Peter Sayer
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OpenAI releases Universe, a platform for training AIs to play games, use apps
OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research company, wants to let AIs loose in their own universe, where they can learn to play games, use apps and interact with websites.Universe is the name of OpenAI's tool for training AIs on, as it puts it, "any task a human can complete with a computer." Using a VNC (Virtual Network Computing) remote desktop, it allows the AI to control the game or app using a virtual keyboard and mouse, and to see its output by analyzing the pixels displayed on the screen. It's essentially an interface to the company's Gym toolkit for developing reinforcement algorithms, a type of machine learning system.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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‘Distributed guessing’ attack lets hackers verify Visa card details
Add credit card fraud to the list of things that distributed processing can speed up. An e-commerce site will typically block a credit card number after 10 or 20 failed attempts to enter the corresponding expiry date and CVV (card verification value), making life difficult for fraudsters who don't have a full set of credentials. But there are plenty of e-commerce sites out there, and it's possible to obtain missing account details by submitting slightly different payment requests to hundreds of them in parallel. It takes less than six seconds to perform the "distributed guessing attack," according to the researchers at Newcastle University in the U.K. who figured out how to do it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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‘Distributed guessing’ attack lets hackers verify Visa card details
Add credit card fraud to the list of things that distributed processing can speed up. An e-commerce site will typically block a credit card number after 10 or 20 failed attempts to enter the corresponding expiry date and CVV (card verification value), making life difficult for fraudsters who don't have a full set of credentials. But there are plenty of e-commerce sites out there, and it's possible to obtain missing account details by submitting slightly different payment requests to hundreds of them in parallel. It takes less than six seconds to perform the "distributed guessing attack," according to the researchers at Newcastle University in the U.K. who figured out how to do it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Implantable medical devices can be hacked to harm patients
It's possible to transmit life-threatening signals to implanted medical devices with no prior knowledge of how the devices work, researchers in Belgium and the U.K. have demonstrated.By intercepting and reverse-engineering the signals exchanged between a heart pacemaker-defibrillator and its programmer, the researchers found they could steal patient information, flatten the device's battery, or send malicious messages to the pacemaker. The attacks they developed can be performed from up to five meters away using standard equipment -- but more sophisticated antennas could increase this distance by tens or hundreds of times, they said."The consequences of these attacks can be fatal for patients as these messages can contain commands to deliver a shock or to disable a therapy," the researchers wrote in a new paper examining the security of implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs), which monitor heart rhythm and can deliver either low-power electrical signals to the heart, like a pacemaker, or stronger ones, like a defibrillator, to shock the heart back to a normal rhythm. They will present their findings at the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC) in Los Angeles next week.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Implantable medical devices can be hacked to harm patients
It's possible to transmit life-threatening signals to implanted medical devices with no prior knowledge of how the devices work, researchers in Belgium and the U.K. have demonstrated.By intercepting and reverse-engineering the signals exchanged between a heart pacemaker-defibrillator and its programmer, the researchers found they could steal patient information, flatten the device's battery, or send malicious messages to the pacemaker. The attacks they developed can be performed from up to five meters away using standard equipment -- but more sophisticated antennas could increase this distance by tens or hundreds of times, they said."The consequences of these attacks can be fatal for patients as these messages can contain commands to deliver a shock or to disable a therapy," the researchers wrote in a new paper examining the security of implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs), which monitor heart rhythm and can deliver either low-power electrical signals to the heart, like a pacemaker, or stronger ones, like a defibrillator, to shock the heart back to a normal rhythm. They will present their findings at the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC) in Los Angeles next week.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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UK’s internet surveillance law receives royal approval
Britons hoping that a quaint historical tradition might stop a Draconian internet surveillance law in its tracks were disappointed on Tuesday morning, when the Queen gave her approval to the Investigatory Powers Act 2016.In theory, the Queen has the power of veto over all U.K. legislation as bills do not become law until they receive royal assent.In practice, though, it's just a formality: no reigning British monarch has rejected a piece of legislation since 1707. Besides, given the post-Brexit backlash against anyone than Parliament deciding British law, it would have been a daring move for a hereditary head of state.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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UK’s internet surveillance law receives royal approval
Britons hoping that a quaint historical tradition might stop a Draconian internet surveillance law in its tracks were disappointed on Tuesday morning, when the Queen gave her approval to the Investigatory Powers Act 2016.In theory, the Queen has the power of veto over all U.K. legislation as bills do not become law until they receive royal assent.In practice, though, it's just a formality: no reigning British monarch has rejected a piece of legislation since 1707. Besides, given the post-Brexit backlash against anyone than Parliament deciding British law, it would have been a daring move for a hereditary head of state.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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HPE sees Synergy in hybrid cloud infrastructure
For Hewlett Packard Enterprise, turn-about is fair play in the cloud. HPE originally pitched its Synergy line of "composable" IT infrastructure as a way to bring the flexibility of cloud services to on-premises systems. Now it's turning that story around, putting those same Synergy components -- and some new ones -- into the public cloud with the goal of simplifying hybrid IT management. The new components of Synergy made their debut in London on Tuesday, at HPE Discover, an event for the company's customers and partners.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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One million broadband offline in Germany; ‘external influence’ blamed
Almost one million Deutsche Telekom customers have been struggling to get online since Sunday afternoon.There's nothing wrong with the network, the company said, advising customers having trouble connecting to the internet to turn their router off and on again in the hope of solving the problem.Around 900,000 lines were initially hit by the connection problem, although the number affected is falling, Deutsche Telekom said Monday. But that number may be an underestimate: Since some of the affected routers also provide subscribers with telephone service, customers may have no way of letting the company know they are having difficulties.The cause of the outage is unknown, with those affected living in different areas and using different routers models, the comapany said. It dismissed suggestions that the problem was worse in congested areas.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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One million broadband offline in Germany; ‘external influence’ blamed
Almost one million Deutsche Telekom customers have been struggling to get online since Sunday afternoon.There's nothing wrong with the network, the company said, advising customers having trouble connecting to the internet to turn their router off and on again in the hope of solving the problem.Around 900,000 lines were initially hit by the connection problem, although the number affected is falling, Deutsche Telekom said Monday. But that number may be an underestimate: Since some of the affected routers also provide subscribers with telephone service, customers may have no way of letting the company know they are having difficulties.The cause of the outage is unknown, with those affected living in different areas and using different routers models, the comapany said. It dismissed suggestions that the problem was worse in congested areas.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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One million broadband offline in Germany; ‘external influence’ blamed
Almost one million Deutsche Telekom customers have been struggling to get online since Sunday afternoon.There's nothing wrong with the network, the company said, advising customers having trouble connecting to the internet to turn their router off and on again in the hope of solving the problem.Around 900,000 lines were initially hit by the connection problem, although the number affected is falling, Deutsche Telekom said Monday. But that number may be an underestimate: Since some of the affected routers also provide subscribers with telephone service, customers may have no way of letting the company know they are having difficulties.The cause of the outage is unknown, with those affected living in different areas and using different routers models, the comapany said. It dismissed suggestions that the problem was worse in congested areas.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Japanese government denies report that its defense forces were hacked
Japanese government officials have denied reports that a secure network used by the country's defense forces was attacked earlier this year.An attacker was able to break into the Ground Self-Defense Force's computer systems, sources at the Japanese Ministry of Defense told Kyodo News on Sunday. The ministry and the Self-Defense Forces discovered the attack in September, said the report, which was also relayed by The Japan Times.Kyodo's sources said the hack was believed to be the work of a nation state, and that information may have been leaked in the attack.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Japanese government denies report that its defense forces were hacked
Japanese government officials have denied reports that a secure network used by the country's defense forces was attacked earlier this year.An attacker was able to break into the Ground Self-Defense Force's computer systems, sources at the Japanese Ministry of Defense told Kyodo News on Sunday. The ministry and the Self-Defense Forces discovered the attack in September, said the report, which was also relayed by The Japan Times.Kyodo's sources said the hack was believed to be the work of a nation state, and that information may have been leaked in the attack.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Japan plans superefficient supercomputer by 2017
Japan plans to build a super-efficient computer that could vault it to the top of the world's supercomputer rankings by the end of next year.With a processing capacity of 130 petaflops, the planned computer would outperform the current world leader, China's Sunway TaihuLight, which delivers 93 petaflops. One petaflop is one million billion floating-point operations per second.Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) isn't just aiming to build the world's fastest supercomputers, it also wants to make one of the most efficient. It is aiming for a power consumption of under 3 megawatts -- a staggering figure, given that Japan's current highest entry in the Top500 supercomputer list, Oakforest-PACS, delivers one-tenth the performance (13.6 petaflops) for the same power.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Britain’s wartime codebreaking base could host a national cyber security college
Plans are afoot to build the U.K.'s first National College of Cyber Security at Bletchley Park, the birthplace of the country's wartime codebreaking efforts.It was at Bletchley Park that Colossus, the world's first electronic computer, was built during World War II to crack the Lorenz code used by the German high command. Bletchley is also where Alan Turing developed some of his mathematical theories of computing while working on breaking the enigma code.After the war the site fell into disrepair, but parts of it have been restored and now house the U.K.'s National Museum of Computing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Britain’s wartime codebreaking base could host a national cyber security college
Plans are afoot to build the U.K.'s first National College of Cyber Security at Bletchley Park, the birthplace of the country's wartime codebreaking efforts.It was at Bletchley Park that Colossus, the world's first electronic computer, was built during World War II to crack the Lorenz code used by the German high command. Bletchley is also where Alan Turing developed some of his mathematical theories of computing while working on breaking the enigma code.After the war the site fell into disrepair, but parts of it have been restored and now house the U.K.'s National Museum of Computing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Make companies pay full cost of breaches to restore trust in the internet, says ISOC
Fake news, online banking thefts and data breaches: It's no wonder that trust in the internet is at an all-time low. But don't worry: The Internet Society has a five-step plan for restoring faith in the network of networks.The first step is to put users first, according to ISOC, which published its 2016 Global Internet Report on Thursday. That involves being more transparent (step two) about risk and the incidence of data breaches and prioritizing data security (step three) to ensure breaches don't happen.ISOC isn't just a talking shop, it is also the organizational home of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), source of many of the protocols and standards on which the internet relies. That adds weight to the more detailed recommendations on how to prioritize security contained in the ISOC report.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Make companies pay full cost of breaches to restore trust in the internet, says ISOC
Fake news, online banking thefts and data breaches: It's no wonder that trust in the internet is at an all-time low. But don't worry: The Internet Society has a five-step plan for restoring faith in the network of networks.The first step is to put users first, according to ISOC, which published its 2016 Global Internet Report on Thursday. That involves being more transparent (step two) about risk and the incidence of data breaches and prioritizing data security (step three) to ensure breaches don't happen.ISOC isn't just a talking shop, it is also the organizational home of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), source of many of the protocols and standards on which the internet relies. That adds weight to the more detailed recommendations on how to prioritize security contained in the ISOC report.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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IBM will open the first of four new UK data centers next month
IBM is opening four new data centers in the U.K., despite some of the gloomy forecasts for the country's economy following its vote to leave the European Union.It's five years since the company began offering cloud services in the U.K., and two years since it opened its second cloud data center there.The new data centers will raise the U.K.'s share of IBM's cloud capacity in Europe from one-sixth to more than one-third. That's an interesting bet on the U.K.'s future outside the E.U.Following June's "Brexit" vote, the U.K. is set to withdraw from the 28-country bloc in a little more than two years, once the U.K. government makes up its mind when and how to leave. After that, it's anybody's guess what role data centers in the U.K. will play in the broader European economy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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IBM will open the first of four new UK data centers next month
IBM is opening four new data centers in the U.K., despite some of the gloomy forecasts for the country's economy following its vote to leave the European Union.It's five years since the company began offering cloud services in the U.K., and two years since it opened its second cloud data center there.The new data centers will raise the U.K.'s share of IBM's cloud capacity in Europe from one-sixth to more than one-third. That's an interesting bet on the U.K.'s future outside the E.U.Following June's "Brexit" vote, the U.K. is set to withdraw from the 28-country bloc in a little more than two years, once the U.K. government makes up its mind when and how to leave. After that, it's anybody's guess what role data centers in the U.K. will play in the broader European economy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here