Google releases update on how their self driving cars work

For those of you who do not already know about Google's self driving cars, this might be a bit of a jaw dropper, but its still true. As true as...well its true.

so now that we are clear with that, the news is that Google has come out with how the whole thing works. Here is the video:

Facebook acquires fitness mobile app maker ProtoGeo

Facebook has now acquired a 2 year-old helinski company, ProtoGeo. The company, consisting of only 10 employes is the maker of the Moves app, a mobile app that can track the distance consumers walk or run and measure calorieds burned. This , i suppose, could be defined as Facebook's way of gaining entree into the market for fitness and health monitoring technology.

Although Facebook hasn't yet disclosed how much was paid for the company, a spokesman for Facebook made it clear that the price for ProtoGeo was not anywhere near what the company had paid for other higher-profile acquisitions recently.

Facebook, as we all know, started this year with a shopping spree, which included buying Whatsapp, a mobile messaging service, for $19 billion in February and virtual reality headset maker, Oculus VR for $2.3 billion a couple of weeks after.

Facebopok said Moves, which would continue to operate as a separate app fits into its recent strategy of offering a variety of standalone mobile apps, such as Instagram for photo-sharing, Facebook Messenger for messaging, and Whatsapp.

Sampo Karjalainen, whose official title is "designer CEO" of ProtoGeo, began working at Facebook's Menlo Park headquaters last week, the Facebook spokeman said.

The Moves app has been downloaded more than 4b million times for Android and iPhone, according to ProtoGeo.

By: Ezekiel .T. Ogidan

The Heart bleed bug - CVE-2014-0160

A major new security vulnerability called "Heartbleed" was discovered on monday night with severe implications to the entire web. The bug can scrape an entire server's memory, where sensitive data is stored,including private data such as user names, passwords, credit card numbers and so on.

This is an EXTREMELY serious issue that has affected about 500,000 servers, according to Netcraft, an internet research firm.

The problem is in open source software, openSSL, which is widely used to encrypt web communications.

According to this tweet by Ronald Prins, yahoo is absolutely vulnerable to the heartbleed bug (assigned CVE-2014-0160)

We were able to scrape a Yahoo username & password via the Heartbleed bug. Censored example in our blog:http://t.co/iBPqitjAFa
— Ronald Prins (@cryptoron) April 8, 2014 

for more information as to the bug, as well as a tester to check the vulnerability of a server, go HERE

By: Ezekiel.T.Ogidan

Facebooks new face recognition System - Deep Face

 
We have seen face recognition technology in several Sci-Fi movies and it’s not new in the market. Even with the technology advancement, it is becoming cheaper, faster and easily available. A new dimension of possibilities has popped up with Facebook’s new face recognition system, "DeepFace". This technology can be boon for the security agencies, however, people anonymity won’t be possible.

This new technology has the ability to even predict who a user is trying to tag in a photo, since tags are not so accurate.This technology, they said, will operate with "near human accuracy" so that user wont have to tag photo´s manually in the future.

It actually maps 3D facial features, creates a colorless model, and then narrows the specific characterization. The Facebook API group said that its accuracy method scored 97.25%, which is closely to human accuracy score of 97.5%.

The researchers said in the released report that, “In modern face recognition, the conventional pipeline consists of four stages: detect => align => represent => classify. We revisit both the alignment step and the representation step by employing explicit 3D face modeling in order to apply a piecewise affine transformation, and derive a face representation from a nine-layer deep neural network.”









To help them develop this technology, the company looked at 4.4 million tagged faces from the 4,030 users in its network to test the system. This will help it to better recognize the specific features of each user.

“Thus we trained it on the largest facial dataset to-date, an identity labeled dataset of four million facial images belonging to more than 4,000 identities, where each identity has an average of over a thousand samples. The learned representations coupling the accurate model-based alignment with the large facial database generalize remarkably well to faces in unconstrained environments, even with a simple classifier.”the researchers said.

The company aims to bridge the gap between computer and human accuracy. However, we still have to see how the technology will run to strike the balance on privacy issues.

by: Ezekiel.T.Ogidan

Businesses scramble to upgrade computers as support for windows XP ends tomorrow

As the support for windows 12-year old platform, the windows XP ends on Tuesday, businesses are now scrambling to upgrade computers from obvious threats that windows´ decision could have on them.

Municipal infrastructure operated by local governments using Windows XP could be vulnerable to security threats after the date, but luckily, most ATMs that use XP software will continue to get security updates.

Computech, Watertown, has been swamped with business from companies seeking to upgrade Windows XP software over the past year, said owner Jordan R. Durant, who launched the small business two years ago. The majority of businesses and residents across the north country still operate under the Windows XP platform, he said, and many are still reacting to news of its demise. He said the business is upgrading about nine computers a week to run on the Windows 7 platform, for which Microsoft actively provides security updates and patches to safeguard its network from viruses and hackers.

“Any business that stores patient records or credit card information is in a mad dash to move to Windows 7 or 8,” said Mr. Durant, whose business provides information-technology support to some 50 businesses in Watertown, and about 150 in outlying communities in Jefferson County. “If affects hospitals, doctor’s offices, dentists and anyone who has patient records or information.”

After Tuesday, any health care business that stores patient records under the Windows XP will be in noncompliance with the Health Insurance Privacy and Portability Act’s Security Rule, Mr. Durant, 30, said. In addition, any business that conducts credit card transactions using computers with Windows XP will be in noncompliance with payment card industry standards.

Some companies have made significant investments during the past year to upgrade computer systems, Mr. Durant said. Computech charges about $150 per computer to complete an installation and data transfer needed to upgrade Windows XP systems. Sometimes computer hardware needs to be fully replaced to complete those upgrades, which could cost anywhere from $690 to $750 per terminal for a processor with 4 gigabytes of RAM.

But businesses that use Windows XP for other tasks at the workplace don’t need to rush yet to replace the operating system, Mr. Durant said. Any third-party anti-virus software that receives real-time support could be used to provide security in Microsoft’s absence, he said.
“It’s like a game of cat and mouse, because now that Windows XP is no longer supported with security updates or patches, you’re going to see companies that offer virus protection support Windows XP,” he said.

by:Ezekiel .T. Ogidan
source: watertown daily times