Spybot Anti-Beacon for Windows

Anti-Beacon is small, simple to use, and is provided free of charge. It was created to address the privacy concerns of users of Windows 10 who do not wish to have information about their PC usage sent to Microsoft. Simply clicking “Immunize” on the main screen of Anti-Beacon will immediately disable any known tracking features included by Microsoft in the operating system.

Source: Spybot Anti-Beacon for Windows

The Washington Post partners with Twitter, Double Robotics to test robot at 2016 political conventions

Working with Twitter and Double Robotics, The Post’s robot will provide a live stream of delegates and politicians in Cleveland and Philadelphia via Twitter’s app, Periscope, giving users a guided tour of the convention site and letting them ask questions about the convention experience via Periscope chat.

Source: The Washington Post partners with Twitter, Double Robotics to test robot at 2016 political conventions – The Washington Post

PC shipments return to growth in the US

While we’re still waiting for worldwide shipments to go positive, both IDC and Gartner report that PC shipments in the US have increased for the first time in more than a year. IDC reports that shipments have increased by 4.9 percent, and Gartner says they’ve risen by 1.4 percent.

Source: PC shipments return to growth in the US | The Verge

Worldwide, PC shipments are still on a decline. Gartner estimates a 5.2 percent drop, and IDC calculates around a 4.5 percent decrease in shipments.

How China Took Center Stage in Bitcoin’s Civil War

Yet despite the talk of a borderless currency, a handful of Chinese companies have effectively assumed majority control of the Bitcoin network. They have done so through canny investments and vast farms of computer servers dispersed around the country. The American delegation flew to Beijing because that was where much of the Bitcoin power was concentrated.

Source: How China Took Center Stage in Bitcoin’s Civil War – The New York Times

Mr. Ng, 36, said he had become an expert in finding cheap energy, often in places where a coal plant or hydroelectric dam was built to support some industrial project that never happened. The Bitcoin mining machines in his facilities use about 38 megawatts of electricity, he said, enough to power a small city.

Lincoln Laboratory demonstrates highly accurate vehicle localization under adverse weather conditions

The reliance on static underground features is LGPR’s advantage as a complement to other localization methods, even in fair weather conditions. The use of a subsurface map reduces the need for continual modifications to high-resolution road maps. Fusing GPS, lidar, camera, and LGPR results yields a system that can accurately localize even when one of the sensing modes fails. This “fail-safe” capability will be necessary to the development of dependable autonomous vehicles that can handle demanding ground environments.

Source: MIT Lincoln Laboratory: News: Lincoln Laboratory demonstrates highly accurate vehicle localization under adverse weather conditions

How to Compromise the Enterprise Endpoint

Because Symantec uses a filter driver to intercept all system I/O, just emailing a file to a victim or sending them a link to an exploit is enough to trigger it – the victim does not need to open the file or interact with it in anyway. Because no interaction is necessary to exploit it, this is a wormable vulnerability with potentially devastating consequences to Norton and Symantec customers.

An attacker could easily compromise an entire enterprise fleet using a vulnerability like this. Network administrators should keep scenarios like this in mind when deciding to deploy Antivirus, it’s a significant tradeoff in terms of increasing attack surface.

Source: Project Zero: How to Compromise the Enterprise Endpoint

World’s First 1,000-Processor Chip

Each processor core can run its own small program independently of the others, which is a fundamentally more flexible approach than so-called Single-Instruction-Multiple-Data approaches utilized by processors such as GPUs; the idea is to break an application up into many small pieces, each of which can run in parallel on different processors, enabling high throughput with lower energy use, Baas said.

Because each processor is independently clocked, it can shut itself down to further save energy when not needed, said graduate student Brent Bohnenstiehl, who developed the principal architecture.

Source: World’s First 1,000-Processor Chip | UC Davis