Linking ideas with the world
WPML (or WP MultiLingual), the most popular WordPress plugin for translating and serving WordPress sites in multiple languages. According to its website, WPML has over 600,000 paying customers and is one of the very few WordPress plugins that is so reputable that it doesn’t need to advertise itself with a free version on the official Read more about WPML WordPress plugin hacked, possibly by angry former employee[…]
Albatrosses and radar tracking One of the successful projects will see albatrosses and petrels benefit from further research using ‘bird-borne’ radar devices. Developed by scientists at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the attached radars will measure how often tracked wandering albatrosses interact with legal and illegal fishing vessels in the south Atlantic to map the Read more about UK puts ‘Bird-borne’ radar on albatrosses among 17 new projects to be funded[…]
Copyright activists just scored a major victory in the ongoing fight over the European Union’s new copyright rules. An upcoming summit to advance the EU’s copyright directive has been canceled, as member states objected to the incoming rules as too restrictive to online creators. The EU’s forthcoming copyright rules had drawn attention from activists for Read more about Europe’s controversial ‘link tax’ sent back after member states rebel – The Verge[…]
[…] today most of us have indoor jobs, and when we do go outside, we’ve been taught to protect ourselves from dangerous UV rays, which can cause skin cancer. Sunscreen also blocks our skin from making vitamin D, but that’s OK, says the American Academy of Dermatology, which takes a zero-tolerance stance on sun exposure: “You Read more about Is Sunscreen the New Margarine?[…]
Last spring, Marketplace host Charlsie Agro and her twin sister, Carly, bought home kits from AncestryDNA, MyHeritage, 23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA and Living DNA, and mailed samples of their DNA to each company for analysis. Despite having virtually identical DNA, the twins did not receive matching results from any of the companies. In most cases, the results from Read more about Twins get some ‘mystifying’ results when they put 5 DNA ancestry kits to the test[…]
The current DNS is unnecessarily slow and suffers from inability to deploy new features. To remediate these problems, vendors of DNS software and also big public DNS providers are going to remove certain workarounds on February 1st, 2019. This change affects only sites which operate software which is not following published standards. […] On or Read more about DNS flag day – 1/2/19[…]
Collection #1 is a set of email addresses and passwords totalling 2,692,818,238 rows. It’s made up of many different individual data breaches from literally thousands of different sources. (And yes, fellow techies, that’s a sizeable amount more than a 32-bit integer can hold.) In total, there are 1,160,253,228 unique combinations of email addresses and passwords. Read more about The 773 Million Record “Collection #1” Data Breach[…]
A rocket carrying a satellite on a mission to deliver the world’s first artificial meteor shower blasted into space on Friday, Japanese scientists said. A start-up based in Tokyo developed the micro-satellite for the celestial show over Hiroshima early next year as the initial experiment for what it calls a “shooting stars on demand” service. Read more about Japan satellite blasts into space to deliver artificial meteors[…]
Robots normally need to be programmed in order to get them to perform a particular task, but they can be coaxed into writing the instructions themselves with the help of machine learning, according to research published in Science. Engineers at Vicarious AI, a robotics startup based in California, USA, have built what they call a Read more about Watch an AI robot program itself to pick things up and push them around[…]
An official warning by the Dutch Doctors guild to a serving doctor needs to be removed from Google’s search result, as the judge says that the privacy of the doctor is more important than the public good that arises from people being warned that this doctor has in some way misbehaved. As a result of Read more about NL judge says doc’s official warning needs removing from Google[…]
Did you know that the manufacturing and construction industries use radio-frequency remote controllers to operate cranes, drilling rigs, and other heavy machinery? Doesn’t matter: they’re alarmingly vulnerable to being hacked, according to Trend Micro. Available attack vectors for mischief-makers include the ability to inject commands, malicious re-pairing and even the ability to create one’s own Read more about Yes, you can remotely hack factory, building site cranes more easily than a garage door[…]
A paper published Monday by United Nations University’s Institute for Water, Environment, and Health in the journal Science of the Total Environment found that desalination plants globally produce enough brine—a salty, chemical-laden byproduct—in a year to cover all of Florida in nearly a foot of it. That’s a lot of brine. In fact, the study Read more about The Dirty Truth About Turning Seawater Into Drinking Water[…]
Alias is a teachable “parasite” that is designed to give users more control over their smart assistants, both when it comes to customisation and privacy. Through a simple app the user can train Alias to react on a custom wake-word/sound, and once trained, Alias can take control over your home assistant by activating it for Read more about Project Alias is a DIY project that deafens your home voice assistant until you want it to listen to you[…]
Federal prosecutors unveiled charges in an international stock-trading scheme that involved hacking into the Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR corporate filing system. The scheme allegedly netted $4.1 million for fraudsters from the U.S., Russia and Ukraine. Using 157 corporate earnings announcements, the group was able to execute trades on material nonpublic information. Most of those Read more about International stock trading scheme hacked into SEC database EDGAR – again[…]
The one thing no one expects on a job interview is North Korean hackers picking up on the other line. But that’s apparently exactly what happened to a hapless employee at Redbanc, the company that handles Chile’s ATM network. The bizarre story was reported in trendTIC, a Chilean tech site. A Redbanc employee found a Read more about North Korean Hackers Gain Access to Chilean ATMs Through Skype[…]
Google has won a patent dispute over its famous “I’m feeling lucky” button that immediately connects a user to its top-raking search link with a single click. The search engine giant was sued in 2016 by Israeli company Spring Ventures (previously Buy2 Networks) for allegedly infringing on its patent, US 8,661,094, that covers displaying a Read more about Do you feel ‘lucky’, well, do you, punk? Google faces down magic button patent claim[…]
The South Korea Ministry of National Defense says 10 of its internal PCs have been compromised by North Korea unknown hackers . Korea’s Dong-A Ilbo reports that the targeted machines belonged to the ministry’s Defense Acquisition Program Administration, the office in charge of military procurement. The report notes that the breached machines would have held Read more about South Korea says mystery hackers cracked advanced weapons servers[…]
A method for fooling breast cancer cells into fat cells has been discovered by researchers from the University of Basel. The team were able to transform EMT-derived breast cancer cells into fat cells in a mouse model of the disease – preventing the formation of metastases. The proof-of-concept study was published in the journal Cancer Read more about Converting Cancer Cells to Fat Cells to Stop Cancer’s Spread[…]
AI systems excel in pattern recognition, so much so that they can stalk individual zebrafish and fruit flies even when the animals are in groups of up to a hundred. To demonstrate this, a group of researchers from the Champalimaud Foundation, a private biomedical research lab in Portugal, trained two convolutional neural networks to identify Read more about Forget Finding Nemo: This AI can identify a single zebrafish out of a 100-strong shoal[…]
A small green shoot is growing on the moon in an out-of-this-world first after a cotton seed germinated on board a Chinese lunar lander, scientists said Tuesday. The sprout has emerged from a lattice-like structure inside a canister since the Chang’e-4 lander set down earlier this month, according to a series of photos released by Read more about Cottoning on: Chinese seed sprouts on moon[…]
If you’re angry about the political feud that drove the federal government to partially shut down, or about a golden parachute for a CEO who ran a business into the ground, you aren’t alone—but you probably won’t do much about it, according to new research by Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. The research, Read more about Relying on karma: Research explains why outrage doesn’t usually result in revolution[…]
On December 28th, Bob Diachenko, Director of Cyber Risk Research at Hacken.io and bug bounty platform HackenProof, analyzed the data stream of BinaryEdge search engine and identified an open and unprotected MongoDB instance: The same IP also appeared in Shodan search results: Upon closer inspection, an 854 GB sized MongoDB database was left unattended, with Read more about 202 Million private Chinese resumes exposed[…]
As good as they are at causing mischief, researchers from the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab realized GANs are also a powerful tool: because they paint what they’re “thinking,” they could give humans insight into how neural networks learn and reason. This has been something the broader research community has sought for a long time—and it’s Read more about A neural network can learn to organize the world it sees into concepts and MIT has found a way to show how it’s doing it[…]
A recent Guardian article about the need for actors and celebrities — male and female — to look their best in a high-definition media world ended on the note that several low-profile Los Angeles VFX outfits specialize in “beautifying actors” in movies, TV shows and video ads. They reportedly use a software named “Beauty Box,” Read more about GPU Accelerated Realtime Skin Smoothing Algorithms Make Actors Look Perfect[…]
But for some who’ve welcomed in Amazon’s Ring security cameras, there have been more than just algorithms watching through the lens, according to sources alarmed by Ring’s dismal privacy practices. Ring has a history of lax, sloppy oversight when it comes to deciding who has access to some of the most precious, intimate data belonging Read more about Amazon’s Ring Security Cameras Allow Anyone to Watch Easily – And They Do![…]