Tag: facebook

The Underground Uber Networks Driven by Russian Hackers

Joseph Cox, reporting for DailyBeat: Uber’s ride-sharing service has given birth to some of the most creative criminal scams to date, including using a GPS-spoofing app to rip off riders in Nigeria, and even ginning up fake drivers by using stolen identities. Add to those this nefariously genius operation: Cybercriminals, many working in Russia, have created their own illegitimate taxi services for other crooks by piggybacking off Uber’s ride-sharing platform, sometimes working in collaboration with corrupt drivers. Based on several Russian-language posts across a number of criminal-world sites, this is how the scam works: The scammer needs an emulator, a piece of software which allows them to run a virtual Android phone on their laptop with the Uber app, as well as a virtual private network (VPN), which routes their computer’s traffic through a server in the same city as the rider. The scammer acts, in essence, as a middleman between an Uber driver and the passenger — ordering trips through the Uber app, but relaying messages outside of it. Typically, this fraudulent dispatcher uses the messaging app Telegram to chat with the passenger, who provides pickup and destination addresses. The scammer orders the trip, and then provides the car brand, driver name, and license plate details back to the passenger through Telegram. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Continue reading here:
The Underground Uber Networks Driven by Russian Hackers

Physicists Made An Unprecedented 53 Qubit Quantum Simulator

Two teams of researchers have published papers [1, 2] in the journal Nature detailing how they were able to create unprecedented quantum simulators consisting of over 50 qubits. The University of Maryland team and National Institute of Standards and Technology team — the two teams behind one of the two new papers — were able to create a quantum simulator with 53 qubits. Motherboard reports: Quantum simulators are a special type of quantum computer that uses qubits to simulate complex interactions between particles. Qubits are the informational medium of quantum computers, analogous to a bit in an ordinary computer. Yet rather than existing as a 1 or 0, as is the case in a conventional bit, a qubit can exist in some superposition of both of these states at the same time. For the Maryland experiment, each of the qubits was a laser cooled ytterbium ion. Each ion had the same electrical charge, so they repelled one another when placed in close proximity. The system created by Monroe and his colleagues used an electric field to force the repelled ions into neat rows. At this point, lasers are used to manipulate all the ytterbium qubits into the same initial state. Then another set of lasers is used to manipulate the qubits so that they act like atomic magnets, where each ion has a north and south pole. The qubits either orient themselves with their neighboring ions to form a ferromagnet, where their magnetic fields are aligned, or at random. By changing the strength of the laser beams that are manipulating the qubits, the researchers are able to program them to a desired state (in terms of magnetic alignment). According to Zhexuan Gong, a physicist at the University of Maryland, the 53 qubits can be used to simulate over a quadrillion different magnetic configurations of the qubits, a number that doubles with each additional qubit added to the array. As these types of quantum simulators keep adding more qubits into the mix, they will be able to simulate ever more complex atomic interactions that are far beyond the capabilities of conventional supercomputers and usher in a new era of physics research. Another team from Harvard and Maryland also released a paper today in which it demonstrated a quantum simulator using 51 qubits. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See more here:
Physicists Made An Unprecedented 53 Qubit Quantum Simulator

Linux Pioneer Munich Confirms Switch To Windows 10

The German city of Munich, once seen as a open-source pioneer, has decided to return to Windows. Windows 10 will be rolled out to about 29, 000 PCs at the city council, a major shift for an authority that has been running Linux for more than a decade. From a report: Back in 2003 the council decided to to switch to a Linux-based desktop, which came to be known as LiMux, and other open-source software, despite heavy lobbying by Microsoft. But now Munich will begin rolling out a Windows 10 client from 2020, at a cost of about Euro 50m ($59.6m), with a view to Windows replacing LiMux across the council by early 2023. Politicians who supported the move at a meeting of the full council today say using Windows 10 will make it easier to source compatible applications and hardware drivers than it has been using a Linux-based OS, and will also reduce costs associated with running Windows and LiMux PCs side-by-side. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More:
Linux Pioneer Munich Confirms Switch To Windows 10

Firefox Quantum Is ‘Better, Faster, Smarter than Chrome’, Says Wired

Wired’s senior staff writer David Pierce says Firefox Quantum “feels like a bunch of power users got together and built a browser that fixed all the little things that annoyed them about other browsers.” The new Firefox actually manages to evolve the entire browser experience, recognizing the multi-device, ultra-mobile lives we all lead and building a browser that plays along. It’s a browser built with privacy in mind, automatically stopping invisible trackers and making your history available to you and no one else. It’s better than Chrome, faster than Chrome, smarter than Chrome. It’s my new go-to browser. The speed thing is real, by the way. Mozilla did a lot of engineering work to allow its browser to take advantage of all the multi-core processing power on modern devices, and it shows… I routinely find myself with 30 or 40 tabs open while I’m researching a story, and at that point Chrome effectively drags my computer into quicksand. So far, I haven’t been able to slow Firefox Quantum down at all, no matter how many tabs I use… [But] it’s the little things, the things you do with and around the web pages themselves, that make Firefox really work. For instance: If you’re looking at a page on your phone and want to load that same page on your laptop, you just tap “Send to Device, ” pick your laptop, and it opens and loads in the background as if it had always been there. You can save pages to a reading list, or to the great read-it-later service Pocket (which Mozilla owns), both with a single tap… Mozilla has a huge library of add-ons, and if you use the Foxified extension, you can even run Chrome extensions in Firefox. Best I can tell, there’s nothing you can do in Chrome that you can’t in Firefox. And Firefox does them all faster. I’ve noticed that when you open a new tab in Chrome’s mobile version, it forces you to also see news headlines that Google picked out for you. But how about Slashdot’s readers? Chrome, Firefox — or undecided? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Link:
Firefox Quantum Is ‘Better, Faster, Smarter than Chrome’, Says Wired

Over 400 of the World’s Most Popular Websites Record Your Every Keystroke

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The idea of websites tracking users isn’t new, but research from Princeton University released last week indicates that online tracking is far more invasive than most users understand. In the first installment of a series titled “No Boundaries, ” three researchers from Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) explain how third-party scripts that run on many of the world’s most popular websites track your every keystroke and then send that information to a third-party server. Some highly-trafficked sites run software that records every time you click and every word you type. If you go to a website, begin to fill out a form, and then abandon it, every letter you entered in is still recorded, according to the researchers’ findings. If you accidentally paste something into a form that was copied to your clipboard, it’s also recorded. These scripts, or bits of code that websites run, are called “session replay” scripts. Session replay scripts are used by companies to gain insight into how their customers are using their sites and to identify confusing webpages. But the scripts don’t just aggregate general statistics, they record and are capable of playing back individual browsing sessions. The scripts don’t run on every page, but are often placed on pages where users input sensitive information, like passwords and medical conditions. Most troubling is that the information session replay scripts collect can’t “reasonably be expected to be kept anonymous, ” according to the researchers. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read More:
Over 400 of the World’s Most Popular Websites Record Your Every Keystroke

Intel Planning To End Legacy BIOS Support By 2020, Report Says

Michael Larabel, writing for Phoronix: Intel is planning to end “legacy BIOS” support in their new platforms by 2020 in requiring UEFI Class 3 or higher. Making rounds this weekend is a slide deck from the recent UEFI Plugfest. Brian Richardson of Intel talked about the “last mile” barriers to removing legacy BIOS support from systems. By 2020, they will be supporting no less than UEFI Class 3, which means only UEFI support and no more legacy BIOS or CSM compatibility support mode. But that’s not going to force on UEFI Secure Boot unconditionally: Secure Boot enabled is considered UEFI Class 3+. Intel hasn’t removed legacy BIOS / CSM support yet due to many customers’ software packages still relying upon legacy BIOS, among other reasons. Removing the legacy BIOS support will mitigate some security risks, needs less validation by vendors, allows for supporting more modern technologies, etc. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

View the original here:
Intel Planning To End Legacy BIOS Support By 2020, Report Says

A Stable Plasma Ring Has Been Created In Open Air For the First Time Ever

New submitter mrcoder83 shares a report from Futurism: Engineers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have been able to create a stable plasma ring without a container. According to the Caltech press release, it’s “essentially capturing lightning in a bottle, but without the bottle.” This remarkable feat was achieved using only a stream of water and a crystal plate, made from either quartz and lithium niobate. The union of these tools induced a type of contact electrification known as the triboelectric effect. The researchers blasted the crystal plate with an 85-micron-diameter jet of water (narrower than a human hair) from a specially designed nozzle. The water hit the crystal plate with a pressure of 632.7 kilograms of force per centimeter (9, 000 pounds per square inch), generating an impact velocity of around 305 meters per second (1, 000 feet per second) — as fast as a bullet from a handgun. Plasma was formed as a result of the creation of an electric charge when the water hit the crystal surface. The flow of electrons from the point of contact ionizes the molecules and atoms in the gas area surrounding the water’s surface, forming a donut-shaped glowing plasma that’s dozens of microns in diameter. Caltech posted a video of the plasma ring on their YouTube channel. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See more here:
A Stable Plasma Ring Has Been Created In Open Air For the First Time Ever

Bitcoin Gold, the Latest Bitcoin Fork, Explained

Timothy B. Lee via Ars Technica explains Bitcoin Gold: A new cryptocurrency called Bitcoin Gold is now live on the Internet. It aims to correct what its backers see as a serious flaw in the design of the original Bitcoin. There are hundreds of cryptocurrencies on the Internet, and many of them are derived from Bitcoin in one way or another. But Bitcoin Gold — like Bitcoin Cash, another Bitcoin spinoff that was created in August — is different in two important ways. Bitcoin Gold is branding itself as a version of Bitcoin rather than merely new platforms derived from Bitcoin’s source code. It has also chosen to retain Bitcoin’s transaction history, which means that, if you owned bitcoins before the fork, you now own an equal amount of “gold” bitcoins. While Bitcoin Cash was designed to resolve Bitcoin’s capacity crunch with larger blocks, Bitcoin Gold aims to tackle another of Bitcoin’s perceived flaws: the increasing centralization of the mining industry that verifies and secures Bitcoin transactions. The original vision for Bitcoin was that anyone would be able to participate in Bitcoin mining with their personal PCs, earning a bit of extra cash as they helped to support the network. But as Bitcoin became more valuable, people discovered that Bitcoin mining could be done much more efficiently with custom-built application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). As a result, Bitcoin mining became a specialized and highly concentrated industry. The leading companies in this new industry wield a disproportionate amount of power over the Bitcoin network. Bitcoin Gold aims to dethrone these mining companies by introducing an alternative mining algorithm that’s much less susceptible to ASIC-based optimization. In theory, that will allow ordinary Bitcoin Gold users to earn extra cash with their spare computing cycles, just as people could do in the early days of Bitcoin. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Visit site:
Bitcoin Gold, the Latest Bitcoin Fork, Explained

Amazon Is Making a ‘Lord of the Rings’ Prequel Series

Amazon is making a Lord of the Rings prequel TV series for its Amazon Instant streaming service. The show, which already carries a multi-season commitment, will “explore new storylines preceding J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring.” TechCrunch reports: It’s possible the new series will mine the ponderous but rich Silmarillion for material, as fan fiction writers and lore aficionados have done for decades. The exploits of the Elf-Lords of old would make for a stirring epic, while many would thrill at the possibility of seeing Moria at the height of its grandeur. So much depends on the quality of the adaptation, though. Amazon has been pretty good about its Originals, but this will be an undertaking far beyond the scope of anything its studios and partners have yet attempted. Amazon is partnering with New Line Cinema, which of course was the film company behind the much-loved trilogy that began in 2001, and the Tolkien Estate, as well as HarperCollins for some reason. The deal also “includes a potential additional spin-off series, ” presumably if it’s popular enough. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read the original post:
Amazon Is Making a ‘Lord of the Rings’ Prequel Series

Text Adventure Competition Reports A 36% Spike In Entries

There’s just four days left to vote for the winner of the 23rd Annual Interactive Fiction Competition. An anonymous reader writes: This year’s contest set a record, drawing 79 new text adventures — 36% more entries than the previous year’s 58. All of this year’s games are available online, furthering the competition’s goal of “making them freely available in order to encourage the creation, play, and discussion of interactive fiction.” (And they’re also available in a 236-megabyte .zip archive.) Each game’s developer is competing for $4, 800 in cash prizes, to be shared among everyone who finishes in the top two-thirds (including a $247 prize to the first-place winner). Authors of the top-rated games will also get to choose from a 38-prize pool (which includes another $200 cash prize donated by Asymmetric Publications, as well as a “well-loved” used Wii console). But the most important thing is there’s a bunch of fun new text adventures to play. Reviews are already appearing online, lovingly collected by the Interactive Fiction Wiki. And one game designer even livestreamed their text adventure-playing on Twitch. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

View the original here:
Text Adventure Competition Reports A 36% Spike In Entries