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Overall seven flaws were patched – including one critical vulnerability that could lead to arbitrary code execution. …read more

Source:: Threatpost

China might be at loggerheads with the United States over trade, but it is calling for a friendlier approach to the development of artificial intelligence. From a report: Speaking at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai this week, China’s vice premier, Liu He, said that AI would depend heavily on international cooperation. “We’re hoping that all countries, as members of the global village, will be inclusive and support each other so that we can respond to the double-edged-sword effect of new technologies,” He said through a translator. “AI represents a new era. Cross-national and cross-discipline cooperation is inevitable.” President Xi Jinping delivered a similar message in a letter presented at the same conference. Xi said that China would “share results with other countries in the field of artificial intelligence.” He also called for collaboration between nations on AI topics such as ethics, law, governance, and security. This new, softer approach to artificial intelligence comes just over a year after the Chinese government announced an ambitious and aggressive AI plan. This blueprint called for Chinese AI researchers to lead the world by 2030, and for domestic companies to build an industry worth more than $150 billion. China’s tech industry has already embraced machine learning and AI at an impressive rate.

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Source:: Slashdot

An anonymous reader shares a report: All around us, algorithms provide a kind of convenient source of authority: an easy way to delegate responsibility, a short cut we take without thinking. Who is really going to click through to the second page of Google results every time and think critically about the information that has been served up? Or go to every airline to check if a comparison site is listing the cheapest deals? Or get out a ruler and a road map to confirm that their GPS is offering the shortest route? But already in our hospitals, our schools, our shops, our courtrooms and our police stations, artificial intelligence is silently working behind the scenes, feeding on our data and making decisions on our behalf. Sure, this technology has the capacity for enormous social good — it can help us diagnose breast cancer, catch serial killers, avoid plane crashes and, as the health secretary, Matt Hancock, has proposed, potentially save lives using NHS data and genomics. Unless we know when to trust our own instincts over the output of a piece of software, however, it also brings the potential for disruption, injustice and unfairness. If we permit flawed machines to make life-changing decisions on our behalf — by allowing them to pinpoint a murder suspect, to diagnose a condition or take over the wheel of a car — we have to think carefully about what happens when things go wrong.

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Source:: Slashdot

NoSQL database biz promises to ‘keep it simple’ for enterprises after real-time analytics

NoSQL database biz Couchbase has promised administrators its latest release will allow them to ditch the laborious extract, transform and load (ETL) process, and analyse info directly from the database.…

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Source:: TheRegister

Python 2 support for runbooks slithers out of preview

Microsoft this week announced something that may have surprised a few devs who’d seen it lurking in Azure for a while – Python 2 support has finally moved out of preview for Azure runbooks.…

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Source:: TheRegister

Newegg is clearing up its website after a month-long data breach. TechCrunch: Hackers injected 15 lines of card skimming code on the online retailer’s payments page which remained for more than a month between August 14 and September 18, Yonathan Klijnsma, a threat researcher at RiskIQ, told TechCrunch. The code siphoned off credit card data from unsuspecting customers to a server controlled by the hackers with a similar domain name — likely to avoid detection. The server even used an HTTPS certificate to blend in. The code also worked for both desktop and mobile customers — though it’s unclear if mobile customers are affected. The online electronics retailer removed the code on Tuesday after it was contacted by incident response firm Volexity, which first discovered the card skimming malware and reported its findings. Newegg is one of the largest retailers in the US, making $2.65 billion in revenue in 2016. The company touts more than 45 million monthly unique visitors, but it’s not known precisely how many customers completed transactions during the period.

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Source:: Slashdot

Signing up for college classes can be intimidating, from tuition, textbook requirements, to finding an engaging professor. Imagine signing up online, but you cannot use your monitor. We wager that roughly ninety-nine percent of the hackers reading this article have it displayed on a tablet, phone, or computer monitor. Conversely, “Only one percent of published books is available in Braille,” according to [Kristina Tsvetanova] who has created a hybrid tablet computer with a Braille display next to a touch-screen tablet running Android. The tablet accepts voice commands for launching apps, a feature baked right into Android. The idea came to her after helping a blind classmate sign up for classes.

Details on the mechanism are not clear, but they are calling it smart liquid, so it may be safe to assume hydraulic valves control the raised dots, which they call “tixels”. A rendering of the tablet can be seen below the break. The ability to create a full page of braille cells suggest they have made the technology pretty compact. We have seen Braille written on PCBs, a refreshable display based on vibrator motors, and a nicely sized Braille keyboard that can fit on the back of a mobile phone.

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Source:: Hackaday

Turing-Welchman machine to do its thing – with original wartime operator present

The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) is going to fire up its replica Enigma code-breaker to decrypt encoded messages sent from Poland – with an original wartime Bombe operator supervising the process.…

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Source:: Register

Social engineering scams target employees’ payroll credentials so attackers can access and change their bank account data. …read more

Source:: DarkReading

The gaming-focused issue will hit newsstands later this month. …read more

Source:: CNet