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  1. #1
    Lead Moderator calikid's Avatar
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    Cutting Edge Technology in the news

    A home for news about the internet, computers, and smart phone tech.

    CaliKid

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    Lead Moderator calikid's Avatar
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    Did you know your HOME wireless network can appear on google maps?

    Removing your Wi-Fi network from Google's map
    by Declan McCullagh

    If you're worried about the street address of your home Wi-Fi hotspot being public, Google has a solution.

    The Mountain View, Calif.-based company late today announced a way for the owners of Wi-Fi networks to be removed from Google's crowdsourced geolocation database, which it reworked this summer after CNET drew attention to privacy concerns.

    It's simple: all you need to do is append "_nomap" to the name of the Wi-Fi network. So "theharrisons" becomes "theharrisons_nomap".

    "As we explored different approaches for opting-out access points from the Google Location Server, we found that a method based on wireless network names provides the right balance of simplicity as well as protection against abuse," Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy counsel, wrote in a blog post. "Specifically, this approach helps protect against others opting out your access point without your permission."

    Wi-Fi-enabled devices, including access points but also PCs, iPhones, iPads, and Android phones, transmit a unique hardware identifier, called a MAC address, to anyone within a radius of a few hundred feet.

    Android devices collect a subset of these MAC addresses and beam them back to Google to be used in the company's geolocation database--a useful feature that allows faster location fixes for cell phones. (Apple, Microsoft, and Skyhook Wireless operate similar databases but do not provide an opt-out mechanism.)

    The privacy risks arise when a device's location can be tracked. CNET confirmed in July that Google's Street View cars recorded not just the locations of Wi-Fi access points, but also the addresses of some laptops, cell phones, and other devices.

    Android's crowdsourced database also can track locations of some Wi-Fi devices, including those in use as a wireless access point. One device spotted in a San Francisco coffeehouse showed up at a street address in an Atlanta suburb a few days later, for instance.

    Story Continues
    Last edited by calikid; 11-16-2011 at 09:05 PM.

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    Lead Moderator calikid's Avatar
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    Has law enforcement become the new Big Business security department?
    FBI and ICE Seize 150 Websites Trafficking Counterfeit and Pirated Merchandise


    WASHINGTON — To mark the official beginning of the online holiday shopping season, known as Cyber Monday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center (IPR Center), the Department of Justice and the FBI Washington Field Office have seized 150 website domain names that were illegally selling and distributing counterfeit merchandise.

    "For most, the holidays represent a season of good will and giving, but for these criminals, it's the season to lure in unsuspecting holiday shoppers," said ICE Director John Morton. "More and more Americans are doing their holiday shopping online, and they may not realize that purchasing counterfeit goods results in American jobs lost, American business profits stolen and American consumers receiving substandard products. And the ramifications can be even greater because the illicit profits made from these types of illegal ventures often fuel other kinds of organized crime."

    "Through this operation we are aggressively targeting those who are selling counterfeit goods for their own personal gain while costing our economy much-needed revenue and jobs," said Attorney General Eric Holder. "Intellectual property crimes harm businesses and consumers, alike, threatening economic opportunity and financial stability, and today we have sent a clear message that the Department will remain ever vigilant in protecting the public's economic welfare and public safety through robust intellectual property enforcement."

    This operation is the eighth phase of Operation In Our Sites, a sustained law enforcement initiative to protect consumers by targeting counterfeit and piracy on the Internet, and the second year it has coincided with Cyber Monday. These 150 domain name seizuresrepresent a more than 80 percent increase over the 82 websites that were seized during last year's Cyber Monday-related operation.

    The 150 seized domains are in the custody of the federal government. Visitors to these websites will now find a seizure banner that notifies them that the domain name has been seized by federal authorities and educates them that willful copyright infringement is a federal crime.

    During this operation, federal law enforcement agents made undercover purchases of a host of products, including professional sports jerseys, golf equipment, DVD sets, footwear, handbags and sunglasses, representing a variety of trademarks from online retailers who were suspected of selling counterfeit products. In most cases, the goods were shipped directly into the United States from suppliers in other countries. If the trademark holders confirmed that the purchased products were counterfeit or otherwise illegal, seizure orders for the domain names of the websites that sold the goods were obtained from federal magistrate judges.

    Since the operation's June 2010 launch, the IPR Center has seized a total of 350 domain names, and the seizure banner has received more than 77 million individual views.

    Of the 350 domain names seized, 116 have now been forfeited to the U.S. government. The federal forfeiture process affords individuals who have an interest in the seized domain names a period of time after the "Notice of Seizure" to file a petition with a federal court and additional time after the "Notice of Forfeiture" to contest the forfeiture. If no petitions or claims are filed, the domain names become property of the U.S. government.
    Story Continues
    Last edited by calikid; 12-10-2011 at 04:36 PM.
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    Lead Moderator calikid's Avatar
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    Maybe your laptop doesn't belong on your lap...
    Wifi-enabled laptops may be nuking sperm
    Reuters - NEW YORK


    The digital age has left men's nether parts in a squeeze, if you believe the latest science on semen, laptops and wireless connections.

    In a report in the venerable medical journal Fertility and Sterility, Argentinian scientists describe how they got semen samples from 29 healthy men, placed a few drops under a laptop connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi and then hit download.

    Four hours later, the semen was, eh, well-done.

    A quarter of the sperm were no longer swimming around, for instance, compared to just 14 percent from semen samples stored at the same temperature away from the computer.

    And nine percent of the sperm showed DNA damage, three-fold more than the comparison samples.

    The culprit? Electromagnetic radiation generated during wireless communication, say Conrado Avendano of Nascentis Medicina Reproductiva in Cordoba and colleagues.

    Story Continues
    Last edited by calikid; 11-29-2011 at 02:46 AM. Reason: Format issues
    The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but
    progress. -- Joseph Joubert
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    Lead Moderator calikid's Avatar
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    So these guys not only rip off big business, they stick the little guys with the bill.
    Why can't people with such talent make a legal living? What a bunch of jerks.

    Criminals create online traffic jams to cover for bank heists

    FBI warns of new scheme that may make it impossible for you to get your money back

    Shady money mules draped in $100,000 worth of jewelry and operating under the cover of darkness — it sounds like the opening scene to a bad mystery movie but it's real, and it's part of a new cyber crime campaign drawing national attention.

    The FBI is warning people to be aware of a new cyber crime scheme in which online crooks launch crippling cyber attacks against banks while simultaneously harvesting your bank-account credentials and making it impossible for you to get your money back once the fraud is complete.

    Cyber criminals first send phishing emails claiming to be from the National Automated Clearing House Association (NACHA), informing recipients there was a problem with their bank-account transaction and it could not be processed. Once victims click on the link in the bogus email, they are infected with "Gameover," a variant of the infamous Zeus Trojan, which enables crooks to harvest bank-account credentials.

    This could be game over for the scam, but the next step is where it gets particularly dangerous.

    After their targeted computers are compromised with Gameover, the attackers launch distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) against the victims' financial institutions as a type of smokescreen to cover up the heist.

    A DDoS is the online equivalent of a traffic jam; no damage is done, but no data can get in or out of a website while it's happening.

    "The belief is the DDoS is used to deflect attention from the wire transfers as well as to make them unable to reverse the transactions (if found)," the FBI wrote.

    Here's where the expensive jewelry comes into play:Story Continues
    Last edited by calikid; 12-10-2011 at 04:33 PM. Reason: Format Issues
    The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but
    progress. -- Joseph Joubert
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    Lead Moderator calikid's Avatar
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    Is YOUR phone spying on you? Certainly seems that way.
    Carrier IQ: More privacy alarms, more confusion

    by Declan McCullagh

    Controversy over a mobile data-logger called Carrier IQ escalated today, with a U.S. senator raising an alarm and Apple and Verizon distancing themselves, even though it's still unclear how the software works.

    An Android developer, Trevor Eckhart, reported last month that Carrier IQ software phoned home with details about how the phone was being used and where it was. Earlier this week, Eckhart posted a video elaborating on his claims, which was followed by another report that the software has been found on iPhones.

    Story Continues
    Last edited by calikid; 12-10-2011 at 04:32 PM. Reason: clean up format
    The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but
    progress. -- Joseph Joubert
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    Junior Member ka-lemtah's Avatar
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    LANL Scientists model brain structure to help computers recognize objects

    FYI,

    cheers,

    ka-lemtah

    From: http://www.lanl.gov/news/releases/do...hat_i_see.html

    - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

    Do you see what I see?
    Scientists model brain structure to help computers recognize objects

    By Garrett Kenyon

    LOS ALAMOS, New Mexico, December 20, 2011—An essential question confronting neuroscientists and computer vision researchers alike is how objects can be identified by simply "looking" at an image. Introspectively, we know that the human brain solves this problem very well. We only have to look at something to know what it is.

    But teaching a computer to "know" what it’s looking at is far harder. In research published this fall in the Public Library of Science (PLoS) Computational Biology journal, a team from Los Alamos National Laboratory, Chatham University, and Emory University first measured human performance on a visual task - identifying a certain kind of shape when an image is flashed in front of a viewer for a very short amount of time (20-200 milliseconds). Human performance gets worse, as expected, when the image is shown for shorter time periods. Also as expected, humans do worse when the shapes are more complicated.

    But could a computer be taught to recognize shapes as well, and then do it faster than humans? The team tried developing a computer model based on human neural structure and function, to do what we do, and possibly do it better.

    Their paper, "Model Cortical Association Fields Account for the Time Course and Dependence on Target Complexity of Human Contour Perception," describes how, after measuring human performance, they created a computer model to also attempt to pick out the shapes.

    "This model is biologically inspired and relies on leveraging lateral connections between neurons in the same layer of a model of the human visual system," said Vadas Gintautas of Chatham University in Pittsburgh and formerly a researcher at Los Alamos.

    <snip>

    Story Continues
    Last edited by calikid; 12-26-2011 at 04:03 PM. Reason: for Fair Use.
    Cameras are ubiquitus, but they are not instruments.

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    Lead Moderator calikid's Avatar
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    Robin Hood or just plain criminal activity? You decide.

    Anonymous claims hack on security think tank
    by Natalie Weinstein

    Anonymous is claiming to have stolen 200GB worth of data, including e-mails and clients' credit card information, from a U.S.-based security think tank, the Associated Press reported today.

    The hacking group also used Twitter to post a link to a list of clients apparently belonging to think tank Stratfor Global Intelligence.

    "Not so private and secret anymore?" read one of numerous tweets from AnonymousIRC, a Twitter account linked to Anonymous.

    This morning Stratfor's site was down. A notice reads: "Site is currently undergoing maintenance."

    Story Continues
    The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but
    progress. -- Joseph Joubert
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    Senior Member noot's Avatar
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    Robin Hood or just plain criminal activity? You decide
    there's a third choice: petulant children.
    "Toon, with an attitude like that I'm surprised you're not in jail". Brother Dankk

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    Lead Moderator calikid's Avatar
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    Got rocket science you want to calculate? How cool would it be to run your calcs on a supercomputer?

    Amazon takes supercomputing to the cloud

    by Dave Rosenberg

    You may not need to use the 42nd fastest supercomputer on Earth, but if you want to, you can for just $1,279 per hour.

    As reported by Wired, Amazon Web Services latest salvo into the computing on demand landscape is a platform known as the Elastic Cloud Computer, which at $1279 per hour, or $11 million a year if run full time, is probably on par in comparison to the time, effort and expense of procuring the same level of compute power in your own data center.

    Amazon's virtual super computer is capable of running 240 trillion calculations per second, or 240 teraflops on 17,000 cores. While undoubtedly impressive, this pales in comparison to Fujitsu's K Computer, which hit 10 petaflops in November 2011, equating to 10 quadrillion calculations a second.

    Admittedly there is a big difference, but I'm pretty sure that K Computer wasn't also running much of the tech world's infrastructure, nor was K Computer also selling books and every other retail item on the planet at the same time.

    Story Continues
    The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but
    progress. -- Joseph Joubert
    Attachment 1008

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