Group items tagged

"Ransomware has been in the news repeatedly over the past few years. This is the insidious malware that will lock your data or device (smartphone or PC) and displays a screen-wide message that demands money from you to release it, which it does by sending you an unlock code."

"The verification codes required for logging into a 2-step enabled account can be generated either using a mobile app - like Authy or Google Authenticator - or you can have them sent to your mobile phone via a text message or a voice call. The latter option however will not work if the mobile phone associated with your account is outside the coverage area"

A cool bit of tech that should help educated young brits on coding and other things to help them in jobs later in life although this could put the younger people at an advantage due to the inequality between older students and younger ones

"Researcher Billy Rios (previously) has extended his work on vulnerabilities in hospital drug pumps, discovering a means by which their firmware can be remotely overwritten with new code that can result in lethal overdoses for patients. "

"Marlinspike's Textsecure has an impeccable reputation as a secure platform, and Whatsapp founder Jan Koum attributes his desire to add security to his users' conversations to his experiences with the surveillance state while growing up in Soviet Ukraine. However, without any independent security audit or (even better) source-code publication, we have to take the company's word that it has done the right thing and that it's done it correctly."

"Re/code, a technology news website, was the first to float the North Korea theory last Friday. Citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter, it said: "Sony Pictures Entertainment is exploring the possibility that hackers working on behalf of North Korea, possibly operating out of China, may be behind a devastating attack that brought the studio's network to a screeching halt earlier this week … The sources stress that a link to North Korea hasn't been confirmed, but has not been ruled out, either.""

"O'Neill recounts an exercise to improve service to homeless families in New York City, in which data-analysis was used to identify risk-factors for long-term homelessness. The problem, O'Neill describes, was that many of the factors in the existing data on homelessness were entangled with things like race (and its proxies, like ZIP codes, which map extensively to race in heavily segregated cities like New York). Using data that reflects racism in the system to train a machine-learning algorithm whose conclusions can't be readily understood runs the risk of embedding that racism in a new set of policies, these ones scrubbed clean of the appearance of bias with the application of objective-seeming mathematics. "

"Petya ransomware victims can now unlock infected computers without paying. An unidentified programmer has produced a tool that exploits shortfalls in the way the malware encrypts a file that allows Windows to start up. In notes put on code-sharing site Github, he said he had produced the key generator to help his father-in-law unlock his Petya-encrypted computer."

"Nemitz identifies four bases of digital power which create and then reinforce its unhealthy concentration in too few hands: lots of money, which means influence; control of "infrastructures of public discourse"; collection of personal data and profiling of people; and domination of investment in AI, most of it a "black box" not open to public scrutiny. The key question is which of the challenges of AI "can be safely and with good conscience left to ethics" and which need law. Nemitz sees much that needs law."

"They've moved "authoritative sources" to the top search results. The question we need to ask is: "How does this play out in the Real World?" In the real world it means that the worldview, the political bias, the social preferences, the positions taken in various ideological and scientific controversies - as decided by top Google Executives - have been virtually hard-coded into Google's search algorithms. No longer is Google returning "unbiased and objective results"."

"Should we embrace these new trust algorithms? Baveja and Shapiro acknowledge the responsibility that comes with trying to take ethical decisions and translate them into code. How much of our personal information do we want trawled through in this way? And how comfortable are we with letting an algorithm judge who is trustworthy?"

"Proponents say that it's more than just a matter of probability. The laws of physics don't seem that different from code in a program, according to some, and it's likely that with enough time, a sufficiently advanced civilization could crunch the numbers and produce a simulation that mimics the existence and behavior of every particle in our universe."

"Fidelis malware mangler Jason Reaves says the TrickBot malware has strong code similarities to the Dyre trojan, a menace that ripped through Western banks and businesses in the US, the UK, and Australia, inflicting tens of millions of dollars in damages through dozens of separate spam and phishing campaigns since June 2014. Dyre stole some US$5.5 million from budget carrier Ryanair and fleeced individual businesses of up to $1.5 million each in substantial wire transfers using stolen online banking credentials."

"Once it's verified, the transaction's information, plus both your digital signature and your friend's digital signature, are stored in a block alongside many other transactions like it. Once the block is full, it gets a hash, which is a unique code that sort of acts like its nametag. It also stores its position on the chain and the hash of the previous block on the chain. (Here's an example block to illustrate what kind of information is stored there.) "

"But an analysis of the app's code found that it does more than decide in real time whether someone poses a contagion risk; it also shares information with the police, setting "a template for new forms of automated social control that could persist long after the epidemic subsides"."

" "Why isn't my face being detected? We have to look at how we give machines sight," she said in a TED Talk late last year. "Computer vision uses machine-learning techniques to do facial recognition. You create a training set with examples of faces. However, if the training sets aren't really that diverse, any face that deviates too much from the established norm will be harder to detect.""

"Chinese delivery firm is moving to embrace automation.Chinese delivery firm is moving to embrace automation. Orange robots at the company's sorting stations are able to identify the destination of a package through a code-scan, virtually eliminating sorting mistakes. Shentong's army of robots can sort up to 200,000 packages a day, and are self-charging, meaning they are operational 24/7."

"An internet blackout that knocked out some of the world's biggest websites on Tuesday was ultimately caused by a single customer updating their settings, the infrastructure provider Fastly has revealed. A bug in Fastly's code introduced in mid-May had lain dormant until Tuesday morning, according to Nick Rockwell, the company's head of engineering and infrastructure. When the unnamed customer updated their settings, it triggered the flaw, which ultimately took down 85% of the company's network."