[…] Beginning on Jan. 31, hosts will only see the initials of guests’ first names until they confirm a booking request, Airbnb announced in a December news announcement spotted by the Verge. After a host confirms the booking, the guest’s full name will appear. The change to how names are displaced will be in place Read more about Airbnb Hides Guest First Names in Oregon to Stop Discrimination[…]
Game-making platform and fledgling metaverse Roblox made the news yesterday as the focus of a New York Times report about a ‘90s era tax cut that’s spun out of control. Originally created to foster investment in small businesses, the Qualified Small Business Stock, or Q.S.B.S., exemption has transformed into a way for ultra-wealthy businesses to Read more about Roblox and many other huge tech businesses Save Millions Taking Advantage Of A Massive Tax Dodge[…]
The United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency and National Cyber Crime Unit have uncovered a colossal trove of stolen passwords. We know this because Troy Hunt, of Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) fame, yesterday announced the agency has handed them over to his service, which lets anyone conduct a secure search of stolen passwords to check Read more about UK National Crime Agency finds 225 million previously unexposed passwords[…]
Norton antivirus’s inbuilt cryptominer has re-entered the public consciousness after a random Twitter bod expressed annoyance at how difficult it is to uninstall. The addition of Ncrypt.exe, Norton 360’s signed cryptocurrency-mining binary, to installations of Norton antivirus isn’t new – but it seems to have taken the non-techie world a few months to realise what’s Read more about Yes, Norton 360 has a built in cryptominer. Deletion is not easy.[…]
[…] Kinetic Architecture is a concept on which buildings are designed to allow parts of the structure to move. CyberPowerPC took this idea and created a KINETIC chassis with 18 individually controlled articulating vents that open and close automatically, all based on the computer’s current internal ambient temperatures. “We are entering 2022 with some of Read more about CyberPowerPC case uses Kinetic Architecture to adjust airflow in real-time[…]
Google and Facebook have come a little unstuck in the cookie department as French watchdog Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) slapped the pair with a €150m and €60m fine respectively. The CNIL kicked off its investigations after receiving complaints regarding the way cookies can be refused on facebook.com, youtube.com and google.fr. The Read more about France fines Meta, Google: Cookies must be as easy to reject as to accept[…]
Researchers were able to identify 74 species of animals by looking for DNA in air samples collected at two zoos. The experiment shows that free-floating DNA could be used to track wild animals, including endangered or invasive species, without needing to observe them directly. Environmental DNA (eDNA) has shaken up how animal populations can be Read more about Scientists Figured Out Which Animals Were in a Zoo Just by Taking DNA From the Air[…]
Snap is suing the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for rejecting its application to trademark the word “spectacles” for its digital eyewear camera device. But the USPTO has maintained that “spectacles” is a generic term for smart glasses and that Snap’s version “has not acquired distinctiveness,” as required for a trademark. In its complaint Read more about Snap suing to trademark the word “spectacles” for its smart glasses that no one has ever used or knows much about[…]
Electric- and hydrogen-powered truck startup Nikola has agreed to a $125 million settlement over charges that it defrauded investors after misleading them about its products, technical advances and financial prospects. Nikola violated the antifraud and disclosure control provisions of the federal securities laws, the Securities and Exchange Commission said Tuesday. In July the founder and Read more about EV startup Nikola (who showed video of car rolling down hill as being powered) settles with U.S. for $125 million[…]
Amazon’s crucial web services business AWS has experienced problems today due to a power outage, affecting services like Slack, Imgur, and the Epic Games store for some users. It’s not looking good if you’re working from home, with some Slack users unable to view or upload images and work management tool Asana also hit by Read more about Amazon’s AWS logs third outage this month, affecting Slack, Epic Games Store, Asana and more[…]
[…] According to court documents, Ishii switched the transfer address for a Sony Life transaction to use a Silvergate Bank account under his control.. Ishii later converted the stolen funds into more than 3879 bitcoins via A Coinbase set up to automatically transfer all added funds to an offline cryptocurrency cold wallet with a Bitcoin Read more about US returns $154 Million in bitcoins stolen by Sony employee[…]
[…] researchers managed to technically deconstruct just how one of the company’s notorious “zero-click” attacks work. Indeed, researchers with Google’s Project Zero published a detailed break-down that shows how an NSO exploit, dubbed “FORCEDENTRY,” can swiftly and silently take over a phone. […] Initial details about it were captured by Citizen Lab, a research unit Read more about How NSO Group’s zero-click iPhone-Hacking Exploit Works[…]
When someone buys a new car, they generally expect to be getting a vehicle that’s fully up-to-date, not one built with leftover parts. Tesla customers who don’t read the fine print, though, could accidentally end up paying the price for a “new” Model 3 with a years-old battery, one which Tesla acknowledges may have already Read more about Tesla Is Selling 2021 Model 3s With Degraded Batteries From 2017[…]
[…]DARPA’s Guaranteeing AI Robustness against Deception (GARD) program […] focuses on a few core objectives. One of which is the development of a testbed for characterizing ML defenses and assessing the scope of their applicability […] Ensuring that emerging defenses are keeping pace with – or surpassing – the capabilities of known attacks is critical Read more about DARPA Open Sources Resources to Aid Evaluation of Adversarial AI Defenses[…]
minDALL-E on Conceptual Captions minDALL-E, named after minGPT, is a 1.3B text-to-image generation model trained on 14 million image-text pairs for non-commercial purposes. Environment Setup Basic setup Other packages Model Checkpoint Model structure (two-stage autoregressive model) Stage1: Unlike the original DALL-E [1], we replace Discrete VAE with VQGAN [2] to generate high-quality samples effectively. We Read more about minDALL-E creates images based on text input[…]
Apple’s AirTags and Find My service can be helpful for finding things you lose—but they also introduce a big privacy problem. While those of us on iOS have had some tools for fighting those issues, Apple left those of us on Android without much to work with. A new Android AirTag finder app finally addresses Read more about This App Will Tell Android Users If an AirTag Is Tracking Them[…]
[…] Researchers at the biotechnology startup Cortical Labs have created “mini-brains“ consisting of 800,000 to one million living human brain cells in a petri dish, New Scientist reports. The cells are placed on top of a microelectrode array that analyzes the neural activity. […] To teach the mini-brains the game, the team created a simplified Read more about Researchers Teach Human Brain Cells in a Dish to Play “Pong”[…]
First, come up with a catchy name for a cryptocurrency project. Next, convince the credulous to buy associated digital tokens. Finally, abandon the project and keep investors’ funds. This “rug pulling” scam lacks sophistication but evidently it works. According to Chainalysis, a blockchain data biz, separating cryptocoin buyers from their money in this manner has Read more about Cryptocurrency ‘rug pulls’ cheated investors out of ‘$8bn’[…]
[…] new research detailed in The Wall Street Journal suggests its inequality problems are worse than the United States’ disgraceful performance under the dollar. An incredible feat considering income inequality in 2020 America was the highest of all G7 nations according to data from Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development viewed by Pew Research. That Read more about Bitcoin’s Inequality Problem Is Putting the Dollar to Shame 0.01% owns 27% of all BTC[…]
Laws that forbid the illegal uploading and downloading of copyrighted content are common around the world but the rise of streaming has sometimes exposed gaps in legislation. Piracy-equipped Kodi devices, illegal streaming apps, and similar tools have led legal specialists to attempt to apply laws that didn’t envision the technology. In Malaysia, for example, it Read more about Malaysia in pocket of big business: Passes Bill to Imprison Illegal Streaming (even devices!) for 20 years[…]
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has revealed a third bug in its Log4 Java-based open-source logging library Log4j. CVE-2021-45105 is a 7.5/10-rated infinite recursion bug that was present in Log4j2 versions 2.0-alpha1 through 2.16.0. The fix is version 2.17.0 of Log4j. That’s the third new version of the tool in the last ten days. In Read more about Bad things come in threes: Apache reveals another Log4J bug[…]
New research from the University of Massachusetts Amherst provides a novel answer to one of the persistent questions in historical climatology, environmental history and the earth sciences: what caused the Little Ice Age? The answer, we now know, is a paradox: warming. The Little Ice Age was one of the coldest periods of the past Read more about Researchers uncover the surprising cause of the Little Ice Age in 1300s[…]
According to the New York Times, China is recruiting YouTubers to report on the country in a positive light and counter the West’s increasingly negative perceptions. “The videos have a casual, homespun feel. But on the other side of the camera often stands a large apparatus of government organizers, state-controlled news media and other official Read more about How China Uses Western Influencers As Pawns In Its Propaganda War[…]
[…] It’s estimated that a quarter of the world’s population is affected by the condition known as presbyopia, which is one of the many unfortunate side effects of aging that typically starts affecting people in their 40s. The condition limits a person’s ability to focus on nearby objects, such as small print […] he use Read more about The FDA Just Approved Eye Drops to Correct Aging near sighted Vision[…]
While it’s certainly possible to sometimes do biometrics well, a long line of companies frequently… don’t. Voice print authentication is particularly shaky, especially given the rise of inexpensive voice deepfake technology. But, much like the continued use of text-message two-factor authentication (which is increasingly shown to not be secure), it apparently doesn’t matter to a Read more about Banks, ISPs Increasingly Embrace ‘Voice Print’ Authentication Despite Growing Security Risk[…]