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sarahnaomi writes:
For years, San Francisco has had a robust fiber optic infrastructure laying dormant underneath its streets. Google announced Wednesday that it’s going to start lighting some of those cables up. Welcome to the future of broadband in major cities.
Most people don’t know that many cities throughout the United States are already wired with "dark fiber": infrastructure that, for a variety of reasons, is never used to provide gigabit connections to actual residents. This fiber is often laid by companies you rarely hear about, like Zayo and Level 3, which lay fiber infrastructure in hopes the city, a provider like Google, or a corporate customer (like an office building) will eventually make use of it.
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sarahnaomi writes:
Brace yourself, because your favorite social media platform might get turned on its head: Twitter is experimenting with a new way of sorting your timeline that breaks with the reverse-chronological format it has used since its inception.
Certain users have already been selected for testing, and a Twitter search for “timeline out of order” revealed a lot of confused Tweeters.
A Twitter spokesperson confirmed via email that this is “an experiment. We're continuing to explore ways to surface the best content for people using Twitter.” Presumably, Twitter is working with algorithms similar to the ones Facebook uses to order items on your News Feed.
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sarahnaomi writes:
Ransomware, the devilish family of malware that locks down a victim's files until he or she coughs up a hefty bounty, may soon be coming to Mac.
Last week, a Brazilian security researcher produced a proof-of-concept for what appears to be the first ransomware to target Mac operating systems (Mac OS X). On Monday, cybersecurity company the researcher’s findings.
“Mabouia is the first case of file-based crypto ransomware for OS X, albeit a proof-of-concept,” Symantec wrote in a blog post.
“It's simple code, I did it in two days,” Rafael Salema Marques, the creator of the malware dubbed “Mabouia,” told Motherboard in a phone interview.
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sarahnaomi writes:
These customizations make it difficult for an attacker to use any sort of turnkey solution, presenting a barrier to any off-the-shelf equipment attackers might use. At border crossings, Wicherski said possible attackers might have “an appliance, that comes with a manual, and low-skilled operators.” By using a setup that is not very common, the border cops might not know what to do.
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sarahnaomi writes:
An entomologist has decided to use the platform to auction off the naming rights for a newly-discovered species of moth.
When a new species is discovered, the honor of naming it goes to whoever found it. However, Eric H. Metzler, an entomologist from the Wedge Entomological Foundation, decided to ask Western National Parks Association—who funded some of his research—to start an online auction and take the proceeds.
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sarahnaomi writes:
The power of Bitcoin is giving your dusty old TI-89 calculator a second chance of being useful.
Matt Whitlock, who helped make one of the world’s first Bitcoin ATMs, is at it again. In a video posted on to Vimeo, he showed how using the calculator once only used for high school geometry and a 12-sided die makes a secure address for your Bitcoin account.
The video self-explanatory. Load up your calculator with the code, roll it 72 times and enter the number rolled into it. After that, the calculator pumps out a private key and address.
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sarahnaomi writes:
The facial recognition pilot program launched last week by US Customs and Border Protection, which civil liberties advocates say could lead to new potentially privacy-invading programs, is just the first of three biometric experiments that the feds are getting ready to launch.
The three experiments involve new controversial technologies like iris and face scanner kiosks, which CBP plans to deploy at the Mexican border, and facial recognition software, according to a leaked document obtained by Motherboard.
All three pilots are part of a broader Customs and Border Protection (CBP) program to modernize screenings at American entry and exit ports, including at the highly politicized Mexican border, with the aid of new biometric technologies. The program is known as Apex Air Entry and Exit Re-Engineering (AEER) Project, according to the leaked slides.
These pilot programs have the goal of “identifying and implementing” biometric technologies that can be used at American borders to improve the immigration system as well as US national security, according to the slides.
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sarahnaomi writes:
Mariina Hallikainen, CEO of small Finnish game developer Colossal Order, is having a good day. When I call her, it's only been a few hours since she learned that Colossal Order's SimCity-like game, Cities: Skylines, has sold more than half a million copies in its first week. The first 250,000 of those were sold in the first 24 hours, making it the fastest-selling game its publisher Paradox Interactive has ever released.
The irony here doesn't escape Hallikainen. Only a week before Skylines was released, game publisher Electronic Arts announced that it was shutting down SimCity developer Maxis' studio in Emeryville, which it acquired in 1997.
"I feel so bad about Maxis closing down," Hallikainen said. "The older SimCitys were really the inspiration for us to even consider making a city builder."
At the same time, Hallikainen admits SimCity's mistakes were Colossal Order's opportunity. "If SimCity was a huge success, which is what we expected, I don't know if Skylines would have ever happened," she said, explaining that it would have been a harder pitch to sell to Paradox if the new SimCity dominated the market.
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sarahnaomi writes:
In countries like Zambia, Tanzania, or Kenya, where very few have access to the Internet, Facebook is bringing its own version of the net: Internet.org, an app that gives mobile users free access to certain sites such as Google, Wikipedia and, of course, Facebook.
While the initiative has clearly positive goals, it’s also been criticized as an “imperialistic” push for Facebook colonies, where novice Internet.org users will grow up thinking their restricted version of the web is the real internet.
To fight against that possibility, a 20-year-old developer from Paraguay is working on an app that tunnels the “regular” internet through Facebook Messenger, one of the services free to use on Internet.org’s app. This allows Internet.org users to establish a link to the outside, unrestricted internet, circumventing restrictions.
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sarahnaomi writes:
I don't know how the hell you get Netflix to play on an original Nintendo, but it's been blowing my mind for the last 18 hours or so. Netflix posted the video with painfully little explanation, which is driving me nuts.
I have tried in many ways to get in touch with the Netflix developers who did what you see above, but no one is getting back to me, so here are some wild speculations. If you have better ones, let me know.
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sarahnaomi writes:
It could have been any other morning. Felipe del Jesús Peréz García got dressed, said goodbye to his wife and kids, and drove off to work. It would be a two hour commute from their home in Monterrey, in Northeastern Mexico’s Nuevo León state, to Reynosa, in neighboring Tamaulipas state, where Felipe, an architect, would scout possible installation sites for cell phone towers for a telecommunications company before returning that evening.
That was the last time anyone saw him.
What happened to Felipe García? One theory suggests he was abducted by a sophisticated organized crime syndicate, and then forced into a hacker brigade that builds and services the cartel’s hidden, backcountry communications infrastructure. They’re the Geek Squads to some of the biggest mafia-style organizations in the world.
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sarahnaomi writes:
It could be the largest child porn investigation ever conducted.
Canadian police say they’ve uncovered a massive online file sharing network for exploitative material that could involve up to 7,500 users in nearly 100 countries worldwide.
But unlike past investigations into the distribution of child porn, which typically involve targeting suspects individually, police have instead seized over 1.2 petabytes of data—more than four times the amount of data in the US Library of Congress—from a data center responsible for storing the material, and may even attempt to lay criminal charges against its operators, too.
“What we are alleging is occurring is that there are individuals and organizations that are profiting from the storage and the exchange of child sexual exploitation material,” Scott Tod, Deputy Commissioner of the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), told Motherboard at a conference late last month, after speaking to a crowd of defence specialists. “They store it and they provide a secure website that you can log into, much like people do with illegal online gaming sites.”
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sarahnaomi writes:
Most of us grew up believing that tiny, distant Pluto was the outermost planet in our solar system. Then, one day, the scientific powers that be decreed that it wasn’t. But it seems the matter is far from settled.
“The International Astronomical Union of wants to hide from the issue,” David Weintraub of Vanderbilt University told me in an email. “They have refused to allow the issue to appear on the agenda at the 2009 or 2012 or 2015 meetings. They hope it will go away.”
Weintraub—who describes Pluto’s exile as a stunt organized by a “very small clique of Pluto-haters”—would have the dwarf world rejoin the ranks of our Solar System’s fully-fledged planets today. But solid evidence that Pluto deserves the title may come in July, when NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft slingshots around the icy rock and sends us back a detailed picture of its composition.
Pluto’s planethood was revoked by majority vote on the final day of the 2006 IAU conference. Over 2,500 astronomers attended the meeting throughout the week, but only 394 votes ultimately decided Pluto’s fate: 237 in favor of demoting the planet and 157 against.
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sarahnaomi writes:
That the internet is the most powerful tool humanity has ever created is old hat. I'm sure I could find the same thing written somewhere in a 1995 issue of Wired. And over those last 20 years, that knowledge has come with a simple imperative: we must increase access, close the digital divide, lest entire populations of people—who are likely already disadvantaged, as access trickles down with economic and geopolitical privilege—be left behind.
Facebook this week released a major report on global internet access, as part of the company's Internet.org campaign, which aims to bring cheap internet to new markets in partnership with seven mobile companies. Facebook says 1.39 billion people used its product in December 2014, and it's natural for the company to try to corral the other four-fifths of the planet.
But aside from ideals and growth markets, the report highlights a tension inherent to the question of access: When Facebook sets sail to disconnected markets, what version of the internet will it bring?
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sarahnaomi writes:
On its face, sex.com looks like a no-frills Pinterest for porn, but behind the site lies an ongoing grudge match between the man who invented online dating and a con artist who stole the crown jewel of the internet out from under him.
The history of the domain is well documented, with two books and dozens of articles written on the subject. It was first registered in 1994 by Gary Kremen, the entrepreneur who founded Match.com and was savvy enough to buy up several generic domains, including jobs.com and housing.com, in the early days of the internet.
