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Comment Re:still no privacy (Score 1) 86

by jcreus (#39459833) Attached to: Can Translucency Save Privacy In the Cloud?

- when you hash a telephone number, a rainbowtable is easily generated

That's where salts are useful. When you MD5 or SHA1, add a random-but-constant string at the beginning of the to-be-hashed string. Rainbow tables will be far mor difficult, if not impossible. Instead of MD5'ing "slashdot", MD5 "f8ds9a03421314159_$!1337_jc0wikislashdot".
AI

Submission + - Militarizing Your Backyard with Python and AI (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Shooting squirrels with a water cannon might not seem to be a serious project, but it involves AI and a lot of hardware. Kurt Grandis took some cutting edge and open source AI tools, Python, an Arduino and a SuperSoaker and built the (almost) perfect squirrel hosing machine. The project involved Open Computer Vision (OpenCV), an a SVM learning procedure that he trained to tell the difference between a squirrel and a non-squirrel. After "perfecting" the classifier the hardware came next — a SuperSoaker Mark I was used as the "water cannon". A pair of servos were used to aim the gun and a third to pull the trigger.
If you want to see squirrels being soaked check out the video.

Comment Re:obviously (Score 5, Interesting) 429

by jcreus (#39327169) Attached to: Have Online Comment Sections Become Specious?
Slashdot, it must be said, continues to be a great source of insightful comments (a thing which is becoming extinct on the Internet lately). I think it can be put down to its great moderation system others lack, and the audience (you know, when we speak we usually know about the topic). It has grown in popularity and thus in spamming, but, again, it's filtered out. Congrats to the Slashdot team and community for making this happen. In fact, recently I read Slashdot basically for its comments. They give so much additional information/jokes/etc. to the original stories.
Android

Submission + - How a Web Link Can Take Control of Your Phone (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by dstates
dstates writes: Technology Review reports a chilling demonstration at the RSA security conference in which George Kurtz and colleagues from security startup CrowdStrike showed on stage that a real, unmodified Android phone could be hacked by a single web click. Kurtz, acted as a busy user who received a text message asking him to download an update to his phone's software. When he clicked on the link in that message, the phone's browser crashed and the device rebooted. Once restarted, the device appeared unchanged, but a silent, malicious app had been installed that relayed all his phone calls and text messages to the attacker, who could also track his location on a map. The bugs exploited are present in the distributions used by 90% of Android users worldwide.

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