#Microsoft Outlook Hacked In China New Report Finds Only a few weeks after Google Gmail service was blocked in China a new report from online censorship monitoring organization Greatfire. org released this morning
states that Microsoft email system Outlook was subjected recently to a an-in-the-middleattack in China.
and SMTP for Outlook were affected but the web interfaces for Microsoft webmail services were not.
That is Outlook. com and Login. live. com were affected not. The attack continued for a about a day
and has stopped since the report states. Affected users were shown warning messages in their email clients that weren as immediately worrisome as those web browsers display which means that some users may not have been aware that an attack was taking place.
For example in an example screenshot Greatfire. org posted an iphone warning message says annot Verify Server Identitybut asks
if the user wants to continue anyway. However when Greatfire. org reproduced the same result via the Firefox web browser the message the browser offers is far more detailed saying also that the error could means hat someone is trying to impersonate the site
and you shouldn continue. uring this attack users would only see the pop-up warning when their email client tried to automatically retrieve new messages.
In most cases they would simply hit ontinueto dismiss the message likely thinking that a network problem was to blame.
But by doing so their emails contacts and passwords were able to be logged by the hacker.
The self-signed certificate is suspected to be from CNNIC (China Internet Network Information center) which is governed by the Cyberspace Administration of China as this would be consistent with previous man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks in China. iven the dangerous nature of this attack on Outlook we again strongly encourage organizations including Microsoft
and Apple to immediately revoke trust for the CNNIC certificate authoritysays Greatfire. org. Below: What happens when a Chinese user accesses Outlook in their email client:
The attack comes within a month of China blocking Gmail which despite a slight recovery is still inaccessible in China.
It also one of many recent MITM attacks in China including those affecting services from Google Yahoo
and Apple in the past. e once again suspect that Lu Wei and the Cyberspace Administration of China have orchestrated this attack
or have allowed willingly the attack to happenwrites Greatfire. org in its report. f our accusation is correct this new attack signals that the Chinese authorities are intent on further cracking down on communication methods that they cannot readily monitor. ee reached out to Microsoft for comment on this attack
and will update if they offer a response n
#Apple Introduces Researchkit, Turning iphones Into Medical Diagnostic Devices Medical research is plagued by small sample sizes and inconsistent data collection.
So Apple is stepping up to help health innovation with Research Kit, a new ios software framework that lets people volunteer to join medical research studies.
Researchkit lets people take tests like saying hhhto detect vocal variations, walking in a line,
Users will decide how to share their data and Apple won see it. And to advance its evolution,
Researchkit will be open source. Researchkit will be available next month, and the first five tests built with it will become available today.
With Researchkit, researchers can build out a medical testing app for ios that accessible to people far from their physical lab. Users can signup with a digital signature,
and instantly start recording data. Tests designed with Researchkit use the iphone sensors to record data.
The touch screen can feel people tapping in rhythm to detect inconsistencies that may signal a disease.
The accelerometer can compare the gait and balance of someone walk against a healthy person speed and posture.
Williams stressed the immediate benefit to users because theye learn about their health even before a researcher study concludes
If a user notices they are having trouble balancing while walking a line, they can talk to their doctor about it.
Since medical data is obviously sensitive, Apple won see anything you put into Researchkit apps and you can give permissions for how data is used by researchers.
The question will be how many developers jump aboard the Researchkit. While it obviously holds potential improvements,
#Purelifi Raises £1. 5m For Tech That Uses Pulsating LED Light To Create Wifi Alternative Purelifi,
an alternative to wireless networking, such as Wifi or 5g, based on visible light communication (VLC). Specifically, the tech uses pulsating LED light, imperceptible to the human eye,
as a way of sending data from one Lifi-equipped device to another. Today the startup is disclosing that it raised £1. 5 million in a new round of funding led by Scottish-based angel group London & Scottish Investment Partners (LSIP), with additional funding from the Scottish
Li-Flameillustration-1024x926interestingly, Lifi tech has some advantages over Wifi networks, such as greater security due to its ine of sightrequirements (no snooping on a network from outside a building
coupled with a battery powered Lifi mobile unit attached to a laptop screen, allows users to roam within a room,
or potentially an entire building, while being connected u
#Xiaomi Buys 3%Of Chinese Games And Software Giant Kingsoft For $68m Xiaomi became the world third largest smartphone company based on sales last year
but it also invested in a number of companies in 2014. Its early deals have largely been in hardware
but today it announced PDF plans to put money into games and software by buying 2. 98 percent of Kingsoft for HK$527 million ($68 million).
Kingsoft started out developing PC games but today the company which is listed in Hong kong and valued at over $2 billion produces security entertainment and enterprise products too.
It already has strong links to Xiaomi whose CEO and cofounder Lei Jun is also founder and chairman of Kingsoft.
because it is a sign of Xiaomi intention to increase its focus on software and services.
Its deals to date have circled around hardware including a $200 million investment in appliance maker Midea
Xiaomi sold more than 60 million devices last year a feat that saw it overtake Samsung as China top smartphone company
and become the third biggest seller of smartphones worldwide in Q3 2014. With a burgeoning family of hardware
and smart home products including an air purifier blood test device smart TV and streaming box Xiaomi could look to construct a network of services to further monetize its user base in the future.
Xiaomi hasn revealed its hand as yet but Hugo Barra the company VP of international did tell Techcrunch last week that it is in the market for investments
The company bought its shares from internet giant Tencent which reduced its stake in Kingsoft to 9. 6 percent.
Apple note which has been reproduced in more than one place online (including here on Russian-language tech site Habrahabr
and requires the developers to cease all use of Apple software and destroy related materials.
Putin government has put in place measures for tracking data on websites and restrictions on certain types of content.
This has resulted in some sites like Github getting blocked and others like Intel shutting down some of their online operations u
The HIPAA compliant Saas software has been rolled out to several paying customers in the U s. healthcare sector so far
machine learning prediction engine at the core of their platform, say cofounders Brent Newhouse and Mudit Garg.
This ingests spectrumof real-time data signals from electronic medical records, to staffing systems and outpatient numbers,
and emergency call button data, to external factors gleaned by scraping public data such as weather info, disease seasonality and even local events
which might have an impact on hospital admissions looking for patterns to generate its demand predictions.
feed the machine enough data and the learning algorithms will find the patterns, or at least be able to predict likelihoods with decent accuracy.
So that what Analyticsmd says its platform can do and with a high degree of accuracy. In testing of its algorithms it says it has measured measured id-step accuracyin the 90%range of predicting volume a day ahead,
or predicting census of a unit a day ahead, although Garg stresses it not putting those test figures in front of customers.)
The software weighs up demand probabilities and considers the various costs involved, meaning financial costs such as staffing and beds but also care costs, so crucial factors such as quality of service and patient satisfaction,
a little bit there are, based on how this algorithm has performed in the past. If you have a sense of what that distribution looks like you can make your decision based on the relative costs,
More than a dashboard This predictive core they argue sets the product apart from rival software products
which just plug multiple data signals into a dashboard view for hospital staff to interpret themselves.
The problem with the dashboard approach in healthcare operations is staff simply don have time to be triaging all this data themselves.
Whatever device and medium is most appropriate for reaching that particular healthcare providersstaff. hese users are ones that are constantly battling fires that are happening in the hospital and taking care of patients,
and then decide what the best data-driven decision, based on that is really hard, says Garg. e started with a real-time dashboard at firstand realized that,
based on analyzing a combination of data signals such as when a patient presses a call button for help,
and used that combination to be able to say who are the patients who are likely to fall. e do use a whole bunch of machine learning algorithms that help take out any unknowns in the equation,
because the platform provides the data overlap as human staff come and go. But what about the other humans in this equation the patients?
In its current rollouts Garg says is only utilizing data elements that hospitals were already capturing,
if a hospital started asking for additional decisions that maybe required additional data elements to be captured then the team would efinitely want to have a conversation with the patients to make sure they are comfortable with that Newhouse also points out that Analyticsmd makes a point of not capturing personal data such as patientsnames
The team third cofounder, Ian Christopher, brings the algorithmic expertise having worked on predictive software while at Stanford.
which have silos of data derive benefit from each other as well. m
#Signal Keeps Your iphone Calls And Texts Safe From Government Spies Don want someone else handing your text messages, pictures, video or phone conversations over to the government?
There an app for that. An ios app called Signal is a project out of Open Whisper Systems,
a not-for-profit collective of hackers dedicated to making it harder for prying government eyes to get a hold of your information.
It gets high marks from both the American Civil liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation as a comprehensive solution for protecting your privacy.
makes it possible to send encrypted group, text, picture and video messages for free from iphone to iphone.
For those who want to share with their friends on Android the community organization currently has two Android apps Textsecure
and Redphone that need to be combined to do the same thing as Signal does on ios. Textsecure is the text message solution
and Redphone is encrypted the phone-call solution. The plan is to combine those two into one Android app for Signal users.
Recent security breaches and other events have prompted a number of apps to emerge that promise encrypted communications between mobile phones.
The Dutch SIM CARD manufacturer Gemalto is just one company among many of the alleged government hacking operations.
Meanwhile, several tech companies have decided to take privacy measures into their own hands after the revelations from Edward Snowden that the NSA was capturing the private data of U s. citizens from several Silicon valley tech giants.
Signal was created to make that sort of mass collection too difficult to pursue. ven if we wanted to,
Founder Moxie Marlinspike tells me over the phone. Marlinspike knows his way around encryption technology.
and formerly ran Twitter security team. he idea is to scramble the information so well that it not worth pursuing.
Adding to the frustration of the NSA in its fight to get at your data, Signal code is open source. This means anyone can go to Github
and use the source code to create encrypted apps. Whatsapp recently incorporated Open Whisper System code into the Android version of its app. e want as many people as possible to have embedded the capability within their apps
so that nobody can get your information, Marlinspike says o
#Facebook Open-sources Some Of Its Deep-Learning Tools In the world of machine learning the buzzword these days is eep learning.
It a technique that has been popularized a by Geoff Hinton who is now at Google and previously worked at Microsoft Research as well as other computer science researchers like Yann Lecun who are looking for better ways to teach computers how to recognize objects and speech.
Facebook too has done quite a bit of work in the area and today the company is open-sourcing some of its projects around the Torch7 computing framework for machine learning.
Torch has long been at the center of many machine learning and artificial intelligence projects in academic labs and at companies like Google Twitter and Intel.
Facebook today is optimized launching tools to increase the speed at which deep-learning projects that use Torch run.
One allows developers to parallelize the training of their networks using multiple GPUS simultaneously. Another improvement ensures that training the convolutional neural nets at the center of many deep learning systems can be trained 23 times faster
when compared to the fastest publicly available code today. In addition Facebook is launching a number of additional tools that bring more speed to other parts of Torch as well.
Some of these are modest but many of Facebook projects results in 3 to 10x improvements over the default tools.
All of this is pretty technical of course and you can read more about the details here. What matters though is that deep learning techniques
(or at least their results) are slowly starting to show up in a lot of the software we use every day.
Google+Photos for example uses it to allow you to find images in your photo library.
And at CES last week Nvidia spent most of its keynote discussing how it uses deep learning to classify objects that a camera on a car may see in order to further its research in autonomous driving o
#Trillion-Dollar Alternative Lending Industry Is A VC Gold mine In a recovering economy where big banks are restricted by complex regulations,
startups and venture investors are gearing up for the next gold rush in the trillion-dollar marketplace lending industry.
according to Crunchbase data. The 17 deals recorded in 2015 average $23 million each, compared to a $14 million average deal size in 2014.
post-financial crisis, they want more data and more transparency about what theye investing in, and the marketplace platform allows investors to do their own analysis,
and software to help them fly, detect obstacles and make sense of terabytes of data they collect.
This is the golden age of drones, and it is just taking off. Take consumer perception roneis a household word.
Just look at the Google Trends for the word ronesor JI. Check out the number of drone videos on Youtube (827
000). ) According to Frost and Sullivan, an aerospace research firm, over 200,000 drones were sold each month in 2014.
Companies like Bouygues, Balfour Beatty and Webcor are using drones to map construction sites. They are employing drones made by Skycatch,
Farmers are increasingly using drones to monitor crop health and gauge growth patterns. This is a job well-suited to drones,
Companies like Precision Hawk are developing software and hardware that automatically measures the height of crops
and detect weeds, and they can even count plants. These kinds of drones are using fixed wings,
and capture a lot more data than a DJI-like quadcopter. Jay Bregman, the former CEO of Hailo, is verified developing database of drones,
that will allow people to know where you can and cannot fly a drone. Saving Lives Many of you will have seen the defibrillator drone
punch in your destination via Google maps, and be driven by a computer, guiding your destination while avoiding all other air traffic.
Youl leave roads, traffic lights, traffic jams and accidents behind. The Challenge for Entrepreneurs This leaves us entrepreneurs with some challenges.
and what kind of software and hardware will have to be developed to manage that growth. There are very few companies out there today creating software to make drones safer.
What about systems to manage where drones can and cannot legally go? How will we know who owns a drone when the next one crashes into a famous person lawn?
and software is going to have to be built to make all of these dreams a reality. There are so many great applications for drones,
#Facebook Unveils Facebook At work Lets Businesses Create Their Own Social networks About six months ago we reported that Facebook was working on a new product aimed squarely at the enterprise market under the working title B@Work
today the company is launching new ios and Android apps called acebook At Workalong with a version of Facebook At work accessible via its main website
which will let businesses create their own social networks amongst their employees that are built to look
and act like Facebook itself. Facebook At work is now available for download on ios and wel update with a links to the Andriod version once it live though both are usable via a limited pilot to start with.
Check out Josh follow-up story for more screenshots details on privacy and analysis.)Employers can create separate logins for employees to use with their Work accounts
or users can link these up with their other profiles to access everything in one place.
The product puts Facebook head-to-head with the likes of Microsoft Yammer Slack Convo Socialcast and a huge number of others who are trying to tackle the nterprise social networkspace.
Even Linkedin conveniently let drop last night that it too was looking at building a product for coworkers to communicate
(but not chat as a Linkedin spokesperson tells me). Not all of these have been a hit:
Lars Rasmussen the engineering director at Facebook who is heading up the project had in his past once headed up one of the failed efforts at an enterprise social network Google Wave.
Facebook is positioning today debut as a bold first step. ee putting the app into the app stores
In fact Facebook has already been running tests of the service with very small setof external businesses around the world Rasmussen says;
In fact the existing Facebook Groups product is used already by smaller organisations. Because of the early nature of the product there are a lot of questions in the air.
For now Facebook Platform has been disabled on the Work product meaning no ads or apps. That may not always be the case (t could be paidhe says.
Rasmussen says that Facebook has effectively been working on Work for the last 10 years because it is based on
what Facebook own employees have been using to communicate with each other pass on news plan meetings and share documents.
That long-time use and Facebook familiarity to all of us are part of what makes Facebook confident that it can carve a place for itself in a market that already is crowded very. acebook At work strength is spent that wee ten years
and incorporated feedback from 1 billion active usershe says. ll embedded of that is now in the same product
but adapted for different use cases. nd it actually used by staff hen Mark Zuckerberg the CEO makes an announcement he just posts it on Facebook at Workrasmussen says.
In fact Facebook own popularity could be Facebook At work biggest advantage. A lot of efforts in offices to get employees to collaborate more with each other have been stymied
because employees don want to use the software. It yet another new thing to learn and doesn feel essential.
A lot of messaging apps (Microsoft Yammer being one of the notably early movers) have tried to tap into onsumerizationor getting enterprise apps to look
In that vein Facebook At work built essentially on Facebook itself will be arguably the closest of all to an authentic onsumersocial experience.
By making this free Facebook could potentially drive a lot more users to its wider network.
The fact that Rasmussen would not rule out advertising as an option down the road to me suggests that Facebook could consider tiers of its own where some businesses may pay for the product
Plus this would give Facebook another revenue stream beyond ads and app-related payments. How it will work Facebook wouldn show me a demo ahead of the launch
but this is how Rasmussen describes it: hen an employer adopts Facebook At work they can construct it with a set of new accounts.
Users can then link their work and personal accounts together so that they are logged into both at the same time. his would work much like Groups
and public profiles do today. On mobile you would have two mobile apps running at the same time he adds. ven
if the employee chooses to link there is no crossover. The content stays entirely within your personal or work Facebook. hat not there/integrations.
You can share documents today but for now there will be no in-app editing urrently. gain that leaves this open as something that will come down the line. he set of features are identitcal to personal Facebook
but just to get it out sooner wee disabled the Platform so the APIS that third parties work with are not there
Hopefully in the future other enterprise tools will integrate with Facebook At work. ackstory on development. Back in June I deduced that Facebook At work was connected with Rasmussen work in London but what
I found out from sources after that report was that this was more than casual: this was his baby.
and the knowledge of a failure of doing this at a different companyhe says referring of course to Google Wave. thought that maybe Facebook experience was
however is one that Facebook will have to continue to grapple with all the more so as it continues to grow.
Canvassing opinion on a Facebook At work product I heard not only once people shy away from the idea concerned with the thought of Facebook wningyour data
and the potential lack of confidentiality resulting from it. That can be frustrating when related to pictures of you too drunk
#Ford#s Applink Will Soon Support Third-party Navigation Apps Most carsbuilt-in navigation systems tend to be compared a bit clunky to modern smartphone apps like of Google maps.
The next version of Applink its system for connecting smartphone apps to its SYNC infotainment system will allow third-party navigation apps to project their maps from the phone onto the built-in screens in its cars.
but Applink 3. 0 will only become available at a later date (SYNC can be updated over Wifi and through a connected smartphone).
The company is already working with Alibaba to bring its navigation and music services to its in-vehicle screens.
There no reason to believe the company will stop Google Microsoft Telenav or Here from offering its mapping services on its platform though.
The members in the Genivi alliance besides Ford include the likes of BMW Honda Nissan renault Volvo and John Deere as well as chip manufacturers like Intel Qualcomm and Nvidia and plenty of aftermarket manufacturers.
Earlier this month the Genivi Alliance also announced that it would offer open source middleware to support Android Auto integration into car infotainment products r
and expand its credit offerings something the company notes is key as it expands into the offline world,
#Sony's Just Released A Worthwhile Waterproof Phone Waterproof phones have been around for ages. But to be waterproof,
But now there the Sony Xperia M4 Aqua, an Android smartphone that waterproof without those annoying caps.
The rest of the phone is on par with other mid-range phones. There are 13mp/5mp cameras
Sony notes that the phone has a two-day battery life. Sony says the phone is waterproof under a few conditions.
First it cannot be submerged past 1. 5 meters. So youe out of luck if you throw it in the deep end.
and the phone should only occasionally be chlorinated in water, and it needs to be rinsed off afterward.
And of course, before the phone is recharged, the USB port needs to be dry. The M4 Aqua will have a starting price of 299 EUR
and will be available in 80 countries, but not the U s. Sony tells us that the company is focusing on its flagship offering in the States.
Yet that point is distinctly farther under the water than any other major cell phone maker.
but I wouldn have any issue reading a Kindle book on the phone while taking my nightly bath l
Slickr, a fashion social network. Swipentap. com a POS ipad app. Integreight which develops novel products for the electronic hobbyist and education market.
Filkhedma A concierge for household services Baby Boons modern baby ecommerce Wallstreetchamber Which claims to have an algorithm for automated share investing.
Zex a mobile ad platform that serves offers to users smartphone via their lock-screens Eventus for creating and analysis social events.
Tennra A a gamified crowdfunding platform. Usertalk An embedded call button for customer support over VOIP.
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011