Tag: open source

Google Translate Is About To Get a Lot Better, Thanks To Its Machine Learning Push

Google CEO Sundar Pichai is offering a big new update that should affect anyone who’s ever used Google’s translation services. From a report on CNBC: The new version will be rolling out in 2017 via Google Cloud, Pichai said. “We have improved our translation ability more in one single year than all our improvements over the last 10 years combined, ” Pichai told investors in a quarterly call, after parent company Alphabet reported mixed results. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Translate Is About To Get a Lot Better, Thanks To Its Machine Learning Push

Scientists Finally Turn Hydrogen Into a Metal, Ending a 80-Year Quest

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In 1935, scientists predicted that the simplest element, hydrogen, could also become metallic under pressure, and they calculated that it would take 25 GigaPascals to force this transition (each Gigapascal is about 10, 000 atmospheres of pressure). That estimate, in the words of the people who have finally made metallic hydrogen, “was way off.” It took until last year for us to reach pressures where the normal form of hydrogen started breaking down into individual atoms — at 380 GigaPascals. Now, a pair of Harvard researchers has upped the pressure quite a bit more, and they have finally made hydrogen into a metal. All of these high-pressure studies rely on what are called diamond anvils. This hardware places small samples between two diamonds, which are hard enough to stand up to extreme pressure. As the diamonds are forced together, the pressure keeps going up. Current calculations suggested that metallic hydrogen might require just a slight boost in pressure from the earlier work, at pressures as low as 400 GigaPascals. But the researchers behind the new work, Ranga Dias and Isaac Silvera, discovered it needed quite a bit more than that. In making that discovery, they also came to a separate realization: normal diamonds weren’t up to the task. “Diamond failure, ” they note, “is the principal limitation for achieving the required pressures to observe SMH, ” where SMH means “solid metallic hydrogen” rather than “shaking my head.” The team came up with some ideas about what might be causing the diamonds to fail and corrected them. One possibility was surface defects, so they etched all diamonds down by five microns to eliminate these. Another problem may be that hydrogen under pressure could be forced into the diamond itself, weakening it. So they cooled the hydrogen to slow diffusion and added material to the anvil that absorbed free hydrogen. Shining lasers through the diamond seemed to trigger failures, so they switched to other sources of light to probe the sample. After loading the sample and cranking up the pressure (literally — they turned a handcrank), they witnessed hydrogen’s breakdown at high pressure, which converted it from a clear sample to a black substance, as had been described previously. But then, somewhere between 465 and 495 GigaPascals, the sample turned reflective, a key feature of metals The study has been published in the journal Science. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Scientists Finally Turn Hydrogen Into a Metal, Ending a 80-Year Quest

China Is Splashing $168 Million To Make It Rain

China, the world’s second largest economy, is pouring 1.5 billion yuan ($168 million) into a program aimed at making it rain in its usually arid northwestern region. From a report: No stranger to using technologies like cloud seeding to influence and even control weather patterns, China’s top economic planners recently gave the go ahead for what will be one of the country’s largest weather-modification projects, reports the South China Morning Post. According to the Post, a feasibility study by the country’s meteorological agency concluded that the three-year program could see a rise in precipitation over an area of 960, 000 sq km, or as much as 10% of the country’s landmass. The multi-million dollar budget allocated by the National Development and Reform Commission will reportedly cover the cost for four new aircraft and updates to eight existing planes, nearly 900 rocket launch systems and over 1, 800 digital control devices. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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China Is Splashing $168 Million To Make It Rain

Ransomware Infects All St Louis Public Library Computers

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Libraries in St Louis have been bought to a standstill after computers in all the city’s libraries were infected with ransomware, a particularly virulent form of computer virus used to extort money from victims. Hackers are demanding $35, 000 (£28, 000) to restore the system after the cyberattack, which affected 700 computers across the Missouri city’s 16 public libraries. The hackers demanded the money in electronic currency bitcoin, but, as CNN reports, the authority has refused to pay for a code that would unlock the machines. As a result, the library authority has said it will wipe its entire computer system and rebuild it from scratch, a solution that may take weeks. On Friday, St Louis public library announced it had managed to regain control of its servers, with tech staff continuing to work to restore borrowing services. The 16 libraries have all remained open, but computers continue to be off limits to the public. Spokeswoman Jen Hatton told CNN that the attack had hit the city’s schoolchildren and its poor worst, as many do not have access to the internet at home. “For many we’re their only access to the internet, ” she said. “Some of them have a smartphone, but they don’t have a data plan. They come in and use the wifi.” As well as causing the loans system to seize up, preventing borrowers from checking out or returning books, the attack froze all computers, leaving no one able to access the four million items that should be available through the service. The system is believed to have been infected through a centralized computer server, and staff emails have also been frozen by the virus. The FBI has been called in to investigate. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Ransomware Infects All St Louis Public Library Computers

The 32-Bit Dog Ate 16 Million Kids’ CS Homework

“Any student progress from 9:19 to 10:33 a.m. on Friday was not saved…” explained the embarrassed CTO of the educational non-profit Code.org, “and unfortunately cannot be recovered.” Slashdot reader theodp writes: Code.org CTO Jeremy Stone gave the kids an impromptu lesson on the powers of two with his explanation of why The Cloud ate their homework. “The way we store student coding activity is in a table that until today had a 32-bit index… The database table could only store 4 billion rows of coding activity information [and] we didn’t realize we were running up to the limit, and the table got full. We have now made a new student activity table that is storing progress by students. With the new table, we are switching to a 64-bit index which will hold up to 18 quintillion rows of information. The issue also took the site offline, temporarily making the work of 16 million K-12 students who have used the nonprofit’s Code Studio disappear. “On the plus side, this new table will be able to store student coding information for millions of years, ” explains the site’s CTO. But besides Friday’s missing saves, “On the down side, until we’ve moved everything over to the new table, some students’ code from before today may temporarily not appear, so please be patient with us as we fix it.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The 32-Bit Dog Ate 16 Million Kids’ CS Homework

FTC Dismantles Two Huge Robocall Organizations

Billions of robocalls came from two groups selling extended auto warranties, SEO services, and home security systems over the last seven years — many to numbers on the “Do Not Call” list — but this week the Federal Trade Commission took action. Trailrunner7 shares this report from OnTheWire: Continuing its campaign against phone fraud operations, the FTC has dismantled two major robocall organizations… They and many of their co-defendants have agreed to court-ordered bans on robocall activities and financial settlements… The FTC and the FCC both have been cracking down on illegal robocall operations recently. The FCC has formed a robocall strike force with the help of carriers and also has signed an agreement to cooperate with Canadian authorities to address the problem. “The law is clear about robocalls, ” says one FTC executive. “If a telemarketer doesn’t have consumers’ written permission, it’s illegal to make these calls.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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FTC Dismantles Two Huge Robocall Organizations

Malwarebytes Discovers ‘First Mac Malware of 2017’

wiredmikey writes: Security researchers have a uncovered a Mac OS based espionage malware they have named “Quimitchin.” The malware is what they consider to be “the first Mac malware of 2017, ” which appears to be a classic espionage tool. While it has some old code and appears to have existed undetected for some time, it works. It was discovered when an IT admin noticed unusual traffic coming from a particular Mac, and has been seen infecting Macs at biomedical facilities. From SecurityWeek.com: “Quimitchin comprises just two files: a .plist file that simply keeps the .client running at all times, and the .client file containing the payload. The latter is a ‘minified and obfuscated’ perl script that is more novel in design. It combines three components, Thomas Reed, director of Mac offerings at Malwarebytes and author of the blog post told SecurityWeek: ‘a Mac binary, another perl script and a Java class tacked on at the end in the __DATA__ section of the main perl script. The script extracts these, writes them to /tmp/ and executes them.’ Its primary purpose seems to be screen captures and webcam access, making it a classic espionage tool. Somewhat surprisingly the code uses antique system calls. ‘These are some truly ancient functions, as far as the tech world is concerned, dating back to pre-OS X days, ‘ he wrote in the blog post. ‘In addition, the binary also includes the open source libjpeg code, which was last updated in 1998.’ The script also contains Linux shell commands. Running the malware on a Linux machine, Malwarebytes ‘found that — with the exception of the Mach-O binary — everything ran just fine.’ It is possible that there is a specific Linux variant of the malware in existence — but the researchers have not been able to find one. It did find two Windows executable files, courtesy of VirusTotal, that communicated with the same CC server. One of them even used the same libjpeg library, which hasn’t been updated since 1998, as that used by Quimitchin.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Malwarebytes Discovers ‘First Mac Malware of 2017’

Hackers Corrupt Data For Cloud-Based Medical Marijuana System

Long-time Slashdot reader t0qer writes: I’m the IT director at a medical marijuana dispensary. Last week the point of sales system we were using was hacked… What scares me about this breach is, I have about 30, 000 patients in my database alone. If this company has 1, 000 more customers like me, even half of that is still 15 million people on a list of people that “Smoke pot”… ” No patient, consumer, or client data was ever extracted or viewed, ” the company’s data directory has said. “The forensic analysis proves that. The data was encrypted — so it couldn’t have been viewed — and it was never extracted, so nobody has it and could attempt decryption.” They’re saying it was a “targeted” attack meant to corrupt the data rather than retrieve it, and they’re “reconstructing historical data” from backups, though their web site adds that their backup sites were also targeted. “In response to this attack, all client sites have been migrated to a new, more secure environment, ” the company’s CEO announced on YouTube Saturday, adding that “Keeping our client’s data secure has always been our top priority.” Last week one industry publication had reported that the outage “has sent 1, 000 marijuana retailers in 23 states scrambling to handle everything from sales and inventory management to regulatory compliance issues.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Hackers Corrupt Data For Cloud-Based Medical Marijuana System

Thousands Of Cubans Now Have Internet Access

There’s been a dramatic change in one of the world’s least-connected countries. An anonymous reader quotes the AP: Since the summer of 2015, the Cuban government has opened 240 public Wi-Fi spots in parks and on street corners across the country… The government estimates that 100, 000 Cubans connect to the internet daily. A new feature of urban life in Cuba is the sight of people sitting at all hours on street corners or park benches, their faces illuminated by the screen of smartphones connected by applications such as Facebook Messenger to relatives in Miami, Ecuador or other outposts of the Cuban diaspora… Cuban ingenuity has spread internet far beyond those public places: thousands of people grab the public signals through commercially available repeaters, imported illegally into Cuba and often sold for about $100 — double the original price. Mounted on rooftops, the repeaters grab the public signals and create a form of home internet increasingly available in private rentals for tourists and cafes and restaurants for Cubans and visitors alike. The article also points out that last month, for the first time ever, 2, 000 Cubans began receiving home internet access. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Thousands Of Cubans Now Have Internet Access

Hamas ‘Honey Trap’ Dupes Israeli Soldiers

wiredmikey quotes Security Week: The smartphones of dozens of Israeli soldiers were hacked by Hamas militants pretending to be attractive young women online, an Israeli military official said Wednesday. Using fake profiles on Facebook with alluring photos, Hamas members contacted the soldiers via groups on the social network, luring them into long chats, the official told journalists on condition of anonymity. Dozens of the predominantly lower-ranked soldiers were convinced enough by the honey trap to download fake applications which enabled Hamas to take control of their phones, according to the official. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Hamas ‘Honey Trap’ Dupes Israeli Soldiers