Google Unveils Neural Network With Ability To Determine Location of Any Image

schwit1 writes: Here’s a tricky task. Pick a photograph from the web at random. Now try to work out where it was taken using only the image itself. If the image shows a famous building or landmark, such as the Eiffel Tower or Niagara Falls, the task is straightforward. But the job becomes significantly harder when the image lacks specific location cues or is taken indoors or shows a pet or food or some other detail. Nevertheless, humans are surprisingly good at this task. To help, they bring to bear all kinds of knowledge about the world such as the type and language of signs on display, the types of vegetation, architectural styles, the direction of traffic, and so on. Humans spend a lifetime picking up these kinds of geolocation cues. So it’s easy to think that machines would struggle with this task. And indeed, they have. Today, that changes thanks to the work of Tobias Weyand, a computer vision specialist at Google, and a couple of pals. These guys have trained a deep-learning machine to work out the location of almost any photo using only the pixels it contains. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Unveils Neural Network With Ability To Determine Location of Any Image

Slysoft (of AnyDVD Fame) Closes After Increased International Pressure By AACS

jlp2097 writes: It looks like the recent activities by Hollywood studios and the AACS LA finally led to the closing of Slysoft Inc, creator of the popular AnyDVD HD tool for creating personal backups of BluRay/DVD/etc. Slysoft Inc’s website confirms the closing due to “recent regulatory requirements”. The final nail in the coffin has also been confirmed with slightly more details in their forum: “this is final. Slysoft is gone.” Sad to see them go — it looks like legitimate buyers of BluRays will now have to find other sources for backing up their property to HTPCs and NASes. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Slysoft (of AnyDVD Fame) Closes After Increased International Pressure By AACS

Nvidia Pascal GP100 GPU To Rock 4 TFLOPS Double Precision, 12 TFLOPS Single Precision Processing Power

New information emerged regarding Nvidia’s Pascal GPU, covering the total compute performance of the much-anticipated FinFET-based chip. Based on a number of slides from an independent researcher, the Nvidia Pascal GPU100 features Stacked DRAM (1 TB/s) giving it as much as 12 TFLOPs of Single-Precision (FP32) compute performance. The flagship GPU is purportedly able to provide four TFLOPs of Double-Precision (FP64) compute performance as well. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Nvidia Pascal GP100 GPU To Rock 4 TFLOPS Double Precision, 12 TFLOPS Single Precision Processing Power

Yahoo Closes Lab – Among Other Things

mikejuk writes: In its recent earnings call, Yahoo revealed plans to cut its workforce by 15% — around 1, 600 employees by the end of the year. Yahoo Labs is another victim of the cuts as revealed in a Tumbler post by Yoelle Maarek who reports that both Yahoo’s Chief Scientist, Ron Brachman, and VP of Research Ricardo Baeza-Yates, will be leaving the company and that going forward: Our new approach is to integrate research teams directly into our product teams in order to produce innovation that will drive excellence in those product areas. We will also have an independent research team that will work autonomously or in partnership with product partners. The integrated and independent teams, as a whole, will be known as Yahoo Research. Maarek, formerly VP of Research now becomes leader of Yahoo Research. To anyone who has followed the story of research at Yahoo there will be a sense of deja vu. Back in 2012 Yahoo laid off many of its research team, many of whom found a new home with Microsoft. It was Marissa Meyer who in the following year recruited a substantial number of PhDs to Yahoo Labs which initiated some interesting projects. Meyer clearly thought research would save Yahoo!, but now it all seems a bit late and Yahoo! can’t save its research lab. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Yahoo Closes Lab – Among Other Things

Global Wind Power Capacity Tops Nuclear Energy For First Time

mdsolar writes: The capacity of wind power generation worldwide reached 432.42 gigawatts (GW) at the end of 2015, up 17 percent from a year earlier and surpassing nuclear energy for the first time, according to data released by global industry bodies. The generation capacity of wind farms newly built in 2015 was a record 63.01 GW, corresponding to about 60 nuclear reactors, according to the Global Wind Energy Council based in Brussels. The global nuclear power generation capacity was 382.55 GW as of Jan. 1, 2016, the London-based World Nuclear Association said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Global Wind Power Capacity Tops Nuclear Energy For First Time

Linux 4.3 Reached End of Life; Users Need To Move To Linux 4.4

prisoninmate writes: As some of you may know, Linux 4.3 was not an LTS (Long Term Support) release, so the last maintenance build is now Linux kernel 4.3.6, as announced earlier by Greg Kroah-Hartman, a renowned kernel developer and maintainer. While he’s telling users of the Linux 4.3 series to update to the 4.3.6 point release, he also urges them, especially OS vendors, to move to the most advanced stable series, in this case, Linux kernel 4.4 LTS, which just received its second point release the other day. However, it appears that Linux kernel 4.3.6 is quite an update, as it changes a total of 197 files, with 2310 insertions and 963 deletions, bringing some much-needed improvements. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux 4.3 Reached End of Life; Users Need To Move To Linux 4.4

Comodo Antivirus Tech Support Feature Lets Anyone Connect To Your PC

An anonymous reader writes: Google Project Zero security researcher Tavis Ormandy has discovered that one of Comodo’s tech support tools packed with many of the company’s security products leaves the door open for attackers to connect with admin privileges on the user’s PC. He discovered that to blame for this problem was a remote desktop tool called GeekBuddy, which Comodo was bundling with its security software. This tool either used no password, or used a simple system to create the password which tech support staff would use to connect to user PCs. Ormandy previously discovered a similar issue in Comodo software, related to the company’s Chromodo browser. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Comodo Antivirus Tech Support Feature Lets Anyone Connect To Your PC

Apple Says Sorry For iPhone Error 53 and Issues IOS 9.2.1 Update To Fix It

Mark Wilson writes: Apple has a lot of support at the moment for its stance on encryption and refusing the FBI access to an iPhone’s contents, but it’s only a couple of weeks since the company was seen in a less favorable light. There was quite a backlash when users found that installing an update to iOS resulted in Error 53 and a bricked iPhone. Apple initially said that Error 53 was caused ‘for security reasons’ following speculation that it was a bid to stop people from using third party repair shops. iFixit suggested that the problem was a result of a failure of parts to correctly sync, and Apple has been rounding criticized for failing to come up with a fix. Today the company has issued an apology, along with an update that ensures Error 53 won’t happen again. But there’s more good news … If you were talked into paying for an out of warranty replacement as a result of Error 53, you could be in line to get your money back. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Apple Says Sorry For iPhone Error 53 and Issues IOS 9.2.1 Update To Fix It

Stealing Keys From a Laptop In Another Room — and Offline

Motherboard carries a report that with equipment valued at about $3, 000, a group of Israeli researchers have been able to extract cryptographic keys from a laptop that is not only separated by a physical wall, but protected by an air gap. This, they say, “is the first time such an approach has been used specifically against elliptic curve cryptography running on a PC.” From the article: The method is a so-called side-channel attack: an attack that doesn’t tackle an encryption implementation head on, such as through brute force or by exploiting a weakness in the underlying algorithm, but through some other means. In this case, the attack relies on the electromagnetic outputs of the laptop that are emitted during the decryption process, which can then be used to work out the target’s key. Specifically, the researchers obtained the private key from a laptop running GnuPG, a popular implementation of OpenPGP. (The developers of GnuPG have since released countermeasures to the method. Tromer said that the changes make GnuPG âoemore resistant to side-channel attack since the sequence of high-level arithmetic operations does not depend on the secret key.â) Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Stealing Keys From a Laptop In Another Room — and Offline

Backdoor In MVPower DVR Firmware Sends CCTV Stills To an Email Address In China

An anonymous reader writes: An IoT security research company has discovered that a DVR model manufactured by MVPower includes a backdoor-like feature in its code that takes a screenshot of your CCTV feed and sends it to an email address hosted somewhere in China. The device’s firmware is based on an open source project from GitHub that was pulled by its developer when someone confronted him about the backdoor. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Backdoor In MVPower DVR Firmware Sends CCTV Stills To an Email Address In China