Supercomputer superheroes attempt to autonomously find, plug software holes, for cash

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Giant refrigerator-sized supercomputers battled each other on Thursday in a virtual contest to show that machines can find software vulnerabilities.

The result: the supercomputers time and time again detected simulated flaws in software.

It represents a technological achievement in vulnerability detection, at a time when it can take human researchers on an average a year to find software flaws. The hope is that computers can do a better job and perhaps detect and patch the flaws within months, weeks or even days.

Thursday’s contest, called the Cyber Grand Challenge, was a step in that direction. The final round of the competition pitted computers from seven teams to play the hacking game “Capture the Flag,” which revolves around detecting software vulnerabilities.

All the machines were brought together to compete in Las Vegas at DEF CON, a cybersecurity event where human hackers have annually played the Capture the Flag game for years.

However, this time, the fully-automated computers were the sole participants, and during the competition, none of them had any help from their human creators.

To score points, the computers played 96 rounds, in which they authored streams of new code to both prove vulnerabilities existed in software and patch flaws. All of this was done in minutes.

Modified versions of bugs including Heartbleed, Sendmail crackaddr and the Morris Worm were also thrown at the computers, and certain machines detected and repaired them.

Officials at DARPA, the U.S. defense agency that sponsored the contest, said the machines gave a possible glimpse of the future of cybersecurity.

“We’ve proven that this automation is possible,” said Mike Walker, program manager for the Cyber Grand Challenge.

However, it still remains to be seen when these supercomputers might be used in real-world environments. For instance, the machines that played the Capture the Flag game analyzed the flaws within a simplified operating system. That’s considerably different from scanning a real OS – which is large and often encompasses a whole ecosystem of software products.

Nevertheless, the supercomputers are up to the challenge, said David Brumley, a designer of one of the machines. His unit, called “Mayhem” was declared the preliminary winner in Thursday’s contest and could come away with the US$2 million grand prize.

“Cybersecurity has really relied on human effort, and we still need that, but we haven’t done enough to automate,” he said. ForAllSecure, his company in Pennsylvania, has already been using its machine-based detecting techniques to find flaws in Linux.

“We can start making a difference right away,” he said. However, Brumley hopes his technology can get more funding.

On Friday, the contest will announce the official winner, and that machine will go on to another test—organizers will pit it against actual human players at a Capture the Flag game at DEF CON.

DARPA doesn’t expect the machine to win. Walker said the scenario is similar to when early chess programs faced off against the best human players.

However, it only took a few decades before those programs began besting human opponents, he said.  

“Automation has nowhere to go but get better,” Walker added.

 

Blender or mixer, what it is better?

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If you are thinking of buying a blender or mixer, and do not know the differences
between them well, we help you decide with the advantages of each of these devices.
We could say that liquefy is the process by which we make something solid liquid,
such as fruit or vegetables. Instead, beat SAR defines as follows: "Move and stir
some substance to it thickens or lock, or that liquefies or dissolves."

Many people believe blender or mixer glass serve the same purpose, but the reality
is different. In fact, they are not exclusive gadgets, one can have both at home
and use each according to their needs. Although the two are characterized by
converting solid substances in liquid, more or less dense, it is important to know
their differences.

First, if you are looking for it is to make fruit or vegetable juices with pulp,
less calories and with a softer texture and palatable; your solution is the
blender. However, the blender has the peculiarity not take the skin of the fruit,
vitamins and fiber in the same way that the mixer. Moreover, precisely, not to take
advantage of all, you need more quantity to make your juices.

The mixer instead takes advantage of everything. It is far more nutritious, because
it provides all the vitamins and fiber fruit, vegetables or any food that we are
beating. Juice or smoothie obtained can be more dense precisely because of this,
but to mix more food can show you more creative. Both the mixer or blender, must be
cleaned after being used, although the blender can have more complexity for its
filter.

If you still doubt the difference between juicer, blender cup, the best you can do
is go to see some products and features they have. We will propose a model of each,
but there are now many different models from which you can choose according to your
needs.

Today, there are many very interesting juicers, but if you are looking for a mixer
that provides many functions, the Jata BT1022 Blender is stainless steel and fully
electronic. It has a 700W power and a glass jar with a capacity of 2 liters. It is
able to mix, stir, chop, liquefy; which makes it perfect for making tasty purees.
In addition, it is also capable of crushing ice. For added convenience, it has
integrated recogecables.

If you've decided on a blender, one of the leading brands in this sector is Taurus.
You can tap to make the Taurus Juicers Liquafresh, which gives you unlimited juice
through a continuous pour. It has 250W power, able to take all the vegetables. In
addition, this blender has dual security system.

Finish with a mixer or blender cup, it is important that you consider the pros and
cons of each of these products. As we said, you can try the two devices, because
each get a different result. However, the good thing about the mixer and blender is
that both contribute to your health and that of your family.

 More Blender Review at appinhome.net

 

 

Russians are getting years in jail for their social media ‘likes’

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TVER, Russia — Anastasia Bubeyeva shows a screenshot on her computer of a picture of a toothpaste tube with the words: “Squeeze Russia out of yourself!” For sharing this picture on a social media site with his 12 friends, her husband was sentenced this month to more than two years in prison.

As the Kremlin claims unequivocal support among Russians for its policies both at home and abroad, a crackdown is underway against ordinary social media users who post things that run against the official narrative. Here the Kremlin’s interests coincide with those of investigators, who are anxious to report high conviction rates for extremism. The Kremlin didn’t immediately comment on the issue.

At least 54 people were sent to prison for hate speech last year, most of them for sharing and posting things online, which is almost five times as many as five years ago, according to the Moscow-based Sova group, which studies human rights, nationalism and xenophobia in Russia. The overall number of convictions for hate speech in Russia increased to 233 last year from 92 in 2010.

A 2002 Russian law defines extremism as activities that aim to undermine the nation’s security or constitutional order, or glorify terrorism or racism, as well as calling for others to do so. The vagueness of the phrasing and the scope of offenses that fall under the extremism clause allow for the prosecution of a wide range of people, from those who set up an extremist cell or display Nazi symbols to anyone who writes something online that could be deemed a danger to the state. In the end, it’s up to the court to decide whether a social media post poses a danger to the nation or not.

In February 2014, when Ukraine was in the middle of a pro-European revolution, President Vladimir Putin signed a bill tightening penalties for non-violent extremist crimes such as hate speech. In July of that year, three months after Russia had annexed the Crimean Peninsula, he signed a bill making calls “to destroy” Russia’s territorial integrity a criminal offense punishable by up to five years in prison. The new amendment makes the denial of Russia’s claims on Crimea an even greater offense if the statement is made in the press or online, even on a private social media account.

Many of the shares that led to the recent rash of convictions were of things critical of Russia’s involvement in Ukraine.

This was true of the articles and images shared by Bubeyeva’s husband, a 40-year-old electrician from Tver, a sleepy provincial capital halfway between Moscow and St. Petersburg.

“Andrei Bubeyev thinks that he was charged as an example so that other ordinary citizens would be discouraged from expressing their opinion,” said his lawyer, Svetlana Sidorkina.

Bubeyev spent a lot of time online, sharing links to various articles on his VKontakte page and engaging in political debates on local news websites, his wife says.

In spring 2015, he left town to work on a rural construction site. After investigators couldn’t get through to him on the phone, they put him on a wanted list as an extremism suspect. When Bubeyev stopped by to visit his wife and young son at their country cottage, a SWAT team stormed in and arrested him.

His wife now lives alone with their 4-year-old son in a sparsely furnished apartment on the ground floor of a drab Soviet-era apartment block. After her husband was arrested, Anastasia Bubeyeva, 23, dropped out of medical school because she couldn’t find affordable day care for her child, who still wears an eye patch for an injury he suffered when he bumped his head during the raid.

Several months after his arrest, Bubeyev pleaded guilty to inciting hatred toward Russians and was sentenced to a year in prison. His offense was sharing articles, photos and videos from Ukrainian nationalist groups, including those of the volunteer Azov battalion fighting Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. Among them was an article about the graves of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine and a video describing Russia as a “fascist aggressor” and showing Russian tanks purportedly crossing into Ukraine.

Less than two weeks after the verdict, Bubeyev was charged again. This time, he was accused of calling for “acts of extremism” and “actions undermining Russia’s territorial integrity.” He had shared the picture of a toothpaste tube and also an article under the headline “Crimea is Ukraine” by a controversial blogger, who is in jail now, calling for military aggression against Russia.

“He was interested in politics, read the news, shared things, but he did it for himself. It was like collecting newspaper clippings,” his wife said. “His page wasn’t popular — he only had 12 friends. He couldn’t have aimed to coerce anyone into anything.”

The new charges were soon followed by a damning report on local television station Tverskoi Prospekt. The program showed an anonymous blogger complaining about social media users who voiced their support for Ukrainian troops and were “ready to back a coup in Russia and take up arms and kill people as the Nazis did.” The television report claimed that the blogger’s complaint had prompted the prosecution of the electrician.

On May 6, Bubeyev was convicted and sentenced to two years and three months in prison.

Also this month, a court in the Caspian Sea city of Astrakhan sentenced a man to two years in prison for his social media posts urging Ukrainians to fight “Putin’s occupying forces.”

In December, a court in Siberia sentenced a man to five years in prison for “inciting hatred” toward residents of eastern Ukraine in his video posts. In October, a court in southern Russia sent a political activist to prison for two years for an unsanctioned picket and posts on social media criticizing Putin and calling for southern Russia to join Ukraine.

The articles, photos and videos that landed Bubeyev in prison were posted on his page on VKontakte, Russia’s most popular social media network with 270 million accounts.

VKontakte founder Pavel Durov sold the site and fled Russia in 2014, claiming that he had come under presser from the security services for VKontakte to disclose personal data of the users of a group linked to a protest movement in Ukraine. The company is now controlled by the media holding of Kremlin-friendly billionaire Alisher Usmanov.

Alexander Verkhovsky, director of the Sova group, says roughly half of the convictions of hate speech online are about posts on VKontakte, which he said might be because its administration might be easier for the Russian police to deal with than that of foreign-owned social media.

Bubeyev’s defense claimed that the privacy settlings on his account made the articles he shared available only to him and his 12 friends. Sidorkina, his lawyer, said she has no explanation for how the security services found his posts unless they received the credentials to his account from VKontakte.

VKontakte declined to comment when contacted by The Associated Press.

Russia faced a surge of racially motivated attacks against Central Asian migrant workers in the 2000s, but the crime rates dropped drastically after dozens of neo-Nazis got lengthy prison sentences for extremism.

Rights activists and lawyers who have worked on extremism cases say the drop in violent hate crimes sent police and investigators scrambling to prosecute people for non-violent offenses to show a solid record of tackling extremism.

The Moscow-based Center for Economic and Political Reform said in a 23-page report on extremism law released this month that most convictions for this type of crime resulted in fines or a few days in custody, with the aim of boosting the crime statistics.

But as tensions with neighboring Ukraine heated up, courts across Russia began to hand out more and more prison sentences for hate speech, the report said.

Many of the hate speech convictions do deal with dubious content, but the severity of the punishment doesn’t seem to correspond to the level of public danger posed, said Verkhovsky of Sova.

“These cases are very arbitrary because there are lots more people out there who have done the same thing. Such enforcement of the law does not address or combat radical activities,” he said. “No one knows where the red line is: It’s like roulette.”

Business users get live chat in Office Online

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Microsoft's attempts to catch up with Google in the online collaboration space took a step forward Wednesday, when the company announced that it's giving business users live chat in Office Online.

The new feature will allow users to discuss documents stored in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business using chat sessions powered by Skype for Business.

When more than one person is working on a shared document inside Word, Excel, OneNote or PowerPoint Online, they'll see a chat button show up in the Web app's toolbar. When clicked, it'll open a chat sidebar so everyone with the document open can discuss it.

It's an enterprise-grade improvement to the Skype chat Microsoft already offers for consumers using Office Online, as part of the company's push to better compete with other productivity suites that feature real-time collaboration. Skype for Business chats compliment other functionality in Office Online, like support for real-time co-authoring of documents shared between users.

The chats aren't designed to replace traditional document collaboration tools like leaving comments and tracking changes, but they can help a team of people all looking at the same document to better work together in a more rapid-fire way.

It's a feature that has been core to Google's Docs productivity suite for quite some time, and this update means that businesses using Office 365 have another reason to consider sticking with Microsoft rather than switching to one of its competitors.

Microsoft has recently rolled out a number of other updates to Office, including new watch face support in Outlook on Android Wear and the launch of SharePoint for iOS, which the company announced earlier this month.

In addition, Microsoft is offering discounts for consumers who want to buy either Office 365 Home or its subscription-free Office Home and Student 2016 software.

When traffic snarls up, China’s street-straddling concept bus zooms above it all

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The Hyperloop may help humanity travel great distances at remarkable speeds, but how should we sustainably get from point A to B in congested cities? An innovative public transport design, revisited over the weekend at the 19th international High-Tech Expo in Beijing, might provide a solution.

The electric “straddling bus” is designed for capacity and efficiency, not necessarily for speed. It’s built extra wide to carry up to 1,400 passengers, and extra tall to allow any cars under seven feet to travel underneath, whether the bus is in motion or not. This is important because, as a public transport vehicle, the bus would stop and start frequently to load and unload passengers. And, with a top speed of 40 miles per hour, restless drivers would undoubtedly want to pass through.

The bus may also help cities become more environmentally friendly. Its size would allow it to replace 40 conventional buses and, since it’s powered by electricity, the design would reduce fuel consumption by some 800 tons and carbon emissions by nearly 2,500 tons every year, chief engineer, Song Youzhou, told China’s official news agency, Xinhua.

Song’s design isn’t new, however, and neither is the concept. Back in 2010, Song gained media attention when Beijing proposed plans to develop an infrastructure to accommodate his bus by year’s end. No tracks were ever laid so many assumed the project would remain an idea.

Treehugger reports that the idea of straddling buses was first proposed by two American architects, Lester Walker and Craig Hodgetts, in 1969. The concept was ambitious, even by todays standards, including computer-driven vehicles, perpetual motion, and “friction-free air cushion bearings” as wheels. Walker and Hodgetts suggested the design be used to modernize New York City.

To those still skeptical about the straddling bus, Song told Xinhua that a full-scale model of is currently being built in Changzhou, China and will be tested by August. If all goes well, the design may help curb the carbon emissions created by approximately 20 million new drivers who take to the road in China every year.

Firefox Market Share Is Now Bigger Than Microsoft

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What browser do you use on your laptop? Firefox has long been the underdog despite the feature-rich set available in its browser. Still, the tide is shifting. Firefox has now captured more market share than Microsoft has with both its browsers. However, the bigger question is does it really matter since Google Chrome has almost double the market share of both these competitors combined.

The latest figures show that Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer now have about 15.5 percent of the market, down from 15.8 percent in March. Firefox, on the other hand, now sits at 15.6 percent of the market, beating both Microsoft’s browsers combined totals.

Of course the bad news for both companies is that despite this shift both platforms are down as Google’s Chrome browser continues to scoop up more of the market, now sitting at 60.5 percent, up from 59 percent in February.

Why is Microsoft faltering? It seems the new Edge browser has failed to impress consumers as much as they would have hoped with the launch of Windows 10. Some have blamed this lack of interest in the limitations of the browser, such as not being able to install any add-ons or plug-ins to enhance the browser’s functionality.

Others believe it is because when you upgrade to Windows 10, your existing apps remain. This means that many Windows 10 adopters haven’t made the switch as they simply stuck with the browser they were already using.

Chrome is the big winner in the last few months, taking more and more market share away from all of the other browsers out there. If the trend continues, Chrome’s share of the market will be more than double that of the others combined.

Other browsers out there, such as Safari and Opera, have remained unchanged for months, capturing a combined total of 8.4 percent.

The browser wars are one of the fiercest battles ever to rage in the PC world. Beginning in the 90s when Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer as a competitor to Netscape and continuing through to today, the war is never ending. Sure some of the players have changed, but the battle still rages. Interesting to note, Firefox was originally based on some of Netscape’s code back in the day. While it has had many changes and is really different today, in some ways it seems Netscape is getting its revenge against Microsoft after so many years.

The biggest question that remains today is what all of these other players will do to combat the ever growing dominance of Google Chrome. Will there be anything they can do? Or are we seeing another repeat of Microsoft’s web browser dominance? Time will tell. If history does repeat itself, don’t expect Google Chrome to reign supreme forever.

What do you think? Is this good news for Firefox or are we really seeing bad news cloaked in a silver lining? Sound off about what you think in the comments below. Also, I would love to hear which browser you prefer to use for all of your surfing needs today? Let me know and we can get our own little informal survey going.

This one little trick will break your phone addiction

If you’re one of those people who can’t stop checking their phone every five minutes, then this life hack is for you.

Most of us are extremely dependent on our smartphones, but it’s all too easy to become addicted to constantly checking them for notifications and updates.

In fact, polls have suggested that the average Brit can’t go for an hour without checking their smartphone.

If that sounds all too familiar, then this hack could revolutionise your relationship with your phone and boost your productivity at the touch of a button.

This funny video from The Atlantic explains that the solution to your phone addiction could be as simple as dulling down your iPhone display.

The video explains that colourful phone screens encourage us to check our devices constantly – and it’s no accident that red is the universal colour for the notification bubbles which pop up from social media apps.

The colour red excites our brains, prompting us to tap the app right away to check the notification.

But this can all be beaten by setting your iPhone display to a boring – but useful – greyscale.

The grey doesn’t stimulate our brains in the same way that bright colours do, reducing the temptation to be distracted by our phones.

And, whilst it may be a bit depressing at first, greying-up your iPhone could work wonders for your productivity.

You can find this sombre option in the settings menu, under the general options.

Click on the accessibility menu, and turn on greyscale to take the colour out of your display.

This only affects the screen itself, meaning that if you take a screenshot, it will still come out in full colour.

As the video explains, this useful hack will revolutionise your relationship with your iPhone but, unfortunately for Android users, the greyscale option doesn’t come with every device.

James Hamblin, senior editor of The Atlantic, says: “There’s a reason that every notification on your phone is red.

“It is a colour that stimulates excitement in the brain.

“Say you find yourself checking your phone too much and you want to break the habit.

“Put it in greyscale and you’ll end up checking your phone much less and appreciating more of the beauty in the natural world.”

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