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Submission + - Crosswalks hacked to Musk and Zuckerberg (paloaltoonline.com)

Submitted by kevink707
kevink707 writes: Crosswalk buttons along the mid-Peninsula appear to have been hacked, so that when pressed, voices professing to be Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk begin speaking.

Videos taken at locations in Redwood City, Menlo Park and Palo Alto show various messages that begin to play when crosswalk buttons are hit. The voices appear to imitate how Zuckerberg and Musk sound.

Comment If clerks ever come... (Score 1) 276

by kevink707 (#64703854) Attached to: Locking Up Items To Deter Shoplifting Is Pushing Shoppers Online
I can likely order something from Amazon and have it delivered more quickly that getting a clerk to unlock a cabinet at my local Target. Maybe a slight exaggeration, however it has taken me over 20 minutes to get a cabinet unlocked on a recent shopping trip (including trying to call the store on my mobile and talking to customer service people (who do not have keys)).

Comment It's not just NYC (Score 1) 33

by kevink707 (#64621913) Attached to: NYC's Massive Link5G Towers Aren't Actually Providing 5G
In 2020 the streetlamp pole in front of my house in San Jose, CA was replaced with one having power and mounting brackets for a 5G antenna. 4 years later no 5G antenna has been installed. I regularly get Verizon salespeople coming by trying to sell me Verizon home Internet over 5G -- I point at the streetlamp pole and tell them as soon as Verizon actually installs 5G I will happily sign up for Verizon Home Internet.

Comment Maybe lack of negative influence (Score 1) 111

Maybe instead of being a positive evolutionary pressure it is lack of a negative one. It would be reasonable to guess that people with the 3rd artery are more likely to die from a serious arm injury which would be evolutionary pressure to only have 2 arteries. With the advent of modern medicine (and decrease of hand combat using sharp weapons) the risk from having the 3rd artery decrease so it is making a comeback. It would be interesting to know how prevalent it was thousands of years ago.

Submission + - Trend Micro set up a fake tech company and honeypot to study cyber-criminals (zdnet.com)

Submitted by DesScorp
DesScorp writes: In an effort to better understand the latest threats to IT systems, antivirus and security company Trend Micro created a fake tech company, complete with AI-generated photos of fake employees, in order to build a honeypot environment that looked like an actual, working tech factory environment. :

Malicious hackers are targeting factories and industrial environments with a wide variety of malware and cyberattacks including ransomware, cryptocurrency miners – and in some cases they're actively looking to shut down or disrupt systems. All of these incidents were spotted by researchers at cybersecurity company Trend Micro who built a honeypot that mimicked the environment of a real factory. The fake factory featured some common cybersecurity vulnerabilities to make it appealing for hackers to discover and target. To help make the honeypot as convincing as possible, researchers linked the desktops, networks and servers to a false company they called MeTech and created a website detailing how the manufacturer served clients in high-tech sectors including defence and aerospace – popular targets for hacking. The website even featured images and bios of people who supposedly worked for the false brand, with headshots generated by artificial intelligence in an effort to make the honeypot look as much like a legitimate company as possible.

Trend Micro even leaked details of system vulnerabilities in things like VNC access to further lure criminals in. The fake company was attacked by everyone from ransomware actors to crytocurrency miners, to hackers that did "recon" to look for possible industrial espionage data.

Submission + - Google Scientists Unveil the Biggest, Most Detailed Map of the Fly Brain Yet (hhmi.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a darkened room in Ashburn, Virginia, rows of scientists sit at computer screens displaying vivid 3-D shapes. With a click of a mouse, they spin each shape to examine it from all sides. The scientists are working inside a concrete building at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus, just off a street called Helix Drive. But their minds are somewhere else entirely – inside the brain of a fly. Each shape on the scientists’ screens represents part of a fruit fly neuron. These researchers and others at Janelia are tackling a goal that once seemed out of reach: outlining each of the fly brain’s roughly 100,000 neurons and pinpointing the millions of places they connect. Such a wiring diagram, or connectome, reveals the complete circuitry of different brain areas and how they're linked. The work could help unlock networks involved in memory formation, for example, or neural pathways that underlie movements.

Gerry Rubin, vice president of HHMI and executive director of Janelia, has championed this project for more than a decade. It’s a necessary step in understanding how the brain works, he says. When the project began, Rubin estimated that with available methods, tracing the connections between every fly neuron by hand would take 250 people working for two decades – what he refers to as “a 5,000 person-year problem.” Now, a stream of advances in imaging technology and deep-learning algorithms have yanked the dream of a fly connectome out of the clouds and into the realm of probability. High-powered customized microscopes, a team of dedicated neural proofreaders and data analysts, and a partnership with Google have sped up the process by orders of magnitude. Today, a team of Janelia researchers reports hitting a critical milestone: they’ve traced the path of every neuron in a portion of the female fruit fly brain they’ve dubbed the “hemibrain.” The map encompasses 25,000 neurons – roughly a third of the fly brain, by volume – but its impact is outsized. It includes regions of keen interest to scientists — those that control functions like learning, memory, smell, and navigation. With more than 20 million neural connections pinpointed so far, it’s the biggest and most detailed map of the fly brain ever completed.

Submission + - Y2K20 Parking Meter Software Glitch Causes Global SNAFU (gothamist.com)

Submitted by grunby
grunby writes: The NYC Department of Transportation said in a statement that parking meters are not currently accepting credit card payments and pre-paid parking cards. "The outage was caused by a configuration error in the credit-card payment software used by Parkeon, a vendor for automated parking systems around the world," the DOT wrote. "The software in the model of Parkeon meter used in New York City had established an end date of January 1, 2020 – and had never been updated by the company. Cities worldwide using the same meters/software began seeing a series of cascading credit card rejections, starting in Australia, as the calendar reached that date."

NYC DOT crews are now in the field reconfiguring the software at individual meters—the NY Times notes that NYC has 14,000 meters covering some 85,000 spaces, so it may take a little while longer to fix.

Comment Long time to read it (Score 1) 175

by kevink707 (#56863114) Attached to: 128TB SD Cards Are Coming
Assuming I did my math correctly, 128 TB at 985 Mb/second is 1.5 days to read the entire card (and I'm guessing writing would be slower). That seems awfully slow (or at least should be by the time 128 TB becomes reality).

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