“Robotic telepresence”, as the technology is known, allows people to move virtually through a distant building by remotely controlling a wheeled robot equipped with a camera, microphone, loudspeaker and screen displaying live video of its pilot’s face.
via Telepresence robots: Your alter ego on wheels | The Economist.
And if even this handholding isn’t enough, more successful ratters sometimes rent out slaves they have already infected. In other cases, they simply hand them off to others in a “Free Girl Slave Giveaway.”
Calling most of these guys “hackers” does a real disservice to hackers everywhere; only minimal technical skill is now required to deploy a RAT and acquire slaves.
via Meet the men who spy on women through their webcams | Ars Technica.
For example, if the user of an e-reader or smartphone wants to share a book or picture with someone else, that person’s phone will transmit an audible signal that can be received and decoded by other devices within earshot. The decoded signal contains information (such as a URL) allowing the receiving device to download the shared content from a remote server.
via ‘Bezos Beep’ could replace the smartphone bump for mobile content sharing – GeekWire.
LOL. Someone reinvented the 300 baud modem.
There are a lot of decent threat sources out there today, and inexpensive tools that can be used to combine them with firewall data, he says.
“For someone that is low on budget, you can perform this with existing log aggregation tools, but I would not try to do this by hand,” Brazil says, who is a big proponent of security information and event monitoring (SIEM) systems.
via Five Ways To Better Hunt The Zebras In Your Network – Dark Reading.
We redesigned the inbox to make email light, fast, and mobile-friendly. Quickly swipe messages to your archive or trash. Scan an entire conversation at once with chat-like organization. Snooze emails until later with the tap of a button.
It’s a whole new inbox.
via Mailbox – Put Email In Its Place.
Who would have thought a company could arise out of good old email? According to this article this mailbox app has added 1.25 million people while processing 50M messages per day (i.e. ~40 emails per user). I wonder what percentage of that are old fashioned spammers and name squatters?
Cross-document coreference resolution is the task of grouping the entity mentions in a collection of documents into sets that each represent a distinct entity. It is central to knowledge base construction and also useful for joint inference with other NLP components. Obtaining large, organic labeled datasets for training and testing cross-document coreference has previously been difficult. We use a method for automatically gathering massive amounts of naturally-occurring cross-document reference data to create the Wikilinks dataset comprising of 40 million mentions over 3 million entities. Our method is based on finding hyperlinks to Wikipedia from a web crawl and using anchor text as mentions. In addition to providing large-scale labeled data without human effort, we are able to include many styles of text beyond newswire and many entity types beyond people.
via Wikilinks – Information Extraction and Synthesis Laboratory.
The private key itself is AES-256 encrypted. After exporting Bitcoin private keys from wallet.dat file, data is stored in a TrueCrypt container on three separate flash drives. Using Shamir’s Secret Sharing algorithm, the container password is then split into three parts utilizing a 2-of-3 secret sharing model. Incorporating physical security with electronic security, each flash drive from various manufacturers is duplicated several times and, together with a CD-ROM, those items are vaulted in a bank safety deposit box in three different legal jurisdictions. To leverage geographic distribution as well, each bank stores only part of a key, so if a single deposit box is compromised, no funds are lost.
Few, if any, of the defendants make their own mapping software. Move.com, for instance, uses maps provided by Microsoft’s Bing. But patent laws allow a patent-holder to sue anyone who makes, sells, or uses a patented item. In this case, it’s the real estate companies, together with their users, who are alleged to be “jointly infringing” the patent.
via Gone house hunting online? Revived patent lawsuit says you’re a “joint infringer” | Ars Technica.
The TL;DR is that there is going to be an unprecedented showdown in a Los Angeles court on Monday that could lead to someone associated with Prenda going to prison.
via Copyright Trolls Order WordPress To Hand Over Critics’ IP Addresses | TorrentFreak.
This story keeps getting stranger and stranger.
Two-thirds of online American adults 67% are Facebook users, making Facebook the dominant social networking site in this country. And new findings from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project indicate there is considerable fluidity in the Facebook user population:
via Coming and Going on Facebook | Pew Internet & American Life Project.
- 3% of Facebook users say they plan to spend more time on the site in the coming year.
- 27% of Facebook users say they plan to spend less time on the site in the coming year.
- 69% of Facebook users say they plan to spend the same amount of time on the site this coming year.