Object recognition for robots

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Because a SLAM map is three-dimensional, however, it does a better job of distinguishing objects that are near each other than single-perspective analysis can. The system devised by Pillai and Leonard, a professor of mechanical and ocean engineering, uses the SLAM map to guide the segmentation of images captured by its camera before feeding them to the object-recognition algorithm. It thus wastes less time on spurious hypotheses.

More important, the SLAM data let the system correlate the segmentation of images captured from different perspectives. Analyzing image segments that likely depict the same objects from different angles improves the system’s performance.

Source: Object recognition for robots

Hacking Team’s RCS Android: The most sophisticated Android malware ever exposed

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The spyware is delivered either via the aforementioned app, or via an SMS or email that contain a specially crafted URL that will trigger exploits for several vulnerabilities in the default browsers of Android versions 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich to 4.3 Jelly Bean.

This will allow the attacker to gain root privilege, and allow the installation of a shell backdoor and RCS Android.

Source: Hacking Team’s RCS Android: The most sophisticated Android malware ever exposed

Online Cheating Site AshleyMadison Hacked

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In a long manifesto posted alongside the stolen ALM data, The Impact Team said it decided to publish the information in response to alleged lies ALM told its customers about a service that allows members to completely erase their profile information for a $19 fee.

According to the hackers, although the “full delete” feature that Ashley Madison advertises promises “removal of site usage history and personally identifiable information from the site,” users’ purchase details — including real name and address — aren’t actually scrubbed.

Source: Online Cheating Site AshleyMadison Hacked — Krebs on Security

New Horizons Sharpens Our View of Pluto’s Icy Heart

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NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is sending back images of Pluto taken during its Tuesday morning flyby. The images reveal a varied surface with ice mountains and frozen plains. The piano-size spacecraft traveled nine years and three billion miles to study the dwarf planet and its five moons.

Source: New Horizons Sharpens Our View of Pluto’s Icy Heart – The New York Times

Computer program fixes old code faster than expert engineers

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From there, the Helium system then replaces the original bit-rotted components with the re-optimized ones. The net result: Helium can improve the performance of certain Photoshop filters by 75 percent, and the performance of less optimized programs such as Microsoft Windows’ IrfanView by 400 to 500 percent.

“We’ve found that Helium can make updates in one day that would take human engineers upwards of three months,” says Amarasinghe. “A system like this can help companies make sure that the next generation of code is faster, and save them the trouble of putting 100 people on these sorts of problems.”

Source: Computer program fixes old code faster than expert engineers | MIT News

Having the ability to automatically fix bad code is like when they introduced auto focus on cameras to automatically fix bad focus or auto tunes to fix bad singing.  The downside might be that development chooses to do less code reviews releasing more bad code into the wild relying on these automatic techniques to fix everything.

Here’s another article recently published by MIT News about this concept.

Remarkably, the system, dubbed CodePhage, doesn’t require access to the source code of the applications whose functionality it’s borrowing. Instead, it analyzes the applications’ execution and characterizes the types of security checks they perform. As a consequence, it can import checks from applications written in programming languages other than the one in which the program it’s repairing was written.

Source: Automatic bug repair | MIT News

Mandating insecurity by requiring government access to all data and communications

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We have found that the damage that could be caused by law enforcement exceptional access requirements would be even greater today than it would have been 20 years ago. In the wake of the growing economic and social cost of the fundamental insecurity of today’s Internet environment, any proposals that alter the security dynamics online should be approached with caution. Exceptional access would force Internet system developers to reverse forward secrecy design practices that seek to minimize the impact on user privacy when systems are breached. The complexity of today’s Internet environment, with millions of apps and globally connected services, means that new law enforcement requirements are likely to introduce unanticipated, hard to detect security flaws.

Source: DSpace@MIT: Keys Under Doormats: Mandating insecurity by requiring government access to all data and communications

Analysing galaxy images with artificial intelligence: astronomers teach a machine how to ‘see’

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Mr Hocking, who led the new work, commented: “The important thing about our algorithm is that we have not told the machine what to look for in the images, but instead taught it how to ‘see’.”

Source: Analysing galaxy images with artificial intelligence: astronomers teach a machine how to ‘see’

The new work appears in “Teaching a machine to see: unsupervised image segmentation and categorisation using growing neural gas and hierarchical clustering”, A. Hocking, J. E. Geach, N. Davey & Y. Sun. The paper has been submitted to Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.