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Medicine

Diet Sodas May Be Tied To Stroke, Dementia Risk (cnn.com) 223

Posted by msmash from the things-to-ponder dept.
Gulping down an artificially sweetened beverage not only may be associated with health risks for your body, but also possibly your brain, a new study suggests. From a report: Artificially sweetened drinks, such as diet sodas, were tied to a higher risk of stroke and dementia in the study, which published in the American Heart Association's journal Stroke on Thursday. The study sheds light only on an association, as the researchers were unable to determine an actual cause-and-effect relationship between sipping artificially sweetened drinks and an increased risk for stroke and dementia. Therefore, some experts caution that the findings should be interpreted carefully. No connection was found between those health risks and other sugary beverages, such as sugar-sweetened sodas, fruit juice and fruit drinks.

Submission + - Recording Keystroke Sounds Over Skype to Steal Passwords

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Researchers have known for a long time that acoustic signals from keyboards can be intercepted and used to spy on users, but those attacks rely on grabbing the electronic emanation from the keyboard. New research from the University of California Irvine shows that an attacker, who has not compromised a target’s PC, can record the acoustic emanations of a victim’s keystrokes and later reconstruct the text of what he typed, simply by listening over a VoIP connection.

The researchers found that when connected to a target user on a Skype call, they could record the audio of the user’s keystrokes. With a small amount of knowledge about the victim’s typing style and the keyboard he’s using, the researchers could accurately get 91.7 percent of keystrokes. The attack does not require any malware on the victim’s machine and simply takes advantage of the way that VoIP software acquires acoustic emanations from the machine it’s on.
Businesses

Tech Firms Have An Obsession With 'Female' Digital Servants (zdnet.com) 571

Posted by BeauHD from the female-personas dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Alexa, Tay, Siri, Cortana, Xiaoice, and Google Now. These technologies all have one thing in common -- they are digital servants aimed at a mass-market audience that feature a "female" voice or persona. And it's not just the voice or persona of the digital persona we interact with that is biased. The results of those interactions also demonstrate male favoritism. It took Apple more than four years to fix Siri's responses to questions about abortion services, and yet the company didn't seem to have any problem programming Siri to search for prostitutes and Viagra. Here's the gender breakdown for the tech workforce of each company:
Microsoft: 83.0% male, 16.9% female
Google: 82.0% male, 18.0% female
Apple: 79.0% male, 22.0% female
Amazon: 61.0% male, 39.0% female

Submission + - Bug In Steam Shows You Other Users' Account Details (kotaku.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Steam game distribution platform is suffering from a particularly bad bug right now. If you log in and try to look at your account details, you're shown the details of another user's account — seemingly picked at random. This includes, email address, last 4 digits of a phone number, whether SteamGuard (their two-factor authentication) is enabled, last the 2 digits of an associated credit card. If you play a game, Steam will show you as being logged in as somebody else while in that game. Many users are being shown pages in other languages, as they are mistaken for players in different regions. This bug follows an apparent DDoS attack that took the service down for several hours. The bug doesn't seem to allow people to purchase games using a different account. That's good, though that means most, perhaps all players, are unable to buy games on Christmas.

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