How it takes just 15 minutes of web tuition for anyone to hack into your email

Email Account Hacking – Easier & Faster

According to latest study, email account hacking is easier and faster than expected and takes less than 15 minutes. A group of volunteers comprising of TV producer, a retiree, a self-employed baker managed to learn the technique of hacking into someone’s account within a span of about 15 minutes.

 The group with limited knowledge of technology followed online tutorial utilising a man in the middle concept to hack into a computer network to gain each other’s login information. The controlled classroom trial led by Life assistance company CPP Group Plc involved helpers with a 14 minute lesson made available freely online.

Through this they were capable of downloading hacking software which enabled them to gain access in login details as well as passwords for email accounts, online shopping accounts and social networking sites within a few minutes.

There seems to be more than 20,000 videos online, coaching users on how to hack social media profiles, email, PayPal accounts and smartphones and the internet’s potentials in hosting hacking tutorials seems to be unchallenged. It has been observed that over seven million people have been the victims of their online password protected information accessed without their permission

Government to Take a Stronger Stand on Online Hacking Tutorials

Many users have had their personal emails hacked with around 19% stating that their eBay accounts have also been hacked.Accounts of social media users were also not spared from being hacked too, with 16% informing that their social networking profiles had been tampered into and around 10% have had their money or a loan taken on their behalf. With the increase in several public Wi-Fi networks as well as smartphone with inbuilt Wi-Fi connections in the last few years have given rise to opportunities for hackers with this type of crime the capabilities which would tend to increase in due course of time.

Most of the people are aware that the online hacking tutorials prevail with several others agreeing that this type of coaching need not be made available to online users, which would be creating a lot of inconvenience to the victim and beneficial to the culprit.

More than half of the people desire that the governments should take timely action in eliminating these hacking tutorials from the internet. The CPP has been advising people to take necessary action in protecting themselves from these online hackers wherever possible and are also influencing the government to take a stronger stand on, online hacking tutorials.

Bring Awareness on Risks Involved

Michael Lynch, the firm’s identity fraud expert had commented that `the recent Sony security break which had seen a hacker gaining access to the personal data of over 100 million online gamers, that included the people in Britain, has portrayed the increase and widespread danger, hackers tend to pose to consumers as well as businesses.

It is essential to bring about awareness on the risks involved so that adequate steps in the protection of their identities and safeguard their personal data from the hands of these hackers. The technique shown in the live session indicate that these hacking skills could be applied within a few minutes and hence it is critical for consumers to take timely action and protect their data from these hackers.

They use the man in the middle hacking technique which works by the hacker interrupting communication between two users or what an individual is viewing on the internet and as the user logs into their online account, their username as well as password appears also on the hackers’ desktop enabling him to store the information and access the account immediately on some time later.

The Search for a Thinking Machine

New Age of Machine Learning

According to some experts, they are of the belief that by 2050, the machines would have reached human level intelligence. To a new age of machine learning, computers have started assimilating information from raw data in much the same way as the human infant tends to learn from the world around them.

This means that we are heading towards machines which for instance teach themselves on how to play computer games and get reasonably good at it as well as devices which tend to begin to communicate like humans such as voice assistants on the smartphones. Computers have started comprehending the world beyond bits and bytes. Fei-Fei Li has spent the last 15 years in teaching computers how to see.

 Initially, a PhD student and thereafter as a director of the computer vision lab at Stanford University, she had tracked difficult goal with the intention of creating the electronic eyes for robots as well as machines to see and to understand their environment. Half content of all human brainpower is in visual processing though it is something we all tend to do without much effort.

Ms Li in a talk at the 2015 Technology, Entertainment and Design – Ted conference had made a comparison stating that `a child learns to see especially in the early years, without being taught but learns through real world experiences and examples’.

Crowdsourcing Platforms – Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

She adds that `if you consider a child’s eyes as a pair of biological cameras, they take one image about every 200 milliseconds, which is the average time an eye movement is made. By the age of three, the child could have seen hundreds of millions of images of the real world and that is a lot of training examples. 

 Hence she decided to teach the computers in the same way. She elaborates further that `instead of focusing solely on improved algorithms, her insight was to give the algorithms the kind of training data which a child is provided through experience in quantity as well as quality. Ms. Li together with her colleagues in 2007 had set about an enormous task of sorting and labelling a billion divers as well as random images from the internet to provide examples for the real world for the computer. 

The theory was that if the machine views enough images of something, it would be capable of recognizing it in real life. Crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk was used, by calling on 50,000 workers from 167 countries in order to help label millions of random images of cats, planes and people.

ImageNet – Database of 15 Million Images

Ultimately they build ImageNet, which is a database of around 15 million images across 22,000 lessons of objects that were organised by daily English words. These have become the resource utilised all over the world by the research scientists in an attempt to give vision to the computers.

To teach the computer in recognizing images, Ms Li together with her team utilised neural networks, computer programs accumulated from artificial brain cells which learn as well as behave in the same ways as human brains.

At Stanford, image reading machine now tends to write accurate captions for a whole range of images though it seems to get things wrong for instance, an image of a baby holding a toothbrush was labelled wrongly as `a young boy is holding a baseball bat’.

Presently machines are learning instead of thinking and if the machine could ever be programmed to think, it is doubtful taking into consideration that the nature of the human thought has escaped scientists as well as philosophers for ages.

Poker Players Targeted By Card-Watching Malware

Malware Target Popular Online Poker Sites

Malware researchers at security firm ESET have come across a new Trojan which has been designed to cheat online poker by a sneak quick look at the cards of infected opponents. According to ESET’s security researcher, Robert Lipovsky, the malware is said to target PokerStars and Full Tilt which are two of the most popular online poker sites.

He has mentioned in his recent blog post that the attackers operate in a simple manner and after the victim has been affected successfully with the Trojan, the culprit then attempt to join the table where the victim tends to be playing with an unfair advantage by getting to know about the cards in their hands.

Malware, Win32/Spy.Odlanor, covers up as a benevolent installer for several general purpose programs like Daemon Tools or mTorrent. Lipovsky has mentioned that people tend to get infected while downloading some other useful application from some unofficial source.

In some instances, it tends to get loaded on to the user’s systems through several poker related programs which comprises of poker player databases as well as poker calculators like Tournament Shark, Smart Buddy, Poker Calculator Pro, Poker Office and much more.

Prowls in Software Created For Better Performance

The tricky malware has been discovered prowling in software created to support poker fans with better performance according to a security firm which discovered it. The software is also said to target other valuable information on a user’s computer like login names as well as passwords.

When a system is infected, the software observes the activity of the PC and operates when a victim has logged in to any of the two poker sites. Thereafter it begins taking screenshots of their activity and the cards they tend to deal with and send the screenshots to the culprits.

Lipovsky mentioned that later on the screenshots can be retrieved by the cheating culprits which reveal not only the hands of the infected opponent but the player ID as well.This according to ESET enables the criminals to search the sites for that play and join in their game. Both the targeted poker sites permit searching for players by their player ID and so the culprit can connect with ease at the table on which they tend to be playing.

Largest Detection of Spywares – Eastern European Countries

With the information gathered with regards to the victim’s hand, it provides significant advantage to the criminal. Lipovsky writes that he is not sure if the attacker tends to play the games manually or in some automated way.ESET have discovered that the Windows malware seem to be prowling in some of the well-known file-sharing applications, PC utilities and many other widely used poker calculators and player databases.

Lipovsky writes that the largest number of detection of spyware has been active for several months where most of the victims were from Eastern European countries. However, the Trojan tends to be a potential threat to any online poker player.

 Most of the victims were from the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary. ESET had stated that they had discovered various versions of this malware dating back to March 2015. To make matters worse, new versions also tend to contain `general purpose data stealing functions’ with the abilities of siphoning passwords from several web browsers. As of September 16, several hundred users have been infected with Win32/Spy.Odlanor.

5 Durable Products for Your Photography

Pictures on the desk or hanging on the wall adorn a variety of homes. However, many of these images have one inescapable flaw: glass frames. How often have you knocked a picture frame off of your desk or had a family portrait crash to the ground? Depending on the extent of the damage, the picture within the frame can be scratched or punctured. Luckily, there are several ways you can protect those valuable pictures from suffering such damages.

Metal Prints

When it comes to durability and longevity, metal prints are some of the most cost efficient forms of protecting your photographs. The process of heat-fusing the image directly onto an aluminum surface provides vibrant colors on a strong surface. In some cases, you can even have the metal shaped in various ways to give the print a more unique look and feel.

Acrylic Blocks

Acrylic is a material that has a completely transparent appearance while offering great resistance to impact damage. Polished to a high-gloss finish, the acrylic allows for vivid colors while augmenting the image. These blocks can be dropped from variable distances without damaging the photograph. Even if the surface is scratched, it can be repaired easily.

Album Boxes

Album boxes can protect your photo albums from various elemental conditions and ultraviolet fading. In most cases, you can have these boxes customized with various colors and cover materials. As many of these boxes resemble books themselves, they can easily fit on a shelf while keeping with the aesthetics of your literary collection.

Coasters

Entertaining your guests with customized coasters of your photographs can enhance a special occasion. These surfaces were designed to prevent moisture damage and can keep your imagery looking like new for years to come. You could also set them aside as a collector's item and never use the coasters if you want to keep them in mint condition.

Puzzles

Many people assemble a puzzle and then return it to its box. This can provide an entertaining pastime while giving you a method in which to keep the image secure. These can also make great gift ideas for special occasions.

Whether your using Photo Prints behind acrylic blocks or having the image fused onto metal plates, there are a number of ways to protect your moments captured in time. By stepping away from the traditional and mundane, you can add more appeal to the area which adorns your durable photography.

Google will Fly a Crazy, Plane-like, 84-Foot Wind Turbine Next Month

The tech giant Google has some extraordinary plans, which might seem futuristic and quite far-fetched in reality but still is worth counting. Google has one of its pet project which aims at gathering the wind energy not from the ground from the higher altitudes where wind possesses more power through stronger and reliable blowing. Google has earlier tested the prototypes of its flying wind turbine with capabilities of harnessing energy from the wind in higher altitudes. Now Google will be launching its 84-foot wind turbine next month at SXSW.

Features of Google Wind Turbine

Google turbines are very much different from the general wind turbines, which are usually seen along the US coastline. It is more like planes, which are equipped with eight propellers and tethered to a docking station. Once it is released from the ground it can hover up to 450 meters in the air and it should be noted that this is the altitude at which planes usually starts doing the circles in the sky. The drag helps turning the propellers on this exciting piece of machine into turbines, which has the ability to send back 6+00 kilowatts of energy harnessed from the wind back to the ground.

Google has long been working on the wind turbines and it has even bought a part in the energy company named Makani Power in 2013 for this purpose. It has also made a number of tests with prototypes with a 28 feet wind turbines but it will be flying a more robust 84 feet wind turbine possessing the ability to harness more power easily.

Prior testing helps in boosting confidence

Google has performed extensive testing in the past to ensure the stability and reliability of the wind in the harsher and much challenging environment found at the higher altitudes. Google indulged in performing the tests on its futuristic wind turbines in one of the windiest places in the whole of North America namely Pigeon Pint in Pescerado California.

The challenges faced by the Google tech were quite pressuring and compelling in every manner but they held their ground and ensured that the product offers the most remarkable results regardless of difficulties. At higher altitudes, the speed of wind can easily change by 20 miles per hour within a matter of few seconds and the direction can change by 90 degrees within a second. However, it is worth noting that wind turbines failed to be let down by the wind changes at all and performed in the most efficient and best manner.

Google X’s Astro Teller has also stated while chatting with the media and smaller crowd of tech enthusiasts that they had done all those tests on smaller prototypes. The testing crew was advised by the Larry Page to make sure they get their wind turbines crashes as many five times in order to ensure it offers best solutions for harnessing energy. But luckily Google techs were able to do it without crashing even once.