Adobe has released an emergency software patch for Flash after it found a serious vulnerability being exploited by hackers. The company said it had evidence of "limited, targeted attacks" and urged people to update their software immediately.
Flash is widely used across the web as a way of providing multimedia content.
This vulnerability - which enables hackers to take control of a computer - affects Windows, Mac and Linux systems.
Users can check if their installation of Flash is up to date by visiting the Adobe website - the current latest version is 18.0.0.194.
People who browse the internet with the latest versions of Google's Chrome browser and Microsoft's Internet Explorer should find that Flash is upgraded automatically.
Holes Adobe's Flash software has a long history of needing security fixes and is regarded by some security researchers as a weak point in many websites.
Along with Java, Flash is routinely targeted by hackers making use of zero-day exploits - the term given to previously unknown security holes.
This was partly because of its ubiquity, said Mark James, a security specialist from ESET.
"Since Flash is such a widely used plug-in, it stands to reason that it will be one of the most targeted apps for vulnerability," he said.
"If you want to affect as many people as possible, then you need an application that a lot of users use, and Flash is one of them."
GOOGLE TRENDS HAS long been a tool for journalists tracking what people wanted to know about in the recent past. The function hasn’t changed, but the tense has: Trends now tracks stories in real time, giving unfettered access to what the Internet wants to know in the moment.
Trends had been largely unchanged since 2012, a helpful but slightly backdated look at subjects people were searching for over the last day or more. As of today, you can see minute-by-minute information culled from the 100 billion-plus searches that take place on Google at any given month. Not only that, but Trends now pulls in information from Google News and YouTube, for a fuller view of what people want to know.
In many ways, insight into what people are searching for is even more powerful than what they already know, says Steve Grove, head of Google’s News Lab.
“Social media data focuses on what people are talking about publicly. Search data goes a layer deeper than that, in some ways, to what people are really interested in.” Grove tells to WIRED. “When you’re searching, you’re not really editing yourself. You find out what people are really interested in. It’s very real, very raw, very personal.”
It also highlights the distance between what’s being reported and what people want to know; if you already have a good read on the Nest Cam, you’re less likely to use Google to find additional information about it. That in turn helps explains why real-time trends can be so illuminating. There’s a much larger curiosity gap on breaking news—when there are still plenty of unknowns to to the media as well—and, say, the state of the Republican primary race. GOOGLE
While that may appear to make Google Trends a sort of populist news ticker—showing what people are genuinely interested in versus what a newsroom bestows importance on—Trends doesn’t quite work that way. Rather than pure volume, it tracks surges of interest relative to how much those items usually generate. “We’re looking for spikes in particular topic areas that we then normalize,” explains Grove. “You can imagine if it was just volume overall, you’d see the same sort of topics every day.” That’s why headliners like the NBA Finals sit alongside less obvious hits like the Alameda County Fair in the top 10 “trending stories” as of this writing.
The new Google Trends also goes well beyond just headlines, though many of the features are just cleaner, more detailed versions of what was previously available. You can still access handy charts comparing how various search terms have fared over time, just now with minute-by-minute granularity. A “featured stories” section displays search data pre-sorted in a variety of visually grabby ways. A series of regularly updated data sets provide pre-packaged looks at everything from how interest in MERS and Ebola has evolved to which Copa America teams are the most search-engine sought-after. And the whole page has gotten a healthy dollop of material design.
If you’re a journalist or a researcher, the benefits of insight into what people want to know right nowshould be self-evident; you’re probably already tinkering. Even if you’re not, though, it’s worth touring the new Google Trends for the fun visualizations, sure, but also for a look at where the Internet is out of step with the news. Or maybe just a quick rundown of what’s going on in Alameda County; I hear they’ve got a great fair lined up.
Facebook’s Moments feature uses facial recognition, but there’s a lot more Facebook can offer with better computer vision and AI. Facebook today launched its Moments product, which uses Facebook’s image recognition abilities to scan your photos for your friends and then lets people create private photo albums with a particular group, such as the people in the photo. The idea is to make it easier to share photos from a big event among attendees without the cumbersome process of emailing snapshots to everyone or the awkward end-of-event huddle while six people take the exact same group shot. It’s not a cure for cancer, but behind the scenes of this new feature is an impressive technology that Facebook has been working on for years.
A key element of the Moments feature is the ability for Facebook’s algorithms to recognize people’s faces across different photos, so that Moments knows who was at the event. This requires computer vision expertise that companies such as Google, Microsoft, Baidu, and others are currently researching for everything from self-driving cars to silly web products such as Microsoft’s How Old Do I Look?
In launching the Moments product Facebook is sharing data about its own successes in computer vision research. Namely, that Facebook can recognize faces with a 98% accuracy, and it can do so quickly—the company says it can identify you in one picture out of 800 million in less than 5 seconds. Finally, it can do all of this even if it doesn’t have the full frontal shot of your face (or even if your face isn’t in the photo at all), thanks to a machine learning algorithm that can look at other elements in the picture and associated with the photo’s data.
Facebook Inside Moments
Fortune spoke with Yann LeCun, Facebook’s director of artificial intelligence research, to understand how his team helped a computer understand who you are, and where Facebook is heading next with its AI research. Perhaps the first thing to understand is that when LeCun discusses computer vision, it’s not the same as how a person sees, although the process of teaching software how to recognize an object has some similarities.
For example, Facebook’s facial recognition, which is the basis of the current efforts, can’t identify you. It only can recognize if a person in one photo is the same as a person in another photo.
Identification is a completely separate step. Because Facebook is about connecting people, its computer vision efforts have focused on recognizing faces as opposed to cats, cars, or other non-human subjects. To do this, it uses a database of celebrity and politicians photos called Labeled Faces in the Wild. This collection of images has 13,000 photos of people with different hairdos, different outfits, sometimes wearing glasses and more. Facebook used this collection to train its machine learning algorithms. Other companies have used this data set as well, and some universities have even trained systems with a higher than 98% accuracy rate using Labeled Faces.
So how did Facebook get from giving a machine a picture of Angelina Jolie to somehow using that photo to help identify your sister across different photo albums on Facebook? LeCun is the man to ask. About 20 years ago when he was working at Bell Labs (now AT&T’s Image Processing Research Department), he happened upon a way of thinking about teaching computers to see that wasn’t really used outside of academia until about three years ago.
How computers learn to see
That technique is called convolutional neural networking, and takes its name from both a mathematical operation called a convolution, and inspiration from how the human brain learns. The brain learns by establishing connections between neurons, and the more often a signal is sent over those neurons, the denser those connections get. In a similar vein, when computers establish similarities between two images it assigns a weight to those similarities. In convolutional neural networks, the goal is to train the machine to recognize the changes in weights between those connections so it can tell with increasing accuracy if the image matches.
The process of doing this is incredibly complicated and involves different calculations that work to establish how important certain aspects of the image are to the actual process of recognizing what the image is. For example, if you want to train a computer to recognize faces, the pixels related to the background are less important. The tricky—and frankly amazing— part of this is that the machine learns on its own how to tell what part of the image is most relevant, and then can generalize those relationships going forward. It still takes a lot of human effort to nudge the computer into recognizing the right way to weight the similarities, but once the model is built, it can generalize going forward.
Convolutional neural networks have become the basis for almost all of the computer vision research done today, after a team of researchers led by Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto, used that technique to win a competition where image recognition algorithms vie to be most accurate. Hinton, whose team and startup were lateracquired by Google, won the competition with a test error rate of 15.3%, compared to 26.2% for the second-place winner.
Don’t post that photo!
As research continues, the opportunities for use in our day-to-day life are significant. Yes, there is the ability to match people’s faces in a crowd that might lead to greater government surveillance, but there is also an opportunity to use better facial recognition to manage your privacy. For example, with automatic facial recognition at scale, any picture of you uploaded to Facebook (or perhaps even the web) could result in a notification.
For example, if you are somehow captured in the background of a tourist shot of Times Square, you could get a notification and the option to blur your face. Applied to children, the blurring or removal could be automated. LeCun notes that Facebook is interested in such tools, but also stresses that Facebook’s interest in machine learning goes far beyond image recognition.
Facebook’s goal is to get a computer to understand empathy. Obviously, it won’t be able to feel what humans do, but it can be trained to recognize what emotions are and how people will react. With that level of understanding, Facebook could, say, offer a warning when you are about to post a photo of you drunk and ask if you really want to do that.
“This would not be face recognition,” said LeCun. “We don’t care who is in the picture. We would use other types of image recognition and train them differently to say that this looks embarrassing and then tap you on the shoulder to make sure you want to post this publicly.”
This isn’t something Facebook can do today, but LeCun offered these concepts as a thought experiment to show where Facebook could head with its AI research. Of course, this sort of expertise informed by an algorithm can make people deeply uncomfortable. Today Facebook doesn’t turn on its auto tagging features in countries like Canada and the EU because of privacy concerns, and there’s a certain creep factor in having a computer second guess your photo-sharing choices or having software trying to parse your jokes to try to understand what you find funny.
“What we’d like to do is make machines more intelligent, understanding text, images, videos and posts,” LeCun said. “Anything that can happen in the digital world we want to understand the context.” Because there is so much digital content people could easily become overwhelmed by the information flooding their feeds. The efforts of LeCun’s team will help connect people with the content that is most relevant to their interests and priorities. It’s a complex solution to a simple goal: to make sure that you see what you want to see on Facebook.
“That’s the big mission that we at Facebook are trying to fulfill,” LeCun said. “Machines that understand people.”
The spinning wheel of death never seems to stop turning these days. It's not you. Web pages really are loading slower.
The average site is now 2.1 MB in size -- two times larger than the average site from three years ago, according to data tracked by HTTP Archive.
There are a few reasons for this added weight.
Websites are adding more attention-attracting videos, images, interactivity plug-ins (comments and feeds) and other code and script-heavy features that clog up broadband pipes and wireless spectrum.
Sites also have ramped up their usage of tracking and analysis tools to learn more about their visitors. Inserting third-party data trackers not only increases a website's weight, but also the number of separate data fetching tasks, which leads to slower load times as well.
Photos and videos continue to be the bulkiest part of websites, making up almost three-fourths their size. That proportion has stayed relatively constant over the past three years, even as the total size of websites has grown.
But as more smartphones, tablets, watches and other gizmos are built to go online, developers have to create even more versions of websites and Web components to fit evermore formats. Some websites, for example, have more than 50 different image sizes which can be called upon to load depending on device. This additional complexity requires more code to run, and adds to a website's bulk.
"The shift from desktop to mobile requests and consumption have had the biggest impact on website performance," said Craig Adams, VP of Web experience products at Akamai, a content delivery network that services 15% to 30% of all online traffic daily.
On top of all this, websites are using stronger encryption to make themselves more secure. Shielding themselves behind secured protocols requires more code and data crunching power, too.
The component that has grown the most in size, surprisingly, is custom fonts. Developers are creating unique fonts to differentiate themselves from everyone else online. Three years ago, font transfer size was less than 1% of a webpage's weight, and now the proportion is up to 5%.
There are a variety of other factors that lead to a slower browsing experience, such as network congestion, processing power, browser type, and the number of other programs and tabs you have open.
But all things being equal, the Web is slowing down. It's only slowing by a matter of seconds, but literally every millisecond counts. The slower a Web page loads the more likely it is we'll leave for a competitor's site.
I’m sure Wikipedia and IMDb instantly spring to mind, but you might not be in the need of all that knowledge ever, or a comprehensive database of all things entertainment. Sometimes you need a bit of VLDB (Very Large Data Base) flavor. Something to spice up your data analysis. Something to put the “big” in your big data. Whelp, good person, you’re in the right place.
The 2003 completion of the Human Genome Project (HGP) was just the beginning. Since then advances in sequencing technology have vastly reduced the per-person cost allowing vast expansion of the HGP from its initial research base of twenty university labs, into a sprawling, globalized network of interconnected genome mapping facilities.
You can download part of the 1000 Genomes Project, containing sequencing information for over 2,600 people from 26 populations around the world. This is a 200TB file, so be prepared. We would suggest using it in conjunction with a powerful cloud computing platform.
The planespotters heaven. A massive image database featuring 2,532,457 photos of all manner of aircraft, from the smallest individual craft to hulking great flying fortresses.
Airliners also features an extensive aircraft data and history section always kept updated in cooperation with Aerospace Publications to ensure factual accuracy. This has made it one of the single most detailed aircraft databases on the Internet.
See also: Try Planespotters.net for a different range of images, or SeatGuru for airplane seating schematics.
The site formerly known as The Internet Archive, has gone through a massive redesign. The site hadn’t changed much since around 2002, but a lot has changed since then. The Internet Archive has doneeven more growing since the early days.
Archiving everything on the Internet, the site gives you free access to digital media including books, music, games, videos, and much more. The collection is currently estimated at around 10 petabytes, and as their webcrawlers keep crawling, it will continue to grow.
Freebase is “a community-curated database of well-known people, places, and things,” stored in a data structure called a graph. A graph is comprised of nodes, connected by their edges, which allowed Freebase to rapidly expand its content without disrupting existing records.
Unfortunately, Freebase, owned by Google, switched to read-only mode early this year, before the standalone service database is transferred over to the Wikimedia Foundation for integration in the Wikidata project (end of June, 2015). Developers can currently still access Freebase using existing APIs, but once the switch is made, developers will have to use Wikimedia APIs to access the data.
From the home base of an Internet knowledge dream-team of Google and Wikimedia, we move to the morbid. Find a Grave is a massive, 121 million record database of burials around the globe.
Most comprehensive records come from the US, but there are some smaller countries with large data. Complete with photos, interesting monuments, and a number of interesting epitaphs…if you need inspiration?
A database maintained by the ever-present reviewing team at Gamespot. GameRankings gives a well-rounded portrayal of a game’s popularity by covering on-and-offline gaming reviews from reputable sources.
In a similar vein to the massive IMDb, The Big Cartoon Database focuses exclusively on all things animated: cartoons, films, television shows, adverts, and more. If it is an animation, you’ll find it here – and if not, sign up as contributor to this ever growing database.
The Big Cartoon Database has a sister site in The Big Comic Database, home to a further 100,000 or more comic book records, spanning some 5,000 series, with over 35,000 cover scans. It also contains a comprehensive search function, including a comic book price guide detailing current resale values at the various grading levels.
See also: The Grand Comics Database, a non-commercial enterprise database of comics worldwide.
An invaluable tool for students and academics alike, CiteSeerX is a public search engine and digital library of academic and scientific papers. Often considered the first automated citation indexing system, it was the inspiration for Google Scholarand Microsoft Academic Search. Though the latter has since been integrated into the Bing search engine.
CiteSeerX focuses on indexing public scholarly documents. If your research paper is openly distributed, it has a higher chance of appearing within the search engine. CiteSeerX is an excellent example of the power of shared knowledge made available to a much wider audience.
See also: Google Scholar for a different range of books and citations.
Unfortunately not a database of each cat picture on the Internet. Now that would be something! WorldCat is much more useful than that. The reference site documents the collections of over 72,000 libraries around the world, covering 170 countries and territories. This is useful if you’re researching in a foreign country, or just have a desire to read rare books in person.
The only downside is the update method. WorldCat uses a batch processing model rather than allow users to access the data in real-time. So, WorldCat does not indicate the loan status of catalogued books, whether a library owns multiple copies of one book, or whether the book in question is directly accessible to those wishing to visit. It is still a very useful tool, especially when used in conjunction with CiteSeerX.
“The Internet’s clearinghouse of Simpsons guides, news, and information.” I couldn’t have put it better myself. The long-standing fan favorite began way back 1994, and is still going strong even without any interactive multimedia, if only to escape the watchful eye of Fox’s legal department.
You will find one of the single largest databases of customization tools for Windows here, spanning from XP up to Windows 8.1. I’m sure it won’t take long for Windows 10 to begin making the rounds. Its vast popularity stems from a combination of forces. Owner Stardock, subsidizes the site meaning there are little-to-no advertisements. It also benefits from the number of individuals funneled to the site from Stardock.
Ah, a trip down nostalgia lane to a database reminding me I was never to be Roger Waters. In fact, I can still barely play, but that’s another story.
The Ultimate Guitar Archive, or just Ultimate-Guitar (UG), has over 1,500,000 registered members around the world, overseeing a ridiculously large amount of community content. It is almost mind-boggling how much guitar related information is scattered out from a single source. The community just doesn’t maintain a massive database, they also frequently collaborate with one another to create sprawling music projects.
Plants for a Future documents ecologically sustainable horticulture. It has a big hand in spreading knowledge on species diversity and the importance of permaculture. What started as a small project in the depths of Cornwall has slowly grown into a worldwide database.
Growth is somewhat slow, and largely focuses on permaculture in the UK and EU, but many of the records can be swapped for specific locations in the US once you have the species details.
Power up with this Excel add-in to process and analyze data. The main Quandl site acts as a database search, locating databases from around the world that match your search terms. Try it if you need some extra data in a hurry, or just like playing with large datasets (honestly, who doesn’t?!).
The Tiny Images dataset acts as a visual dictionary. Click anywhere within the image and a search term pops up with extra information. You can also use specific terms to sift through 80 million images.
The database is part of wider machine learning project focused upon teaching computers to “see” and “read” semantic fields within images.
The “front page of the Internet” is a solid home for data mining enthusiasts around the globe. There are subreddits dedicated to machine learning, data mining, text to data, and datasets. If you need something specific make a request. New datasets appear every week.
The Internet has created the single-clearest opportunity for individuals to come together and concentrate their knowledge into a single database. We are valiantly trying to document everything about anything. Some of these databases are for perusing, others are for learning, but we hope you enjoy them all.
What are your favorite databases? Are there any open massive reference sources I should have included in this list?
Visitors are seen at the SIdO, the Connected Business trade show, in Lyon April 7, 2015. The slogan reads 'The four freedom of free software'. REUTERS/ROBERT PRATTA/FILES
REUTERS - The global market for "Internet of Things", the concept of connecting household devices to the Internet, will nearly triple to $1.7 trillion by 2020, research firm International Data Corp said.
The IoT market, valued at $655.8 billion in 2014, is set to grow at a compounded annual rate of 16.9 percent, IDC said on Tuesday.
"Devices, connectivity, and IT services will make up the majority of the IoT market in 2020," IDC said. "Together, they are estimated to account for over two-thirds of the worldwide IoT market in 2020..."
Technology firms including Google Inc, Intel Corp, Cisco Systems, Samsung Electronics and telecoms majors including Vodafone and Verizon are betting heavily on Internet device-connected homes for future revenue and profit.
Intel said in February it would buy German network chip maker Lantiq to expand its range of chips used in Internet-connected gadgets.
Google bought smart thermostat and smoke alarm-maker Nest Labs Inc for $3.2 billion last year and Samsung Electronics acquired U.S. start-up SmartThings, which makes software that helps control everything from door locks to light switches in homes, for $200 million.
(Reporting by Lehar Maan in Bengaluru; Editing by Kirti Pandey)
Nearly half of the global population will be using the internet by the end of this year, according to a new report. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a United Nations body, predicts that 3.2 billion people will be online. The population currently stands at 7.2 billion.
About 2 billion of those will be in the developing world, the report added.
But just 89 million will be in countries such as Somalia and Nepal.
Mobile There will also be more than 7 billion mobile device subscriptions, the ITU said.
It found that 78 out of 100 people in the US and Europe already use mobile broadband, and 69% of the world has 3G coverage - but only 29% of rural areas are served.
Africa lags behind with just 17.4% mobile broadband penetration.
By the end of the year 80% of households in developed countries and 34% of those in developing countries will have internet access in some form, the report continued.
The study focused on the growth of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector over the past 15 years.
In the year 2000 there were just 400 million internet users worldwide, it said - an eighth of the current figure.
"Over the past 15 years the ICT revolution has driven global development in an unprecedented way," said Brahima Sanou, director of the ITU telecommunication development bureau.
"ICTs will play an even more significant role in the post 2015 development agenda and in achieving future sustainable development goals as the world moves faster and faster towards a digital society."
Summary:Earlier this year, Google quietly rolled out a new feature that lets users download their search history.
By Liam Tung | April 21, 2015 -- 09:02 GMT (02:02 PDT)
With just a few clicks, anyone can now download their entire Google search history - that's every query ever made while the user was signed in.
To download the archive, Google Search users need to sign in and go to their Google Account History page, then click on the gear icon and select Download.
As the file is potentially sensitive, Google urges users to read its warnings, which are "not the usual yada yada". Google advises that the archive shouldn't be downloaded on a public computer and, if it is to be exported to another cloud storage service, that the user reads their export policy in the event they want to take their files elsewhere in future.
Google will send an email to notify a user when the download is complete, with a link to the data, which will be transferred to a Takeout folder in Google Drive. The user will find a .ZIP archive folder containing a series of .JSON files containing searches over quarterly periods.
Takeout is the feature that lets Google users download archives of multiple products, such as Gmail, YouTube, Google Photos, +1s, Hangouts, Calendars, and more. The featurelaunched in 2011 under its Data Liberation Front initiative, but it historically didn't include Search and still doesn't include Google Wallet.
The new capability was first spotted by the Google System blog, which noted that Google started testing the archive download feature for Search last year.
Google's product forums show that people have been using the feature, with mixed success, to download their history since at least February. Google toldVenture Beat that it released the feature in January.
Other companies that allow users to download and store an archive of their activities include Facebook and Twitter.
Two things worth noting are that downloading search history only gives the user a copy of their archive held by Google and doesn't delete the history from the users Web & App Activity page. Google provides instructions how to do that here.
Liam Tung is an Australian business technology journalist living a few too many Swedish miles north of Stockholm for his liking. He gained a bachelors degree in economics and arts (cultural studies) at Sydney's Macquarie University, but hacked (without Norse or malicious code for that matter) his way into a career as an enterprise tech, s... Full Bio
Associated Press GoogleGOOGL -0.11% is changing its search algorithm Tuesday to favor sites that look good on smartphones, a move some are calling “mobilegeddon” because of its impact on website operators.
The new formula will give a boost in Google’s “organic” search results to sites that are designed to look good on smartphones, while penalizing those that don’t.
Google changes its algorithm frequently, but in this case it took the unprecedented step of warning sites in February that it was coming, and giving them tips on how to prepare.
“Google wants people going mobile friendly,” said Danny Sullivan, founding editor of Search Engine Land. He said the April 21 deadline had created a “panic and frenzy” among Web developers to make the changes.
There’s potential benefit for Google in the move, too. Users are conducting more searches on mobile devices. A Google executive said at a conference last year that smartphone searches could soon outnumber searches from personal computers.
However, advertisers typically pay less for clicks from phones, because they less often lead to sales. Encouraging developers to tailor sites to look good on smartphones should lead to more sales and consequently higher prices for Google’s mobile ads, said Matt Ackley, chief marketing officer of Marin Software, an advertising technology firm.
Google wants developers to make their sites look better on smartphones by tailoring them for small screens, using bigger text and links that are farther apart and easier to tap.
“As people increasingly search on their mobile devices, we want to make sure they can find content that’s not only relevant and timely, but also easy to read and interact with on smaller mobile screens,” a Google spokeswoman said.
Some website operators create special sites just for mobile devices, while others are building a single “responsive” site that adapts to the size of the user’s screen.
Joe Megibow, chief digital officer of American Eagle Outfitters, says his company is preparing to launch a new “responsive” site which will mean it no longer has to maintain two different sites, one for mobile and one for personal computers.
The Bay Area needs talented, educated coders, designers, and IT professionals! And opportunities for students and job seekers to prepare for web and mobile app design and development abound at CCSF!
The CCSF Web and Mobile App Collaborative is kicking off with a series of events for students and job seekers to learn about a career in tech with City College's Web & Mobile Programs at one of these upcoming orientation meetings:
Tuesday, April 28
Ocean Campus, 50 Phelan Ave.
1-3pm | Science Building, Room 108 or
5-7pm | Science Building, Room 108
Wednesday, April 29
Ocean Campus, 50 Phelan Ave.
12:30-2:30pm | Science Building, Room 100
Wednesday, May 6
Mission Center, 1125 Valencia Street
5:30-7:30pm | Room 275
There is also a new CCSF web and mobile app programs landing page with more details about these events along with program descriptions and how to get started. Share these links and this flyer with your students! If you have any question or want to learn more about how you can help promote the events and programs, contact Anna Colibri at anna@annacolibri.com.
