Linking ideas with the world
Imagine a liquid that could move on its own. No need for human effort or the pull of gravity. You could put it in a container flat on a table, not touch it in any way, and it would still flow. Brandeis researchers report in a new article in Science that they have taken the Read more about Self flowing liquids[…]
The US House of Representatives has just approved a “congressional disapproval” vote of privacy rules, which gives your ISP the right to sell your internet history to the highest bidder. The measure passed by 215 votes to 205. This follows the same vote in the Senate last week. Just prior to the vote, a White Read more about Your internet history on sale to highest bidder: US Congress votes to shred ISP privacy rules[…]
A black hole with three billion times the mass of the Sun has been found hurtling out of its parent galaxy at 8 million kilometers per hour! What could give it that kind of incredible boost? Turns out, it’s something even more incredible: the two supermassive black holes that merged to form it in the first place. Read more about A 3 billion solar mass black hole rockets out of a galaxy at 8 million kilometers per hour.[…]
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, Read more about UK flight ban on electronic devices announced – copying Trumpist insanity[…]
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 Read more about Burglars can easily make Google Nest security cameras stop recording[…]
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.” Read more about A new definition would add 102 planets to our solar system — including Pluto[…]
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 Read more about Patents Are A Big Part Of Why We Can’t Own Nice Things: the Supreme Court Should Fix That[…]
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 Read more about 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 Read more about 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 Read more about WikiLeaks’ New Dump Shows How The CIA Allegedly Hacked Macs and iPhones Almost a Decade Ago[…]
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, Read more about The Senate Just Voted to Let Internet Providers Sell Your Web History[…]
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 Read more about 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 Read more about Metered Connections in Windows 10 Creators Update Will Not Block All Windows Update Downloads[…]
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. Read more about Your brain doesn’t stop developing[…]
The World Wide Web Consortium has formally put forward highly controversial digital rights management as a new web standard. Dubbed Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), this anti-piracy mechanism was crafted by engineers from Google, Microsoft, and Netflix, and has been in development for some time. The DRM is supposed to thwart copyright infringement by stopping people Read more about W3C erects DRM as web standard[…]
Fillings could be consigned to history after scientists discovered that a drug already trialled in Alzheimer’s patients can encourage tooth regrowth and repair cavities. Researchers at King’s College London found that the drug Tideglusib stimulates the stem cells contained in the pulp of teeth so that they generate new dentine – the mineralised material under Read more about End of fillings in sight as scientists find Alzheimer’s drug makes teeth grow back […]
Today, the University of California at Berkeley has deleted 20,000 college lectures from its YouTube channel. Berkeley removed the videos because of a lawsuit brought by two students from another university under the Americans with Disabilities Act. We copied all 20,000 and are making them permanently available for free via LBRY. This makes the videos Read more about 20,000 Worldclass University Lectures Made Illegal, So We Irrevocably Mirrored Them – LBRY[…]
Your antivirus and network protection efforts may actually be undermining network security, a new paper and subsequent US-CERT advisory have warned. The issue comes with the use of HTTPS interception middleboxes and network monitoring products. They are extremely common and are used to check that nothing untoward is going on. However, the very method by Read more about Web security products introduce man in the middle insecurities[…]
The system, which has been trained on thousands of hours of BBC News programmes, has been developed in collaboration with Google’s DeepMind AI division. “Watch, Attend and Spell”, as the system has been called, can now watch silent speech and get about 50% of the words correct. That may not sound too impressive – but Read more about Towards a lip-reading computer[…]
“WikiLeaks has made initial contact with us via secure@microsoft.com,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Motherboard — but then things apparently stalled. An anonymous reader quotes Fortune: Wikileaks this week contacted major tech companies including Apple and Google, and required them to assent to a set of conditions before receiving leaked information about security “zero days” and Read more about WikiLeaks will disclose CIA vulns to companies that sign standard responsible disclosures – or maybe not so standard?[…]
Apache Guacamole is a clientless remote desktop gateway. It supports standard protocols like VNC, RDP, and SSH.We call it clientless because no plugins or client software are required.Thanks to HTML5, once Guacamole is installed on a server, all you need to access your desktops is a web browser. Source: Apache Guacamole (incubating) You set up Read more about Guacamole – Logmein alternative[…]
A small yellow robot submarine, called Boaty McBoatface after a competition to name a new polar research ship backfired, is being sent on its first Antarctic mission. Boaty, which has arguably one of the most famous names in recent maritime history, is a new type of autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), which will be able to Read more about Boaty McBoatface to go on its first Antarctic mission[…]
MXNet stands for mix and maximize. The idea is to combine the power of declartive programming together with imperative programming. In its core, a dynamic dependency scheduler that automatically parallelizes both symbolic and imperative operations on the fly. A graph optimization layer on top of that makes symbolic execution fast and memory efficient. The library Read more about MXNet – Amazon machine learning Open sourced[…]
The duration (2016–09–22 to 2017–02–20) and potential breadth of information exposed is huge — Cloudflare has over 2 million websites on its network, and data from any of these is potentially exposed. Cloudflare has said the actual impact is relatively minor, so I believe only limited amounts of information were actually disseminated. Essentially, broad range of data Read more about Cloudbleed: How to deal with it[…]