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Submission + - Uber Plans To Kill Surge Pricing With Machine Learning (npr.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Surge pricing is a familiar term for any regular Uber rider — or driver. It's when you call an Uber, and the price of a ride is two, three, or four times more as a result of greater demand brought on by a sporting event or weather event nearby. For riders, it's an annoyance, but for drivers, it's a perk as it usually results in more pocket change. Inside Uber, surge pricing is considered a market failure, and a problem to be solved. "That's where machine learning comes in. That's where the next generation comes in," says Jeff Schneider, engineering lead at Uber Advanced Technologies Center. "Because now we can look at all this data, and we can start to make predictions." Everyone knows that when a Beyonce concert ends, for example, there's going to be a lot of demand for Uber drivers. Schneider explains, "[What's harder] is to find those Tuesday nights when it's not even raining and for some reason there's demand — and to know that's coming. That's machine learning." With enough of the right data inputs, computer algorithms can do the research that Uber drivers already do — only better, "so the surge pricing never even has to happen," Schneider says.

Submission + - Sourceforge Hijacks the Nmap Sourceforge Account (seclists.org) 2

Submitted by vivaoporto
vivaoporto writes: Gordon Lyon (better known as Fyodor, author of nmap and maintainer of the internet security resource sites insecure.org, nmap.org, seclists.org, and sectools.org) warns on the nmap development mailing list that the Sourceforge Nmap account was hijacked from him.

According to him the old Nmap project page (located at http://sourceforge.net/projects/nmap/, screenshot) was changed to a blank page and its contents were moved to a new page (http://sourceforge.net/projects/nmap.mirror/, screenshot) which controlled by sf-editor1 and sf-editor3, in pattern mirroring the much discussed the takeover of GIMP-Win page discussed last week on Ars Technica, IT World and eventually this week Slashdot.

That happens after Sourceforge promises to stop "presenting third party offers for unmaintained SourceForge projects. At this time, we present third party offers only with a few projects where it is explicitly approved by the project developer, or if the project is already bundling third party offers."

To their credit Fyodor states that "So far they seem to be providing just the official Nmap files (as long as you don't click on the fake download buttons) and we haven't caught them trojaning Nmap the way they did with GIMP" but reiterates "that you should only download Nmap from our official SSL Nmap site: https://nmap.org/download.html"

Submission + - Linux Kernel Switching To Linux v4.0, Coming With Many New Addons (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Following polling on Linus Torvald's Google+ page, he's decided to make the next kernel version Linux 4.0 rather than Linux 3.20. Linux 4.0 is going to bring many big improvements besides the version bump with there being live kernel patching, pNFS block server support, VirtIO 1.0, IBM z13 mainframe support, new ARM SoC support, and many new hardware drivers and general improvements. Linux 4.0 is codenamed "Hurr durr I'ma sheep."

Submission + - New French Law Prohibits After-Hours Work Emails

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Lucy Mangan reports at The Guardian that a new labor agreement in France means that employees must ignore their bosses' work emails once they are out of the office and relaxing at home – even on their smartphones. Under the deal, which affects a million employees in the technology and consultancy sectors (including the French arms of Google, Facebook, and Deloitte), employees will also have to resist the temptation to look at work-related material on their computers or smartphones – or any other kind of malevolent intrusion into the time they have been nationally mandated to spend on whatever the French call la dolce vita. “We must also measure digital working time," says Michel De La Force, chairman of the General Confederation of Managers. "We can admit extra work in exceptional circumstances but we must always come back to what is normal, which is to unplug, to stop being permanently at work.” However critics say it will impose further red tape on French businesses, which already face some of the world's tightest labor laws. However according to Simon Kelner French productivity levels outstrip those of Britain and Germany, and French satisfaction with their quality of life is above the OECD average. "No wonder, we may say. We'd all like to take a couple of hours off for lunch, washed down with a nice glass of Côtes du Rhône, and then switch our phones off as soon as we leave work. It's just that our bosses won't let us."

Submission + - Canada halts online tax returns in wake of Heartbleed (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: Canada Revenue Agency has halted online filing of tax returns by the country's citizens following the disclosure of the Heartbleed security vulnerability that rocked the Internet this week. The country's Minister of National Revenue wrote in a Twitter message https://twitter.com/KerryLynne... on Wednesday that interest and penalties will not be applied to those filing 2013 tax returns after April 30, the last date for filing the returns, for a period equal to the length of the service disruption. The agency has suspended public access to its online services as a preventive measure to protect the information it holds, while it investigates the potential impact on tax payer information, it said.

Submission + - Pinterest Reveals its First Transparency Report

Submitted by SmartAboutThings
SmartAboutThings writes: There’s been a lot of brouhaha surrounding privacy these days, and despite the fact that Pinterest isn’t among the most targeted websites when it comes to government data requests, the company, which is said to have near 80 million users, has decided to make public its first ever transparency report. Given the nature of the service and the fact that it is much smaller than Facebook, it was only natural not to expect too many data requests. According to Pinterest’s report, from July to December 2013, the company has received only 7 warrants, 5 subpoenas, 1 civil subpoena, and 0 other requests about 13 user accounts. Compare that to Microsoft which has received more than 35,000 requests during the second half of last year while Facebook received somewhere around 15,000.

Submission + - Hacking Of US Navy Extensive, Repair Cost $10M And 4 Months. Upgrades Needed

Submitted by cold fjord
cold fjord writes: The Australian reports, "Iran's infiltration of a US Navy computer network was far more extensive than previously thought ... hackers targeted the ... network used by ... the Navy to host websites, store non-sensitive information and handle voice, video and data communications. The network has 800,000 users ... “It was a real big deal,” said the senior US official. “It was a significant penetration ...” ... the penetration allowed the Iranians to conduct surveillance on the Navy’s and Marine Corps’ unclassified networks ... the cost to repair the Navy network ... was approximately $US10 million. ... The attack and other cyberthreats prompted a broader review of Navy and DoD network security and upgrades ... were needed. The added defences are expected to cost several hundred million dollars ... within three weeks of the intrusion, officials understood the full scope of the attack and put in place a plan to try and push the intruders out. ... the unclassified network was taken down twice for upgrades ... officials were surprised at the skills of the Iranian hackers. Previously, their tactics had been far cruder ... denial of service attacks ..." — Also at Fox News.

Submission + - Healthcare organizations under siege from cyberattacks, study says (chicagotribune.com)

Submitted by BigVig209
BigVig209 writes: A new study set to be officially released Wednesday found that networks and Internet-connected devices in places such as hospitals, insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies are under siege and in many cases have been infiltrated without their knowledge.

The study was conducted by Norse, a Silicon Valley cybersecurity firm, and SANS, a security research institute. In the report, the groups found from September 2012 to October 2013 that 375 healthcare organizations in the U.S. had been compromised, and in many cases are still compromised because they have not yet detected the attacks.

Submission + - Engineers Invent Acoustic Equivalent of One-Way Glass

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Up until now, acoustic waves traveling between two points in space always exhibited a basic symmetry summed up with the phrase, “if you can hear, you can also be heard.” Not anymore as Tia Ghose reports at Live Science that a team at UT Austin has created a “nonreciprocal acoustic circulator," the first step that could lead to the sound equivalent of a one-way mirror.” All waves — whether visible light, sound, radio or otherwise — have a physical property known as time reversal symmetry so a wave sent one way can always be sent back. For radio waves, researchers figured out how to break this rule using magnetic materials that set electrons spinning in one direction. The resulting radio waves detect the difference in the material in one direction versus the other, preventing reverse transmission. To accomplish the feat with sound waves, the team created a cavity loaded with tiny CPU fans that spin the air with a specific velocity. The air is spinning in one direction, so the flow of air "feels" different to the wave in one direction versus the other, preventing backward transmission. As a result, sound waves can go in, but they can't go the other way. The result is one-directional sound. With such a device, people can hear someone talking, but they themselves cannot be heard.The findings will likely lead to many useful applications, says Sebastien Guenneau "I would be surprised if sound industries do not pick up this idea. This could have great applications in sound insulation of motorways, music studios, submarines and airplanes."

Submission + - Building Deception Into Encryption Software (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by holy_calamity
holy_calamity writes: MIT Technology Review reports on a new cryptosystem designed to protect stolen data against attempts to break encryption by brute force guessing of the password or key. Honey Encryption serves up plausible fake data in response to every incorrect guess of the password. If the attacker does eventually guess correctly, the real data should be lost amongst the crowd of spoof data. Ari Juels, who invented the technique and was previously chief scientist at RSA, is working on software to protect password managers using the technique.

Submission + - Snowden joins Daniel Ellsberg on board of Freedom of the Press Foundation (pressfreedomfoundation.org)

Submitted by sunbird
sunbird writes: Edward Snowden is joining the board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit committed to defending public-interest journalism which exposes law-breaking in government. The foundation is presently raising money and awareness for a variety of open-source encryption tools. Please consider donating to my favorite: the LEAP Encryption Access Project.

Submission + - Europol, Microsoft Target 2-million Strong ZeroAccess Click Fraud Botnet

Submitted by tsu doh nimh
tsu doh nimh writes: Authorities in Europe joined Microsoft Corp. this week in disrupting "ZeroAccess," a vast botnet that has enslaved more than two million PCs with malicious software in an elaborate and lucrative scheme to defraud online advertisers. KrebsOnSecurity.com writes that it remains unclear how much this coordinated action will impact the operations of ZeroAccess over the long term, but for now the PCs infected with the malware remain infected and awaiting new instructions. ZeroAccess employs a peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture in which new instructions and payloads are distributed from one infected host to another. The actions this week appear to have targeted the servers that deliver a specific component of ZeroAccess that gives infected systems new instructions on how to defraud various online advertisers, including Microsoft. While this effort will not disable the ZeroAccess botnet (the infected systems will likely remain infected), it should allow Microsoft to determine which online affiliates and publishers are associated with the miscreants behind ZeroAccess, since those publishers will have stopped sending traffic directly after the takedown occurred. Europol has a released a statement on this action, and Microsoft has published a large number of documents related to its John Doe lawsuits intended to unmask the botnet the ZeroAccess operators and shut down the botnet.

Submission + - India's Mars Mission back on track after hiccup!

Submitted by rahultyagi
rahultyagi writes: After running into some problems in its 4th orbit raising maneuver 2 days ago, Mangalyaan (India's Mars Orbiter Mission) seems back on track now. A supplementary burn lasting ~304 seconds was completed today, raising the apogee of MOM to 118642 km — the intended apogee after the original 4th orbit raising maneuver. After the glitch two days ago, ISRO again seems to be on track to become the first entity to have a successful mars mission on its first attempt. Though, of course, there are quite a few things that might still go wrong before this can be called a successful mission. Let's all hope that a year from now we are all celebrating the entry of another nation into the small club capable of successful interplanetary missions.

Submission + - Amazon Gets Blow-back from Kindle Sales at Small Shops Plan (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Rambo Tribble
Rambo Tribble writes: No sooner had Amazon revealed their plan to offer independent book shops the Kindle for re-sale, along with a kick-back on e-book purchases, than the fur began to fly. It appears the shops view the plan as Amazon-assisted suicide. Given the apparent terms of the deal, it looks like they may have a point. Amazon may well have done themselves more harm than good with this ploy.

Submission + - Microsoft and Facebook Launch Internet Bug Bounty Program

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft and Facebook today jointly launched a new initiative called the Internet Bug Bounty program. In short, the two companies are looking to secure the Internet stack by rewarding anyone and everyone who hacks it, and responsibly discloses vulnerabilities they find. The minimum bounty for hacking any component of the Internet is $5,000.

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