Tag: yorker-vanity

British Library sticks 1 million pics on Flickr, asks for help making them useful

In 2008, the British Library, in partnership with Microsoft, embarked on a project to digitize thousands of out-of-copyright books from the 17 th , 18 th , and 19 th centuries. Included within those books were maps, diagrams, illustrations, photographs, and more. The Library has uploaded more than a million of them onto Flickr and released them into the public domain. It’s now asking for help. Though the library knows which book each image is taken from, its knowledge largely ends there. While some images have useful titles, many do not, so the majority of the million picture collection is uncatalogued, its subject matter unknown. Next year, it plans to launch a crowdsourced application to fill the gap, to enable humans to describe the images. This information will then be used to train an automated classifier that will be run against the entire corpus. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

See more here:
British Library sticks 1 million pics on Flickr, asks for help making them useful

Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers

Ever wonder why most e-mail clients hide images by default? The reason for the “display images” button is because images in an e-mail must be loaded from a third-party server. For promotional e-mails and spam, usually this server is operated by the entity that sent the e-mail. So when you load these images, you aren’t just receiving an image—you’re also sending a ton of data about yourself to the e-mail marketer. Loading images from these promotional e-mails reveals a lot about you. Marketers get a rough idea of your location via your IP address. They can see the  HTTP referrer , meaning the URL of the page that requested the image. With the referral data, marketers can see not only what client you are using (desktop app, Web, mobile, etc.) but also what folder you were viewing the e-mail in. For instance, if you had a Gmail folder named “Ars Technica” and loaded e-mail images, the referral URL would be “https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#label/Ars+Technica”—the folder is right there in the URL. The same goes for the inbox, spam, and any other location. It’s even possible to uniquely identify each e-mail, so marketers can tell which e-mail address requested the images—they know that you’ve read the e-mail. And if it was spam, this will often earn you more spam since the spammers can tell you’ve read their last e-mail. But Google  has just announced  a move that will shut most of these tactics down: it will cache all images for Gmail users. Embedded images will now be saved by Google and the e-mail content will be modified to display those images from Google’s cache, instead of from a third party server. E-mail marketers will no longer be able to get any information from images—they will see a single request from Google, which will then be used to send the image out to all Gmail users. Unless you click on a link, marketers will have no idea the e-mail has been seen. While this means improved privacy from e-mail marketers, Google will now be digging deeper than ever into your e-mails and literally modifying the contents. If you were worried about e-mail scanning , this may take things a step further. However, if you don’t like the idea of cached images, you can turn it off in the settings. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

Taken from:
Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers

Ukranian fraudster and CarderPlanet “Don” finally sentenced to 18 years

401(K) 2012 In 2001, a group of 150 Russian-speaking hackers gathered at a restaurant in Odessa to found CarderPlanet . It ultimately became one of the world’s most notorious fraudulent credit card data websites, and it was shut down in 2004 . On Thursday, one of the site’s founders, Roman Vega (aka “Boa”), was sentenced to 18 years in prison by a United States federal judge. Vega’s case has been going on for quite some time. The Ukrainian credit card fraudster was arrested, prosecuted, and convicted in Cyprus in 2003. Then, he was brought to the United States in 2004 to face federal charges in California, to which he pleaded guilty. By 2007, Vega faced fresh charges in New York. By early 2009, Vega pleaded guilty to those charges, but then he attempted to withdraw his plea in 2011. Various motions were filed, but by May 2012, the judge denied his request and his plea stood. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

More:
Ukranian fraudster and CarderPlanet “Don” finally sentenced to 18 years

AT&T offers gigabit Internet discount in exchange for your Web history

AT&T is watching you browse. Seth Anderson AT&T’s “GigaPower” all-fiber network has launched in parts of Austin, Texas, with a price of $70 per month for download speeds of 300Mbps (which will be upgraded to a gigabit at no extra cost in 2014). The $70 price is only available if you agree to see targeted ads from AT&T and its partners, however. Interestingly, AT&T labels the Internet service with targeted ads as its “premier” service while calling the service without targeted ads “standard.” Not only is the price of the premier service (with ads) only $70 a month, but it comes with a waiver of equipment, installation, and activation fees. The standard service without ads is $99 a month, and there’s no mention of a waiver in AT&T’s announcement . “The waiver is part of the Premier package, so is not available with the standard service at this time,” AT&T told Ars. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

Read this article:
AT&T offers gigabit Internet discount in exchange for your Web history

The first smartring has an LED screen, tells time, and accepts calls

Forget smartwatches —smartrings are the new thing now. An Indiegogo campaign for a product called the “Smarty Ring” has hit its funding goal. Smarty Ring is a 13mm-wide stainless steel ring with an LED screen, Bluetooth 4.0, and an accompanying smartphone app. The ring pairs with a smartphone and acts as a remote control and notification receiver. The ring can display the time, accept or reject calls, control music, trigger the smartphone’s camera, and initiate speed-dial calls. It will also alert the wearer with light-up icons for texts, e-mails, Facebook, Twitter, Google Hangouts, and Skype. It supports dual time zones and comes with a countdown timer, a stopwatch, and an alarm. It can work as a tracker for your phone, too—if your smartphone is more than 30 feet away from the ring, Smarty Ring will trigger an alarm. The ring supports Android and iOS—as long as your device has Bluetooth 4.0, it should be compatible. The creators are promising 24 hours of battery life from the whopping 22 mAh battery, and charging happens via a wireless induction pad. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

Read More:
The first smartring has an LED screen, tells time, and accepts calls

French agency caught minting SSL certificates impersonating Google

sharyn morrow Rekindling concerns about the system millions of websites use to encrypt and authenticate sensitive data, Google caught a French governmental agency spoofing digital certificates for several Google domains. The secure sockets layer (SSL) credentials were digitally signed by a valid certificate authority, an imprimatur that caused most mainstream browsers to place an HTTPS in front of the addresses and display other logos certifying that the connection was the one authorized by Google. In fact, the certificates were unauthorized duplicates that were issued in violation of rules established by browser manufacturers and certificate authority services. The certificates were issued by an intermediate certificate authority linked to the Agence nationale de la sécurité des systèmes d’information, the French cyberdefense agency better known as ANSSI. After Google brought the certificates to the attention of agency officials, the officials said the intermediate certificate was used in a commercial device on a private network to inspect encrypted traffic with the knowledge of end users, Google security engineer Adam Langley wrote in a blog post published over the weekend . Google updated its Chrome browser to reject all certificates signed by the intermediate authority and asked other browser makers to do the same. Firefox developer Mozilla and Microsoft, developer of Internet Explorer have followed suit . ANSSI later blamed the mistake on human error . It said it had no security consequences for the French administration or the general public, but the agency has revoked the certificate anyway. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

Originally posted here:
French agency caught minting SSL certificates impersonating Google

Kingpin behind large chunk of world’s malware exploits led lavish life

A screenshot showing BlackHole statistics. Group-IB An online crime kingpin arrested in October and charged with creating and distributing the Blackhole exploit kit may have had his hand in as much as 40 percent of the world’s malware infections, according to information released by the security firm that helped track him down. The 27-year-old Russian, identified only as Paunch, allegedly earned about $50,000 per month selling BlackHole subscriptions for as much as $500 per month, according to a report published Friday by security firm Group-IB. He is also alleged to be behind the much more expensive Cool Exploit Kit and a “Crypt” service used to obfuscate malware to go undetected by antivirus programs. With more than 1,000 customers, he was able to lead a lavish lifestyle that included driving a white Porsche Cayenne, Group-IB said. A man Group-IB identifies as “Paunch” standing in front of a Porsche Cayenne. Group-IB Exploit kits are the do-it-yourself tools used to embed crimeware into hacked or malicious websites so they target a host of vulnerabilities found on end-user computers. People who visit the websites are exposed to “drive-by” attacks that are often able to install highly malicious software on the computers with no sign that anything is amiss. Group-IB estimated that Paunch may have supplied the code used in as much as 40 percent of the PC crimeware infections worldwide. Researchers arrived at that guess by gauging sales of BlackHole and Cool, which they said accounted for about 40 percent of world revenue for exploit kits. Even assuming that some crimeware is installed independent of exploit kits, it’s hard to overstate the role these two kits played in seeding the Web with exploit code that installed malware used in bank fraud and other forms of online crime. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

See the original article here:
Kingpin behind large chunk of world’s malware exploits led lavish life

Mozilla making progress with Firefox’s long journey to multiprocess

Multiple Firefox processes. Gill Penney Internet Explorer and Chrome both use a multiprocess architecture to enhance stability and security. They separate the task of parsing and rendering Web pages from the job of drawing the browser on-screen, saving downloaded files, creating network connections, and so on. This allows them to run the dangerous parts—the parts exposed to malicious scripts and exploitative HTML—in a sandbox with reduced permissions, making it harder for browser flaws to be turned into system compromises. It also means that they’re much more tolerant of crash bugs; a bug will bring down an individual tab, but shouldn’t, in general, bring down the browser as a whole. In 2009, Mozilla announced the Electrolysis project , which was to bring this kind of multiprocess design to Firefox. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

Read the article:
Mozilla making progress with Firefox’s long journey to multiprocess

Scientist-developed malware covertly jumps air gaps using inaudible sound

Topology of a covert mesh network that connects air-gapped computers to the Internet. Hanspach and Goetz Computer scientists have developed malware that uses inaudible audio signals to communicate, a capability that allows the malware to covertly transmit keystrokes and other sensitive data even when infected machines have no network connection. The proof-of-concept software—or malicious trojans that adopt the same high-frequency communication methods—could prove especially adept in penetrating highly sensitive environments that routinely place an “air gap” between computers and the outside world. Using nothing more than the built-in microphones and speakers of standard computers, the researchers were able to transmit passwords and other small amounts of data from distances of almost 65 feet. The software can transfer data at much greater distances by employing an acoustical mesh network made up of attacker-controlled devices that repeat the audio signals. The researchers, from Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing, and Ergonomics , recently disclosed their findings in a paper published in the Journal of Communications . It came a few weeks after a security researcher said his computers were infected with a mysterious piece of malware that used high-frequency transmissions to jump air gaps . The new research neither confirms nor disproves Dragos Ruiu’s claims of the so-called badBIOS infections, but it does show that high-frequency networking is easily within the grasp of today’s malware. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

More:
Scientist-developed malware covertly jumps air gaps using inaudible sound

Anti-GMO crop paper to be forcibly retracted

Chiot’s Run Last year, a French researcher made waves by announcing a study that suggested genetically modified corn could lead to an increased incidence of tumors in lab animals. But the way the finding was announced seemed designed to generate publicity while avoiding any scientific evaluation of the results. Since then, the scientific criticisms have rolled in, and they have been scathing. Now, the editor of the journal that published it has decided to pull the paper despite the objections of its primary author. The initial publication focused on corn that had been genetically engineered to carry a gene that allowed it to break down a herbicide. French researchers led by Gilles-Eric Séralini fed the corn, with and without herbicide, to rats. Control populations were given the herbicide alone or unmodified corn. The authors concluded that the genetically-modified corn led to an elevated incidence of tumors and early death. But even a cursory glance at the results suggested there were some severe problems with this conclusion. To begin with, there were similar effects caused by both the genetically engineered crop and by the herbicide it was designed to degrade. None of the treatments showed a dose effect; in some cases, the lowest doses had the most dramatic effect. And, if the treatment populations were combined, in some cases they were healthier than the controls. Tests of whether the results were statistically significant were completely lacking. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

More:
Anti-GMO crop paper to be forcibly retracted