Group items tagged

""As we have said now for more than years, fingerprints should not be used to secure anything. You leave them everywhere, and it is far too easy to make fake fingers out of lifted prints."

By connecting laptops and smartphones to enormous, remote computing banks, cloud computing gives us access to more processing power than could ever fit in any one of those devices, along with access to all our data and documents from anywhere in the world.

""The Internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains," said researcher Andrea Stocco, assistant professor in psychology at the University of Washington."

"From a computer science perspective, learning the behaviour of a single user is tough. This is the small data problem; unlike big data, where patterns and trends easily emerge, individual human beings can be unpredictable and can change behaviour, which is not helpful for pattern-hunting algorithms."

"Meet GIST, a gesture-controlled wearable device that helps the visually impaired navigate the world around them. University of Nevada computer scientists Vinitha Khambadkar and Eelke Folmer recently debuted GIST at a technology conference."

The US National Security Agency (NSA) knew of the Heartbleed flaw in the widely used OpenSSL security tool and exploited it for year - instead of blowing the whistle so that the patch could be flawed."

"But Lodge admits that the BYOD trend does have a number of flaws. His biggest concern? It encourages students to use technology during teaching time: "The major downside of BYOD is the potential for distraction. Students' own devices are likely to include all the applications they use on a regular basis. This cannot be controlled like it can be with computers provided by the institution.""

"But Computercop isn't security software -- quite the opposite; it's classic malware. The software, made in New York by a company that markets to law enforcement, is a badly designed keylogger that stores thingstyped into the keyboard -- potentially everything typed on the family PC -- passwords, sensitive communications, banking logins, and more, all stored on the hard drive, either in the clear, or with weak, easily broken encryption. And Computercop users are encouraged to configure the software to email dumps from the keylogger to their accounts (to spy on their children's activity), so that all those keystrokes are vulnerable to interception by anyone between your computer and your email server. "

"Dye told the Wall Street Journal that hackers increasingly use novel methods and bugs in the software of computers to perform attacks, resulting in about 55% cyberattacks going unnoticed by commercial antivirus software."

"high-frequency trading that you hear a lot is that it destabilizes markets, because all the computers trading with each other don't have the common sense famously possessed by stock exchange floor traders, and so they sometimes do dumb stuff like sell stock for a penny or buy it for $99,999.99, and then later when you yell at them they just point to their algorithms and shrug. "

"The type of tracking, called canvas fingerprinting, works by instructing the visitor's web browser to draw a hidden image, and was first documented in a upcoming paper by researchers at Princeton University and KU Leuven University in Belgium. Because each computer draws the image slightly differently, the images can be used to assign each user's device a number that uniquely identifies it."

"As soon as 20 years from now, 45 percent of American jobs may be performed by computers, as many as 10 million self-driving cars will be on the roads, and robots-computerized machines-will infiltrate almost every arena of our daily lives, from healthcare to energy production."

"Ddos attacks have been used to cause both financial and reputational damage to businesses and services from Sony to government websites. The attacks can last from hours to days, and typically use computers or internet routers infected with viruses to make innocent users unwitting parties to the attack. The Lizard Stresser tool was used effectively by Lizard Squad during cyber attacks on Microsoft's Xbox Live and Sony's PlayStation Network online gaming services in December last year."

"Human beings have been replaced with robot arms, which have been busily crafting parts for mobile phones, with production per employee increased from 8,000 to 21,000 pieces at the same time. This amounts to a 162.5 per cent productivity improvement, and there is further bad news for the outdated meatsacks clutching their Chinese equivalent of P45s - the previous defect rate average of 25 per cent has now been reduced to just five per cent."

"That's right, they're coming after us literally for a few splotches of ink. What companies like this do is broker works of art on behalf of actual photographers, but then engage in copyright trolling by threatening anyone who uses even a small piece of them. Increased computing power and more sophisticated algorithms allow them to do this with improved speed and "efficiency.""

"In amongst the numerous reports of privacy infringements, there have been a handful of genuine issues. Reports of Microsoft utilizing your computer as a P2P node for update sharing were completely founded, and the 13 pages of privacy settings are also no joke."

The BBC has defended its plan to supply a million schoolchildren with free micro:bit computers after it was criticised for delaying the launch until at least 2016.