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"Netlab researchers, who are usually among the firsts to discover emerging botnets, said the botnet contains several clues to suggest this is the work of the same group which developed the Moobot botnet in 2019 and the LeetHozer botnet in 2020. Both botnets were essentially built and used for launching DDoS attacks, which also appears to be Matryosh's primary function, as well. The Netlab team says they found functions in the code specific to features that will use infected devices to launch DDoS attacks via protocols like TCP, UDP, and ICMP."

"Do screens destroy kids' executive functioning? In short: no. Some types of screen use (in particular, non-educational, 'fantastical' shows) may have short-term impacts on attention, memory, or inhibition. But these effects don't seem to be long-term, unless screen use is excessive and interfering with other important activities. And some screens (educational apps, certain video games) may actually improve executive functioning skills. "

"Some people assume that once quantum computing comes along modern encryption technologies will be outpowered. But experts are starting to posit that hash functions and asymmetric encryption could defend not only against modern computers, but also against quantum attackers from the future."

"95% of the US population, 93% of Europeans and 92% of Asians can't do "level three" tasks like "You want to know what percentage of the emails sent by John Smith last month were about sustainability" -- tasks where "use of tools (e.g. a sort function) is required to make progress towards the solution. The task may involve multiple steps and operators. The goal of the problem may have to be defined by the respondent, and the criteria to be met may or may not be explicit.""

"Researchers have demonstrated how garbled speech commands hidden in radio or video broadcasts could be used to control a smartphone. The clips, which sound like the Daleks from Doctor Who, can be difficult for humans to understand but still trigger a phone's voice control functionality. The commands could make a smartphone share its location data, make calls and access compromised websites."

"Unskilled manual laborers have felt the pressure of automation for a long time - but, increasingly, they're not alone. The last few years have been a bonanza of advances in artificial intelligence. As our software gets smarter, it can tackle harder problems, which means white-collar and pink-collar workers are at risk as well. Here are eight jobs expected to be automated (partially or entirely) in the coming decades. Call Center Employees call-center Telemarketing used to happen in a crowded call center, with a group of representatives cold-calling hundreds of prospects every day. Of those, maybe a few dozen could be persuaded to buy the product in question. Today, the idea is largely the same, but the methods are far more efficient. Many of today's telemarketers are not human. In some cases, as you've probably experienced, there's nothing but a recording on the other end of the line. It may prompt you to "press '1' for more information," but nothing you say has any impact on the call - and, usually, that's clear to you. But in other cases, you may get a sales call and have no idea that you're actually speaking to a computer. Everything you say gets an appropriate response - the voice may even laugh. How is that possible? Well, in some cases, there is a human being on the other side, and they're just pressing buttons on a keyboard to walk you through a pre-recorded but highly interactive marketing pitch. It's a more practical version of those funny soundboards that used to be all the rage for prank calls. Using soundboard-assisted calling - regardless of what it says about the state of human interaction - has the potential to make individual call center employees far more productive: in some cases, a single worker will run two or even three calls at the same time. In the not too distant future, computers will be able to man the phones by themselves. At the intersection of big data, artificial intelligence, and advanced

"MEMS and nanotechnology utilize seemingly impossibly small mechanisms in order to sense, control and respond to a particular environment - these technologies can sense mechanical information as well as biological data. Many MEMS sensors function by detecting small electrical currents that provide data on things such as position, geomagnetic field, acceleration and more, and then pass this information along to other mechanisms within a device or machine. "

"The most well-documented of these deals with the hash function used to "anonymize" the license and medallion numbers. A bit of lateral thinking from one civic hacker and the data was completely de-anonymized. This data can now be used to calculate, for example, any driver's annual income. More disquieting, though, in my opinion, is the privacy risk to passengers. With only a small amount of auxiliary knowledge, using this dataset an attacker could identify where an individual went, how much they paid, weekly habits, etc. I will demonstrate how easy this is to do in the following section."

"This is what's about to happen with twitpic, for years the go-to service for posting photos to Twitter, and the people in charge appear to be doing what they can to prevent the Internet Archive preserving the database and to deny users functional archive access to their own uploads. "

"Following backlash, the company said it removed the alarm function from the smartwatch, but reports maintain the employees are still being required to wear the device so their location can be tracked."

"The robust way to do that, the way that can't be set aside at the whim of a government, is to require systems to be built so as not to collect data about a person. The basic principle is that a system must be designed not to collect certain data, if its basic function can be carried out without that data."

"The tech giant revealed updates to the controversial tool on Monday that include improving the accuracy and functionality of its face analysis features such as identifying gender, emotions and age range."

"The arcane nature of "protein folding", a mind-boggling form of molecular origami, is rarely discussed outside scientific circles, but it is a problem of profound importance. The machinery of biology is built from proteins and it a protein's shape defines its function. Understand how proteins fold up and researchers could usher in a new era of scientific and medical progress."

"Privacy, transparency, and consent are of utmost importance in this effort, and we look forward to building this functionality in consultation with interested stakeholders. We will openly publish information about our work for others to analyze. All of us at Apple and Google believe there has never been a more important moment to work together to solve one of the world's most pressing problems. Through close cooperation and collaboration with developers, governments and public health providers, we hope to harness the power of technology to help countries around the world slow the spread of COVID-19 and accelerate the return of everyday life."

"Brain scans, however, are quite telling, especially when analyzed with an algorithm, Brent and his colleagues discovered. "We're trying to figure out what's going on in somebody's brain when they're thinking about suicide," says Brent.  These scans, taken using fMRI, or functional magnetic resonance imaging, show that strong words such as 'death,' 'trouble,' 'carefree,' and 'praise,' trigger different patterns of brain activity in people who are suicidal, compared with people who are not. That means that people at risk of suicide think about those concepts differently than everyone else-evidenced by the levels and patterns of brain activity, or neural signatures."

"A data trust is a legal entity that collects and manages people's personal data on their behalf. Though the structure and function of these trusts are still being defined, and many questions remain, data trusts are notable for offering a potential solution to long-standing problems in privacy and security."

"Researchers fed these algorithms (which function like autocomplete, but for images) pictures of a man cropped below his neck: 43% of the time the image was autocompleted with the man wearing a suit. When you fed the same algorithm a similarly cropped photo of a woman, it auto-completed her wearing a low-cut top or bikini a massive 53% of the time. For some reason, the researchers gave the algorithm a picture of the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and found that it also automatically generated an image of her in a bikini. (After ethical concerns were raised on Twitter, the researchers had the computer-generated image of AOC in a swimsuit removed from the research paper.)"

"Citizen, which was launched in 2017, is a glorified police scanner that promises to help users "stay safe and informed". It invites input from witnesses - mostly involving shaky phone footage of police milling around while a stretcher is carted by in the background - and, bafflingly, includes a comments section, in which users speculate fatuously on the crime in question and quibble over the accuracy of the map function. It is grimly fascinating, mildly addictive and, relative to its stated aims, totally without value."

"Wong opened the bag later that day and took her debit card from her purse. He then used it to top up his ez-link card with S$100 through the PayWave function at Somerset MRT Station."