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Submission + - Target Says Encrypted PIN Data Taken in Breach 1

Submitted by danlip
danlip writes: Target says Encrypted PIN Data Taken in Breach but doesn't think they can be unencrypted by whoever may have taken them because they never had the key in their system. The article has no details on exactly how they were encrypted, but it doesn't seem like it would be hard to brute force it given that there are only 10^4 possibilities for each PIN.

Submission + - Federal judge rules NSA data collection legal (foxnews.com) 2

Submitted by CheezburgerBrown .
CheezburgerBrown . writes: A federal judge in New York has ruled the National Security Agency's massive data collection program is legal, one week after another federal judge ruled the opposite.

The conflicting rulings increase the likelihood that the challenges could someday end up before the Supreme Court.

The ruling on Friday came from District Judge William H. Pauley III, in the case of the ACLU vs. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence. The judge agreed with the federal government's request to dismiss the court.

copy and pasted from fox news

Submission + - NASA Could Explore Titan With Squishable 'Super Ball Bot' (ieee.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: IEEE Spectrum reports on a rover design being developed at NASA Ames Research Center: Super Ball Bot. The premise is that the rover's brain and scientific equipment would be suspended in the middle on a structure made of rigid rods and elastic cables. The rods and cables would be deformable, allowing the rover to roll over complex terrain without damage. This design would be ideal for exploring a place like Saturn's moon Titan. Its atmosphere is thick enough that a probe could drop the rover from 100km above the surface, and it would survive the fall without a parachute. 'In a scenario studied by the team, the robot could be collapsed to a very compact configuration for launch. Once it reaches the moon, it would pop open and drop to the surface, flexing and absorbing the force of impact. By shortening and lengthening the cables that connect its rigid components, the ball bot could then roll about the surface. These same cables could be used to pull back parts of the robot, so that science instruments at the center could be exposed and used.'

Submission + - Neural Net Learns Breakout By Watching The Game On Screen--Then Thrashes Humans (medium.com)

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: A curious thing about video games is that computers have never been very good at playing them like humans--by looking at a monitor and judging actions accordingly using. Sure, they're pretty good if they have direct access to the program itself but "hand-to-eye-co-ordination" has never been their thing. But now our superiority in this area is coming to an end. A team of AI specialists in London have created a neural network that learns to play games simply by looking at the RGB output from the console. And they've tested it successfully on a number of games from the legendary Atari 2600 system from the 1980s. The method is relatively straightforward. To simplify the visual part of the problem, the system down-samples the Atari's 128-colour, 210x160 pixel image to create an 84x84 grayscale version. Then it simply practices repeatedly to learn what to do. That's time consuming but fairly simple since at any instant in time during a game, a player can choose from a finite set actions that the game allows: move to the left, move to the right, fire and so on. So the task for any player—human or otherwise—is to choose an action at each point in the game that maximises the eventual score. The researchers say that after learning Atari classics such as Breakout and Pong, the neural net can then thrash expert human players. However, the neural net still struggles to match average human performance in games such as Seaquest, Q*bert and, most important of all, Space Invaders. So there's hope for us yet...just not for very much longer.

Submission + - Battlefield 4 banned in China (techienews.co.uk)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: The Chinese government has officially banned Battlefield 4 stating that Electronic Arts has developed a game that not only threatens national security of the country, but is also a form of cultural invasion. The country’s Ministry of Culture has issued a notice banning all material retailed to the game in any form including the game itself, related downloads, demos, patches and even news reports. According to reports on PCGames.com.cn [Chinese language], Battlefield 4 has been characterized as illegal game on the grounds that the game endangers national security and cultural aggression.

Submission + - Video Games Charity Raises Over $10 Million

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Gaming for Good, a charity established and fronted by celebrity gamer Bachir 'Athene' Boumaaza, has this week passed the significant milestone. At time of writing the group's tally stands at a tame $10 million. It works like this: game publishers donate games to the charity, without asking for profit. Regular folks buy points, which can then be exchanged to games on the website. Finally the money used to buy the points goes to charity. So in one way they're really just buying games, but instead of the money going to publishers, it's going to a good cause. Money raised is going to the international charity Save The Children, where it can be used on health programs in Malawi, Indonesia and Bangladesh.
Security

Submission + - Are UK police hacking file-sharers' computers? (zdnet.co.uk)

Submitted by
superglaze
superglaze writes: "Following its takedown earlier this week of the music blog RnBXclusive, the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) has claimed that "a number of site users have deleted their download histories" in response. Given that the site didn't host copyright-infringing files itself, how do they know? We've asked, but SOCA refuses to discuss its methods. A security expert has pointed out that, if they were hacking using Trojans, the police would themselves have been breaking the law. Added fun fact: SOCA readily admits that the scare message it showed visitors to the taken-down site was written "with input from industry"."

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