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Aug 6, 2022

New York Health Department says hundreds of people may be infected with polio virus

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

The health department reiterated that it is still investigating the virus’ origin, and said that it is not yet clear whether the infected person in Rockland County was linked to the other cases.

Polio is “a serious and life-threatening disease,” the state health department said. It is highly contagious and can be spread by people who aren’t yet symptomatic. Symptoms usually appear within 30 days of infection, and can be mild or flu-like. Some people who are infected may become paralyzed or die.

Before the polio vaccine was introduced in the 1950s, thousands of Americans died in polio outbreaks and tens of thousands, many of them children, were left with paralysis. After a successful vaccination campaign, polio was officially declared eradicated in the U.S. in 1979.

Aug 6, 2022

Twitter confirms zero-day used to expose data of 5.4 million accounts

Posted by in category: cybercrime/malcode

Twitter has confirmed a recent data breach was caused by a now-patched zero-day vulnerability used to link email addresses and phone numbers to users’ accounts, allowing a threat actor to compile a list of 5.4 million user account profiles.

Last month, BleepingComputer spoke to a threat actor who said that they were able to create a list of 5.4 million Twitter account profiles using a vulnerability on the social media site.

This vulnerability allowed anyone to submit an email address or phone number, verify if it was associated with a Twitter account, and retrieve the associated account ID. The threat actor then used this ID to scrape the public information for the account.

Aug 6, 2022

Hackers Have Found A New Way To Hack Into Microsoft Email Account

Posted by in categories: business, cybercrime/malcode

Security researchers at Zscaler’s ThreatLabz group have discovered a new strain of a large-scale phishing campaign, which uses an adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) attack technique capable of bypassing multi-factor authentication (MFA).

For the unversed, AiTM attack is a cyberattack where the attacker secretly conveys and possibly alters the communications between two parties who believe that they are directly communicating with each other, as the attacker has inserted themselves between the two parties. Hackers through this method can use the stolen cookies to log in and completely evade MFA.

The main purpose of the large-scale phishing campaign is believed to be breaching of corporate accounts to conduct BEC (business email compromise) attacks, which redirects payments toward the hacker’s bank account using forged documents, as reported by BleepingComputer.

Aug 6, 2022

Florida braces for crowds for NASA’s Artemis 1 moon mission launch

Posted by in category: space

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Tourism officials in Florida’s Space Coast are expecting a massive influx of tourists for the upcoming Artemis 1 moon mission, the first launch for NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecra.

Aug 6, 2022

Major Applications of Natural Language Processing

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

NLP will experience exponential growth due to the growing prominence of computers and Artificial Intelligence and the digitization of society. Click here to learn more.

Aug 6, 2022

Cannibal squid change color to “speak” in a way that resembles human language

Posted by in category: futurism

Humboldt squid can communicate complex messages. Let’s hope that they don’t evolve lungs and legs, or humanity might be in real trouble.

Aug 6, 2022

30 Free Circuit Simulators Lightly Reviewed

Posted by in category: computing

We live in a time where great software is available with the click of a mouse, often for free or — at least — low cost. But there’s a problem: how do you select from so many alternatives? We were interested in [Lee Teschler]’s review earlier this year of 30 free circuit simulators. If you are selecting one or don’t like the one you are currently using, it is well worth the time to review.

There are several on the list that you’ve probably heard of before like GNUCap and LTspice. There are also some lesser-known products. Some of those are just trial or student versions of paid products. Some are branded versions of commercial products (like Tina) or were made free after selling for higher price tags (like MicroCap 12).

Old favorites like Falstad (which is apparently known as Circuit Sims) and TinkerCAD made the list. Many of the trial versions were very limited. For example, DCAClab only provides an NPN bipolar transistor model. Proteus doesn’t let you save or print unless you pay. While the list includes TI’s Tina, it doesn’t seem to mention that TI also provides a free version of PSpice which is a very popular professional product.

Aug 6, 2022

How GPT-3 Wrote a Movie About a Cockroach-AI Love Story

Posted by in categories: bitcoin, entertainment, internet, robotics/AI

In artist Miao Ying’s animated film Surplus Intelligence, a cockroach falls in love with the artificial intelligence responsible for monitoring her behavior. There’s only one problem: The AI, personified as a man with movie-star looks, committed a crime in Walden XII, the quasi-medieval fantasyland where the story is set. He stole the village’s power stone, and so the roach sets off to mine bitcoin to save him.

Viewers might see in the plot a metaphor for the conflicted relationship some Chinese people have with social credit scoring, which is meant to nudge citizens toward better behavior. Or it could be a nod to the insidious ways social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook condition our behavior and mine us for data. If the tale itself seems a little ridiculous at times, that’s because Miao had a stealth collaborator: the AI text-generating system GPT-3, which wrote the script for the film. That power stone in the village? GPT-3 determined that it looks like “a burrito from Mexico,” perhaps a side effect of all the advertising copy GPT-3 has been tasked with writing.

The half-hour film is on view through the end of the year at the Asia Society in New York as part of the exhibition Mirror Image: A Transformation of Chinese Identity. “All of Miao Ying’s work is a satirical look at what digital means in China,” says Barbara Pollack, who curated Mirror Image and wrote the book Brand New Art from China. But, she notes, the works also celebrate the creativity the policies inspire in its citizens. Miao’s Hardcore Digital Detox (2018) challenges viewers to experience the internet behind the Great Firewall—and without the filter bubbles that platforms in the East and West impose. Chinternet Plus (2016) describes how to brand a “counterfeit ideology.” And for 2007’s Blind Spot, Miao manually annotated a Chinese dictionary to indicate all of the words that were censored on Google.cn at the time.

Aug 6, 2022

New discovery in cancer progression paves way to combat the disease

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Researchers have identified an important gene that could enable more targeted treatment for cancer.

Scientists from Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)’s Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB) and Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS), as well as the NUS Cancer Science Institute of Singapore (CSI Singapore), National Cancer Centre Singapore (NCCS) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU), have identified an important cancer progression mechanism that is observed in 90 percent of cancer cells. This discovery, which was published in Nucleic Acid Research, will guide further development of cancer specific drugs with potentially fewer side effects.

Aug 6, 2022

Solaris Hits A Milestone With Its 2000th Electric Bus

Posted by in categories: sustainability, transportation

Electric buses are great for municipalities. They are cheaper to operate and maintain than diesel buses, and they emit no pollutants. For passengers, they’re awesome because they’re comfortable, smooth, and relatively quiet. But, even a decade ago they were almost unheard of. The price of batteries has come down significantly in recent years, making electric buses a more viable option for many city transit agencies.

So, it’s no surprise that sales of electric buses have exploded as prices fell and made them the superior choice in most circumstances. In 2012, only 15 electric buses were put into service throughout Europe’s urban areas. In 2021, every fourth newly registered bus in Western Europe was electric. Now, they’re showing up all over the place in much greater numbers.

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