Slashdot Mirror
Domain: thestack.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to thestack.com.
Stories · 460
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India Scans a Billion Irises In Interest of National Security (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Indian government is using a loophole to fast-track legislation to allow federal agencies access to its database of 1 billion individuals' finger prints and iris scans. The Aadhaar database was set up in 2009 to 'streamline' benefit payments and help control fraud. The programme claims to have saved an estimated 150 billion rupees (approx. $2.2 billion) between 2014-2015. Privacy advocates are expressing fears that an approval in parliament could facilitate a police state, with data used to silence individuals considered as potential security threats, as well as presenting an enormous risk if breached. -
Alibaba To Train a Million Youngsters In E-commerce (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Alibaba has announced its plans to train a million teenagers and graduates living in rural areas of China to kick-start their own businesses. The Chinese e-commerce giant reached an agreement today with the China Communist Youth League to support the teenagers with funding, training and partnerships. The company's internet financing branch Ant Financial will set aside 1 billion yuan to invest in the training of recent college graduates who want to return to their home-towns and launch businesses. -
Major Browsers Add Experimental Support For WebAssembly (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Four major web browsers have announced support for the near-native compiling technology WebAssembly, and collaborated to bring an initial common game demo of Angry Bots, running via Unity and WebAssembly, to experimental builds of Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge and, shortly, Safari. WebAssembly was launched last year in a joint project between Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple and Google as a potentially more efficient route to assembly-level performance than asm.js, which is in itself a low-level subset of JavaScript. -
Amazon Wants To Replace Passwords With Selfies and Videos (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Amazon has filed a patent application for a technology which would allow consumers to authenticate transactions via selfie or video. As part of the verification process, the computer or mobile device will prompt the user to 'perform certain actions, motions or gestures, such as to smile, blink, or tilt his or her head.' Amazon claims that the introduction of facial recognition technology will make transactions more user friendly and secure than conventional identification methods, such as passwords which can be stolen and hacked. -
LG Releases First Smartphone With DAB+ Chip (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: LG have released the first smartphone with built-in DAB+ circuitry,allowing users to listen to digital radio without consuming mobile data bandwidth. The LG Stylus 2 will initially be released in the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Norway, Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands (perhaps not coincidentally these are among the highest-rate adopters of DAB/DAB+). Patchy coverage and often-poor bitrates have hindered the take-up of DAB/+, which has been in development since the early 1980s, and it's hoped that the shift from the motoring to the smartphone space will alleviate some of the coverage problems that users experienced with the push to DAB-based car radios. No benchmarks on power consumption of the integrated DAB+ circuitry is currently available. -
Google, Facebook, WhatsApp and Others To Beef Up Encryption (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Tech giants including Google, Facebook, Whatsapp and Snapchat are looking to increase the privacy of user data by expanding their encryption features. The recent reports mark growing industry support for Apple in its fight to not allow authorities backdoor access into users' devices. Facebook has suggested that it is increasing privacy of its Messenger service, while its instant messaging app Whatsapp also confirmed that it would be extending its encryption offering to secure voice calls. Others reportedly joining the industry shift include Snapchat, which is working on securing its messaging service, and search heavyweight Google, which is currently developing an encrypted email project. From The Guardian's substantially similar story from which the above-linked article draws: WhatsApp has been rolling out strong encryption to portions of its users since 2014, making it increasingly difficult for authorities to tap the service's messages. The issue is personal for founder Jan Koum, who was born in Soviet-era Ukraine. When Apple CEO Tim Cook announced in February that his company would fight the government in court, Koum posted on his Facebook account: "Our freedom and our liberty are at stake." His efforts to go further still are striking as the app is in open confrontation with governments. Brazil authorities arrested a Facebook executive on 1 March after WhatsApp told investigators it lacked the technical ability to provide the messages of drug traffickers. Facebook called the arrest "extreme and disproportionate." The sooner, the better on this front: as TechDirt points out, WhatsApp may be next on the list of communication tools to which the U.S. government would like to give the Apple Treatment. -
China Criticizes Subsidized Ride-Hailing Apps As Anti-Competitive (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: China's minister of transport Yang Chuantang has warned that the current round of ferocious price-wars among China's leading ride-sharing app providers, including Didi Dache and Uber, represents an attempt to kill local competition with massively-subsidized price cuts that will not subsequently be sustained. Chuantang, speaking at the annual national assembly in Beijing, said that the subsidies "are aimed at occupying more market share within the short term and is competitively unfair for the taxi industry. It is unhealthy and cannot be sustained in the long term." Uber is currently investing (or, arguably, losing) $1 billion a year in its attempts to consolidate a place in the Chinese ride-sharing market. -
GM Buys Driverless Software Startup Cruise Automation (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: General Motors has confirmed its acquisition of autonomous software company Cruise Automation. The Silicon Valley-based firm, set up by former Twitch co-founder Kyle Vogt in 2013, creates auto-pilot technologies which can transform regular cars into driverless vehicles. Cruise will now be turning its focus exclusively to designing software for GM vehicles. It will continue to operate as an independent unit from its San Francisco base within the auto giant's newly established Autonomous Vehicle Development Team. Cruise now represents the latest strategic push for the multinational into future transport technologies, following its purchase of assets from former ride-hailing company Sidecar and a $500 million partnership with Uber-rival Lyft. -
Russian Bitcoin Issuers Will Risk 7 Years In Prison (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Russian Ministry of Finance has announced an amendment to the country's criminal code which will impose prison sentences of up to seven years for the issuing of Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. A government source speaking to Interfax (Russian) said that the maximum prison sentence for individuals found issuing cryptocurrencies would be 2-4 years, and/or up to three years' worth of salary or income, whilst managers of dispensing institutions could face seven years in prison, up to four years of income equivalent in fines, and a lifetime ban from similar posts. Russia announced the ban on Bitcoin or other 'money surrogates' in February of 2014, asserting that cryptocurrencies facilitate money-laundering and other criminal activity. -
Research Establishes 13-Hour Gap Between Viral Misinformation and Correction (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers in China and America will soon launch a platform called Hoaxy, designed to identify and analyze what happens when misinformed news goes viral, and the processes which lead to a correction of the misinformation. The study, which compared 71 likely and prominent sources of inaccurate internet news over a period of three months to the same news stories on fact-checking sites, concludes that the average interval between viral diffusion of inaccurate news and the discovery of facts which disprove it stands at about 13 hours. Hoaxy uses a custom crawler written in Python and diffused via the Scrapy web crawling framework. -
Bank of England Looks Into 'Centralized' Bitcoin Alternative, RSCoin (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Bank of England is working with researchers at University College London to design a Bitcoin clone of its own that can be centrally controlled. It was recently found that the UK's central bank had reached out to university researchers to help it create a cryptographically secure digital currency. The resulting system has now been revealed, and is named RSCoin. The system employs cryptography to obviate counterfeiting and tampering. Unlike other mechanisms, the digital ledger used by the new cryptocurrency is handled exclusively by a central body and will only be made accessible to users in possession of a specific encryption key. Its developers explained that an RSCoin ledger could be published publicly by a central bank, and added that the system's design would also allow a central bank to make transactions entirely, or partially, anonymous. -
Opera Introduces Native Adblocking, 45% Faster Than Chrome With Adblock Plus (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A new version of the Opera desktop web browser introduces fully-featured native adblocking which is able to load adblocked pages significantly faster than rivals running the Adblock Plus browser. The new feature includes whitelisting of domains and a benchmarker to test the difference between page load-times with and without ads. Krystian Kolondra, head of Opera desktop, indicates in his post that the company's hope is to encourage the 'simpler' and less intrusive advertising which has been promised, but does not yet seem to be evident. -
Laser System Set To Revolutionize Future Aircraft, Satellite Data Links (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A new laser system, dubbed HYPERION, promises to improve the transmission of data from aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and orbiting satellites to ground stations. The optical system, developed by a team of Innovate UK researchers, has been designed to send critical information more securely, rapidly and efficiently than traditional radio frequency (RF) methods. Suggested applications for HYPERION include helping UAVs involved in disaster monitoring and other humanitarian projects to quickly offload detailed data back to the ground for analysis. The system could also be applied in future airline systems to transmit vast amounts of technical data collected by on-board sensors to ground stations — a process which could help speed up maintenance procedures and significantly cut turnaround times. -
What Airbnb's Blockchain Authentication Proposal Means For Online Privacy (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Nathan Blecharcyzk, one of the co-founders at home rental platform Airbnb, has detailed the company's interest in blockchain technologies to help establish user reputation and trust. He revealed that in 2016 Airbnb would be looking into blockchain integration, or a similar distributed ledger system, to authenticate a user's reputation and establish trust on the platform. The proposal marks a potentially revolutionary step for e-commerce sites and peer opinion platforms looking to identify and filter out damaging reviews planted by competitors and trolls, or self-promoting posts which can mislead consumers. However, while protecting the integrity of some, the introduction of a blockchain-based reputation system holds a potential threat to anonymity and privacy online. A distributed and irreversible system for trust management, which stores personal data, could offer a hotbed for doxing and identity theft – and even undermine an individual's right to be forgotten. -
China Car-Tracking Scheme Could Allow Higher Fuel Prices For Gas-Guzzling Cars (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: In the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, traditionally a test-bed for nationwide infrastructure and technology schemes, 200,000 vehicles have been experimentally hooked into a real-time traffic-monitoring system based on RFID and roadside monitoring stations. China's state-owned Aerospace Science and Industry Corp (CASC) claims that such intense monitoring will be necessary for the driverless cars of the future, and to foil license-plate forgeries. On Monday the general manager of Chinese auto manufacturer Great Wall Motor suggested that a monitoring scheme of such scope could also be used to introduce a wide range of usage-based levies, and to easily ensure that less efficient cars could be charged more for fuel at gas stations. -
Why Japan Is Facing Pressure To Return To Military Research (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: China's growing nation status has Japan reconsidering its 70-year old ban on military research projects, as Japanese defense circles actively seek to take advantage of the country's vanguard position in robotic technology. Pressure from the government is also mounting, as authorities try to find means to bring university researchers into the defense fold — particularly to meet the challenge of a more aggressive Chinese military. Funding cuts in Japanese higher education, combined with a weakened economy and governmental austerity measures, may make the allure of military funding irresistible to researchers and academic institutions. -
Amazon Job Posting Hints At New VR Platform (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Amazon is looking to expand its business into the realms of virtual reality (VR), according to a recent job site posting looking for someone to lead the new project. The ad, posted to Amazon's Glassdoor page, is for a 'Senior Software Development Manager' who will be responsible for 'the Virtual Reality experience within Amazon Video.' The posting outlines that 'basic qualifications' must include a degree in computer science, at least 15 years of relevant experience in engineering, seven years of technical experience and an additional five years of experience as a software development manager. The job posting elaborates: 'The Virtual Reality team will explore and create the platform and interface for immersive storytelling. This will include an ingestion and playback platform for Virtual Reality experiences.' -
Google Docs Can Now Export EPUB (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The EPUB format is now available as an export option from Google Docs. Tests show that the feature can very accurately translate Word-style hyperlinked indexes into EPUB sidebar indices, offering the possibility of updating legacy documents to a more portable and open format. However, despite the completely open XML-based nature of the format, and how much better it handles text-reflow than PDF can, the paucity of easy-to-use editors — particularly in the mobile space — may mean that EPUB continues to be seen as a 'baked' format. -
Anonymous Claims Twitter Is Suspending 'OpISIS' Member Accounts (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Anonymous has claimed that Twitter mistakenly shut down several of its activist accounts in a widespread cull of pages belonging to terrorist supporters. In an effort to rid the site of an extremist presence, Twitter has recently suspended over 125,000 accounts for 'threatening or promoting terrorist acts, primarily related to ISIS.' However, the international activist group Anonymous is now reporting that among this number were multiple member accounts, which were actively supporting the fight against the Islamic State and helping to seek out terrorist supporters and recruiters online. Twitter has typically re-opened the Anonymous accounts within a matter of hours, bombarded with requests by hacktivists and the wider online community. -
MIT's Eyebrowse To Rank and Review Internet Sites, While Retaining Privacy (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: MIT has launched a new scheme whereby participating users can voluntarily share data on their website viewing habits, via the use of a Google Chrome extension and by signing up to an MIT website. The scheme, called Eyebrowse, began development in 2010 and has been in closed beta for the last 18 months. Cornell information science professor Mor Naaman says of the project: "Data has traditionally been used by anyone from corporations to the government...but the goal of this system is to make the data more useful for the individuals themselves, to give them more control, and to make it more useful to communities." -
Mozilla Jumps On IoT Bandwagon (thestack.com)
mikejuk writes: Mozilla has been clarifying some of its plans to convert the Firefox OS project into four IoT based projects. At a casual glance, this seems like a naive move that is doomed to failure. Project Link is a 'user agent' for the smart home, that helps the end user set preferences for device interaction, and automates those connections for the user in a secure environment. Next, Project Sensor Web will be a pilot project for crowdsourcing a pm2.5 sensor network. Project Smart Home is focused on bridging the gap in IoT smart home providers between completely boxed solutions like Apple HomeKit, and completely DIY solutions like Raspberry Pi. Finally, Project Vaani is a voice interface for IoT access, which Mozilla credits as the 'most natural way to interact with connected devices.' With Firefox losing market share and projects like Firefox OS, Thunderbird, Shumway, and Persona closing down, perhaps Mozilla should try and find its way back to core concerns. All four of the projects need significant AI expertise and a powerful cloud computing resource neither of which Mozilla is likely to be able to afford. -
South Korea Breaks Filibuster Record Fighting New Surveillance Bill (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Lawmakers in South Korea's National Assembly have broken the global collective filibuster record in its determination to defeat a new anti-terrorism bill which they believe threatens personal privacy for the country's citizens. 38 liberal members of the National Assembly spoke for a total of 193 hours in a collective effort which began on February 23rd and ended today, with the passing of the bill by 160 parliament members, with one 'no' and apparent abstention from the filibusters. -
UK Gov't Launches Anti-Adblocking Initiative, Compares It To Piracy (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: UK culture secretary John Whittingdale has announced that the British government will set up a 'round-table' between online publishers and adblocking companies to discuss the 'problem' of adblocking. He described the practice of charging companies to be whitelisted as a 'modern day protection racket', and said: "Quite simply – if people don't pay in some way for content, then that content will eventually no longer exist And that's as true for the latest piece of journalism as it is for the new album from Muse." The issue has largely been left to the market to self-regulate until now, although Germany's courts ruled adblocking legal in 2015. -
New P2P Torrent Site 'Play' Has No Single Point of Failure (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Play, a new peer-to-peer (P2P) site for downloading torrents, is practically impossible to shut down and promises to be the latest technology to revolutionise online downloads. The platform has appeared recently across ZeroNet, a Budapest-based open source site which is looking to offer a home to decentralised platforms which employ Bitcoin-crypto and BitTorrent technologies. As no central server exists, every additional user is a further point of connection inside the network, helping to avoid potential failures. As the first torrent site to appear on the network, Play can be accessed directly through a ZeroNet URL (only available with the tool installed). The site serves magnetic links sourced from RARBG, with which users can download films, series and other media files, in varying qualities. While ZeroNet itself is not an illegal platform, Play is identical to any other P2P download site in that it could face legal challenges over violating copyright. -
YouTube Promises Changes To Copyright Claim Policy (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: YouTube has set up a new team dedicated to weeding out false copyright claims and subsequent erroneous takedowns, responding to community criticism. Complaints have accused the video streaming site of a lazy approach to monitoring content, and using an unreliable automated system, Content ID, to enforce copyright policy. In response to these allegations, YouTube has announced that it will be introducing a workforce focused entirely on minimizing mistakes that delete legitimate videos. The tech giant has also promised to improve transparency into the status of monetization claims, and help strengthen communications between video creators and its support teams. -
Japanese Court Demands 'Right To Be Forgotten' For Sex Offender (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A Tokyo court has ordered that Google remove any results linked to the arrest of a sex offender, after a judge ruled that he deserves to rebuild his life 'unhindered' by online records of his criminal history. Citing the right to be forgotten, the Saitma district court demanded the removal of all personal information online related to the conviction. Judge Hisaki Kobayashi argued that, dependent on the nature of the crime, an individual should be able to go through a fair rehabilitation process, which would include a clean sheet on their online records after a certain amount of time has passed. In this case, the unnamed man had requested that information from more than three years ago, related to his child prostitution and pornography crimes, be removed from Google's results. -
Censorware Failure: Kiddle's "Child-Safe" Search Engine (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: In a bid to protect young internet users from inappropriate content, a new visual search engine designed for children has launched this week. Kiddle.co filters its results so that only 'safe' sites are displayed and page descriptions are written in simple language. It also claims to get rid of indecent images and 'bad words.' However, tests have revealed that the odd risque image will still slip by into the listings. The words 'gay' and 'lesbian' have also controversially been removed from the 'child-friendly' platform. Other reports claimed that references to killing rabbits, naked images of Vanessa Hudgens and Khloe Kardashian's sex tape had initially slipped into the results. While Kiddle, based in the U.S. and the Netherlands, is a separate and unrelated venture to Google, the system uses the web giant's safe search mode in addition to its own team of human editors to pick out the unsuitable content. -
Facebook Fined 100,000 Euros In German Intellectual Property Dispute (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A regional court in Berlin found that Facebook had not changed their terms and conditions statement to adequately address intellectual property concerns. The court fined Facebook 100,000 euros ($109,000) today, just one week after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's visit to Berlin, where he was awarded the first ever Axel Springer Award for entrepreneurship and innovation. Four years ago, in response to a complaint filed by the Federation of German Consumer Organizations (VZBV), a German court found that Facebook's terms and conditions did not address the circumstances in which users intellectual property could be used by Facebook or even licensed to third parties. The regional court in Berlin ruled today that while Facebook did change the wording of the statement on intellectual property in their terms and conditions, the message remained the same. -
HoloLens For Developers Available For Pre-Order (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft's HoloLens, touted as the world's 'first and only fully untethered holographic computer' is available today for pre-order and will ship on March 30. The HoloLens Development Edition is available for purchase to qualified developer applicants and will cost $3,000. While the augmented-reality headset is still far from a commercial release to consumers, Microsoft will release six applications that run on the holographic platform – a mix of development tools, games, and user programs. From today, developers can access documentation, guides and tutorials for HoloLens. Additional development tools will be made available when the first HoloLens ship at the end of March, including Visual Studio projects and a HoloLens emulator, which will allow testing of holographic apps on a PC without a physical HoloLens. -
AI Bookworms Seek To Predict Human Behavior (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Creating virtual assistants that can understand and anticipate human behavior and needs is one of the current lodestars of artificial intelligence research. Now, researchers at Stanford University have decided to approach the problem by using descriptions of everyday human activities found in online fiction, namely 600,000 stories from 500,000 writers at online writing community WattPad – input totalling 1.8 billion words – to inform a new knowledge base called Augur, designed to power vector machines in making predictions about what an individual user might be about to do, or want to do next. The scientists suggest that crowdsourcing or similar user-feedback systems would likely be necessary to amend some of the more dramatic associations that certain objects or situations might inspire. As the research notes, 'If fiction were truly representative of our lives, we might be constantly drawing swords and kissing in the rain.' -
Linguistics Could Help Future Driverless Cars Cooperate Better (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A team of swarm robotics researchers have applied a linguistics technique typically used in manufacturing to automatically program and control a 600-strong robot fleet. The scientists found that human error was significantly reduced, making the solution safer and more reliable than previous 'trial and error' approaches. The tasks in the experiments were defined by a graphical tool, which a machine then automatically translated to the bots. The supervisory technique uses a linguistics system through which the robots construct their own 'words', related to what they can 'see' and which moves they choose to action next. Robots will only perform actions from valid 'words', which means they are guaranteed to carry out the required tasks. -
Google Proposes New Hard Drive Format For Data Centers (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: In a new research paper the VP of Infrastructure at Google argues for hard drive manufacturers and data center provisioners to consider revisions to the current 3.5" form-factor in favour of taller, multi-platter form factors — with the possibility of combining the new format with HDDs of smaller circumference which hold less data but have better seek times. Eric Brewer, also a professor at UC Berkeley, writes "The current 3.5" HDD geometry was adopted for historic reasons – its size inherited from the PC floppy disk. An alternative form factor should yield a better TCO overall. Changing the form factor is a long term process that requires a broad discussion, but we believe it should be considered." -
Google DeepMind Applies AI To Healthcare With NHS Partnership (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Google's London-based AI group DeepMind has launched DeepMind Health, teaming up with the NHS to work on its first project. The "neuroscience-inspired" company, bought by Google in 2014, said of the collaboration: "We want to see the NHS thrive, and to ensure that its talented clinicians get the tools and support they need to continue providing world-class care." In its first initiative alongside kidney experts at London's Royal Free Hospital, DeepMind Health has introduced a mobile app called Streams. The software is designed to support the provision of critical information to doctors and nurses in order to help detect the presence of acute kidney injuries (AKI). To support the development of the Streams app, the AI group has also acquired clinical task management app company Hark. -
Google Releases Project Shield To Fight Against DDoS Attacks (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Google has launched a free tool to help all media sites and and other organisations protect themselves against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. The Project Shield initiative allows websites to redirect traffic through Google's existing infrastructure, in order to keep their content online in the face of such attacks. Google will aim to work with smaller sites which do not necessarily have the money or are not fully equipped with strong enough infrastructure to the attacks. However, the Shield tool has also been made available to larger outlets, such as popular news sites and human rights platforms. -
Japan Considers Treating Bitcoin As Conventional Currency (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Regulators in Japan are considering officially recognizing bitcoins and other digital currencies as valid methods of payment. The Japan Financial Services Agency (FSA) is in the process of deciding whether to make legislative revisions to regulation that currently regards virtual currencies as objects rather than traditional forms of payment. Under the new proposal, consumers will be able to purchase goods and services using bitcoin and other digital currencies, and also use them as an alternative to legal tender through purchases or trades. The new definition will be submitted during the current session of the Diet, Japan's legislature, which concludes on 1st June this year. -
Hacking Group Presents 'Long-Standing' Threat To Japan (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Japanese energy, oil and gas, and transport industries have been among those targeted by a group of cyberattackers focusing its efforts on Japanese critical infrastructure. According to research at Cylance SPEAR, the cyber threat group had previously been targeting U.S. defence agencies but has recently turned its attention to East Asia. While SPEAR does not believe the criminals have yet conducted "destructive or disruptive" attacks, it argues that they have been patiently and persistently spying on a range of Japanese organisations, such as construction companies and financial firms. The researchers have dubbed the campaign Operation Dust Storm, and have identified phishing lures related to current affairs as the attackers' tool of choice. SPEAR noted that the cyberattack group has managed to stay under the radar by registering new domain names, relying heavily on Dynamic DNS, and using a range of customised backdoors – especially a number of second-stage backdoors with hardcoded proxy addresses and credentials. The group also adopted several Android backdoors to support its mobile operations. -
Cross-Site Scripting Enabled On 1000 Major Sites (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A CloudFlare engineer has discovered that 1000 of the top one million websites, including bitcoin holding sites and trading sites, are running a default setting that enables cross-site scripting. This article details his examination of the top 1 million Alexa sites for evidence of compromised settings and finds that about 1000 of the sites on the list are capable of being compromised because of running a header called Access-Allow-Origin. He found the vulnerability while working on a legitimate use of domain-communication called Cross Origin Resource Sharing for the Stripe API. The header, which Johnson claims the vulnerable websites are outputting, is concluded with a wild-card asterisk, meaning that the sites in question are giving full permission for cross-domain communication via venerable protocols such as SOAP/AJAX XML exchanges. -
MasterCard Rolls Out 'Selfie' Verification For Mobile Payments (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: MasterCard has announced plans to invest in facial recognition technology in the UK, in a push to reduce false decline transactions and increase security for mobile payments. Following trials in countries including the U.S. and the Netherlands, 'Selfie Pay' will be introduced in Britain this summer as part of the financial services company's identity validation process. Users will be able to choose between finger scanning and face recognition for verification, instead of traditional passwords or PIN numbers. Consumers will be asked to upload their pictures to be stored on MasterCard servers [paywalled]. These registered images will then be used as a reference every time a user opts for facial verification during a transaction. -
U.S. Army Testing 3D-Printed Mission-Specific Drones (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. army will conduct field experiments early in 2016 to test the feasibility of designing and 3D-printing military drones in direct response to specific operational challenges. The Army is working in conjunction with Georgia Tech's Aerospace System Design Labs in the next round of Army Expeditionary Warrior Experiments (AEWE) to develop the responsive drone pipeline. Dr. Mark Valco, director of the Vehicle Technology Directorate says "Innovation is the key. We're demonstrating a capability, but we need to evolve design tools, higher-grade materials and the ability to print faster. Our researchers are continually looking for opportunities to enable these new capabilities." -
Mobile Giant Three Group To Block Online Advertising (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Global mobile provider Three has announced that it will shortly begin to block online advertising on all of its six European networks, beginning with the UK and Italy. The company, which also has networks in Hong Kong and Indonesia, will announce its partnership with Israeli network ad-blocking startup Shine at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, according to sources. Shine's first network ad-block customer was Caribbean provider Digicel last year, but the new Three Group deal seems set to cause massive disruption to web-based publishers — who, it seems, may have to pay for bandwidth and show more respect for user privacy in their ads if they want to continue to operate in the mobile space. -
Google Submits Patent Application For Online Voting (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Google has outlined a concept for real-time online voting in the Google home page in a patent to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Entitled 'Social Voting-Based Campaigns in Search', the application proposes a voting user interface (VUI) that will enable a user to submit one or more votes in a voting-based campaign, giving the hypothetical example of a campaign to vote for the 'Top American Singer', with users authenticated via Google log-ins. If implemented, the system would represent a new foray for Google into generating rather than recording analytics and metrics of popularity. -
Russian POS Pickpocket Generates New Interest In RFID-Blocking Wallets (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A Facebook post depicting a man apparently stealing from commuters by tapping a POS reader against them unobserved on public transport caused a sensation on Facebook before being removed earlier today. The provenance of the photo is uncertain, but unnamed authorities have said that it was taken in Russia. Since this type of opportunistic street theft requires a merchant business account through which any transactions would be easily traceable, the question arises as to how such acts of fraud are being made profitable. Comments on the matter have brought up anew the topic of RFID-blocking wallets as necessary everyday security. -
Auschwitz Museum Releases Software To Rewrite Holocaust Nomenclature (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum has released software for Windows and Mac which is intended to catch and rewrite terms such as 'Polish death camps' and other phrases which associate the Polish people with the atrocities of the holocaust, rather than the occupying German forces which created and ran the death camps. The software comes in the form of Microsoft Word Add-Ins on Windows and a revision to the system-wide dictionary in OSX, making the facility available to Mac programs including Safari, Keynote and Outlook. A spokesperson for the ad agency that developed the programs said, "We decided to make use of the primary tool used by text writers and create an easy to install add-on that finds the mistake made and suggests a correct phrase." -
Uber Losing $1 Billion a Year In China (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has revealed that the ride-sharing company is writing off $1 billion a year in order to consolidate its place in the Chinese ride-sharing app market. Kalanick said in a speech at the Vancouver Launch Academy that Uber is deeply engaged in a fight for customers in the Chinese market, and that an unnamed competitor is "buying up market share." Uber's main rival in China is Didi Kuaidi, which invested $100 million in Lyft and Ola to last year in a consolidation effort against Uber's incursion into the market — which many believe to have occurred too late into the development of ride-share schemes in China. -
Pollen-Based Electrodes Could Boost Battery Storage (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Bee pollen could hold the answer to next generation battery research, according to a new study led by scientists at Purdue University, Indiana. The team has been exploring how the unique microstructures found in allergen pollen grains could be used to provide a more energy efficient type of energy storage. The research explained that by turning pollen into a carbon anode with a more efficient microstructure than graphite, the team was able to create a battery which could store more energy than conventional graphite models. The scientists took the pollen from honeybees and common wetland plant cattails, and discovered that cattail pollen had more energy-storing capacity, compared to the bee pollen. -
How To Defeat VPN Location-Spoofing By Mapping Network Delays (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: An interesting paper from a PhD student in Ontario outlines a system which in initial tests has proved 97% effective at unmasking geo-spoofing VPN users. The Client Presence Verification (CPV) system presented in the paper utilises analysis of delays in network packets in order to determine the user's location, disregarding the IP address geolocation information which currently underpins the efforts of content providers such as Netflix to prevent VPN users accessing content which is not licensed in their country. The detection system was tested at global network laboratory PlanetLab using 80 network nodes based in the U.S. and Canada. -
Iranian App Helps Users Avoid Morality Police (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Young people in Iran are using a new app called Gershad (a contraction of 'Gashte Ershad', or 'guidance patrol'), to avoid the 'morality police' by sharing the location of checkpoints with other users. At checkpoints strict Islamic dress and behavior codes are enforced, and their ad hoc nature can make them difficult to avoid. Hadi Ghaemi, the executive director of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, said of Gershad, "This is an innovative idea and I believe it will lead to many other creative apps which will address the gap between society and government in Iran." -
BT Announces Free Service To Screen Nuisance Callers (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: British telco BT is launching a free landline service for UK customers which promises to divert millions of unwanted calls. A dedicated team at BT will monitor calls made to UK numbers, across its network of over 10 million domestic landlines, to identify suspicious patterns, which could help to filter out nuisance callers. The flagged numbers will then be directed to a junk voicemail box. The company has estimated that the voicemail 'net' will catch up to 25 million cold calls every week. It explained that to achieve this success rate, it would be deploying enormous amounts of compute power to monitor and analyse large amounts of data in real-time. -
French Court Rules That Facebook Can Now Be Sued in France (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A Paris court of appeal has ruled in favor of a French complainant whose account was suspended, because he linked to an image of the 1866 Gustav Courbet nude 'L'Origine du monde', currently residing at the Musee d'Orsay. The appeals court not only agreed that the user's suspension by Facebook constitutes censorship, but the ruling itself negates Facebook's insistence that all legal challenges take place in its native California. -
Indonesia Moves To Ban Same-Sex Emojis On Messaging Apps (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Indonesian government has this week demanded that instant messaging apps available in the country remove all same-sex emoticons from their platforms, or face heavy sanctions. While homosexuality is not illegal in the country, it remains a controversial issue in the Muslim-dominated country. Now in the latest effort to crackdown on gay rights, Indonesian authorities want to ban emojis, stickers and emoticons which depict same-sex couples, the rainbow flag, and any symbol that symbolises the lesbian, bay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community. Apps that have been targeted by the demands include the popular Asian messaging app LINE, Whatsapp, Facebook and Twitter. The Indonesian Communication and Information Ministry added that a particular concern was that children would find the bright coloured stickers appealing.