Showing posts with label News. Show all posts
Showing posts with label News. Show all posts
U.S. Banks May Have Been Hacked By Russia
FBI Examining Whether Russia Is Tied to JPMorgan Hacking
The FBI is investigating a wave of coordinated cyberattacks that have hit JPMorgan Chase and other U.S. firms in the past month.
The FBI is investigating a wave of coordinated cyberattacks that have hit JPMorgan Chase and other U.S. firms in the past month.
Computer hackers have targeted JPMorgan Chase & Co. and at least four other banks in a coordinated attack on U.S. financial institutions in the past month, Bloomberg is reporting.
Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
Two unidentified sources — one a U.S. official and another a person briefed by U.S. law enforcement — discussed the incident with Bloomberg, with one saying that the theft of customer data could be used to drain accounts.
A third person said that employee data had been breached, and that the scale of the theft — which involved many gigabytes of data — meant there was potential for serious fraud.
Bloomberg’s report says the FBI is in the process of investigating whether Russian hackers were involved in attacks on JPMorgan and at least one other bank.
FBI Said to Examine Whether Russia Tied to JPMorgan Hacking http://t.co/JOOKy5zVPv via @BloombergNews
The attack may have been in retaliation for sanctions placed on the country for its involvement in the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine.
In a statement, JPMorgan spokesperson Trish Wexler said: “Banks of our size unfortunately experience cyberattacks nearly every day. We have multiple layers of defense to counteract any threats and constantly monitor fraud levels.”
According to the Guardian, Wexler did not confirm the reports.
“We are working with the United States Secret Service to determine the scope of recently reported cyber attacks against several American financial institutions,” FBI spokesman Joshua Campbell said in a statement.
JPMorgan is America’s largest bank in terms of assets.
The Wall Street Journal said the hacking incidents marked a “significant breach of corporate computer security.”
UPDATE
This piece has been updated with the statement from Joshua Campbell.
Here's The Driverless Car Video Google Doesn't Want You To See
We caught this over at IEEE Spectrum — here's a video of a couple of rascals horsing around in their Infiniti Q50. What begins as an autonomous but innocuous joyride turns into a nonsensical, dangerous stunt around the 1:28 mark.
Watch above as the blurred-out would-be stuntman leaves the driver's seat to sit in the back. The driver's seat is completely unoccupied as the thousand-pound vehicle hurtles down the freeway.
No, this isn't a Google self-driving car. But as Google aims to be synonymous with self-driving car technology, we can't imagine they'd appreciate getting the idea into people's heads that a driver could catch a nap in the backseat while a car's in motion.
It also bears mentioning that the Q50 isn't an all-in-one driverless solution. It merely has a highway autopilot-type function designed for keeping the car in its lane, and nothing more.
Can Schools Solve The Tech Industry's Pipeline Problem?
It's been only a couple of weeks since Google released the diversity numbers on its workforce, and there's been a lot of talk since then about why the tech giant and others in the industry don't really reflect the American population as a whole.
A well-written piece today in Mother Jones offers some provocative thoughts on what can be done about it — and schools could play a big role.
So, to catch up, Google last month released a breakdown of its 46,000-member global workforce that put some data behind stereotypes about the tech giant. And turns out, that stereotype is largely true: Google's workforce is heavily white and male.
Thirty percent of Google's employees worldwide are women, according to the figures released in May, and just 17 percent of technical staffers are female.
Racially and ethnically, Google's U.S.-based staff is 61 percent white, 30 percent Asian, 3 percent Hispanic, and 2 percent African-American.
So, how does that stack up against the U.S. workforce as a whole? Here are the comparable figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor:
- 47 percent of U.S. workers are women,
- 80 percent are white,
- 12 percent are black and 5 percent are Asian. (The numbers for Hispanics are more complicated, because people of Hispanic ethnicity may be of any race.)
Laszlo Bock, Google's senior vice president of people operations suggested in a blog post that there are a slew of reasons why Google and other tech companies struggle to reflect the demographics of the country:
Google isn't the only tech company facing this challenge, and it certainly isn't the only one to lay the blame, at least in part, on a "pipeline problem." The argument is that companies can only hire the people who apply for jobs, and in tech, those people tend to be male and white.
Today in the Mother Jones piece, Tasneem Raja suggests that part of the solution might be quite simple: start introducing coding and computer skills to children early.
Raja, an editor at the publication, also suggests changing the message on STEM, so that girls will embrace science, technology, engineering and math rather than be repelled.
Raja cited evidence that tweaking the way computer science is introduced can make a difference:
Sure, there's an argument that it's critical for the workforce of the country's leading technology companies to reflect, well, the demographics of the country. But as Raja points out, it's also just good for the corporate bottom line.
Virtual Reality Lets Dying Woman 'Walk' Outside Again
Sometimes a simple walk outside can mean so much. Even if it’s not quite the real thing.
Last December, Roberta Firstenberg died of cancer at the age of 76. Before the throat tumor formed, her granddaughter Priscilla said that Roberta loved to travel and garden. She baked cookies. She was known for her delicious banana bread.
But cancer ultimately robbed Roberta of her ability to travel or ride in a car without great pain. Even the vibrations from being pushed in a wheelchair proved too much. That’s when Priscilla, a 29-year-old video game artist, reached out to Oculus Rift’s customer support center. She asked for one of the startup's popular virtual reality headsets that would allow her grandmother to “walk” outside again.
And the result can be seen in the video below, which was taken just a month before Roberta died.
“The Oculus Rift gave her options and gave her an experience that made her feel like she could walk again, without people having to hold her," Priscilla wrote in an email to The Huffington Post. "She got to go up stairs on her own. She got to do a great number of things we couldn’t give her.”
Since the video was posted in November and picked up interest again this week, Priscilla said the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. Commentators with immobile loved ones said they wanted a headset of their own.
Priscilla admitted that she doesn’t watch the video now, preferring instead to remember the happier moments before her grandmother became ill.
“I can hear the difference in her voice, as it was getting tired from being used too much towards the end of her response,” Priscilla wrote, while also remarking how difficult it was to hear the sound of her sick dog in the background, the same dog she said she buried under her grandmother’s cherry blossom tree just a few days after filming. “The video has been described as ‘beautiful and sad’ by many. But because events are still fresh with me, it’s a marker of the most struggling time of my life.”
Most recently, Oculus Rift has been best known for its $2 billion buyout by Facebook, which imagines using the technology for non-gaming purposes like virtual classrooms and doctor visits. But Priscilla insists that her video wasn’t a PR stunt for the headset.
"It’s about using something that was thought of as just a video game, a toy,” Priscilla wrote, “and turning it into something more important than anyone could ever really understand."
These Quadcoptors Are Better Robotic Musicians Than the Rock-Afire Explosion
In his book Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks writes that, “Anatomists would be hard put to identify the brain of a visual artist, a writer, or a mathematician—but they could recognize the brain of a professional musician without a moment's hesitation."
Making music is one of the most neurologically demanding things we people can do. When you're playing off sheet music you're performing a combination of fine physical and mental operations—translating the symbols to motion, memorizing and reciting phrases, all while simultaneously getting and integrating feedback from what you're playing. And just as a guitarist's fingers become calloused in response to repeated exposure to strings, a musician's brain changes in response.
A study comparing the brains of professional musicians, amateur musicians, and non-musicians found a positive correlation between between being a musician and an increase in gray matter volume in the brain's perirolandic regions, including “primary motor and somatosensory areas, premotor areas, anterior superior parietal areas, and in the inferior temporal gyrus bilaterally.”
Now, what these drones are doing in the video above isn't really comparable—the drones aren't listening to the music they're making, learning from it, or getting any more gray matter.
Of course, the credit still lies with the programmers, which, in the case of the video above, KMel Robotics, particularly for how cleverly they rigged up the slide guitar. For now, the culpability for when robots do something stupid, like fly by a jetliner, or when they do something rad, like the national anthem, still resides with Team Flesh & Blood.
But it is an example of the fine coordination, timing and incremental movements that we people can now program groups of drones to perform, which is very cool. Coordinating swarming groups of robots remains an engineering/bandwidth puzzle, and each of these drones singing videos—while indisputably sort of silly—is also an amazing, if incremental step toward robots repairing bridges and building stuff on Mars.
If they start playing other songs of their own volition, maybe this should all be filed away under “better left undone.” As Motherboard's loyal readers will know, superintelligent AI carries real risk. It's nice to imagine that, if its ever developed, it will also carry a tune.
A New Look at Kowloon Walled City, the Internet's Favorite Cyberpunk Slum
Until its final demolition in 1994, Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City remained one of the strangest places on Earth. At its height in the late 80s, some 33,000 people were packed into roughly 2.6 hectares enclosed by the former military base. Fitting so many people into such an incredibly tiny space meant building upward, turning the city into a stunningly dense vertical slum.
By all accounts, the ungoverned city had terrible living conditions, owing both to the simple reality of cramming so many people into such a tiny place as well as a legacy of Triad control. As noted by a 1995 South China Morning Post article touting the $61 million park that replaced the slum, the Kowloon Walled City was beset by "squalor and lawlessness" right up until it was demolished.
"The Walled City—the only part of Hong Kong which the imperial Chinese government refused to hand over to the British—became famous for its prostitutes, opium dens and unlicensed dentists," reads SCMP reporter John Flint's eulogy for the city. Flint reported that then-Hong Kong Governor Chris Patten "applauded the 'fantastic transformation'" of the former slum.
And what else could you say? Cramming tens of thousands of people into an area comparable to a city block without proper infrastructure could result in nothing else. And yet in the two decades since its disappearance, fascination with the city has endured, especially online.
Likely because it represents the perfect confluence of things internet loves—superlatives (the most crowded place on Earth!), a weird, bloggable history, China, contrarianism, its image of the cyberpunk dystopia we're all rocketing towards—the city has, in some portrayals, transitioned from one of the world's worst slums into "the modern pirate utopia."
That dichotomy, of the city being both a symbol of poverty affected by political gamesmanship as well as an internet curio, is why the Wall Street Journal's new documentary on Kowloon proves fascinating. It features Ian Lambot and Greg Girard, who combined to produce the text and photographs of City of Darkness: Life In Kowloon Walled City, which was published around the time of the city's demise, and remains one of the best records of what life there was actually like.
The city was borne out of longstanding tensions between the British and Chinese governments. It was spawned by the agreement, completed in 1898, to lease Hong Kong to the British for 99 years, which didn't include the Walled City. Hong Kong authorities attempted to demolish much of the former military outpost in the 1930s, which left the Walled City's formerly small population at close to zero, and Japan continued to tear down the fort during World War II.
But following the Japanese surrender, China reasserted its claim, causing the first flow of squatters to enter the city, which opened up to a flood as Mao Zedong instituted Communist rule in China. An essay by Julia Wilkinson in City of Darkness explains that these events, combined with an inability by the British to control the Walled City left it largely lawless; a 1959 murder trial resulted in jurisdiction being assigned to Hong Kong, but by that time, as the Journal documentary notes, the Walled City was already entrenched.
The result was a heavily isolated, ramshackle city-state. The documentary, as told through the lenses of Lambot and Girard, who are about to release a follow-up book called City of Darkness Revisited, shows how that isolation was a double-edged sword.
The city in 1989, soon before evictions began. Image: Wikipedia
The lack of outside support meant the Walled City was built on itself largely by itself, with commerce and industry mixed into itself as produced by a self-sufficient population. This idea, that an entire city could be built in three dimensions to support itself—imagine, say, a dentist's office squeezed into a dark alley four stories in the air—is likely what sparks the romanticized view of the city, especially after its influence spread into countless seminal sci-fi works, including William Gibson's Bridge trilogy.
It's a viewed typified by what Hong Kong architect Aaron Tan, who was a grad student when the Walled City came down, told CNN earlier this week. "I was fascinated—it was like a piece of machinery that worked very well. The demolition was like taking the machine apart—the first time you could see what was inside," he said. "It was a really humbling process for me as a designer—when we met this Walled City, we started to see that people could be more intelligent than us, the designers—that they could think of ways to solve problems that are outside the traditional academic world."
At the same time, that ingenuity was spawned by the city's isolation. There was little in the way of public services, meaning sanitation, public safety, and crime prevention were all the purview of locals. Heroin addiction and prostitution were rampant, and the city's citizens were largely on their own.
The same set of conditions that allowed the city to grow into an organic mass that's not been duplicated also produced its essential problem, which has often gotten lost in translation as the city's history has been canonized: The city's political, physical, and economic isolation left its citizens trapped inside its walls. It's a problem that stayed with residents to the end. "When people couldn't afford heroin, they would die," one former resident told the Journal. "Their family members just moved their dead bodies to the bedrooms."
The Kowloon Walled City continues to captivate people because of those problems, and its ills are also what make it such powerful inspiration for fictional portrayals of what's to come. An anonymous suburb is neither memorable nor a great plot device; even in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, which is perhaps the best cyberpunk representation of the suburbanization of America, burbclaves take a back seat to the mystery of the floating slum that is the Raft. At the same time, the Walled City stands as proof that the dystopian futures we imagine have already been built.
Copernicus Will Be Europe's All-Seeing Satellite Constellation
The launch of the European Space Agency’s radar satellite Sentinel-1A, and with it the lift-off of its ambitious Copernicus programme, which has one broad mission: observe the Earth. It’s essentially a comprehensive, always-on fitness monitor for the planet.
Sentinel-1A is just the first of Copernicus’ many eyes in the sky, which will work together to feed back huge amounts of data on everything from land movement to ocean patterns, pollution to ice coverage. It’s an ambitious project that will monitor Earth more intently than any other, and aim to give decision-makers across Europe useful information to act on, both at the EU level and on a regional basis. And for any data junkies out there, a new open policy means the data will be easier than ever to get your hands and calculators on.
Ahead of the launch, which will see Sentinel-1A blast off from French Guiana in a Soyuz at around 11pm tomorrow by local time, I spoke to Josef Aschbacher, the head of the ESA’s Earth Observation Programme Planning & Coordination Service.
How the Sentinel-1 satellite should look in orbit. Image: ESA
He explained the scope of the Copernicus project, which will see the launch of six families of satellites, but will also use data from existing satellites and measurements taken from Earth. “It really means to combine satellite observations with measurements on the ground, together with model data or information that comes from model outputs, and create an information service on an operational basis that will be used by decision-makers across Europe,” he summarised.
According to the ESA, this coordinated data collection will “provide accurate, timely and easily accessible information to improve the management of the environment, understand and mitigate the effects of climate change and ensure civil security.”
To give just one application, Aschbacher gave the example of oil spills around the European coasts, caused by pollution or traffic. “What we’re doing is using satellites that are observing the area regularly, and once pollution is discovered then the coastguards will be informed,” he said. It’s a way of monitoring the environment to check up on any issues—and also of making sure that European Union directives are followed by individual member states.
He later highlighted another use that illustrates just how omniscient the satellites will be. Using interferometry, an instrument on the satellite 700km above the ground could measure a change in just millimetres on the Earth’s surface. “If, for example, a house will sink in because of some motion in the surroundings by one or two millimetres, this can be detected by satellites from space,” he said. If that sounds like an unlikely scenario, he pointed out that during the recent construction of the Jubilee underground line in London, satellites picked out that houses were sinking in where the ground had been excavated when they’d moved only millimetres. The same technique could also be used for monitoring life-saving measures like dams, and life-threatening activity like landslides.
With a series of satellite launches starting tomorrow and scheduled to continue until at least 2014, Copernicus is a huge operation. I asked Aschbacher if there wasn’t already enough Earth-monitoring satellites—by NASA, for instance—and why Europe needed its own. He responded that, while countries like the US, Japan, and India had bits and pieces similar to some of Copernicus’ components, its overall scope was unmatched. “There’s nothing comparable in terms of complexity, number of satellite missions, and the operational setup we have, so it really is the most ambitious, most comprehensive Earth observation system worldwide,” he said, adding, “It’s not a copy of something American like we sometimes do.”
He compared the Copernicus programme to existing methods in meteorology, where satellite data is combined with measurements like humidity, temperature, air pressure, and so on, to give a full picture of the forecast. Copernicus will take a similar all-encompassing approach “for disaster management, for agricultural monitoring, for oil spill monitoring, for ice monitoring, for Arctic research, for climate research, for land motion measurements, and so on and so forth.”
Sentinel-1A, the satellite that’s launching tomorrow, will be joined by its mission buddy Sentinel-1B in about 18 months, and is responsible for radar. “The radar satellites have the huge advantage of looking through clouds and taking images in day and in night, so it’s really independent of weather and illumination,” said Aschbacher. Sentinels 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 will eventually make up the full constellation, and all bring different imaging tech to observe the land, oceans, and atmosphere.
That means a huge amount of information, and institutions across different countries will be crunching the data to make useful products. The project’s open data policy means that anyone, from government institutions to private companies, research organisations, and the public, will be able to get a look-in and figure out new ways to use the data. That comes with the caveat that the huge volume of data requires a certain amount of technical capability, but Aschbacher said he considered the policy a “quantum leap forward.”
The Soyuz getting into position for the launch. Image: ESA
Before that can happen, the satellite has to launch, and there’ll no doubt be a few crossed fingers as the Soyuz passes through the most critical moments right after lift-off tomorrow night. The satellite will separate from the launcher after about 30 minutes, and then comes the unfolding of the solar panel and the delicate radar antenna. “It’s a very delicate process because quite a few things could go wrong,” said Aschbacher. When they’re unfolded, the satellite will be about ten metres in length and the instruments will start to switch on.
It’ll then take a few months to calibrate the instruments and run tests to check everything’s working before the data is distributed via the open data policy. In turn, Aschbacher hopes that will lead to even more applications of the programme. “I think this will be a breakthrough in the use of satellite data for everyday life,” he said.
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