the plugin’s source code that handles file uploads to PHP servers.
Cashdollar says that attackers can abuse this vulnerability to upload malicious files on servers, such as backdoors and web shells.
The creators of the world’s first 3D-printed steel bridge, a 40-foot stainless steel structure titled simply “The Bridge” that looks tantalizingly otherworldly thanks to its unique construction methods, say it is now ready for installation in Amsterdam following its ongoing week on show at the Dutch Design Week from Oct. 20-28.
Photo: MX3D (Joris Laarman Lab)
The team at MX3D, which originally planned to build the Joris Laarman Lab-designed bridge in mid-air over a canal but later opted to construct it in a controlled environment away from pedestrians, told Gizmodo in a statement that it is now ready to commence the structure’s final installation in Amsterdam’s famed De Wallen red-light district. They’ve also shared a number of photos from the finished bridge, which is designed to look like two billowing sheets connected by organic curves of steel, on display at the festival. It looks fantastic:
“The Bridge” on display at Dutch Design Week.
Photo: MX3D (Adriaan de Groot)
“The Bridge” on display at Dutch Design Week.
Photo: MX3D (Adriaan de Groot)
“The Bridge” on display at Dutch Design Week.
Photo: MX3D (Adriaan de Groot)
“The Bridge” on display at Dutch Design Week.
Photo: MX3D (Adriaan de Groot)
“The Bridge” on display at Dutch Design Week.
Photo: MX3D (Adriaan de Groot)
As the construction method is new and has not previously been used in any such large-scale project, MX3D worked with Amsterdam officials to develop a new safety standard and have also coordinated with partners including the UK’s Alan Turing Institute to equip it with a network of sensors. MX3D told Gizmodo that once in place the structure will be capable of collecting data on “bridge traffic, structural integrity, and the surrounding neighborhood and environment,” with the information being “used as input for a ‘digital twin’ of the bridge” that will be monitored to detect any safety issues. A steel deck on the bottom of the bridge should also provide additional stability.
If it seems as though the app you deleted last week is suddenly popping up everywhere, it may not be mere coincidence. Companies that cater to app makers have found ways to game both iOS and Android, enabling them to figure out which users have uninstalled a given piece of software lately—and making it easy to pelt the departed with ads aimed at winning them back.
Adjust, AppsFlyer, MoEngage, Localytics, and CleverTap are among the companies that offer uninstall trackers, usually as part of a broader set of developer tools. Their customers include T-Mobile US, Spotify Technology, and Yelp. (And Bloomberg Businessweek parent Bloomberg LP, which uses Localytics.) Critics say they’re a fresh reason to reassess online privacy rights and limit what companies can do with user data. “Most tech companies are not giving people nuanced privacy choices, if they give them choices at all,” says Jeremy Gillula, tech policy director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocate.
Some providers say these tracking tools are meant to measure user reaction to app updates and other changes. Jude McColgan, chief executive officer of Boston’s Localytics, says he hasn’t seen clients use the technology to target former users with ads. Ehren Maedge, vice president for marketing and sales at MoEngage Inc. in San Francisco, says it’s up to the app makers not to do so. “The dialogue is between our customers and their end users,” he says. “If they violate users’ trust, it’s not going to go well for them.” Adjust, AppsFlyer, and CleverTap didn’t respond to requests for comment, nor did T-Mobile, Spotify, or Yelp.
Uninstall tracking exploits a core element of Apple Inc.’s and Google’s mobile operating systems: push notifications. Developers have always been able to use so-called silent push notifications to ping installed apps at regular intervals without alerting the user—to refresh an inbox or social media feed while the app is running in the background, for example. But if the app doesn’t ping the developer back, the app is logged as uninstalled, and the uninstall tracking tools add those changes to the file associated with the given mobile device’s unique advertising ID, details that make it easy to identify just who’s holding the phone and advertise the app to them wherever they go.
The tools violate Apple and Google policies against using silent push notifications to build advertising audiences, says Alex Austin, CEO of Branch Metrics Inc., which makes software for developers but chose not to create an uninstall tracker. “It’s just generally sketchy to track people around the internet after they’ve opted out of using your product,” he says, adding that he expects Apple and Google to crack down on the practice soon. Apple and Google didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Facebook announced today that it has removed 8.7 million pieces of content last quarter that violated its rules against child exploitation, thanks to new technology. The new AI and machine learning tech, which was developed and implemented over the past year by the company, removed 99 percent of those posts before anyone reported them, said Antigone Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety, in a blog post.
The new technology examines posts for child nudity and other exploitative content when they are uploaded and, if necessary, photos and accounts are reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Facebook had already been using photo-matching technology to compare newly uploaded photos with known images of child exploitation and revenge porn, but the new tools are meant to prevent previously unidentified content from being disseminated through its platform.
The technology isn’t perfect, with many parents complaining that innocuous photos of their kids have been removed. Davis addressed this in her post, writing that in order to “avoid even the potential for abuse, we take action on nonsexual content as well, like seemingly benign photos of children in the bath” and that this “comprehensive approach” is one reason Facebook removed as much content as it did last quarter.
But Facebook’s moderation technology is by no means perfect and many people believe it is not comprehensive or accurate enough. In addition to family snapshots, it’s also been criticized for removing content like the iconic 1972 photo of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, known as the “Napalm Girl,” fleeing naked after suffering third-degree burns in a South Vietnamese napalm attack on her village, a decision COO Sheryl Sandberg apologized for.
The UK’s Information Commissioner has formally fined Facebook £500,000 – the maximum available – over the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
In a monetary penalty notice issued this morning, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) stated that the social media network had broken two of the UK’s legally binding data protection principles by allowing Cambridge academic Aleksandr Kogan to harvest 87 million Facebook users’ personal data through an app disguised as an innocent online quiz.
“Facebook… failed to keep the personal information secure because it failed to make suitable checks on apps and developers using its platform. These failings meant one developer, Dr Aleksandr Kogan and his company GSR, harvested the Facebook data of up to 87 million people worldwide, without their knowledge,” said the ICO in its statement on the fine.
“The Facebook Companies thereby acted in breach of section 4(4) of the [Data Protection Act], which at all material time required data controllers to comply with the data protection principles in relation to all personal data in respect of which they were the data controller,” continued the ICO in its penalty notice (PDF, 27 pages).
The £500k fine is the maximum penalty available to the ICO under 1998’s Data Protection Act. The regulator noted: “But for the statutory limitation on the amount of the monetary penalty, it would have been reasonable and proportionate to impose a higher penalty.” Nonetheless, with Facebook making a net income of $5.1bn in its latest fiscal quarter, the penalty amounts to just over quarter of an hour’s profits*.
In a landmark study, 20 top US corporate lawyers with decades of experience in corporate law and contract review were pitted against an AI. Their task was to spot issues in five Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs), which are a contractual basis for most business deals.
The study, carried out with leading legal academics and experts, saw the LawGeex AI achieve an average 94% accuracy rate, higher than the lawyers who achieved an average rate of 85%. It took the lawyers an average of 92 minutes to complete the NDA issue spotting, compared to 26 seconds for the LawGeex AI. The longest time taken by a lawyer to complete the test was 156 minutes, and the shortest time was 51 minutes. The study made waves around the world and was covered across global media.
A security bug in Systemd can be exploited over the network to, at best, potentially crash a vulnerable Linux machine, or, at worst, execute malicious code on the box.
The flaw therefore puts Systemd-powered Linux computers – specifically those using systemd-networkd – at risk of remote hijacking: maliciously crafted DHCPv6 packets can try to exploit the programming cockup and arbitrarily change parts of memory in vulnerable systems, leading to potential code execution. This code could install malware, spyware, and other nasties, if successful.
The vulnerability – which was made public this week – sits within the written-from-scratch DHCPv6 client of the open-source Systemd management suite, which is built into various flavors of Linux.
This client is activated automatically if IPv6 support is enabled, and relevant packets arrive for processing. Thus, a rogue DHCPv6 server on a network, or in an ISP, could emit specially crafted router advertisement messages that wake up these clients, exploit the bug, and possibly hijack or crash vulnerable Systemd-powered Linux machines.
systemd-networkd is vulnerable to an out-of-bounds heap write in the DHCPv6 client when handling options sent by network adjacent DHCP servers. A attacker could exploit this via malicious DHCP server to corrupt heap memory on client machines, resulting in a denial of service or potential code execution.
A vulnerability that is trivial to exploit allows privilege escalation to root level on Linux and BSD distributions using X.Org server, the open source implementation of the X Window System that offers the graphical environment.
[…]
Three hours after the public announcement of the security gap, Daemon Security CEO Michael Shirk replied with one line that overwrote shadow files on the system. Hickey did one better and fit the entire local privilege escalation exploit in one line.
Apart from OpenBSD, other operating systems affected by the bug include Debian and Ubuntu, Fedora and its downstream distro Red Hat Enterprise Linux along with its community-supported counterpart CentOS.
AI can translate between languages in real time as people speak, according to fresh research from Chinese search giant Baidu and Oregon State University in the US.
Human interpreters need superhuman concentration to listen to speech and translate at the same time. There are, apparently, only a few thousand qualified simultaneous interpreters and the job is so taxing that they often work in pairs, swapping places after 20 to 30 minute stints. And as conversations progress, the chance for error increases exponentially.
Machines have the potential to trump humans at this task, considering they have superior memory and don’t suffer from fatigue. But it’s not so easy for them either, as researchers from Baidu and Oregon State University found.
They built a neural network that can translate between Mandarin Chinese to English in almost real time, where the English translation lags behind by up to at least five words. The results have been published in a paper on arXiv.
The babble post-Babel
Languages have different grammatical structures, where the word order of sentences often don’t match up, making it difficult to translate quickly. The key to a fast translation is predicting what the speaker will say next as he or she talks.
With the AI engine an encoder converts the words in a target language into a vector representation. A decoder predicts the probability of the next word given the words in the previous sentences. The decoder is always behind the encoder and generates the translated words until it processes the whole speech or text.
“In one of the examples, the Chinese sentence ‘Bush President in Moscow…’ would suggest the next English word after ‘President Bush’ is likely ‘meets’”, Liang Huang, principal scientist at Baidu Research, explained to The Register.
“This is possible because in the training data, we have a lot of “Bush meeting someone, like Putin in Moscow” so the system learned that if “Bush in Moscow”, he is likely “meeting” someone.
The difficulty depends on the languages being translated, Huang added. Languages that are closely related, such as French and Spanish for example, have similar structures where the order of words are aligned more.
Japanese and German sentences are constructed with the subject at the front, the object in the middle, and the verb at the end (SOV). English and Chinese also starts with the subject, but the verb is in the middle, followed by the object (SVO).
Translating between Japanese and German to English and Chinese, therefore, more difficult. “There is a well-known joke in the UN that a German-to-English interpreter often has to pause and “wait for the German verb”. Standard Arabic and Welsh are verb-subject-object , which is even more different from SVO,” he said.
The new algorithm can be applied to any neural machine translation models and only involves tweaking the code slightly. It has already been integrated to Baidu’s internal speech-to-text translation and will be showcased at the Baidu World Tech Conference next week on 1st November in Beijing.
“We don’t have an exact timeline for when this product will be available for the general public, this is certainly something Baidu is working on,” Liang said.
“We envision our technology making simultaneous translation much more accessible and affordable, as there is an increasing demand. We also envision the technology [will reduce] the burden on human translators.”
The Portuguese Courts issued today a decision against Google in relation to the injunction filed by Aptoide. It is applicable on 82 countries including UK, Germany, USA, India, among others. Google will have to stop Google Play Protect from removing the competitor Aptoide‘s app store from users‘ phone without users‘ knowledge which has caused losses of over 2.2 million users in the last 60 days.
The acceptance of the injunction is totally aligned with Aptoide’s claim for Google to stop hiding the app store in the Android devices and showing warning messages to the users.
Aptoide is now working alongside its legal team to next week fill in courts the main action, demanding from Google indemnity for all the damages caused.
Aptoide, with over 250 million users, 6 billion downloads and one of the top stores globally, has presented this July, a formal complaint to the European Union’s anti-trust departments against Google.
Paulo Trezentos, Aptoide’s CEO, says that, “For us, this is a decisive victory. Google has been a fierce competitor, abusing his dominant position in Android to eliminate App Store competitors. Innovation is the reason for our 200 million users base. This court’s decision is a signal for startups worldwide: if you have the reason on your side don’t fear to challenge Google.”
About Aptoide
Founded in 2011 and based in Lisbon with offices in Shenzhen and Singapore, Aptoide is one of the top three Android app stores in the world. With over 200 million users, 4 billion downloads and 1 million apps, Aptoide is an app store that reinvents the app discovery experience through an online community, tailored recommendations and the opportunityfor users to create and share their own personal app stores. The Aptoide App Store is available for mobile and TV android devices and is accessible in over 40 languages. With an ever-growing community of users and partners worldwide, Aptoide is now one of the leading players in the world of Apps.
A startup that claims to sell surveillance and hacking technologies to governments around the world left nearly all its data—including information taken from infected targets and victims—exposed online, according to a security firm who found the data.
Wolf Intelligence, a Germany-based spyware company that made headlines for sending a bodyguard to Mauritania and prompting an international incident after the local government detained the bodyguard as collateral for a deal went wrong, left a trove of its own data exposed online. The leak exposed 20 gigabytes of data, including recordings of meetings with customers, a scan of a passport belonging to the company’s founder, scans of the founder’s credit cards, and surveillance targets’ data, according to researchers.
Security researchers from CSIS Security discovered the data on an unprotected command and control server and a public Google Drive folder. The researchers showed screenshots of the leaked data during a talk at the Virus Bulletin conference in Montreal, which Motherboard attended.
“This is a very stupid story in the sense that you would think that a company actually selling surveillance tools like this would know more about operational security,” CSIS co-founder Peter Kruse told Motherboard in an interview. “They exposed themselves—literally everything was available publicly on the internet.”
In a statement on Wednesday, the Italian competition authority, the Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato (AGCM), said both companies had violated consumer protection laws by “inducing customers to install updates on devices that are not able to adequately support them.”
It fined Apple €10m ($11.4m): €5m for slowing down the iPhone 6 with its iOS 10 update, and a further €5m for not providing customers with sufficient information about their devices’ batteries, including how to maintain and replace them. Apple banks millions of dollars an hour in profit.
Samsung was fined €5m for its Android Marshmallow 6.0.1 update which was intended for the Galaxy Note 7 but which lead to the Note 4 malfunctioning due to the upgrade’s demands.
Both companies deny they deliberately set out to slow down older phones, but the Italian authorities were not persuaded and clearly felt it was a case of “built-in obsolescence” – where products are designed to fall apart before they need to in order to drive sales of newer models.
It’s no secret that mobile apps harvest user data and share it with other companies, but the true extent of this practice may come as a surprise. In a new study carried out by researchers from Oxford University, it’s revealed that almost 90 percent of free apps on the Google Play store share data with Alphabet.
The researchers, who analyzed 959,000 apps from the US and UK Google Play stores, said data harvesting and sharing by mobile apps was now “out of control.”
“We find that most apps contain third party tracking, and the distribution of trackers is long-tailed with several highly dominant trackers accounting for a large portion of the coverage,” reads the report.
It’s revealed that most of the apps, 88.4 percent, could share data with companies owned by Google parent Alphabet. Next came a firm that’s no stranger to data sharing controversies, Facebook (42.5 percent), followed by Twitter (33.8 percent), Verizon (26.27 percent), Microsoft (22.75 percent), and Amazon (17.91 percent).
According to The Financial Times, which first reported the research, information shared by these third-party apps can include age, gender, location, and information about a user’s other installed apps. The data “enables construction of detailed profiles about individuals, which could include inferences about shopping habits, socio-economic class or likely political opinions.”
Big firms then use the data for a variety of purposes, such as credit scoring and for targeting political messages, but its main use is often ad targeting. Not surprising, given that revenue from online advertising is now over $59 billion per year.
According to the research, the average app transfers data to five tracker companies, which pass the data on to larger firms. The biggest culprits are news apps and those aimed at children, both of which tend to have the most third-party trackers associated with them.
