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An Intelligent Speed Bump Uses Non-Newtonian Liquid

turkeydance quotes Business Insider: A Spanish company has designed a speed bump that won’t hinder slow drivers but will still stop motorists driving too fast. The speed bump is filled with a non-Newtonian liquid which changes viscosity when pressure is applied at high velocity. They’ve been installed in Villanueva de Tapia, Spain and there has also been interest from Israel and Germany. There’s a video on the site showing the speed bump in action. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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An Intelligent Speed Bump Uses Non-Newtonian Liquid

Google Drive Faces Outage, Users Report [Update]

Numerous Slashdot readers are reporting that they are facing issues access Google Drive, the productivity suite from the Mountain View-based company. Google’s dashboard confirms that Drive is facing outage. Third-party web monitoring tool DownDetector also reports thousands of similar complaints from users. The company said, “Google Drive service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change. Google Drive is not loading files and results in a failures for a subset of users.” Update: 09/07 17:13 GMT: Google says it has resolved the issue. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Drive Faces Outage, Users Report [Update]

Lost Languages Discovered in One of the World’s Oldest Continuously Run Libraries

Saint Catherine’s Monastery, a sacred Christian site nestled in the shadow of Mount Sinai, is home to one of the world’s oldest continuously used libraries. Thousands of manuscripts and books are kept there — some of which contain hidden treasures. An anonymous reader shares a report: Now, a team of researchers is using new technology to uncover texts that were erased and written over by the monks who lived and worked at the monastery. Many of these original texts were written in languages well known to researchers — Latin, Greek, Arabic — but others were inscribed in long-lost languages that are rarely seen in the historical record. Manuscripts with multiple layers of writing are known as palimpsests, and there are about 130 of them at St. Catherine’s Monastery, according to the website of the Early Manuscript Electronic Library, which has been leading the initiative to uncover the original texts. With the rise of Islam in the 7th century, Christian sites in the Sinai Desert began to disappear, and Saint Catherine’s found itself in relative isolation. Monks turned to reusing older parchments when supplies at the monastery ran scarce. To uncover the palimpsests’ secret texts, researchers photographed thousands of pages multiple times, illuminating each page with different-colored lights. They also photographed the pages with light shining onto them from behind, or from an oblique angle, which helped “highlight tiny bumps and depressions in the surface, ” Gray writes. They then fed the information into a computer algorithm, which is able to distinguish the more recent texts from the originals. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Lost Languages Discovered in One of the World’s Oldest Continuously Run Libraries

Hackers Have Penetrated Energy Grid, Symantec Warns

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: Hackers have been burrowing their way inside the critical infrastructure of energy and other companies in the U.S. and elsewhere, warns cybersecurity giant Symantec. In a new report, Symantec claims that the threat of cyberattack-induced power outages in the west has elevated from a theoretical concern to a legitimate one in recent months. “We’re talking about activity we’re seeing on actual operational networks that control the actual power grid, ” Eric Chien, technical director of security technology and response at Symantec, told Fortune on a call. Reports surfaced over the summer of hackers targeting staff at nuclear energy facilities with phishing attacks, designed to steal login credentials or install malware on machines. The extent of the campaign as well as the question of whether the attackers had breached operational IT networks, rather than merely administrative ones, was unclear at the time. Symantec is now erasing all doubt. “There are no more technical hurdles for them to cause some sort of disruption, ” Chien said of the hackers. “All that’s left is really motivation.” Symantec detailed its findings in a report released Wednesday morning. The paper tracks the exploits of a hacker group that Symantec has dubbed DragonFly 2.0, an outfit that the company says it has linked to an earlier series of attacks perpetrated between 2011 and 2014 by a group it dubbed DragonFly. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Hackers Have Penetrated Energy Grid, Symantec Warns

Boston Red Sox Used Apple Watches To Steal Hand Signals From Yankees

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Mac Rumors: Investigators for Major League Baseball believe the Boston Red Sox, currently in first place in the American League East, have used the Apple Watch to illicitly steal hand signals from opposing teams, reports The New York Times. The Red Sox are believed to have stolen hand signals from opponents’ catchers in games using video recording equipment and communicated the information with the Apple Watch. An inquiry into the Red Sox’ practice started two weeks ago following a complaint from Yankees general manager Brian Cashman, who caught a member of the Red Sox training staff looking at his Apple Watch in the dugout and then relaying information to players. It’s believed the information was used to determine the type of pitch that was going to be thrown. Baseball investigators corroborated the claim using video for instant replay and broadcasts before confronting the Red Sox. The team admitted that trainers received signals from video replay personnel and then shared them with some players. “The Red Sox told league investigators said that team personnel scanning instant- replay video were electronically sending the pitch signs to the trainers, who were then passing the information to the players, ” reports The New York Times. “The video provided to the commissioner’s office by the Yankees was captured during the first two games of the series and included at least three clips. In the clips, the team’s assistant athletic trainer, Jon Jochim, is seen looking at his Apple Watch and then passing information to outfielder Brock Holt and second baseman Dustin Pedroia, who was injured at the time but in uniform. In one instance, Pedroia is then seen passing the information to Young.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Boston Red Sox Used Apple Watches To Steal Hand Signals From Yankees

A Canadian University Gave $11 Million To a Scammer

A Canadian university transferred more than $11 million CAD (around $9 million USD) to a scammer that university staff believed to be a vendor in a phishing attack, a university statement published on Thursday states. From a report: Staff at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta became aware of the fraud on Wednesday, August 23, the statement says. According to the university, the attacker sent a series of emails that convinced staff to change payment details for a vendor, and that these changes resulted in the transfer of $11.8 million CAD into bank accounts that the school has traced to Canada and Hong Kong. The school is working with authorities in Edmonton, Montreal, London, and Hong Kong, the statement reads. According to the university, its IT systems were not compromised and no personal or financial information was stolen. A phishing scam is not technically a “hack, ” it should be noted, and only requires the attacker to convince the victim to send money. The school’s preliminary investigation found that “controls around the process of changing vendor banking information were inadequate, and that a number of opportunities to identify the fraud were missed.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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A Canadian University Gave $11 Million To a Scammer

The IRS Decides Who To Audit By Data Mining Social Media

In America the Internal Revenue Service used to pick who got audited based on math mistakes or discrepancies with W-2 forms — but not any more. schwit1 shares an article from the Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law describing their new technique: The IRS is now engaging in data mining of public and commercial data pools (including social media) and creating highly detailed profiles of taxpayers upon which to run data analytics. This article argues that current IRS practices, mostly unknown to the general public, are violating fair information practices. This lack of transparency and accountability not only violates federal law regarding the government’s data collection activities and use of predictive algorithms, but may also result in discrimination. While the potential efficiencies that big data analytics provides may appear to be a panacea for the IRS’s budget woes, unchecked these activities are a significant threat to privacy [PDF]. Other concerns regarding the IRS’s entrée into big data are raised including the potential for political targeting, data breaches, and the misuse of such information. While tax evasion cost the U.S.$3 trillion between 2000 and 2009, one of the report’s authors argues that people should be aware âoethat what they say and do onlineâ could be used against them. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The IRS Decides Who To Audit By Data Mining Social Media

Massive New Spambot Ensnares 711,000,000 Email Addresses

An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: A huge spambot ensnaring 711 million email accounts has been uncovered. A Paris-based security researcher, who goes by the pseudonymous handle Benkow, discovered an open and accessible web server hosted in the Netherlands, which stores dozens of text files containing a huge batch of email addresses, passwords, and email servers used to send spam. Those credentials are crucial for the spammer’s large-scale malware operation to bypass spam filters by sending email through legitimate email servers. The spambot, dubbed “Onliner, ” is used to deliver the Ursnif banking malware into inboxes all over the world. To date, it’s resulted in more than 100, 000 unique infections across the world, Benkow told ZDNet. Troy Hunt, who runs breach notification site Have I Been Pwned, said it was a “mind-boggling amount of data.” Hunt, who analyzed the data and details his findings in a blog post, called it the “largest” batch of data to enter the breach notification site in its history… Those credentials, he explained, have been scraped and collated from other data breaches, such as the LinkedIn hack and the Badoo hack, as well also other unknown sources. The data includes information on 80 million email servers, and it’s all used to identify which recipients have Windows computers, so they can be targeted in follow-up emails delivering Windows-specific malware. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Massive New Spambot Ensnares 711,000,000 Email Addresses

Engineers Discover How To Make Antennas For Wireless Communication 100x Smaller Than Their Current Size

Engineers have figured out how to make antennas for wireless communication 100 times smaller than their current size, an advance that could lead to tiny brain implants, micro-medical devices, or phones you can wear on your finger. Science Magazine reports: The new mini-antennas play off the difference between electromagnetic (EM) waves, such as light and radio waves, and acoustic waves, such as sound and inaudible vibrations. EM waves are fluctuations in an electromagnetic field, and they travel at light speed — an astounding 300, 000, 000 meters per second. Acoustic waves are the jiggling of matter, and they travel at the much slower speed of sound — in a solid, typically a few thousand meters per second. So, at any given frequency, an EM wave has a much longer wavelength than an acoustic wave. Antennas receive information by resonating with EM waves, which they convert into electrical voltage. For such resonance to occur, a traditional antenna’s length must roughly match the wavelength of the EM wave it receives, meaning that the antenna must be relatively big. However, like a guitar string, an antenna can also resonate with acoustic waves. The new antennas take advantage of this fact. They will pick up EM waves of a given frequency if its size matches the wavelength of the much shorter acoustic waves of the same frequency. That means that that for any given signal frequency, the antennas can be much smaller. The trick is, of course, to quickly turn the incoming EM waves into acoustic waves. The team created two kinds of acoustic antennas. One has a circular membrane, which works for frequencies in the gigahertz range, including those for WiFi. The other has a rectangular membrane, suitable for megahertz frequencies used for TV and radio. Each is less than a millimeter across, and both can be manufactured together on a single chip. When researchers tested one of the antennas in a specially insulated room, they found that compared to a conventional ring antenna of the same size, it sent and received 2.5 gigahertz signals about 100, 000 times more efficiently, they report in Nature Communications. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Engineers Discover How To Make Antennas For Wireless Communication 100x Smaller Than Their Current Size

Microsoft Speech Recognition Now As Accurate As Professional Transcribers

An anonymous reader quotes TechCrunch: Microsoft announced today that its conversational speech recognition system has reached a 5.1% error rate, its lowest so far. This surpasses the 5.9% error rate reached last year by a group of researchers from Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research and puts its accuracy on par with professional human transcribers who have advantages like the ability to listen to text several times. Both studies transcribed recordings from the Switchboard corpus, a collection of about 2, 400 telephone conversations that have been used by researchers to test speech recognition systems since the early 1990s. The new study was performed by a group of researchers at Microsoft AI and Research with the goal of achieving the same level of accuracy as a group of human transcribers who were able to listen to what they were transcribing several times, access its conversational context and work with other transcribers. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft Speech Recognition Now As Accurate As Professional Transcribers