Linking ideas with the world
Facebook is staring down yet another security blunder, this time with an incident involving an exposed server containing hundreds of millions of phone numbers that were previously associated with accounts on its platform. The situation appears to be pinned to a feature no longer enabled on the platform but allowed users to search for someone Read more about Hundreds of Millions of Facebook Users Phone Numbers Exposed[…]
The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that “more than half of the nation’s state attorneys general” have signed on to and are preparing an antitrust investigation against digital titan Google, with the paper writing the inquiry is “scheduled to be announced next week, marking a major escalation in U.S. regulators’ efforts to probe Silicon Valley’s Read more about More Than Half the Nation’s State Attorneys General Could Sign on to Antitrust Inquiry Against Google[…]
Researchers from Texas A&M University published new research in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science, which shows that retailers’ branded mobile apps are very effective in increasing customer engagement, increasing sales on multiple levels, not just on the retailer’s website, but also in its stores. At the same time, apps increase the rate of returns, although Read more about Do those retail apps increase customer engagement and sales in all channels? In the US: Yes.[…]
Professor Nikos Bozionelos, of the EMLyon Business School, France, and Dr. Sumona Mukhuty, Manchester Metropolitan University, asked staff in the NHS to assess their managers’ emotional intelligence—defined as their level of empathy and their awareness of their own and others’ emotions. The 309 managers were also assessed on the amount of effort they put into Read more about Managers rated as highly emotionally intelligent are more ineffective and unpopular, research shows[…]
The European Space Agency was forced to perform a “collision avoidance maneuver” to prevent its Aeolus spacecraft from potentially smashing into one of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites, in what is quickly becoming an all-too-common occurrence. According to SpaceX, it never received the expected alert that a collision was possible. ESA pumped out a series of Read more about SpaceX Says a ‘Bug’ Prevented It From Receiving Warning of Possible ESA Satellite Collision. For the first time ESA had to unexpectedly avoid a satellite constellation.[…]
On Tuesday, Mozilla said it is not planning to change the ad-and-content blocking capabilities of Firefox to match what Google is doing in Chrome. Google’s plan to revise its browser extension APIs, known as Manifest v3, follows from the web giant’s recognition that many of its products and services can be abused by unscrupulous developers. Read more about Mozilla says Firefox won’t defang ad blockers – unlike Google Chrome, which is steadily removing your privacy from 3rd parties[…]
The Department of Homeland Security has been forced to release a list of keywords and phrases it uses to monitor social networking sites and online media for signs of terrorist or other threats against the U.S. The intriguing the list includes obvious choices such as ‘attack’, ‘Al Qaeda’, ‘terrorism’ and ‘dirty bomb’ alongside dozens of Read more about REVEALED: Hundreds of words to avoid using online if you don’t want the government spying on you[…]
The CEO of an energy firm based in the UK thought he was following his boss’s urgent orders in March when he transferred funds to a third-party. But the request actually came from the AI-assisted voice of a fraudster. The Wall Street Journal reports that the mark believed he was speaking to the CEO of Read more about Scammer Successfully Deepfaked CEO’s Voice To Fool Underling Into Transferring $243,000[…]
A team of researchers from Zhejiang University and Xiamen University has found a way to repair human tooth enamel. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes their process and how well it worked when tested. […] the researchers first created extremely tiny (1.5-nanometer diameter) clusters of calcium phosphate, the main Read more about A way to repair tooth enamel[…]
The European Space Agency (ESA) accomplished a first today: moving one of its satellites away from a potential collision with a “mega constellation”. The constellation in question was SpaceX’s Starlink, and the firing of the thrusters of the Aeolus Earth observation satellite was designed to raise the orbit of the spacecraft to allow SpaceX’s satellite Read more about ESA satellite dodges a “mega constellation” – Musks cluster satellites[…]
Dutch researchers found it easy to download the names and addresses of people in neighbourhoods they weren’t a part of and to discover who was on holidays when. Source: Buurtapp Nextdoor ‘zo lek als een mandje’ – Emerce
The potential impact of the latest attack on iPhones is massive, not to mention hugely concerning for every user of Apple’s famous smartphone. That simply visiting a website can lead to your iPhone being hacked silently by some unknown party is worrying enough. But given that, according to Google researchers, it’s possible for the hackers Read more about up to 2% of all Apple iPhones Hacked, says Google, and Breaks ALL messaging Encryption as well as sending location data[…]
A new study has revealed an unsettling truth about the citation metrics that are commonly used to gauge scientists’ level of impact and influence in their respective fields of research. Citation metrics indicate how often a scientist’s research output is formally referenced by colleagues in the footnotes of their own papers – but a comprehensive Read more about Some of The World’s Most-Cited Scientists Have Been Citing Themselves Through Citation Farms[…]
Following an Apple notice that a “limited number” of 15-inch MacBook Pros may have faulty batteries that could potentially create a fire safety risk, multiple airlines have barred transporting Apple laptops in their checked luggage—in some cases, regardless of whether they fall under the recall. Bloomberg reported Wednesday that Qantas Airways and Virgin Australia had Read more about Don’t fly with your Explody MacBook![…]
Scientists at MIT built a 16-bit microprocessor out of carbon nanotubes and even ran a program on it, a new paper reports. Silicon-based computer processors seem to be approaching a limit to how small they can be scaled, so researchers are looking for other materials that might make for useful processors. It appears that transistors Read more about MIT Researchers Build Functional Carbon Nanotube Microprocessor[…]
Robotics engineers at MIT have built a threadlike robot worm that can be magnetically steered to deftly navigate the extremely narrow and winding arterial pathways of the human brain. One day it could be used to quickly clear blockages and clots that contribute to strokes and aneurysms […] Strokes are a leading cause of death Read more about MIT Researchers Design Robotic Thread that navigates Human Brains to clear clots[…]
An Irish teenager just won $50,000 for his project focusing on extracting micros-plastics from water. Google launched the Google Science Fair in 2011 where students ages 13 through 18 can submit experiments and their results in front of a panel of judges. The winner receives $50,000. The competition is also sponsored by Lego, Virgin Galactic, Read more about Irish Teen Wins 2019 Google Science Fair For Removing Microplastics From Water[…]
Electric vehicles are everywhere now. It’s more than just Leafs, Teslas, and a wide variety of electric bikes. It’s also trains, busses, and in this case, gigantic dump trucks. This truck in particular is being put to work at a mine in Switzerland, and as a consequence of having an electric drivetrain is actually able Read more about Electric Dump Truck Produces More Energy Than It Uses[…]
This is a library dedicated to adversarial machine learning. Its purpose is to allow rapid crafting and analysis of attacks and defense methods for machine learning models. ART provides an implementation for many state-of-the-art methods for attacking and defending classifiers. Documentation for ART: https://adversarial-robustness-toolbox.readthedocs.io https://github.com/IBM/adversarial-robustness-toolbox
The AI Fairness 360 toolkit is an open-source library to help detect and remove bias in machine learning models. The AI Fairness 360 Python package includes a comprehensive set of metrics for datasets and models to test for biases, explanations for these metrics, and algorithms to mitigate bias in datasets and models. The AI Fairness Read more about IBM releases AI Fairness 360 tool open source[…]
The AI Explainability 360 toolkit is an open-source library that supports interpretability and explainability of datasets and machine learning models. The AI Explainability 360 Python package includes a comprehensive set of algorithms that cover different dimensions of explanations along with proxy explainability metrics. The AI Explainability 360 interactive experience provides a gentle introduction to the Read more about IBM releases AI Explainability tools[…]
In southern France, 35 nations are collaborating to build the world’s largest tokamak, a magnetic fusion device that has been designed to prove the feasibility of fusion as a large-scale and carbon-free source of energy based on the same principle that powers our Sun and stars. The experimental campaign that will be carried out at ITER Read more about ITER is making a mini sun to power the earth[…]
Not only has a vulnerability been found in Lenovo Solution Centre (LSC), but the laptop maker fiddled with end-of-life dates to make it seem less important – and is now telling the world it EOL’d the vulnerable monitoring software before its final version was released. The LSC privilege-escalation vuln (CVE-2019-6177) was found by Pen Test Read more about Lenovo Solution Centre can turn users into Admins – Lenovo changes end of life for LSC until before the last release in response.[…]
There are lots of reasons to patent something. The most obvious one is that you’ve come up with a brilliant invention, and you want to protect your idea so that nobody can steal it from you. But that’s just the tip of the patent strategy iceberg. It turns out there is a whole host of Read more about Why do tech companies file so many weird patents?[…]
Researchers from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Vienna have experimentally demonstrated what was previously only a theoretical possibility. Together with quantum physicists from the University of Science and Technology of China, they have succeeded in teleporting complex high-dimensional quantum states. The research teams report this international first in the journal Physical Read more about Complex quantum teleportation achieved for the first time[…]