Linking ideas with the world
If you’re like me, you’ve probably been ignoring the bitcoin phenomenon for years — because it seemed too complex, far-fetched, or maybe even too libertarian. But if you have any interest in a future where the world moves beyond fossil fuels, you and I should both start paying attention now.Last week, the value of a Read more about Bitcoin could cost us our clean-energy future[…]
In the paper, DeepMind describes how a descendant of the AI program that first conquered the board game Go has taught itself to play a number of other games at a superhuman level. After eight hours of self-play, the program bested the AI that first beat the human world Go champion; and after four hours Read more about DeepMind’s AI became a superhuman chess (and shogi and go) player in a few hours using generic reinforcement learning[…]
New submitter Chir breaks the news to us that the NiceHash crypto-mining marketplace has been hacked. The crypto mining pool broke the news on Reddit, where users suggest that as many as 4,736.42 BTC — an amount worth more than $62 million at current prices — has been stolen. The NiceHash team is urging users Read more about NiceHash Hacked, $62 Million of Bitcoin May Be Stolen[…]
A 2-in-1 Windows 10 laptop powered by a smartphone chip The chipset behind the Asus NovaGo comes straight from smartphones, so we were into the fact that the volume and power keys are aligned along the right side of the laptop. This is shaping up to be the always-connected laptop counterpart to a smartphone in Read more about Asus NovaGo: laptop built on an ARM mobile phone processor runs Windows[…]
Uber’s ride-sharing service has given birth to some of the most creative criminal scams to date, including using a GPS-spoofing app to rip off riders in Nigeria, and even ginning up fake drivers by using stolen identities.Add to those this nefariously genius operation: Cybercriminals, many working in Russia, have created their own illegitimate taxi services Read more about The Underground Uber Networks Driven by Russian Hackers[…]
Back in 2014, scientists at the Scripps Research Institute in California reported that they’d engineered bacteria whose DNA used a whole new pair of letters, nicknamed X and Y. That same team now reports that they’ve gotten the bacteria to actually use these new letters. The biological possibilities, as a result, now seem endless.“The resulting Read more about Scientists Added Two New Letters to DNA’s Code[…]
Coditany of Timeness” is a convincing lo-fi black metal album, complete with atmospheric interludes, tremolo guitar, frantic blast beats and screeching vocals. But the record, which you can listen to on Bandcamp, wasn’t created by musicians.Instead, it was generated by two musical technologists using a deep learning software that ingests a musical album, processes it, Read more about This frostbitten black metal album was created by an artificial intelligence[…]
For the past few years, Gingerich has been laying the groundwork for Sopranica, an open source, DIY cell network that allows smartphone owners to make calls, send texts and eventually browse the internet with total anonymity.In January, Gingerich published the code for the first part of Sopranica called JMP. This is essentially a way of Read more about Sopranica: an Anonymous, DIY Cell Phone Network[…]
I’m excited to announce the initial release of Mozilla’s open source speech recognition model that has an accuracy approaching what humans can perceive when listening to the same recordings. We are also releasing the world’s second largest publicly available voice dataset, which was contributed to by nearly 20,000 people globally. […] This is why we Read more about Announcing the Initial Release of Mozilla’s Open Source Speech Recognition Model and Voice Dataset[…]
“Bots come in and buy up all the toys and then charge ludicrous prices amidst the holiday shopping bustle,” the New York Democrat said on Sunday. “Cyber bots — we call them ‘Grinch bots’ — are expanding their reach and unfairly scooping up the hottest toys your parents can’t even click buy.”For example, Schumer said, Read more about ‘Grinch bots’ are stealing Christmas[…]
In May 2017, researchers at Google Brain announced the creation of AutoML, an artificial intelligence (AI) that’s capable of generating its own AIs.More recently, they decided to present AutoML with its biggest challenge to date, and the AI that can build AI created a ‘child’ that outperformed all of its human-made counterparts.The Google researchers automated Read more about Google’s AI Built its own AI That Outperforms Any Made by Humans[…]
PayPal says that one of the companies it recently acquired suffered a security incident during which an attacker appears to have accessed servers that stored information for 1.6 million customers.The victim of the security breach is TIO Networks, a Canadian company that runs a network of over 60,000 utility and bills payment kiosks across North Read more about PayPal Says 1.6 Million Customer Details Stolen in Breach at Canadian Subsidiary[…]
In a sustained campaign, Voits managed to get the login details and passwords for 1,600 county employees, including for the Xjail computer system that is used to track inmates. By March he had the logins to the prison management system and tried to amend the records of one inmate to arrange their early release. His Read more about Prison hacker who tried to free friend now likely to join him inside[…]
A group of physicists from Russia, Sweden and the U.S. has demonstrated a highly unusual optical effect. They managed to “virtually” absorb light using a material that has no light-absorbing capacity. The research findings, published in Optica, break new ground for the creation of memory elements for light. The absorption of electromagnetic radiation, including light, Read more about Scientists make transparent materials absorb light[…]
Air Help, het claimbedrijf voor vliegtuigpassagiers, zet kunstmatige intelligentie in om real-time te beslissen of een claim sterk genoeg is om in te dienen. De juridische bot Lara bepaalt of vertragingen en annuleringen conform de Europese regelgeving in aanmerking komen voor een vergoeding.De bot is geprogrammeerd om onder andere de vluchtstatus, luchthavenstatistieken en weerrapporten te Read more about AirHelp zet volgende stap in kunstmatige intelligentie[…]
High-Tech Bridge used its free mobile app analysis software, called Mobile X-Ray, to peek under the hood of the top 30 cryptocurrency apps in the Google Play store at three different popularity levels: apps with up to 100,000 downloads, up to 500,000 downloads, and apps with more than 500,000 downloads. So, a total of 90 Read more about 66 Percent of Popular Android Cryptocurrency Apps Don’t Use Encryption[…]
The sensitive personal information of 246,000 Department of Homeland Security employees was found on the home computer server of a DHS employee in May, according to documents obtained by USA TODAY. Also discovered on the server was a copy of 159,000 case files from the inspector general’s investigative case management system, which suspects in an Read more about Former DHS employee had 246000 DHS employee records at home to sell. DHS waits 3 months(!) to notify employees.[…]
The patch addresses a flaw in its operating system that allows anyone sitting at a Mac to gain administrator access by entering “root” as the username and leaving the password box blank in authentication prompts. This works when altering system settings, logging into the machine, and accessing it remotely via VNC, RDP, screen sharing, and Read more about As Apple fixes macOS root password hole, here’s what went wrong (note: get patching!)[…]
A California federal court has ordered Coinbase to turn over identifying records for all users who have bought, sold, sent, or received more than $20,000 through their accounts in a single year between 2013 and 2015. Coinbase estimates that 14,355 users meet the government’s requirements. The full order is embedded below. For each account, the Read more about Coinbase ordered to report 14,355 users to the IRS[…]
Bacteria found on the outside of the International Space station could be alien life, according to a cosmonaut who has visited the satellite. Spacewalkers regularly take samples and materials from the outside of the station when they head outside for what are officially called “extravehicular activity”. Those samples are then taken down to scientists on Read more about Bacteria found on International Space Station may be alien in origin, says cosmonaut[…]
AWS Announces Five New Machine Learning Services and the World’s First Deep Learning-Enabled Video Camera for Developers Amazon SageMaker makes it easy to build, train, and deploy machine learning models AWS DeepLens is the world’s first deep learning-enabled wireless video camera built to give developers hands-on experience with machine learning Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Translate, Amazon Read more about Amazon Announces Five New Machine Learning Services and the World’s First Deep Learning-Enabled Video Camera for Developers[…]
Forget fingerprint computer identification or retinal scanning. A University at Buffalo-led team has developed a computer security system using the dimensions of your heart as your identifier. The system uses low-level Doppler radar to measure your heart, and then continually monitors your heart to make sure no one else has stepped in to run your Read more about Using heart size by scanning using doppler radar as a biometric[…]
The Alisons, husband and wife, have done something no scholars of interrogation have been able to do before. Working in close cooperation with the police, who allowed them access to more than 1,000 hours of tapes, they have observed and analysed hundreds of real-world interviews with terrorists suspected of serious crimes. No researcher in the Read more about Empirical evidence on how to interrogate: build rapport, not conflict[…]
On November 23, Imgur was notified of a potential security breach that occurred in 2014 that affected the email addresses and passwords of 1.7 million user accounts. Imgur
There are three types of lies: omission, where someone holds out on the facts; commission, where someone states facts that are untrue; and paltering, where someone uses true facts to mislead you. It’s not always easy to detect, but there are a few telltale signs. A recent study, published in the Journal of Personality and Read more about Paltering: lying by using the truth[…]