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John Lemke

$100 Million Pledged To Indie Film On Kickstarter... And 8,000 Films Made | Techdirt - 0 views

  • And, yes, the "but what about my $100 million movie" crowd will scoff and argue that this number is so "small." But, two points there: first, this number is growing very, very, very fast. And if you can't understand how trends explode, then you're going to be in trouble soon. Second -- and this is the more important point -- those funds helped create 8,000 films. For those who have been arguing about culture and how we're going to lose the ability to make movies... this suggests something amazing and important is happening which goes against all those gloom and doom predictions. By way of comparison, the UN, which keeps track of stats on film production, claimed that in 2009, 7,233 films were made. Worldwide.
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    "Less than a year after being declared the darling of Sundance -- especially for not having "the arrogance of a studio" -- Kickstarter has announced that over $100 million has been pledged to indie film via its platform (which, of course, is hardly the only crowdfunding platform that filmmakers use, though it is the most popular). There are some caveats, of course. This is over Kickstarter's lifetime (since April 2009), but the numbers have been growing rapidly. $60 million of those pledges came in 2012. Also, that's pledges, not actual money given, since only projects that hit their target get the money. The actual total collected is $85.7 million -- which means that'll get over $100 million pretty quickly. "
John Lemke

Hackers charged with stealing Xbox, 'Call of Duty,' and US Army secrets worth over $100... - 0 views

  • Four hackers have been jointly charged with conspiracies to commit computer fraud, copyright infringement, wire fraud, mail fraud, identity theft, and theft of trade secrets. Individually, they have been charged with counts of aggravated identity theft, unauthorized computer access, copyright infringement, and wire fraud.
  • The defendants, aged between 18 and 28, are believed to have stolen more than $100 million in intellectual property and other proprietary data from the likes of Microsoft Corporation, Epic Games, Valve, and even the US Army. This includes pre-release versions of Gears of War 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Apache helicopter simulation software developed for the US army, and information about the Xbox One console. Two of the suspects have pleaded guilty, one of which is 22-year old David Pokora. His plea represents what may be the first conviction of a foreign-based individual for hacking into US businesses to steal trade secret information.
  • 18-count superseding indictment
John Lemke

RoboMara 2011: Autonomous bot wins marathon by a nose - 0 views

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    he RoboMara or robot marathon has just come to a close in Osaka Japan, with a pair of bipedal bots battling it out in surprisingly close dash to the finish. After 422 laps of a 100-meter track, two robots found themselves only inches apart as coming out of the final turn.
John Lemke

Leaked Snowden documents detail NSA's plans for 'millions' of malware attacks | The Verge - 0 views

  • A program known as TURBINE, first revealed last year, is meant to dramatically speed the process: one document says it will "allow the current implant network to scale to large size (millions of implants) by creating a system that does automated control implants by groups instead of individually."
  • The scaling process, according to Greenwald, started in 2004, when the NSA operated only 100 to 150 software implants. The number of implants used in the years between 2010 to 2012, by contrast, is described as numbering in the tens of thousands.
John Lemke

How LexisNexis and others may have unwittingly aided identity thieves | Ars Technica - 0 views

  • Wednesday's report exposes serious risks in what banks, mortgage companies, and other financial services call "knowledge-based authentication." Representatives from these services frequently rely on a list of about 100 questions such as "What was your previous address?" or "Which company services your mortgage?" when trying to determine if the person on the phone or filling out an application is the individual he claims to be. Ready access to the data stored by the data aggregators can make the difference between a fraudulent application being approved or rejected. Krebs goes on to recount a story told by Gartner fraud analyst Avivah Litan about a fellow analyst who witnessed an identity thief in action.
John Lemke

Stepson of Stuxnet stalked Kaspersky for months, tapped Iran nuke talks | Ars Technica - 0 views

  • Since some time in the second half of 2014, a different state-sponsored group had been casing their corporate network using malware derived from Stuxnet, the highly sophisticated computer worm reportedly created by the US and Israel to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program.
  • the malware was more advanced than the malicious programs developed by the NSA-tied Equation Group that Kaspersky just exposed. More intriguing still, Kaspersky antivirus products showed the same malware has infected one or more venues that hosted recent diplomatic negotiations the US and five other countries have convened with Iran over its nuclear program.
  • We see this battle or arms race emerging and now it involves some kind of confrontation between the security industry and nation-state sponsored spies
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  • Kaspersky officials first became suspicious their network might be infected in the weeks following February's Security Analyst Summit, where company researchers exposed a state-sponsored hacking operation that had ties to some of the developers of Stuxnet. Kaspersky dubbed the highly sophisticated group behind the 14-year campaign Equation Group. Now back in Moscow, a company engineer was testing a software prototype for detecting so-called advanced persistent threats (APTs), the type of well-organized and highly sophisticated attack campaigns launched by well-funded hacking groups. Strangely enough, the developer's computer itself was having unusual interactions with the Kaspersky network. The new APT technology under development, it seemed, was one of several things of interest to the Duqu attackers penetrating the Kaspersky fortress. "For the developer it was important to find out why" his PC was acting oddly, Kamluk said. "Of course, he did not consider that machine could be infected by real malware. We eventually found an alien module that should not be there that tried to mask behind legitimate looking modules from Microsoft. That was the point of discovery."
  • What they found was a vastly overhauled malware operation that made huge leaps in stealth, operational security, and software design. The Duqu actors also grew much more ambitious, infecting an estimated 100 or so targets, about twice as many as were hit by the 2011 version.
  • So the Duqu 2.0 attackers pulled an audacious feat that Kaspersky researchers had never seen before. Virtually all of the malware resided solely in the memory of the compromised computers or servers. When one of them was restarted, the infection would be purged, but as the rebooted machine reconnected to the network, it would be infected all over again by another compromised computer in the corporate network. The secret lynchpin making this untraceable reinfection scheme possible was the Windows vulnerability Microsoft patched only Tuesday, which has been designated
John Lemke

'Solid' light could compute previously unsolvable problems - Princeton Engine... - 0 views

  • The researchers are not shining light through crystal – they are transforming light into crystal. As part of an effort to develop exotic materials such as room-temperature superconductors, the researchers have locked together photons, the basic element of light, so that they become fixed in place.
  • The results raise intriguing possibilities for a variety of future materials. But the researchers also intend to use the method to address questions about the fundamental study of matter, a field called condensed matter physics.
  • To build their machine, the researchers created a structure made of superconducting materials that contains 100 billion atoms engineered to act as a single "artificial atom." They placed the artificial atom close to a superconducting wire containing photons. By the rules of quantum mechanics, the photons on the wire inherit some of the properties of the artificial atom – in a sense linking them. Normally photons do not interact with each other, but in this system the researchers are able to create new behavior in which the photons begin to interact in some ways like particles. "We have used this blending together of the photons and the atom to artificially devise strong interactions among the photons," said Darius Sadri, a postdoctoral researcher and one of the authors. "These interactions then lead to completely new collective behavior for light – akin to the phases of matter, like liquids and crystals, studied in condensed matter physics."
John Lemke

Feds Say Legally Dead Is Slightly Alive - Lowering the Bar - 0 views

  • Under state law a person can be presumed dead after five years. Miller had been gone for eight, and efforts to find him (for child-support purposes) had been unsuccessful.
  • So "I don't know where that leaves you," Judge Davis told Miller, "but you're still deceased as far as the law is concerned." And he still is, because he did not appeal that ruling
  • in April the Social Security Administration sent letters to Miller's two daughters, demanding that they pay back the federal death benefits they got while Miller was legally dead. They got about $100 a week until they were 18, and the payments totaled less than $30,000. Including fees and interest, the SSA sought $47,256 from the daughters. It reportedly said that if it couldn't get the money from them, it would then seek it from the ex-wife, and only if she also couldn't pay would it go after the guy who abandoned them in the first place.
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