Siri says: Apple WWDC 2016 is June 13-17

When you want to get an answer from Apple, your best bet is to go directly to Siri and cut out the middleman. Siri says Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference will be held June 13 through 17 in San Francisco. And Siri can't wait for it: "I'm so excited." Maybe that's because Apple is expected to reveal iOS and OS X updates in which Siri might even get a new feature or two. A thinner version of Apple Watch, plus upgrades to the Mac line, are also expected. The 9to5Mac blog first picked up on the Siri leak about WWDC.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Siri reveals that Apple’s WWDC event will take place from June 13-17

While Apple's annual iPhone unveiling is undoubtedly the company's biggest event each and every year, WWDC is clearly a close second. As the event where Apple showcases its latest advancements in user design and iOS and OS X technologies, Apple's annual worldwide developers conference typically provides us with a fascinating sneak peak at the future of mobile and desktop computing.This year, WWDC is slated to take place from June 13 and June 17 in San Francisco at the Moscone West convention center. Interestingly enough, word of Apple's WWDC schedule this year was initially leaked by Siri. Earlier today, a number of sites noted that when you ask Siri when WWDC is, Apple's intelligent personal assistant responds with the following:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NASA: Top 10 space junk missions

While many of the usual suspects are still the top space junk producers, much more debris is now floating around Earth’s atmosphere since the six years NASA last looked a the top 10 space junk missions. NASA' s Orbital Debris Program Office said that by far the source of the greatest amount of   orbital   debris   remains   the   Fengyun-1C   spacecraft, which was the target of   a People’s Republic of China anti-satellite test in January 2007. +More on Network World: 13 awesome and scary things in near Earth space+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NASA: Top 10 space junk missions

While many of the usual suspects are still the top space junk producers, much more debris is now floating around Earth’s atmosphere since the six years NASA last looked a the top 10 space junk missions. NASA' s Orbital Debris Program Office said that by far the source of the greatest amount of   orbital   debris   remains   the   Fengyun-1C   spacecraft, which was the target of   a People’s Republic of China anti-satellite test in January 2007. +More on Network World: 13 awesome and scary things in near Earth space+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Location data from 2 apps can ID you across domains even if you use fake names

If you think that making up a bogus name or using a fake age on a profile actually makes you harder to link to your profiles on other sites, then think again as researchers have determined how to use location data to link users across domains. You also should not be comforted when you learn that big data has been stripped of names and personal details; researchers say it is “no guarantee of privacy.”Columbia University computer science researchers Chris Riederer, Yunsung Kim, and Augustin Chaintreau, along with Google researchers Nitish Korula and Silvio Lattanzi, combined their considerable brain power to come up with an algorithm that only needs location data from two apps to identify someone. The researchers recently presented their paper, “Linking Users Across Domains with Location Data: Theory and Validation” (pdf), at the 25th International World Wide Web Conference.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Location data from 2 apps can ID you across domains even if you use fake names

If you think that making up a bogus name or using a fake age on a profile actually makes you harder to link to your profiles on other sites, then think again as researchers have determined how to use location data to link users across domains. You also should not be comforted when you learn that big data has been stripped of names and personal details; researchers say it is “no guarantee of privacy.”Columbia University computer science researchers Chris Riederer, Yunsung Kim, and Augustin Chaintreau, along with Google researchers Nitish Korula and Silvio Lattanzi, combined their considerable brain power to come up with an algorithm that only needs location data from two apps to identify someone. The researchers recently presented their paper, “Linking Users Across Domains with Location Data: Theory and Validation” (pdf), at the 25th International World Wide Web Conference.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Geekiest Boston Marathon Wellesley Scream Tunnel signs for runners

Wellesley College may be known as a liberal arts college for women, but you can see that STEM is in full bloom at the school too by the nature of some of the signs students waved to runners along the Scream Tunnel at this year's Boston Marathon.MORE: 2012's Geekiest Boston Marathon Scream Tunnel signs Bob Brown/NetworkWorld Kiss Me I Can Laser CutTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Sony cranks up optical disc storage to 3.3TB

Optical discs like Blu-ray are losing favor, but Sony and Panasonic don't seem to care. The companies have cranked up the storage capacity on optical media to a stunning 3.3TB.That's a big advance in Sony's optical storage, which is based on technology used in Blu-ray. The 3.3TB disc is targeted at studios, filmmakers, and broadcasters that store large volumes of video, and at large companies that store infrequently modified data.For example, video streaming companies could hold a large library of films in storage arrays with many optical drives. Instead of using PCs, servers in data centers could then pull out movies from the drives and serve them to users via the cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Sony cranks up optical disc storage to 3.3TB

Optical discs like Blu-ray are losing favor, but Sony and Panasonic don't seem to care. The companies have cranked up the storage capacity on optical media to a stunning 3.3TB.That's a big advance in Sony's optical storage, which is based on technology used in Blu-ray. The 3.3TB disc is targeted at studios, filmmakers, and broadcasters that store large volumes of video, and at large companies that store infrequently modified data.For example, video streaming companies could hold a large library of films in storage arrays with many optical drives. Instead of using PCs, servers in data centers could then pull out movies from the drives and serve them to users via the cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AI + humans = kick-ass cybersecurity

Neither humans nor AI has proven overwhelmingly successful at maintaining cybersecurity on their own, so why not see what happens when you combine the two? That's exactly the premise of a new project from MIT, and it's achieved some pretty impressive results. Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and machine-learning startup PatternEx have developed a new platform called AI2 that can detect 85 percent of attacks. It also reduces the number of "false positives" -- nonthreats mistakenly identified as threats -- by a factor of five, the researchers said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AI + humans = kick-ass cybersecurity

Neither humans nor AI has proven overwhelmingly successful at maintaining cybersecurity on their own, so why not see what happens when you combine the two? That's exactly the premise of a new project from MIT, and it's achieved some pretty impressive results. Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and machine-learning startup PatternEx have developed a new platform called AI2 that can detect 85 percent of attacks. It also reduces the number of "false positives" -- nonthreats mistakenly identified as threats -- by a factor of five, the researchers said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Personal data is exposed by older, shortened URLs

Services that convert long, cumbersome URLs, such as those found in mapping directions, to short URLs are publicly exposing the original URL.Original addresses can be obtained through brute-force scanning, researchers say. And that vulnerability allows foes to track an individual’s possibly sensitive movements, as well as see perceived-of-as-private documents.Additionally, the brute force-exposed cloud documents could allow “adversaries” to “inject arbitrary malicious content into unlocked accounts, which is then automatically copied into all of the account owner’s devices,” say Vitaly Shmatikov, of Cornell Tech, and Martin Georgiev, an independent researcher, in their paper (PDF). They made the discovery.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Personal data is exposed by older, shortened URLs

Services that convert long, cumbersome URLs, such as those found in mapping directions, to short URLs are publicly exposing the original URL.Original addresses can be obtained through brute-force scanning, researchers say. And that vulnerability allows foes to track an individual’s possibly sensitive movements, as well as see perceived-of-as-private documents.Additionally, the brute force-exposed cloud documents could allow “adversaries” to “inject arbitrary malicious content into unlocked accounts, which is then automatically copied into all of the account owner’s devices,” say Vitaly Shmatikov, of Cornell Tech, and Martin Georgiev, an independent researcher, in their paper (PDF). They made the discovery.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Securing BGP: A Case Study (7)

In the last post on this series on securing BGP, I considered a couple of extra questions around business problems that relate to BGP. This time, I want to consider the problem of convergence speed in light of any sort of BGP security system. The next post (to provide something of a road map) should pull all the requirements side together into a single post, so we can begin working through some of the solutions available. Ultimately, as this is a case study, we’re after a set of tradeoffs for each solution, rather than a final decision about which solution to use.

The question we need to consider here is: should the information used to provide validation for BGP be somewhat centralized, or fully distributed? The CAP theorem tells us that there are a range of choices here, with the two extreme cases being—

  • A single copy of the database we’re using to provide validation information which is always consistent
  • Multiple disconnected copies of the database we’re using to provide validation which is only intermittently consistent

Between these two extremes there are a range of choices (reducing all possibilities to these two extremes is, in fact, a misuse of the Continue reading

Google’s biggest, craziest ‘moonshot’ yet

Google is nothing if not ambitious. It’s famed “moonshot” projects have taken on notoriously large projects, from extending human lifespans to drones that can stay aloft for years at a time. But this one takes the cake.According to the subscription tech news site The Information, Alphabet, Google’s holding company, is trying to get CEO Larry Page to sign off on “Project Sidewalk.” The Information describes the effort as an attempt “to create an area in the U.S. that serves as a test bed for new technologies from superfast internet to autonomous cars. … An area that could accommodate hundreds of thousands of people has been contemplated.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here