For six years, a group of robots lived in three houses. No humans resided there with them. The house was solely occupied by robots, fake sweat machines, and a bunch of electronic appliances, which turned on every day. The homes themselves were set up to mimic typical suburban households.
They were equipped with TVs, dishwashers, and washing machines — all of which turned on and off throughout the day. But the appliances themselves varied from house to house. One home was programmed to be extremely energy efficient, whereas another was only slightly more energy-efficient than the control home, which replicated the habits of an average family.
Read moreSocial network Facebook introduces a new policy for the use of data about users, allowing you to transfer them to third parties without the Express permission of the data owner. This is stated in the notice of the social network, directed to the Russian users.
According to the notification, the person shall be deemed to agree with the new policy, if after 1 January 2015 will continue to use the social network and its services. In the new edition of the policy tells you who Facebook will share the personal data of its users. Facebook will also give data users the government, if it considers that the request is legally justified.
Read moreWith all the news about massive data breaches in the biggest retail chains and the ever-present risk of online fraud, you may be wondering whether or not it is really a good idea to use credit cards at all.
Of course it is! After all, it’s much safer than carrying lots of cash in your pockets, and you have no viable alternatives when buying something online – be it a new smartphone app or a car. So, banking cards are good, despite the possibility of security issues. You just have to make sure your “virtual pockets” are not wide open for a thief’s convenience. There are some tips for you to follow in order to protect your credit cards.
Read moreAgainst the team of hackers, the poor car stood no chance. Meticulously overwhelming its computer networks, the hackers showed that - given time - they would be able to pop the trunk and start the windshield wipers, cut the brakes or lock them up, and even kill the engine.
Their motives were not malicious. Automakers are betting heavily that consumers will want not just the maps and music playlists of today but also Internet-enabled vehicles that stream movies and the turn dictation into email. The federal government wants to require cars to send each other electronic messages warning of dangers on the road.
Read moreDHL has announced the maiden voyage of their "Parcelcopter" will be made in Germany. The unmanned drone service will be used to transfer drugs and other urgent medical supplies to a pharmacy on a remote island off the North coast. This is the first time an autonomous aircraft has been authorised to deliver goods in Europe.
The drone has been cleared by the German transport ministry and air traffic control to use a restricted airspace now reserved purely for the Parcelcopter's delivery missions, where the flight zone is mostly open water. If this is successful, DHL could well be on their way to challenging Amazon's Prime Air project.
Read moreReports that Sony Pictures has been hacked have been trickling in this morning, after a thread appeared on Reddit claiming all computers at the company were offline due to a hack. An image appeared on all employee’s computers demanding their “requests be met” along with links to leaked data.
The Reddit user that posted the thread posted a year ago that they worked at Sony Pictures. The ZIP files mentioned in the images contain a list of filenames of a number of documents pertaining to financial records along with private keys for access to servers. They said that “a single server was compromised and the attack was spread from there.”
Read moreEarlier this week a federal court in Florida issued a temporary restraining order shutting down a series of organizations in the business of peddling fake software and nonexistent tech support services, temporarily freezing the assets of those companies’ and placing them under the control of a court-appointed receiver.
The scam relies on its victims downloading a piece of free trial software that claims to enhance computer performance or increase security. Once the software is installed, it runs a fake scan on the machine. The defendants’ scanner allegedly always detects a number of problems. Of course, the trial software then informs users that they will need to purchase the full version of the software in order to remedy the issues detected by the scanner.
Read moreHighly anticipated federal rules on commercial drones are expected to require operators to have a license and limit flights to daylight hours. The drone industry has awaited commercial rules for about six years, hoping the rules would pave the way for widespread drone use in industries such as farming, filmmaking and construction.
Current FAA policy allows recreational drone flights in the USA but essentially bars drones from commercial use. While the FAA wants to open the skies to unmanned commercial flights, the expected rules are more restrictive than drone supporters sought and wouldn’t address privacy concerns over the use of drones.
Read moreThere's a new hacking group in cyberspace, and it's going after the Islamic State's online propaganda. Less than 24 hours after ISIS social media accounts posted a threatening message from the group's leader, the audio recording was replaced with a song and its transcript with a logo resembling that of the Egyptian military.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's recording had been hacked, and the operation carried all the hallmarks of a group such as the Syrian Electronic Army. The Egyptian Cyber Army is clearly inspired by the infamous Syrian hacktivist group, but a spokesperson told that the group's members are all Egyptians — some civilians, some with a military or police background.
Read moreIn the face of widespread Internet surveillance, we need a secure and practical means of talking to each other from our phones and computers. For years, privacy and security experts worldwide have called on the general public to adopt strong, open-source cryptography to protect our communications.
Many companies offer “secure messaging” products — but are these systems actually secure? The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s secure messaging scorecard made a list of mobile and Internet messaging services that scored well on privacy and security and the services that scored poorly. Let’s focus primarily on the most popular messengers.
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