An anonymous reader writes: Apple's first disclosed acquisition of 2016 is software company Emotient, which specializes in reading users' expressions while they operate computers. Emotient uses AI software to break down micro-emotions shown on each face in a video frame and quantify it into three indicators: is the subject paying attention to the advertising, are they emotionally engaged, and are they showing a positive or negative emotion? The faces are pixelated to provide user anonymity without sacrificing the expression.

Deathlizard writes with a report at Engadget that when this year's "Forbes 30 Under 30" list came out , "it featured a prominent security researcher. Other researchers were pleased to see one of their own getting positive attention, and visited the site in droves to view the list. On arrival, like a growing number of websites, Forbes asked readers to turn off ad blockers in order to view the article. After doing so, visitors were immediately served with pop-under malware, primed to infect their computers, and likely silently steal passwords, personal data and banking information."

StartsWithABang writes: The news has been aflame with reports that North Korea detonated a hydrogen bomb on January 6th, greatly expanding its nuclear capabilities with their fourth nuclear test and the potential to carry out a devastating strike against either South Korea or, if they're more ambitious, the United States. The physics of what a nuclear explosion actually does and how that signal propagates through the air, oceans and ground, however, can tell us whether this was truly a nuclear detonation at all, and if so, whether it was fusion or fission. From all the data we've collected, this appears to be nothing new: just a run-of-the-mill fission bomb, with the rest being a sensationalized claim. (Related: Yesterday's post about how seismic data also points to a conventional nuke, rather than an H-bomb.)

An anonymous reader writes with a link to this article at Boy Genius Report about a software upgrade now hitting Tesla owners, which begins: Tesla earlier today began pushing out version 7.1 of its software to Model S and Model X owners and, suffice it to say, it's a doozy of a software update. While we'll get to the full changelog shortly, we first wanted to highlight a feature called Summon which enables users to park their cars without having to be inside it. Conversely, it also lets Tesla owners summon their cars that already happen to be parked.

itwbennett writes: Since June, researchers have found and reported several dozen serious flaws in antivirus products from vendors such as Kaspersky Lab, ESET, Avast, AVG Technologies, Intel Security (formerly McAfee) and Malwarebytes. Many of those vulnerabilities would have allowed attackers to remotely execute malicious code on computers, to abuse the functionality of the antivirus products themselves, to gain higher privileges on compromised systems and even to defeat the anti-exploitation defenses of third-party applications. And evidence suggests that attacks against antivirus products are both possible and likely. Some researchers believe that such attacks have already occurred, even though antivirus vendors might not be aware of them because of the very small number of victims. Among the emails leaked last year from Italian surveillance firm Hacking Team there is a document with exploits offered for sale by an outfit called Vulnerabilities Brokerage International. The document lists various privilege escalation, information disclosure and detection bypassing exploits for multiple antivirus products, and also a remote code execution exploit for ESET NOD32 Antivirus with the status 'sold.'

hypnosec writes: In a first kind of discovery in decades, researchers have created a new class of hybrid sound waves that are gentle enough to be used in biomedical devices. Known as "surface reflected bulk waves", the new class of sound waves are a hybrid of bulk waves and surface waves and have been created by a team at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. According to the team the new class of sound waves have already proved their worth in delivering vaccines and other drugs directly to the lung and are hopeful that their creation could lead to a revolution in stem cell therapy. As Dr Amgad Rezk, from RMIT's Micro/Nano Research Laboratory, explains, they have already dramatically improved the efficiency of an innovative new "nebuliser" that could deliver vaccines and other drugs directly to the lung in as little as 30 seconds [study abstract]. Researchers are hopeful that their work opens up the possibility of using stem cells more efficiently for treating lung disease enabling them to nebulise stem cells straight into a specific site within the lung to repair damaged tissue and this could be a real game changer for stem cell treatment in lungs as well as other organs.

An anonymous reader writes: The Free Software Foundation is conducting a survey to gather feedback on where they should be focusing their efforts over the next five years. Should they concentrate on IP issues, UX issues, or something else? Is their stance on Free Software versus Open Source a battle that's already lost, and should they compromise? What do users think an ideal world would look like in 2020? And how miserable could things get? Without the FSF (and GNU), today's computing landscape would sure look a lot different.

As manufacturing gets more distributed, it gets more anonymous in some ways: the parts for one computer might have been made in several countries, and even the assembly might have been split between more than one place; place of origin is complicated, and typically opaque for the purchaser of consumer goods. However, modern logistics and tracking mean that it doesn't have to be a mystery, and stages of a device's production can in theory be traced, which means that buyers and intermediaries can decide to buy essentially identical products and components based on factors like whether coffee is shade grown, or whether production line workers are treated in line with the buyer's own ethical demands. A slice from an article at Forbes about this kind of logistics-based practical ethics: An anonymous reader writes: Certain companies are taking this a step further, by using technology to assist workers in their day-to-day activities – for example, BMW is creating bespoke thermoplastic polyurethane thumb protectors for their factory workers. Others are working on ways of incentivizing behavior on top of these systems. Levi's is piloting a program where they offer cheaper short-term credit to companies that meet their safety levels. While it's true that this would result in an initial upfront cost, the whole reason CSR programs were created to begin with was to obtain legitimacy and the appearance of good corporate citizenship. If consumers wanted fair supply chains to be a priority, they could let their shopping habits speak louder than their words. Technologically speaking, we are not far off from a point where price tags could also include a QR code that has a geotagged history of all the places the item has been.

theodp writes: While past U.S. Presidents have had to contend with radio propaganda, President Obama also has to worry about online propaganda. On Friday, U.S. national security officials met with leaders in Silicon Valley seeking ideas for ways to curtail terrorists' use of social media and to use technology to "disrupt paths to radicalization to violence." The closed door meetup, which included Apple CEO Tim Cook and top execs from Facebook, Twitter and Google, occurred on the same day the White House also announced the creation of the Countering Violent Extremism Task Force, which will focus on using social media to counter online propaganda by Islamic State and other terrorist groups, and the State Department promised to revamp its online counter-messaging campaign.

An anonymous reader writes: Breaking the Enigma code is rightfully assessed to have significantly shortened World War Two by as much as two years. The genius of Alan Turing played a large role in building on the early successes of Polish mathematicians in continuing to pry messages out from Enigmas encryption. But Turing's genius might very well have counted for naught had it not been for the actions of Lieutenant-Commander David Balme, Royal Navy. On May 9, 1941, Lt-Cmdr Balme led a boarding party from the destroyer HMS Bulldog across freezing waters to storm Nazi U-boat U-110 where they seized the submarine's Enigma encryption device, along with the documents containing the top secret settings and procedures for sending messages. Under the greatest secrecy the Enigma and the accompanying documents were taken to Bletchley Park where they paved the way for breakthroughs in the efforts to defeat Enigma. Lt-Cmdr Balme was presented with a Bletchley badge and a certificate signed by British Prime Minister David Cameron in March. Local MP Dr. Julian Lewis said of him, "He played a crucial role in the winning of the Battle of the Atlantic at a very young age and I am proud to have counted him as a friend."

An anonymous reader writes: Cisco's Talos research team has managed to identify and partially shut down a cyber-criminal group that is using the RIG exploit kit to infect users with spambots via a malvertising campaign. Their investigation led them back to Russian ISP Eurobyte, who didn't bother answering critical emails and allowed the campaign to go on even today. In October 2015, Cisco's researchers also thwarted the activity of another group of cyber-criminals that made around $30 million from distributing ransomware.

StartsWithABang writes: With the launch of the Fermi satellite in the late 2000s, we began observing the highest energy photons in the Universe — gamma rays — all over the sky, to unprecedented precision. Produced from cosmic ray showers in space when high energy protons run into other, stationary protons, these gamma rays locate point sources from supermassive black holes to supernova remnants to pulsars. There is, additionally, a great correlation between the infrared sky and the gamma ray sky, since the great high-energy background scatters off of the diffuse infrared gas, producing gamma rays there as well. But while a great many sources can be correlated with known structures, Fermi reveals at least one unknown, intense behemoth that emits spectacularly in gamma rays.

jones_supa writes: Men have been advised to drink no more than seven pints of beer a week – the same as the maximum limit for women – in the first new drinking guidelines to be released by the UK's chief medical officers for 20 years. They also advise there is no safe level of drinking for either sex, and issued a stark warning that any amount of alcohol consumption increases the risk of developing a range of cancers, particularly breast cancer. David Spiegelhalter from University of Cambridge said: 'These guidelines define 'low-risk' drinking as giving you less than a 1% chance of dying from an alcohol-related condition.'

An anonymous reader writes: A project called 'Gridstrike' found that free and publicly available information can be used to determine the most critical electric substations in the US, which if attacked, could result in a nationwide blackout. Researchers from iSIGHT Partners used a combination of publicly available transmission substation information, maps, Google Earth, and grid congestion documentation, and drew correlations among the substations that serve the top ten cities in the US. They ID'ed 15 substations that if attacked and knocked offline would result in a nationwide blackout, they say. Their research took the spin of whether a homegrown terror group with little funding could get this crucial information. The study was inspired by the 2013 Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) study in 2013 that found that attacks on just nine electric substations in the U.S. could cause a blackout across the entire grid.

New submitter mmiscool writes: ESP8266 Basic is a project less than 6 moths old. It is open source and designed specifically for the internet of things. The ESP8266 microcontroller costs less than $3, and once the basic firmware is loaded to the device a user can connect to it using Wi-Fi and start programming right inside their web browser. No wires, no software or plugins to install. Just a simple text editor. There is now a community, primarily older folks who fell in love with Basic on the Commodore, who are using it for controlling a variety of projects. The code is amazingly simple and includes commands for interfacing with neo pixels, OLED displays, Temperature sensors, hobby servo motors and of course the blinky LED. It also provides commands for browser widgets that can be used to construct interfaces for the device like textboxes, buttons, sliders and dropdowns. The bottom line is that Basic is not dead, and has finally made its way into the internet of things. Make last year ran a three-part series on the chip (here's part one), but things have advanced quite a bit since then, when people were first noticing that the ESP8266 is more powerful than the tasks for which it was first marketed.