Pilot Projects to Improve Cybersecurity, Reduce Online Theft

 

For Immediate Release: September 21, 2015 Contact: Jennifer Huergo 301-975-6343 The U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) today announced it will award nearly $3.7 million for three pilot projects designed to make online transactions more secure and privacy-enhancing for healthcare, government services, transportation and the Internet of Things.  The three recipients of the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) grants will pilot solutions aimed at reducing tax refund theft, improving the security of medical information and providing secure online data storage. “As ‘America’s Innovation Agency,’ the Commerce Department is committed to supporting innovation and industrial competitiveness that enhances our economic security,” said Deputy Secretary of Commerce Bruce Andrews. “These pilots will provide innovative, practical solutions to ensure the trust we need to combat the growing threat of cyber threats and keep our online economy growing.” This is the fourth round of pilot grants awarded to support implementation of NSTIC, which was launched by the Obama administration in 2011 and is managed by NIST. The strategy supports collaboration between the private sector, advocacy groups and public-sector agencies to encourage the adoption of secure, efficient, easy-to-use and interoperable identity credentials to access online services in a way that promotes confidence, privacy, choice and innovation. “The way we represent ourselves online is fundamental to nearly everything we do,” said Mike Garcia, acting director of the NSTIC National Program Office. “We need more—and better—tools to make online identity easier and more secure, and to advance the commercial deployment of privacy-enhancing technologies. The pilots we’re announcing today add to an NSTIC pilot portfolio that has already improved the digital lives of millions.” The grantees announced today are: MorphoTrust USA (Billerica, Mass., $1,005,168) MorphoTrust’s second NSTIC pilot grant will focus on preventing the theft of personal state tax refunds. Through MorphoTrust’s partnerships with multiple states, the project will show how to efficiently leverage trust created during the online driver licensing process, which includes enrollment, verification through biometric identification, authentication and validation, and issuance, in a scalable way to create trustworthy electronic IDs that individuals control. HealthIDx (Alexandria, Va., $813,922) HealthIDx is developing an innovative, privacy-enhancing technology that protects patients’ identity and information. This project will pilot a “triple blind” technology in which medical service providers have no knowledge of which credential service provider an end-user chooses, credential service providers have no knowledge of which medical service provider the end-user is visiting, and the identity broker has no knowledge (nor retains any information) about the transaction’s parties or contents. Galois, Inc. (Portland, Ore., $ 1,856,778) Galois will build a tool that allows users to store and share private information online. The user-centric personal data storage system relies on biometric-based authentication and will be built securely from the ground up. As part of the pilot, Galois will work with partners to develop just-in-time transit ticketing on smart phones and to integrate the secure system into an Internet of Things-enabled smart home. Read more about the 2015 grantees and their NSTIC-aligned solutions in the latest NSTIC blog post. As a non-regulatory agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, NIST promotes U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards and technology in ways that enhance economic security and improve our quality of life. To learn more about NIST, visit www.nist.gov.     http://www.nist.gov/itl/20150921nstic.cfm

Sweet hacks

 

101 amazing PC/Internet tricks none told you before

Searching the Internet inflates estimates of internal knowledge

 

Working in groups is advantageous because different individuals can be responsible for different information, allowing each individual to develop more in-depth expertise. For instance, a plumber, electrician, and carpenter work together to build a house, but each is responsible for unique aspects of the project. This is an example of a transactive memory system: information is distributed across the group, and each group member is aware of what he or she knows, as well as who knows what. Because the Internet surpasses any person in accessibility, speed, and breadth of knowledge, the Internet may be treated as an all-knowing expert transactive memory partner. However, in a recent paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Fisher, Goddu, and Keil (2015) suggest that these same features may exacerbate potentially negative effects of transactive memory, in particular conflating knowledge for which a partner is responsible with knowledge one actually possesses. Each of the experiments had an induction phase followed by a self-assessment phase. In the induction phase, participants rated their ability to explain the answers to common questions (e.g., "How do zippers work?") after either searching the Internet to confirm their explanation, or being specifically instructed not to use the Internet. In the subsequent self-assessment phase, participants were asked to rate how well they could explain the answers to groups of questions from a variety of domains that were unrelated to the induction phase questions. Participants who searched the Internet in the induction phase rated themselves as being able to give better explanations than participants who were not allowed to search the Internet. This result was obtained even when participants in the Internet condition were given a specific web source to find (e.g., "Please search the scientificamerican.com page for this information") and participants in the no Internet condition were shown text from that same website. In other words, searching for explanations online led to increases in self-assessed knowledge even when both groups had access to the same explanatory content, and when Internet search did not involve effortful processes like choosing between sources. Higher self-assessed knowledge was also observed following unsuccessful Internet searches (e.g., searches that did not yield an answer to the question). Increases in self-assessed knowledge following Internet search were reduced or eliminated in the following conditions: 1) when participants were provided with a link to access the web source in the induction phase, and 2) when autobiographical knowledge was probed in the self-assessment phase. These results suggest that it is the act of searching online that promotes increases in self-assessed knowledge, and this effect is limited to domains where the Internet might plausibly be of use. Together, this series of experiments demonstrates that actively searching the Internet inflates our sense of the knowledge we actually possess because we fail to recognize the extent to which we rely on external sources for information. While similar illusions of knowledge have been obtained for other external information sources, these illusions may be particularly strong for the Internet because online information is easily and nearly constantly accessible, is retrieved quickly, and covers an incredible breadth of content. Such access to information has many benefits, but the authors caution that the strength of the illusion of knowledge with respect to the Internet could have negative consequences in situations in which the Internet is not available, and individuals think they know more than they really do. Story Source: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by American Psychological Association. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. Journal Reference: Matthew Fisher, Mariel K. Goddu, Frank C. Keil. Searching for explanations: How the Internet inflates estimates of internal knowledge.. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2015; 144 (3): 674 DOI: 10.1037/xge0000070

50 More of the Most Useful Websites on the Internet

 

by Johnny Webber 1. MapC.am – Call and connect with a random person somewhere in the world. 2. Pective.com – Find out the actual size of things. 3. ShareOnFB.com – Share fake news stories, and prank your friends. 4. WhichDateWorks.com – Find out which date works best with your friends. 5. imo.im – Free voice, messaging, and video calls. 6. LiveShare.com – Beautiful messaging for your groups. 7. Rappad.co – Write a song about whatever you want. 8. MySlideRule.com – Find online courses on any topic. 9. KeyboardTester.com – Test your keyboard’s functionality. 10. SndTst.com – A sound test for various games. 11. InternetDirectory.info – The Yellow Pages but for the Internet. 12. ABetterQueue.com – Use Rotten Tomatoes standards to create a better Netflix queue. 13. LucyPhone.com – Never wait on hold for a company ever again. 14. ZeroDollarMovies.com – Find free movies online. 15. Alertful.com – Get reminded of important appointments via email. 16. CommercialTunage.com – Find out which song was used in that one commercial. 17. JazzAndRain.com – Listen to the soothing sounds of jazz and rainfall. 18. OffTheRoost.com – Find a place to eat. 19. Studio.StupeFlix.com – Make amazing videos in seconds. 20. TypingWeb.com – Learn to touch type. 21. Bonanza.com – Remove backgrounds from images. 22. CloudConvert.org – Convert a file to anything. 23. 7CupsOfTea.com – Connect with someone who will listen to your troubles. 24. Boostgr.am – Promote your Instagram photos. 25. Chordify.net – Extract high quality guitar chords from any song. 26. Archive.today – Take a snapshot of a webpage so it will always be online. 27. TuneIn.com – Listen to over 100,000 real radio stations. 28. TakeLessons.com – Search thousands of teachers for local and online lessons. 29. Forget.me – Remove yourself from Google search results. 30. PizzaCodes.com – Get coupons for your pizzas. 31. AlternativeTo.net – Find alternative software. 32. Gixen.com – Automatically place eBay bids. 33. MapMyRun.com – Plan out every stride of your jog. 34. XKCDGraphs.com – Create your own XKCD style graphs. 35. WarrantyGenius.com – Organize and track all of your product warranties. 36. TheSquatrack.com – Track your workouts. 37. GodChecker.com – An encyclopedia of over 3,700 gods, demons, spirits, and beasts. 38. EasyASCII.com – Quickly copy ASCII characters. 39. PrintablePaper.net – Printable lined, graph, and music paper with more. 40. IP-Grabber.com – Grab an IP address from a link. 41. GifCtrl.com – Reverse gifs. 42. YourLogicalFallacyIs.com – Learn your logical fallacies. 43. HabitRPG.com – Create habits and earn rewards. 44. Jog.fm – Find the perfect music for your run. 45. HaveIBeenPwned.com – Check if you have an account that has been compromised in a data breech. 46. TeachMeAnatomy.info – Learn about human anatomy. 47. WobZip.org – Uncompress zip files online. 48. PDF.yt – Imgur for PDF documents. 49. UnplugTheTV.com – Watch educational YouTube videos at random. 50. 50WaysToGetAJob.com – Find out what you should do next to get a job. source : http://johnnylists.com

Isso me irrita

 

Nada me irrita mais do que ler em uma publicação algo como “Diabetes affects millions of americans every year”..   Bem, não existe apenas estadunidenses no mundo, (o GENTÍLICO referente aos Estados Unidos é “Estadunidenses” ou em inglês “the Staters” ou se quiserem,  “the US people, the US residents, the US citizens”, e não “Americans”) ou seja, não existe apenas um país nas Américas, os Estados Unidos.   Um importante website como por exemplo o Science Daily, presumo que não irá publicar algo dirigido apenas à eles, porque o alcance da internet como todos sabem é GLOBAL, e uma doença como o diabetes atinge o mundo todo. Sempre que topo com isso eu retiro essa anormalidade.  Estamos todos no mesmo barco.  Se um site quer que apenas os estadunidenses tomem conhecimento de um artigo, basta usar uma criptografia que seja decodificada apenas pelos residentes dos Estados Unidos, e assim o resto do mundo não tomará conhecimento.  Como isso não é possível, convém lembrar que todos dependem uns dos outros, em todos os sentidos.  A Internet é uma entidade GLOBAL, não pertence apenas aos Estados Unidos. Já existe o equívoco de usar “americans” para o povo estadunidense. Tampouco existe o termo “North americans” designando exclusivamente os habitantes da terra do Tio Sam. Eles são óbviamente “Norte-Americanos”, porém há mais países na América do Norte.      Dizer que o diabetes afeta milhões de americanos todos os anos tem um duplo sentido. Na verdade ele afeta centenas de milhões de pessoas no mundo todo, e não apenas pessoas residentes nos “States” Fica aqui registrada a minha indignação. Divulgue-se e cumpra-se de acordo com as normas éticas vigentes na Web. JS Melo

14 Totally Free Things On The Internet Everyone Should Be Taking Advantage Of

 

Signifyd The wunderkinds over on Reddit recently took a break from uncracked safes and banana-based measurements to post a mega-thread addressing the best of the best of all things free on the interwebs, and I couldn't help but share some of the highlights with you all. If you're savvy, you might recognize a few of these bad boys already, but don't spoil the Supermarket Sweep-style fun for the rest of us, OK? ii.library.jhu.edu 1. College courses, no tuition Is the fear of smothering, unbearable student debt steering you away from the path of higher education? Class Central exposes hundreds of online class courses from the likes of Harvard, Stanford, and MIT, without that pesky tuition nonsense. This means you can educate yourself in subjects like Molecular Biology, Advanced Operating Systems, or The Rise Of Superheroes And Their Impact On Pop Culture. It's all the information you need to become a fully functional adult in today's global economy, without the loans, leftover futons, and career-debilitating Facebook photo rolls. related 33 Things You Used To Own That Your iPhone Replaced Wikimedia 2. Self-destructing email addresses With 10 Minute Mail, you can create an extremely temporary email address that will automatically self-destruct in 10 minutes, allowing you to sign up for sites, lists, and deals without the unbearable spam cannon that normally accompanies your quiet compliance. Also good for anonymous threats and insults to friends/family members. Not that I'd do that, of course. imagenesygraficos 3. Ambient sounds for any occasion If you simply can't work/sleep/make love without some kind of comforting white noise cascading over your eardrums, A Soft Murmur has you covered with all the classic ambient noises, and the somewhat odd ability to play a bunch of them at once. DJ Careless Whisper? You had me at "singing bowl" and "fire." related Why I Will Never Wear the Apple Watch Wikimedia 4. Learn every language on Earth If you've ever felt devastatingly isolated at your Swedish cousin's wedding to her Argentinean lover in Seoul (due to the triple language barrier), Duolingo might be right for you. Touted as the free Rosetta Stone—and some consider it to be even better—Duolingo softens the blow of learning another language by taking the pressure off your wallet. You'll be ordering with cultural authenticity at Taco Bell en un santiamén, muchacho. The Filmmakers Workshop 5. Unlimited access to a mega-library of documentaries Documentaries have been experiencing a recent boom thanks to their accessibility on Netflix, but one can only watch Jiro Dreams of Sushi so many times, and there's no chance in hell I'm buying a DVD again. With Documentary Heaven you have access to an endless river of reality piping through your computer monitor, like trout swimming upstream during their annual mating season (watch the documentary, you'll see what I mean). The Movie Mash 6. Someone to spill your guts to Everyone needs somebody, sometime—as Dean Martin once famously crooned, and most of the time, you don't have the funds or time to drop on a therapist or high-end escort. Welcome to 7 Cups of Tea, a completely free way to connect live with a "listener," with a bounty of free counseling options available. It's all anonymous too, so you don't have to worry about any of your dirty little secrets becoming public. What an age to be alive. related 10 Failed Gadgets That Were Before Their Time 7. Automatic alerts or actions for everything you care about While it's been notorious on the Internet for quite some time, If This, Then That is one of those sites that's bound to blow up one day (in a good way). Once you log in, you can create a "recipe," programming an alert or action that will happen anytime two correlating actions occur on the web. For instance, you can automatically push photos posted on your Facebook to a secure Dropbox, the second they are posted. Or, have an email sent to you anytime someone mentions "Cat," "Shaving," and "Wanted by Authorities" on all your local news sites. The possibilities are endless. Craigslist 8. Free used sh*t Craigslist - the domain of questionable career opportunities as well as questionable sexual opportunities, has become a digital smorgasbord of totally free sh*t. If you select your appropriate region, you’ll see a “Free” section under the “For Sale” category (confusing, I know) chock-full to the innuendo-soaked rim with perfectly good items folks are just begging to give away. Check out what you can snag sans payment in NYC alone. Pro Tip: avoid any cloth-based furniture (for obvious, soiled reasons) as well as any intimate products, also for obvious reasons. Nintendo 9. Old-school video games For my generation, some of the best childhood memories consist of gathering around a glowing TV screen, slowing rotting our minds with video games while vehemently ignoring the shining sun and temperate climate outside. Man, those were the days. For a quick blast of nostalgia to the face, hit up this SNES, NES, and SEGA emulator to relive your pasty glory years. All you have to worry about is your boss catching you playing Castlevania in-between TPS reports. Unless you don’t have a job. Then you probably shouldn't be playing SNES emulators, anyway. related Text This Number, Get Anything You Want On-Demand Lost Type 10. All the fonts you could ever want Normally, finding the right font for your situation isn't a huge problem. But that's probably because you don't know the dizzying heights design has reached in recent years. You are in for the shock of a lifetime, pal, because Lost Type has you covered from stylized head to sans-serif toe. With psychoactive billboard sets and funkadelic superfly stylings, your eyes will be widened to the magical world of spectacular fonts, all free to use in any way you wish. But please, type responsibly. Pixlr 11. Photo editing with panache  For those who want their photos to shine a little bit brighter or to casually drop themselves into Ariana Grande’s vacation pics (no judging), but balk at the big bucks for Photoshop, the photo editing app Pixlr is available for your computer and smartphone for the low price of absolutely nothing. Though it doesn’t have the absurd level of customization and features that Photoshop so smugly touts, it's a very serviceable application for amateur to mid-level Instagrammers who are sick of using Valencia as a crutch. SavingForMyFamily 12. Piles and piles of valuable coupons This is extremely relevant for those who not only want free swag, but want their free swag to turn into other free swag. RetailMeNot is an aggregate of comped codes, coupons, and other door-busting deals for both online services and brick & mortar outfits—with offerings varying from H&M to Domino's. So, you can get those organ-constricting skinny jeans on the cheap, with money left over to get cheese-soaked, grease-stuffed sugar sticks to ensure you will never fit in them again. related The 10 Best Parts Of Pierce Brosnan's Reddit AMA 13. Manage your finances and your future Living paycheck to paycheck? Can't afford to buy milk for your nonexistent cereal? Is your life literally crashing down around you as we speak? The sleek, financial management site Mint is a payment-free resource that allows you to check your credit, pay bills, and manage your bank accounts on a safe, well-designed platform. It will pretty much handle everything that has to do with your hard-earned bacon, aside from actually earning it for you. Still waiting for that upgrade, slackers... JustGive.org 14. Help feed the world Meet the only thing on this list ideal for those instances when you are trying to actually give the world something, instead of just reaping the bounty of comped items and services like a cyber-glutton. With Freerice, you can exercise your noggin and help feed hungry humans all over the world, without sparing a dime. The site presents you with a series of questions in subjects like English grammar and basic chemistry, and for every correct answer, the World Food Programme will donate 10 grains of rice to the global cause. You can rack up the grains pretty quickly, though—and all for a worthwhile cause. It's trivia that can make an actual difference. Unlike Trivial Pursuit, which just tears families apart. Trust me, I haven't spoken to my sister in years. Denise, if you're reading this, please call me. Wil Fulton is a staff writer for Supercompressor, and he doesn't really have a sister named Denise. Though if he did, he'd probably dislike her. Follow him @WilWithOnlyOneL.

How quickly DATA is generated

 

Internet in real time

Images of extremely thin women on social media sites

 

Some of the most popular social media sites are filled with images of extremely thin women that might be harmful to those who view them -- whether they are seeking them or not, according to research from the University of California, Davis. The images were often cropped to remove heads or focus on just a few body parts. Doctoral candidate Jannath Ghaznavi and associate professor Laramie Taylor in the Department of Communication examined about 300 photographs from Twitter and Pinterest postings that used the terms "thinspiration" and/or "thinspo" to tag images and ideas promoting extreme thinness and often casting eating disorders in a positive light. Their paper "Bones, body parts, and sex appeal: An analysis of #thinspiration images on popular social media" was recently published in Body Image: An International Journal of Research. "Imagine a teenage girl or even a young woman looking for inspiration using terms such as 'attractive,' 'fit,' or 'pretty,'" Ghaznavi said. "She will likely find images of headless, scantily clad, sexualized women and their body parts." Images from Twitter, popular among younger audiences, were most likely to be cropped to remove heads and focus on specific body parts compared to Pinterest, according to the study. The content analysis cannot speak to the effects of viewing the images, the researchers concede, but they point to studies that have shown repeated exposure to such content can result in body dissatisfaction and disordered eating attitudes. "A young woman looking at these image may think that's what she should look like," Ghaznavi said. "That could prompt these girls and women to resort to extreme dieting, excessive exercise or other harmful behaviors in order to achieve this thin ideal." Story Source: The above story is based on materials provided by University of California - Davis. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. Journal Reference: Jannath Ghaznavi, Laramie D. Taylor. Bones, body parts, and sex appeal: An analysis of #thinspiration images on popular social media. Body Image, 2015; 14: 54 DOI: 10.1016/j.bodyim.2015.03.006

9 Websites Where You Can Download Free Things

 

by Johnny Webber 1. ClipConverter.cc – Turn any YouTube video into an mp3 available for download. 2. Rip.Archives.com – Download and rip full Imgur, Flickr, or Instagram albums. 3. Gutenberg.org – Over 45,000 free ebooks. 4. MyAbondonware.com – Download computer games from the 80s and 90s. 5. OffLiberty.com – Download almost any media from any website. 6. Wikipedia.org – Download the Wikipedia archive. 7. Google Takeout – Download your Google data. 8. MetMuseum.org – Download high resolution scans of historic art. 9. Wallbase.cc – Search and download desktop wallpapers.

Does Internet use sharpen the brain ?

 

 

 

Internet beats books for improving the mind, say scientists

By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent

Browsing the internet is better than reading books for boosting the brain power of middle-aged and older adults, new research has found.

Scientists discovered that searching the world wide web exercised the mind far more than reading and was similar to completing crosswords and puzzles.

Brain scans showed that going online stimulated larger parts of the brain than the relatively passive activity of reading a novel or non-fiction book.

It was so stimulating that the authors of the study believe it could actually help people maintain healthier brains into their old age.

"The study results are encouraging, that emerging computerised technologies may have physiological effects and potential benefits for middle-aged and older adults," said principal investigator Dr Gary Small, a professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at University of California.

"Internet searching engages complicated brain activity, which may help exercise and improve brain function." The study, the first of its kind to assess the impact of internet searching on brain performance, is published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.

As the brain ages, a number of changes occur which impact on performance, such as general wasting and reductions in cell activity.

The team found that for computer-savvy middle-aged and older adults, searching the internet triggers key centres in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning.

They worked with 24 research volunteers between the ages of 55 and 76 with healthy brain function.

Half of the study participants had experience searching the internet, while the other half had no experience. Age, educational level and gender were similar between the two groups.

Both sets performed web searches and read books while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans, which recorded the subtle brain-circuitry changes experienced during these activities.

This type of scan tracks the intensity of cell responses in the brain by measuring the level of blood flow during tasks.

All study participants showed significant brain activity during the book-reading task, demonstrating use of the regions controlling language, reading, memory and visual abilities, which are located in the temporal, parietal, occipital and other areas of the brain.

But internet searches revealed a major difference between the two groups. While all participants demonstrated the same brain activity that was seen during the book-reading, the web-savvy group also registered activity in the frontal, temporal and cingulate areas of the brain, which control decision-making and complex reasoning.

"Our most striking finding was that internet searching appears to engage a greater extent of neural circuitry that is not activated during reading - but only in those with prior internet experience," said Dr Small, who is also the director of UCLA's Memory and Ageing Research Centre.

Volunteers with prior experience of the internet registered a twofold increase in brain activation while web searching when compared with those with little internet experience.

Top Ten Websites of The Day To Kill Boredom

 

Everyone succumbs to boredom once in a while, especially at work. No one can read your mind but, you can still bear with others whilst your mind still begs for a little entertainment and fun. These following websites could make your day a little better and sway away your boredom. I’ve also rated the websites from 10, based on their humor and the level of fun they were packed with. 10. Happiness Islands A Stretchy Hand, One of Coca Cola’s funny website from the Happiness Islands, with a red stretchy hand that sticks with your page margins. Go around and play with it unless you get bored of it. You’ve still got more from Coca Cola though. You can find similar browser based fun sites like, Falling Dominoes in the islands. 9. 8 Bit Games from Snesbox: This website has a directory of all the famous nostalgic Nintendo games, which you can play anytime anywhere without downloading any emulators. It’s completely free to play online. 8. PointerPointer: This one is quite interesting. All you have to do is to place your mouse pointer inside the box to let random images of people pointing your pointer, no matter where you point. 7. Zombo: You can do anything! Anything is possible! 6. NewRafael: This website contains multiple links to the funny websites created by Rafaël Rozendaal. From Text Free Browsing Plugin to the Annoying Cursor, you can slay a few minutes. 5. Fucking Homepage: Click the fucking link! And find… What the fuck the website is about! 4. Trypap This is actually a very funny site and tells you exactly how your in-laws would react if they are helping you with a password. Tim Holman, the designer of this website has also created a few other good time slaying website like this WebGL Experiment – Fizzy Cam. You can find his entire projects here: theolman.com. 3. Hop Along WebGL: This actually brought back the epic scene from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey to my mind. It’s quite stunning piece of work from Barry Martin. 2. Mr.Doob’s WebGL Collections: Interactive visual treats are always the best way to distract your mind from the chaotic world and let it immerse in a different world. Mr.Doob here has got a wide range of stunning WebGL works. Indeed there are lots of WebGL experiments which we will see in the upcoming slots, but Mr.Doob’s work and some of his cool collections from around the web is really amazing and it’s obviously an eye candy for the bored. Some cool interactive experiments: PV3D Magic Dust Voxels Liquid Clouds ( Fullscreen Please ) Harmony 3DWaveform Also swipe: Top Ten Websites Of The Day To Kill Boredom [Day 2] 1. Liveplasma: Liveplasma is an exploration engine especially for the music addicts and movie fanatics and a great tool to discover music, movies and books. There are sites that almost made the list and I assure you that your favorite websites will be in our upcoming lists. Share your favorite websites in the comments and we will credit you on our lists. If you are planning to slay the boredom forever, try these 15 addictive browser games, which would take years to crawl out from.

Human Traffickers Caught on Hidden Internet

A new set of search tools called Memex, developed by DARPA, peers into the “deep Web” to reveal illegal activity February 8, 2015 By Larry Greenemeier Hidden in Plain Sight: Investigators are using DARPA's Memex technology pull information from the so-called "deep Web" that can be used to find and prosecute human traffickers. - Courtesy of PhotoDisc/ Getty Image. More In This Article In November 2012 a 28-year-old woman plunged 15 meters from a bedroom window to the pavement in New York City, a devastating fall that left her body broken but alive. The accident was an act of both desperation and hope—the woman had climbed out of the sixth-floor window to escape a group of men who had been sexually abusing her and holding her captive for two days. Four months ago the New York County District Attorney’s Office sent Benjamin Gaston, one of the men responsible for the woman’s ordeal, to prison for 50-years-to-life. A key weapon in the prosecutor’s arsenal, according to the NYDA’s Office: an experimental set of Internet search tools the U.S. Department of Defense is developing to help catch and lock up human traffickers. Although the Defense Department and the prosecutor’s office had not publicly acknowledged using the new tools, they confirmed to Scientific American that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Memex program provided advanced Internet search capabilities that helped secure the conviction. DARPA is creating Memex to scour the Internet in search of information about human trafficking, in particular advertisements used to lure victims into servitude and to promote their sexual exploitation. Much of this information is publically available, but it exists in the 90 percent of the so-called “deep Web” that Google, Yahoo and other popular search engines do not index. That leaves untouched a multitude of information that may not be valuable to the average Web surfer but could provide crucial information to investigators. Google would not confirm that it indexes no more than 10 percent of the Internet, a statistic that has been widely reported, but a spokesperson pointed out that the company’s focus is on whether its search results are relevant and useful in answering users' queries, not whether it has indexed 100 percent of the data on the Internet. Much of this deep Web information is unstructured data gathered from sensors and other devices that may not reside in a database that can be scanned or “crawled” by search engines. Other deep Web data comes from temporary pages (such as advertisements for illegal sexual and similarly illicit services) that are removed before search engines can crawl them. Some areas of the deep Web are accessible using only special software such as the Tor Onion Router, which allows people to secretly share information anonymously via peer-to-peer connections rather than going through a centralized computer server. DARPA is working with 17 different teams of researchers—from both companies and universities—to craft Internet search tools as part of the Memex program that give government, military and businesses new ways to analyze, organize and interact with data pulled from this larger pool of sources. Law and order DARPA has said very little about Memex and its use by law enforcement and prosecutors to investigate suspected criminals. According to published reports, including one from Carnegie Mellon University, the NYDA’s Office is one of several law enforcement agencies that have used early versions of Memex software over the past year to find and prosecute human traffickers, who coerce or abduct people—typically women and children—for the purposes of exploitation, sexual or otherwise. “Memex”—a combination of the words “memory” and “index” first coined in a 1945 article for The Atlantic—currently includes eight open-source, browser-based search, analysis and data-visualization programs as well as back-end server software that perform complex computations and data analysis. Such capabilities could become a crucial component of fighting human trafficking, a crime with low conviction rates, primarily because of strategies that traffickers use to disguise their victims’ identities (pdf). The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates there are about 2.5 million human trafficking victims worldwide at any given time, yet putting the criminals who press them into service behind bars is difficult. In its 2014 study on human trafficking (pdf) the U.N. agency found that 40 percent of countries surveyed reported less than 10 convictions per year between 2010 and 2012. About 15 percent of the 128 countries covered in the report did not record any convictions. Evidence of criminals peddling such services online is hard to pinpoint because of the use of temporary ads and peer-to-peer connections within the deep Web. Over a two-year time frame traffickers spent about $250 million to post more than 60 million advertisements, according to DARPA-funded research. Such a large volume of Web pages, many of which are not posted long enough to be crawled by search engines, makes it difficult for investigators to connect the dots. This is, in part, because investigators typically search for evidence of human trafficking using the same search engines that most people use to find restaurant reviews and gift ideas. Hence the Memex project. Inside Memex At DARPA’s Arlington, Va., headquarters Memex program manager Christopher White provided Scientific American with a demonstration of some of the tools he and his colleagues are developing. Criminal investigations often begin with little more than a single piece of information, such as an e-mail address. White plugged a demo address into Google to show how investigators currently work. As expected, he received a page of links from the portion of the Internet that Google crawls—also referred to as the “surface Web”—prioritized by a Google algorithm attempting to deliver the most relevant information at the top. After clicking through several of these links, an investigator might find a phone number associated with the e-mail address. Thus far, White had pulled the same information from the Internet that most people would see. But he then faced a next step all Web users confront: sifting through pages of hyperlinks with very little analytical information available to tie together different search results. Just as important as Memex’s ability to pull information from a broader swath of the Internet are its tools that can identify relationships among different pieces of data. This helps investigators create data maps used to detect spatial and temporal patterns. One example could be a hub-and-spoke visualization depicting hundreds of Web sites connected to a single sex services e-mail, phone number or worker  Scientific American exclusive: A sneak peek at Memex data maps White also showed how MEMEX can generate color-coded heat maps of different countries that locate where the most sex advertisements are being posted online at any given time. These patterns and others could help reveal associations that investigators might otherwise miss, says White, who began working with DARPA in 2010 as a consultant developing data-science tools to support the U.S. military in Afghanistan. Search results The technology has already delivered results since DARPA began introducing Memex to select law enforcement agencies about a year ago. The NYDA says that its new Human Trafficking Response Unit now uses DARPA’s Memex search tool in every human trafficking case it pursues. Memex has played a role in generating at least 20 active sex trafficking investigations and has been applied to eight open indictments in addition to the Gaston conviction, according to the NYDA’s Office. “Memex helps us build evidence-based prosecutions, which are essential to fighting human trafficking,” says Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr. “In these complex cases prosecutors cannot rely on traumatized victims alone to testify. We need evidence to corroborate or, in some cases, replace the need for the victim to testify.” Different components of Memex are helping law enforcement crack down on trafficking elsewhere in the country as well. A detective in Modesto, Calif., used a specific piece of software called Traffic Jam to follow up on a tip about one particular victim from Nebraska and ended up identifying a sex trafficker who was traveling with prostitutes across the Midwest and West. The investigation culminated in his arrest. Traffic Jam, developed independently of DARPA in 2011 by Carnegie Mellon University researchers and later spun off into a company called Marinus Analytics, enabled investigators to gather evidence by quickly reviewing ads the trafficker posted for several locales. DARPA has since awarded Carnegie Mellon a three-year, $3.6-million contract to enhance Traffic Jam’s basic search capabilities as part of Memex, with machine-learning algorithms that can analyze results in depth, according to the university. Carnegie Mellon researchers are also studying ways to apply computer vision to searches in a way that helps investigators identify images with similar elements—such as furniture from the same hotel room that appears in multiple images—even if the images themselves are not identical, says Jeff Schneider. Schneider is the project's principal investigator and a research professor in the Auton Lab at the university’s School of Computer Science, which studies statistical data mining. Furniture in a hotel room, for example, could help law enforcement identify the location of trafficking operations. Vance and other law enforcement officials welcome such advances. “Technology alone won’t solve cases, but it certainly helps,” he says. “We’ve had the most success with this effort when we married traditional field intelligence with the information this tool provides.” White agrees that DARPA’s technology is a supplement to other investigative methods, including interviews with victims. In addition to targeting human trafficking, law enforcement officials are finding that they can tap Memex to crack down on other, related crimes, including trafficking in guns and drugs. source : www.scientificamerican.com

A look at North Korea's limited internet capabilities

 

12/23/2014    An hours-long Internet outage Tuesday in one of the world's least-wired countries was probably more inconvenient to foreigners than to North Korean residents, most of whom have never gone online. Even for wired Koreans south of the heavily armed border separating the rivals, the temporary outage made little difference - southerners are banned by law from accessing North Korean websites. While North Korea tightly controls its citizens' activities, especially their access to information on the outside world, it does have a cyberspace. Here's a look at North Korea's unique broadband and mobile Internet, the country's use of email and its tightly controlled use of a domestic Intranet. INTERNET VS INTRANET Only a very small number of people among North Korea's elite use the Internet, as the rest of the world knows it. A slightly larger group of privileged North Koreans can see a tightly controlled Intranet called "Kwangmyong," meaning "Bright." On this self-contained, authoritarian alternative to the World Wide Web, chats and emails are monitored and content comes pre-filtered by the state. The Intranet provides a connection between industry, universities and government. Its role seems to be to spread information, rather than for commerce, entertainment or communication, Will Scott, a computer science instructor at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, told the AP in February. It is unclear how many Internet-connected devices are used in North Korea. But it's likely that the number of Internet users is small considering that the country has only 1,024 Internet Protocol addresses for a population of 25 million, according to So Young Seo, a researcher at South Korea's state-run Korea Information Society Development Institute. North Korea's small circle of Internet users consist of elites in the government and military, propagandists and media workers, state-trained hackers and researchers at education institutes such as Kim Il Sung University and the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, Seo said. Other North Koreans are limited to the intranet, which provides access to state media and a limited number of information sources that were pulled and censored from the real Internet. Most common North Koreans probably don't actively use Kwangmyong because owning a computer requires permission from government authorities and would cost as much as three months' salary for the average worker, Seo said. It's unclear what was behind the temporary shutdown of key North Korean websites. The shutdown followed a U.S. vow to respond to a crippling cyberattack on Sony Pictures that Washington blames on Pyongyang. The White House and the State Department declined to say whether the U.S. government was responsible. A cyberattack on North Korea would be an exercise in futility if the purpose was to cause a serious disruption, said Chang Yong Seok, a North Korea expert at Seoul National University. "Even if their Internet is shut down, the inconvenience will be shared only by members of the power elite," Chang said. "It would be an entirely different matter if hackers manage to penetrate the Kwangmyong network, but that has never happened before." MOBILE PHONES Cell phone use in North Korea is also controlled by the government. While mobile phones are now a popular gateway to the Internet in the South, for North Koreans cell phones are used for domestic calls. They can't access the Internet or make overseas calls. Cellular service is provided by Koryolink, a joint venture between North Korea's Korea Post & Telecommunications Corporation and Egypt's Orascom Telecom Media and Technology Holding SAE. More than 2 million cellphones are used in North Korea, according to the International Telecommunication Union. But the number of mobile users is believed to be significantly smaller, Seo said, because elite North Koreans often use more than one device because it's cheaper to buy a new phone than buy additional minutes on the same handset. In 2013, North Korea began to allow foreigners to access the Internet through the 3G networks. They could upload posts or photos on Twitter and Instagram from North Korea. Starting last year, North Korea began selling monthly mobile Internet data plans to foreigners for use with a USB modem or on mobile devices using their SIM cards. Orascom built a 3G network more than five years ago. The network now covers most major cities. PROPAGANDA USE AND PAST ATTACKS North Korea's use of the Internet targets outsiders more than residents, who still mostly rely on traditional outlets for information and entertainment. Various North Korean government bodies have launched websites as well as English-language Facebook pages, YouTube channels and Twitter accounts to spread propaganda aimed at international audiences. The North uses social media to praise its system and leaders, and to repeat commentaries sent out by the country's official Korean Central News Agency. In 2013, some of these social media accounts run by North Korea were hacked by those who purported to be part of the hacker activist group Anonymous. Hackers left a message on Twitter and posted a picture of the North Korean leader's face with a pig-like snout and a drawing of Mickey Mouse on his chest. In another attack, Pyongyang saw intermittent Internet access for two days in March 2013. North Korea blamed the shutdown on the United States and South Korea, accusing the allies of "intensive and persistent virus attacks." South Korea denied the allegation and the U.S. military declined to comment.

Creating the fastest outdoor wireless internet connection

 

Fri, 12/19/2014   Lancaster University Lancaster University engineers are to head up a European team working on the world’s first W-band wireless system, heralding the arrival of cost effective, high speed internet everywhere, every time. The ground-breaking £2.8 million TWEETHER project, funded by Horizon 2020, the biggest EU research and innovation programme ever, will set an important milestone in ‘millimeter wave technology’ for high speed wireless mobile and fixed point Internet. Millimeter waves - extremely high frequency waves found in the spectrum between microwaves and infrared waves - are deemed to be the most promising and cost effective solution for the future. The TWEETHER project will result in a powerful and compact transmission hub, based on a novel travelling wave tube power amplifier and an advanced chipset in a compact terminal, with performance far outweighing any other technology.                                                     After three years of design and development, the system will be tested in a real operating environment. The project has been sparked by the huge rise in demand for mobile data, which places unprecedented strains on networks to deliver more and more capacity. Millions of users are now suffering a ‘digital divide’ because of the very limited availability of high data rate in most residential, sub urban or rural areas, where optical fibre, often slow and expensive to install, is not available. “The enormous flux of data transferred via wireless networks, increasing at a super-high pace, makes today’s state-of-the-art networks quickly outdated, says Lancaster University’s Professor of Electronics Claudio Paoloni, who is also the Project Co-ordinator. “The huge spread of portable smart phone, tablets and the increasing demand of services hungry for data, such as high definition TV, videoconferencing and online games, are posing formidable challenges with the congestion of the available spectrum and the limits of present technology.” Professor Paoloni said the answer was the exploitation of unused portions of the spectrum but at higher frequencies. The recent outstanding advancements in the field of vacuum electron devices and solid state electronics using millimetre wave frequencies opens the route for the breakthrough in wireless high speed data communications. Source: Lancaster University

14 amazing and lesser known historical facts

One Minute List

Spend 60 seconds daily to learn something new

1. The shortest war, The Anglo-Zanzibar war (1896) on record lasted for 38 minutes.
2. Saddam Hussein was given the key to the city of Detroit.
3. In Ancient Egypt people used stones as pillows.
4. The Romans used human urine as mouthwash.
5. Japan invaded Alaska during the WWII in 1942.
6. The last American Civil War veteran lived until 1956. This means he grew up while there was still slavery and was able to see jets and nukes.
7. At ony point during the WWII the German Army was only 12 miles away from Moscow.
8. Albert Einstein was offered to be the second president of Israel in 1952 (he declined).
9. Genghis Khan and his army killed 11% of the entire world population (around 40 million people).
10. Iceland’s parliament was established in 930 and still functioning.
11. Oxford University predates the Aztec Empire by 250 years.
12. The Egyptian pyramids were built by paid laborers not by slaves.
13. Since the Second World War all British tanks are equipped with tea-making facilities.
14. The Roman Empire was only the 19th largest empire in history.

www.oneminutelist.com

16 most addictive websites

One Minute List

Spend 60 seconds daily to learn something new

1. Console Living Room – Created by the Internet Archives, you can play 900 classic arcade games in your browser.
2. Reddit – Reddit is the most addictive website for millions of people worldwide. According to traffic stats the site makes a little less than 1 million unique visitors every day and 90% of them are returning users.
3. The useless web – Similar to StumbleUpon (which can also be addictive), but instead of useful and educational sites it shows you completely useless one.
4. Mental_Floss – Random interesting and amazing facts.
5. Plink – Make music with other people live.
6. SNES Fun – Play SNES games in your browser!
7. GeoGuesser – This awesome websites gives you a random street view location and you have to guess where you are in the World. You can also share your map and challenge your friends.
8. Wonder How To – Learn impressive and useful things.
9. 2leep – Collection of bizarre blogs and articles.
10. Eyes In Space – Fly up to the space while you can look around.
11. Uncrate – The ultimate gadget guide for men.
12. Where Cool Things Happen – Daily resource for cool things.
13. Cracked – Source of bizarre and interesting lists.
14. The Onion – Satiric newspaper. Take nothing seriously on this site.
15. Ovguide – Search for a movie you want to watch or discover new ones.
16. Build With Chrome – Build anything with LEGO in your browser.

www.oneminutelist.com

Leading researchers discuss privacy and security in a connected age

 

As we increasingly rely on the Internet to connect to everything from banks and electrical grids to medical devices and autonomous vehicles, we are exposed to new vulnerabilities that threaten our security and privacy.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has long supported research to enable transformational advances in cybersecurity.  From early NSF investments in cryptography and data protection in the 1980s and 1990s to today's broad portfolio of research investments enabling new paradigms for cybersecurity and consumer protection.

On Thursday, Oct. 30, NSF and IEEE-USA gathered experts in cybersecurity and privacy to explain the nature of these threats and discuss new, innovative ways to combat them.

In a conversation moderated by CISE acting assistant director Suzi Iacono, Lorrie Cranor (Carnegie Mellon University), Roxana Geambasu (Columbia University) and Gary McGraw (Cigital, Inc.) discussed the fundamental research that underlies online privacy and cybersecurity and the translation of ideas from academia to the marketplace.

Said Iacono: "NSF support for cybersecurity research is shaping a future that will give us more individual choice and control."

Credit: NSF

The right to privacy in a big data world: When properly understood, privacy rules essential, experts say

 

October 25, 2014

Washington University in St. Louis

In the digital age in which we live, monitoring, security breaches and hacks of sensitive data are all too common. It has been argued that privacy has no place in this big data environment and anything we put online can, and probably will, be seen by prying eyes. In a new article privacy law expert makes the case that when properly understood, privacy rules will be an essential and valuable part of our digital future.

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In the digital age in which we live, monitoring, security breaches and hacks of sensitive data are all too common. It has been argued that privacy has no place in this big data environment and anything we put online can, and probably will, be seen by prying eyes.

In a new paper, a noted Washington University in St. Louis privacy law expert makes the case that when properly understood, privacy rules will be an essential and valuable part of our digital future.

"If, as a society, we are going to retain the human values on which our political, social and economic institutions have been built, we must be able to feel secure in our digital lives," said Neil M. Richards, JD, professor of law.

Richards is an internationally recognized authority on privacy and information law.

He is co-author of a new paper "Big Data and the Future for Privacy," with Jonathan H. King, a 2013 graduate of the Washington University Intellectual Property & Technology Law LLM program and an executive at CenturyLink, a global network and cloud services provider.

In the paper, Richards and King makes three basic points about the future of privacy.

"First, we need to think differently about privacy," Richards said.

"Privacy is not merely about keeping secrets, but about the rules we use to regulate information, which is, and always has been, in intermediate states between totally secret and known to all," he said. "Privacy rules are information rules, and in an information society, information rules are inevitable."

Second, the scholars suggest that privacy protections are a means to safeguard other values. They examine several such values that privacy rules should protect, including identity, equality, security and trust.

Third, mindful of the complexity of our digital society, Richards and King suggest how meaningful privacy protection can be achieved in a big data future, through a combination of traditional regulation, "soft" regulation and the development of big data ethics.

"Our claim is that the shiny future asserted as inevitable by the pro-innovation, anti-privacy rhetoric turns out to be both shallow and unappealing on closer analysis," Richards said. "We believe there is an alternative future, where we can have the benefits of data science while at the same time preserving meaningful legal and ethical protections for data subjects."

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Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by Washington University in St. Louis. The original article was written by Neil Schoenherr. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

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Journal Reference:

1. Neil M. Richards, Jonathan H. King. Big Data and the Future for Privacy. SSRN Electronic Journal, 2014; DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.2512069

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