Photoshop trolls can manipulate photos, but in the future we may have a new type of troll … trolls which can easily manipulate spoken words just by typing text into an audio editing program.Last week at the Adobe Max Creativity Conference, Adobe developer Zeyu Jin mentioned that people “having been making weird stuff online” with photo editing software, before adding, now “let’s do something to human speech.”Jin gave a sneak peek of software which is like Photoshop for audio, demonstrating Project VoCo, for voice conversion, by altering a voice clip of comedian Keegan-Michael Key. The voice clip was something Key said after being nominated for an award.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The banking arm of U.K. supermarket chain Tesco has suspended online payments for its 136,000 checking account customers following a spate of fraudulent transactions.The bank suspended its payment service for all checking account customers after 40,000 experienced suspicious transactions, bank CEO Benny Higgins told BBC Radio 4 on Monday."Around half of them had money taken from the account," he said.The bank will bear any losses as a result of the fraudulent activity and customers are not at financial risk, he said.But they might be inconvenienced until the bank has secured its systems.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It's already early November and, in case you missed it, Apple's AirPods are nowhere to be found in stores. Originally introduced alongside the iPhone 7 in September, Apple's new AirPods were poised to help usher in a new wireless era where the notion of connecting to a device via a cord would seem backwards if not downright antiquated. To that end, the unveiling of Apple's AirPods came at an appropriate time, right next to the iPhone 7 which famously was designed without a traditional 3.5mm headphone jack.Back in September, Apple said that its AirPods would launch in late October. And yet, October has come and gone and the highly-anticipated earbuds still lack a release date. Addressing the delay just ahead of the company's special Mac event in late October, an Apple spokesperson told TechCrunch that the AirPods launch was being pushed back so that Apple could presumably address some lingering bugs and usability issues.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
FBI Director James Comey said new emails that had been found had not changed the agency's July decision not to recommend charges against Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server.In a letter Sunday to lawmakers, Comey wrote that based on the FBI's review of the emails, the agency had not changed the conclusion it had expressed in July with regard to Clinton's use of a personal email server when she was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.The letter from Comey comes ahead of U.S. presidential elections on Tuesday and will likely blunt criticism that Clinton used the email server for confidential government communications.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Think fast, CIOs.It’s time for organizations to move past the “false promise” of a bimodal approach to IT, which results in a divided tech department operating at two different speeds, according to research and advisory firm Forrester. Instead, CIOs need to push for enterprise-wide acceleration – and a comprehensive business technology strategy – to keep up with customers’ appetites for new products and services.“Gone are the days of stability and predictability. The business environment you operate in will change faster than ever in 2017. Many of these changes will be outside of your control, but your ability to anticipate and respond will make or break your success,” Forrester writes in a research document focused on the evolving role of the CIO in 2017.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Forerunner 920XT packs a fleet of high-end training features into a sleek watch that is wet suit-friendly and about 15 percent lighter than its predecessor, the Forerunner 910XT. It boasts a high-resolution color display; flexible, hinged bands and a watch mode, so you can wear it all day. The activity tracking feature measures your steps, sleep and calories burned all day, giving you a more complete picture of your daily activity. For swimmers, it captures detailed swim metrics, including distance, pace, stroke count, stroke rate and SWOLF score. For runners, it will report your cadence, vertical oscillation (amount of “bounce” in your step) and ground contact time. The 920XT also has a metronome feature with vibe and audible alerts to guide your cadence training. VO2 max estimate, race predictor and recovery advisor. Smart notifications let you see email, text and other alerts on your watch. And connected features include automatic uploads to Garmin Connect, live tracking, and social media sharing. This deal comes with a heart rate monitor included. The 920XT is currently discounted 13% down to $249.99 for a limited time on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The malware behind last month's massive internet disruption in the U.S. is targeting Liberia with financially devastating results.This week, a botnet powered by the Mirai malware has been launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on IP addresses in the African country, according to security researchers. These attacks are the same kind that briefly disrupted internet access across the U.S. almost two weeks ago. They work by flooding internet connections with too much traffic, effectively forcing the services offline.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft has revealed a Unified Update Platform that's designed to make it easier for devices to upgrade from one version of Windows 10 to another. The UUP encompasses a set of behind-the-scenes changes in Windows 10 that reduce the processing power needed to update, shrink the size of update files, and streamline updates on Windows smartphones.These improvements are designed to help Microsoft address user complaints about the update process. Because the company's vision for Windows 10 includes many updates, streamlining those procedures is important.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Researchers at Washington State University have developed a portable sensor that uses a smartphone's camera to detect a biological indicator for several types of cancers with 99% accuracy, yielding laboratory quality results.The sensor, a light spectrometer, can process up to eight blood or tissue samples at the same time (or one sample in eight wells) and can detect the human protein interleukin-6 (IL-6). That protein is a known biological marker for lung, prostate, liver, breast and epithelial cancers. Washington State University
The spectrometer attached to an iPhone 5.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The cloud has made it dead simple to quickly spin up a new server without waiting for IT. But the ease of deploying new servers -- and the democratic nature of cloud management -- can be a security nightmare, as a simple configuration error or administrative mistake can compromise the security of your organization's entire cloud environment.With sensitive data increasingly heading to the cloud, how your organization secures its instances and overall cloud infrastructure is of paramount importance. Cloud providers, like Amazon, secure the server hardware your instances run on, but the security of the cloud infrastructure your organization sets up on that infrastructure is all on you. A broad array of built-in security services and third-party tools are available to secure practically any workload, but you have to know how to use them. And it all starts with proper configuration.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A group of former Facebook and Dropbox engineers is developing a service for debugging complex systems and answering ad hoc questions in real time.Honeycomb, currently in an open beta cycle, is a SaaS platform that reduces MTTR (mean time to repair) for outages and degraded services, identifies bugs and performance regressions, isolates contributing factors to failures, and reproduces user bug reports.[ Find out how to get ahead with our career development guide for developers. | The art of programming is changing rapidly. We help you navigate what's hot in programming and what's going cold. | Keep up with hot topics in programming with InfoWorld's Application Development newsletter. ]
The collective debugging skills of teams would be captured and preserved, according to the project website. Rather than relying on a dashboard, Honeycomb is for interactive debugging.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Kate Flathers was having a bad day. Between meetings, phone calls and projects going off the rails, the last thing she wanted to do was a candidate interview. So her first thought when she glanced at the résumé and cover letter that crossed her desk was, “Whew — I’m glad I don’t have to get involved in this one.”In her role as director of product development at DrugDev, a provider of a clinical trials operations platform, Flathers was pulled into the interviewing process only after the first few rounds, when things were going well and a candidate had passed a number of initial screenings. And the candidate she was looking at certainly didn’t fit the usual profile of a software developer: A woman in her 40s who was making a late-stage career change.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
They have blinking lights and tend to chirp constantly. One of them can vacuum your living room carpet on a schedule. Another can play games with the kids using artificial intelligence.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Twitter has played an outsized role in a 2016 presidential election that continues to test the electorate. Despite Twitter's ongoing business problems, the ability of a single tweet to shape political conversation and drive media coverage has never been greater. A marked contrast exists between Twitter's business acumen (or lack thereof) and the sometimes seemingly unintentional influence it wields on the current election.The leading candidates for America's next presidency use Twitter to energize their supporters and draw citizens who wouldn't otherwise follow political discourse. Twitter's simple and personal messages resonate in a way that more traditional means of communication — mail robocalls and yard signs — no longer can.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Three years after Target missed alerts warning them about a massive data breach, the amount of threat information coming in from security systems is still overwhelming for many companies, according to new reports, due to a lack of expertise and integration issues.Seventy percent of security pros said that their companies have problems taking actions based on threat intelligence because there is too much of it, or it is too complex, according to a report by Ponemon Research released on Monday. In particular, 69 percent said that their companies lacked staff expertise. As a result, only 46 percent said that incident responders used threat data when deciding how to respond to threats, and only 27 percent said that they were effective in using the data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Privacy Shield transatlantic data transfer deal is now caught in a pincer action: A week after it emerged that Irish digital rights activists had filed suit to annul the deal come reports that a French campaign group has begun its own legal action.French civil liberties campaign group La Quadrature du Net filed suit against the European Commission, the European Union's executive body, on Oct. 25.Although the Court of Justice of the EU has not yet published details of the complaint, Brussels-based news agency Euractiv reported Thursday that La Quadrature's goal is to annul the Commission's decision that Privacy Shield provides adequate protection under EU law when the personal information of EU citizens is transferred to the U.S. for processing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In the early morning hours of Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2016, an apparent Telephony Denial of Service (TDoS) attack was brought against several cities that brought 911 to a grinding halt.The incident triggered a response from the Department of Homeland Security's National Cybersecurity & Communications Integration Center National Coordinating Center for Communications (NCIC/NCC) and a Watch Advisory for a TDoS attack on public-safety answering points (PSAP) was issued just after lunch.Investigators were led to a web page created by 18-year-old, Phoenix-based Meetkumar Hiteshbhai Desai. Desai said he was merely looking for bugs in Apple's iOS in an attempt to capture a reward from Apple as part of its bug bounty program. Apple launched this long-awaited program in September, and the company is offering five different categories of reward prizes:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The closely watched launch on Wednesday of Microsoft's Teams, a rival to chat platforms Slack and HipChat, shows how important this kind of collaboration is for any company that wants to dominate workday life. Cisco Systems is no exception.On Tuesday at Cisco’s conference for channel partners, the company laid out an ambitious goal for its Spark chat platform and announced two moves to make it more attractive to enterprises.Spark is now the centerpiece of Cisco’s collaboration portfolio, which spans voice calling, videoconferencing, document sharing, and other capabilities. Like Slack or Microsoft Teams, the messaging platform is designed to be the virtual home base for teams of employees, from which they branch out into other collaboration tools and productivity applications.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
News of Broadcom buying Brocade for an estimated $5.5 billion comes with some caveats: Most notably, chipmaker Broadcom isn’t planning to keep Brocade’s Ethernet business. So what will happen to it?When announcing the deal, Broadcom made its plans to sell Brocade’s IP networking business clear. “Broadcom, with the support of Brocade, plans to divest Brocade’s IP Networking business, consisting of wireless and campus networking, data center switching and routing, and software networking solutions,” the press release states.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Internet of things (IoT) has already been used to launch the biggest DDoS attacks ever, but now it represents a potential path for attackers to compromise cell phones.Flaws in Belkin WeMo devices - electrical switches, cameras, light bulbs, coffee makers, air purifiers, etc. – enabled Invincea Labs researchers to not only hack into the devices, but to use that access to attack an Android phone running the app that controls the WeMo devices.“This is the first instance we’ve seen of IoT hacking something else,” says researcher Scott Tenaglia, who pledges to look for other vulnerable devices that might be abused to carry out similar attacks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here