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Media

Analyzing YouTube's Audio Fingerprinter 116

Posted by timothy from the streeeeeehtch-thiiiiingsss-ouuuuuut dept.
Al Benedetto writes "I stumbled across this article which analyzes the YouTube audio content identification system in-depth. Apparently, since YouTube's system has no transparency, the behaviors had to be determined based on dozens of trial-and-error video uploads. The author tries things like speed/pitch adjustment, the addition of background noise, as well as other audio tweaks to determine exactly what you'd need to adjust before the fingerprinter started mis-identifying material. From the article: 'When I muted the beginning of the song up until 0:30 (leaving the rest to play) the fingerprinter missed it. When I kept the beginning up until 0:30 and muted everything from 0:30 to the end, the fingerprinter caught it. That indicates that the content database only knows about something in the first 30 seconds of the song. As long as you cut that part off, you can theoretically use the remainder of the song without being detected. I don't know if all samples in the content database suffer from similar weaknesses, but it's something that merits further research.'"
Space

Scientists Discover Exoplanet Less Than Twice the Mass of Earth 201

Posted by Soulskill from the it's-so-small dept.
Snowblindeye writes with this excerpt from the European Southern Observatory: "Well-known exoplanet researcher Michel Mayor today announced the discovery of the lightest exoplanet found so far. The planet, 'e,' in the famous system Gliese 581, is only about twice the mass of Earth. The team also refined the orbit of the planet Gliese 581 d, first discovered in 2007, placing it well within the habitable zone, where liquid water oceans could exist. Planet Gliese 581 e orbits its host star — located only 20.5 light-years away in the constellation Libra ('the Scales') — in just 3.15 days. 'With only 1.9 Earth-masses, it is the least massive exoplanet ever detected and is, very likely, a rocky planet,' says co-author Xavier Bonfils from Grenoble Observatory. Being so close to its host star, the planet is not in the habitable zone. But another planet in this system appears to be. ... The planet furthest out, Gliese 581 d, orbits its host star in 66.8 days. 'Gliese 581 d is probably too massive to be made only of rocky material, but we can speculate that it is an icy planet that has migrated closer to the star,' says team member Stephane Udry. The new observations have revealed that this planet is in the habitable zone, where liquid water could exist. '"d" could even be covered by a large and deep ocean — it is the first serious "water world" candidate,' continued Udry."
Security

Attacking Local Browser Storage 28

Posted by CmdrTaco from the ripe-for-pwnage dept.
CrazyCanucklehead writes "At the Blackhat security conference in Washington, DC, researcher Michael Sutton has detailed how common XSS flaws in web applications employing (Google) Gears and HTML 5 Database Storage can leave local databases wide open to attack. This comes just as Gears is starting to take off, and just yesterday Google demonstrated a beta version of offline Gmail on phones, thanks to HTML 5 support in WebKit-based browsers, such as those used by Android and the iPhone. Sutton drove home the point by walking through a real world example on commercial site Paymo.biz, which has thankfully since been fixed."
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Wozniak Heeds the Call of the Motherboard 2

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is going back to work as chief scientist at Fusion-io, a start-up company that tweaks computers to let them tap vast amounts of storage at very quick rates. In the early days of Apple, Wozniak stood out as one of Silicon Valley's most creative engineers demonstrating a knack for elegant computer designs that made efficient use of components and combined many features into a cohesive package and Wozniak will do similar work at Fusion-io, although this time with larger server computers and storage systems rather than PCs. "I have a pretty quiet life, and I like to watch technology evolve," says Wozniak. "In this case, I like the people and the product, and said I would like some greater involvement." Fusion-io packs flash chips together on a module that gives quick access to data with performance comparable to DRAM and storage capacity on par with today's hard disks. A $10,000 module from Fusion-io can handle much of the work usually done by storage systems costing more than $100,000 sold by EMC, NetApp and others. The idea of eliminating a middleman — in this case, a storage maker — appealed to Wozniak's penchant for efficient hardware designs. "In my opinion, it's absolutely a game-changing product." Would Wozniak like to return to Apple someday? "I have thought about that in recent years, but it's not on my mind at all right now," he says. "I think I have a better place at smaller companies looking at new ideas.""

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