An image kernel is a small matrix used to apply effects like the ones you might find in Photoshop or Gimp, such as blurring, sharpening, outlining or embossing. They’re also used in machine learning for ‘feature extraction’, a technique for determining the most important portions of an image. In this context the process is referred to more generally as “convolution” (see: convolutional neural networks.)
Source: Image Kernels explained visually
Twelve out of 16 Bluetooth smart locks examined could be unlocked by a remote attacker, a researcher said at the DEF CON hacker conference.
Source: 75 Percent of Bluetooth Smart Locks Can Be Hacked
The problems didn’t lie with the Bluetooth Low Energy protocol itself, Rose said, but in the way the locks implemented Bluetooth communications, or with a lock’s companion smartphone app. Four locks, for example, transmitted their user passwords in plaintext to smartphones, making it easy for anyone with a $100 Bluetooth sniffer to pluck the passwords out of thin air.
From: http://xkcd.com/538/
Basically, the default User Authentification Settings of Edge/Spartan (also Internet Explorer, Outlook) lets the browser connect to local network shares, but erroneously fail to block connections to remote shares. To exploit this, an attacker would simply set up a network share. An embedded image link that points to that network share is then sent to the victim, for example as part of an email or website. As soon as the prepped content is viewed inside a Microsoft product such as Edge/Spartan, Internet Explorer or Outlook, that software will try to connect to that share in order to download the image. Doing so, it will silently send the user’s Windows login username in plaintext along with the NTLMv2 hash of the login password to the attacker’s network share.
Source: Microsoft Live Account Credentials Leaking From Windows 8 And Above | Hackaday
It wasn’t only about his News Feed list: He also tried to use the Facebook search function, also to no avail. It wasn’t that there were no posts about how great the Leave victory was. It was that Facebook, having identified him as a Remain voter, just wasn’t allowing him to see them.
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
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.
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.
Increasingly, attacks focus on social engineering or phishing that lures users onto compromised websites that can steal information or serve ransomware.
Those websites are so short-lived that antivirus software often doesn’t update fast enough to recognize them, Sjouwerman added.
Source: Could antivirus software make your computer less safe?
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.
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.