Linking ideas with the world
Efforts to track down criminals in the US state of North Carolina have laid bare a dangerous gap in the law over the use of location data. Raleigh police went to court at least three times last year and got a warrant requiring Google to share the details of any users that were close to Read more about US cops go all Minority Report: Google told to cough up info on anyone near a crime scene[…]
D Doctors have taken a major step towards curing the most common form of blindness in the UK – age-related macular degeneration. Douglas Waters, 86, could not see out of his right eye, but “I can now read the newspaper” with it, he says. He was one of two patients given pioneering stem cell therapy Read more about Stem cell therapy cures most common cause of blindness in UK[…]
Orbitz says one of its older websites may have been hacked, potentially exposing the personal information of people who made purchases online between Jan. 1, 2016 and Dec. 22, 2017. The current Orbitz.com website was not involved in the incident. Orbitz is now owned by Expedia Inc. of Belleview, Washington. Orbitz said Tuesday about 880,000 Read more about Orbitz Says Legacy Travel Site Likely Hacked, Affecting 880K[…]
Telegram, the encrypted messaging app that’s prized by those seeking privacy, lost a bid before Russia’s Supreme Court to block security services from getting access to users’ data, giving President Vladimir Putin a victory in his effort to keep tabs on electronic communications. Supreme Court Judge Alla Nazarova on Tuesday rejected Telegram’s appeal against the Read more about Telegram Loses Bid to Block Russia From Encryption Keys[…]
Windows 10 S, Microsoft’s new locked-down operating system that comes bundled with the Surface Laptop, won’t allow you to change the default Web browser away from Microsoft’s own Edge. Furthermore, Edge’s default search provider can’t be altered: Bing is all you get. Curiously you can download other browsers from the Windows Store, such as Opera Read more about Windows 10 S (for Surface) and Cortana force you to use Edge and Bing, and Windows Mail forces links to open in Edge[…]
Every time you book a flight, you generate personal data that is ripe for harvesting: information like the details on an ID card, your address, your passport information and your travel itinerary, as well as your frequent-flyer number, method of payment and travel preferences (dietary restrictions, mobility restrictions, etc.). All that data becomes part of Read more about Booking Flights: Our Data Flies with Us – the huge dataset described[…]
The program began in 2012 as a partnership between New Orleans Police and Palantir Technologies, a data-mining firm founded with seed money from the CIA’s venture capital firm. According to interviews and documents obtained by The Verge, the initiative was essentially a predictive policing program, similar to the “heat list” in Chicago that purports to Read more about Palantir has secretly been using New Orleans to test its predictive policing technology, was given huge access to lots of private data without oversight due to loophole[…]
That’s when it hit him. Right there, in the numbers on the page, he noticed a flaw—a strange and surprising pattern, like the cereal-box code, written into the fundamental machinery of the game. A loophole that would eventually make Jerry and Marge millionaires, spark an investigation by a Boston Globe Spotlight reporter, unleash a statewide Read more about The Lottery Hackers[…]
Most recent advances in artificial-intelligence systems such as speech- or face-recognition programs have come courtesy of neural networks, densely interconnected meshes of simple information processors that learn to perform tasks by analyzing huge sets of training data. But neural nets are large, and their computations are energy intensive, so they’re not very practical for handheld Read more about MIT builds Neural network chip with 95% reduction in power consumption, allowing it to be used in a mobile[…]
I’m getting sick of Windows 10’s auto-installing apps. Apps like Facebook are now showing up out of nowhere, and even displaying notifications begging for me to use them. I didn’t install the Facebook app, I didn’t give it permission to show notifications, and I’ve never even used it. So why is it bugging me? Windows Read more about Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps On My PC Without Asking[…]
Thousands of FedEx customers were exposed after the company left scanned passports, drivers licenses, and other documentation on a publicly accessible Amazon S3 server. The scanned IDs originated from countries all over the world, including the United States, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Japan, China, and several European countries. The IDs were attached to forms Read more about 119,000 Passports and Photo IDs of FedEx Customers Found on Unsecured Amazon Server[…]
An unidentified hacker or hackers broke into a Tesla-owned Amazon cloud account and used it to “mine” cryptocurrency, security researchers said. The breach also exposed proprietary data for the electric carmaker. The researchers, who worked for RedLock, a 3-year-old cybersecurity startup, said they discovered the intrusion last month while trying to determine which organization left Read more about Tesla’s Amazon Cloud Account Hacked to Mine Cryptocurrency[…]
Nissan the car company never really cared who Uzi Nissan was. Then it decided he had something it wanted very much—the website www.nissan.com, which he created for his small retail computer business in 1994—and it sued him for $10 million. When the two Nissans went to war, Uzi Nissan prevailed in the end, but lost Read more about Uzi Nissan Spent 8 Years Fighting The Car Company With His Name. He Nearly Lost Everything To Win. The legal system doesn’t work very well if you have no money.[…]
Cisco’s Elastic Services Controller’s release 3.0.0 software has a critical vulnerability: it accepts an empty admin password. The Controller (ESC) is Cisco’s automation environment for network function virtualisation (NFV), providing VM and service monitors, automated recovery and dynamic scaling. Cisco’s advisory about the flaw explains the bug is in ESC’s Web service portal: “An attacker Read more about Cisco NFV elastic services controller accepts empty admin password[…]
“Platforms like Monero are designed to be truly anonymous, and tumbler services like CoinJoin can [further] obscure transaction origins,” said Dr Mike McGuire, senior lecturer in criminology at Surrey University and author of the study. Many cybercriminals are using virtual currency to convert the illegal proceeds of crime into hard cash and assets. Digital payment Read more about Crooks opt for Monero, paypal, ebay and gamesfor laundering[…]
De MIVD tapte vorig jaar in totaal 348 keer. De AIVD plaatste dat jaar 3.205 taps. Vandaag publiceerden beide diensten de tapstatistieken over de periode 2002 tot en met 2017 op hun website. Source: MIVD tapte vorig jaar 348 keer | Nieuwsbericht | Defensie.nl And of course we have no idea how many of these Read more about 2017: Dutch Military Intelligence 348 and Internal Intelligence 3205 taps placed. No idea how many the police did, but wow, that’s a lot![…]
This page shows how they used Deep Dream, Neural Style Transfer and OpticalFlow tools to create this music video Source: Music Video and Artificial Intelligence – Jean Pierre by Hardcore Anal Hydrogen
Today we’re announcing updates to our Quantum Development Kit, including support for macOS and Linux, additional open source libraries, and interoperability with Python. These updates will bring the power of quantum computing to even more developers on more platforms. At Microsoft, we believe quantum computing holds the promise of solving many of today’s unsolvable problems Read more about Microsoft updates its Quantum Development Kit and adds support for Linux and Mac[…]
paper published this week by a trio of machine learning researchers from the University of Freiburg in Germany. They were exploring a particular method of teaching AI agents to navigate video games (in this case, desktop ports of old Atari titles from the 1980s) when they discovered something odd. The software they were testing discovered Read more about A video game-playing AI beat Q*bert in a way no one’s ever seen before[…]
To turn off facial recognition on your computer, click on the down arrow at the top of any Facebook page and then select Settings. From there, click “Face Recognition” from the left column, and then click “Do you want Facebook to be able to recognize you in photos and videos?” Select Yes or No based Read more about How to Disable Facebook’s Facial Recognition Feature[…]
A paper released on arXiv last week by a team of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, National University of Singapore, and Google Brain reveals just how vulnerable deep learning is to information leakage. The researchers labelled the problem “unintended memorization” and explained it happens if miscreants can access to the model’s code and Read more about AI models leak secret data too easily[…]
Ok, to reduce the amount significantly. Using ML they figure out which baggage routes create the most stress in the system and then they can optimise these routes. Source: SITA: met AI geen zoekgeraakte bagage meer – Emerce
Since October, a mysterious flying object has been seen moving through the skies over the South Island of New Zealand. It looks like a cross between a small plane and a drone, with a series of small rotor blades along each wing that allow it to take off like a helicopter and then fly like Read more about Larry Page’s Flying Taxis, Now Exiting Stealth Mode – The New York Times[…]
On Friday, eight artists launched an augmented reality gallery at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, digitally overlaying their artwork over the museum’s. Motherboard reports the guerrilla installation was created and deployed without the museum’s permission. “Hello, we’re from the internet” is an “unauthorized gallery concept aimed at democratizing physical exhibition spaces, museums, Read more about Artists Protest Elite Art World With Unauthorized AR Gallery at the MoMA[…]
Last week, the code repository GitHub was taken off air in a 1.3Tbps denial of service attack. We predicted then that there would be more such attacks and it seems we were right. Arbor Networks is now reporting that a US service provider suffered a 1.7Tbps attack earlier this month. In this case, there were Read more about World’s biggest DDoS attack record broken after just five days using poorly configured memcache servers[…]