By Unknown Lamer from
Slashdot's shotgun-network-intrusion department:
An anonymous reader writes
New research was released on cyber-attacks via human-rights NGO World Uyghur Congress over a period of four years. Academic analysis was conducted through the lense of a human-rights NGO representing a minority living in China and in exile when most targeted attack reports are against large organizations with apparent or actual financial or IP theft unlike WUC, and reported by commercial entities rather than academics. The attacks were a combination of sophisticated social engineering via email written primarily in the Uyghur language, in some cases through compromised WUC email accounts, and with advanced malware embedded in attached documents. Suspicious emails were sent to more than 700 different email addresses, including WUC leaders as well as journalists, politicians, academics and employees of other NGOs (including Amnesty International and Save Tibet — International Campaign for Tibet).The study will be
presented at USENIX on August 21, and the
full paper is already available.
Read Replies (0)
By Soulskill from
Slashdot's revolution-will-not-be-streamed department:
New submitter
Mauro sends word that Microsoft has
announced upcoming Xbox One support for streaming media both from attached USB devices, such as flash drives, and DLNA media servers. Compatibility with a broad list of media formats will be added by the end of the year,
including .MKV files. They also followed up last week's
announcement of a digital TV tuner with an interesting twist: it will be able to stream broadcasts over a local network to devices running the Smartglass app, which is available on Windows, Android, and iOS.
Read Replies (0)
By Soulskill from
Slashdot's siri-why-does-my-cat-throw-up-so-much? department:
paysonwelch sends this report from Wired on the next generation of consumer AI:
Google Now has a huge knowledge graph—you can ask questions like "Where was Abraham Lincoln born?" And it can name the city. You can also say, "What is the population?" of a city and it’ll bring up a chart and answer. But you cannot say, "What is the population of the city where Abraham Lincoln was born?" The system may have the data for both these components, but it has no ability to put them together, either to answer a query or to make a smart suggestion. Like Siri, it can’t do anything that coders haven’t explicitly programmed it to do. Viv breaks through those constraints by generating its own code on the fly, no programmers required. Take a complicated command like "Give me a flight to Dallas with a seat that Shaq could fit in." Viv will parse the sentence and then it will perform its best trick: automatically generating a quick, efficient program to link third-party sources of information together—say, Kayak, SeatGuru, and the NBA media guide—so it can identify available flights with lots of legroom.Read Replies (0)
By Soulskill from
Slashdot's first-of-many department:
An anonymous reader sends news that
the 2014 Fields Medals have been awarded for outstanding work in the field of mathematics. The winners are Artur Avila, Manjul Bhargava, Martin Hairer, and Maryam Mirzakhani. Quanta Magazine writes,
Mirzakhani is the first woman to win a Fields Medal. The gender imbalance in mathematics is long-standing and pervasive, and the Fields Medal, in particular, is ill-suited to the career arcs of many female mathematicians. It is restricted to mathematicians younger than 40, focusing on the very years during which many women dial back their careers to raise children. Mirzakhani feels certain, however, that there will be many more female Fields medalists in the future. "There are really many great female mathematicians doing great things," she said.Quanta has profiles of the other winners as well (
Avila,
Bhargava,
Hairer), and of Rolf Nevanlinna Prize winner
Subhash Khot.
Read Replies (0)
By Roblimo from
Slashdot's you-can-type-faster-if-you-use-more-than-one-finger-at-a-time department:
Joshua Lifton says you can learn to type at 225 words per minute with his
Stenosaurus, an open source stenography keyboard that has a not-there-yet website with nothing but the words, "Stenography is about to evolve," on it as of this writing. If you've heard of Joshua it's probably because he's part of the team behind
Crowd Supply, which claims, "Our projects raise an average of $43,600, over twice as much as Kickstarter." A brave boast, but there's
plenty of brainpower behind the company. Joshua, himself. has a PhD from MIT, which according to his company bio means, "he's devoted a significant amount of his time learning how to make things that blink." But the steno machine is his own project, independent of Crowd Supply.
<
article continued at Slashdot >
Read Replies (0)