Gmail to Warn When Messages Take Unencrypted Routes

Security of User’s Data Vulnerable

Google has observed that the security of its user’s data has become more vulnerable when they received message sent through a different email provider. There is a possibility that most of the users would now begin to see the alerts coming, in a few months.

Google has plans of ramping up security at its free email service by enabling users to be aware when messages arrive through unencrypted connection which could be susceptible to snooping or tampering. These threats have urged Gmail to work on warning system which could alert users when they tend to receive unencrypted mail.

Elie Bursztein and Nicolas Lidzborski of Gmail security team had mentioned in a blog post this week that these warning would begin to roll out in the coming months and while these threats does not seem to affect Gmail to Gmail communication, they could affect messaging between providers.

This statement came with the result of the study indicating that email encryption has been increasing together with measures to prevent spam and fraud by improved authenticating messages. The good news is that more email providers have been offered email encryption along the board with the majority of them utilising a few type of authentication in order to decrease phishing.

Google/Yahoo/Others – Improve Encryption of Websites/Email

But Google has said that it discovered regions of the Internet wherein email encryption had been secretly thwarted as well as exposed malicious servers that were programmed to hijack Gmail message by providing them false routing information.

Bursztein and Lidzborski had indicated in the post that though this kind of attack seems rare, it was a matter of concern as it would enable attackers to censor or alter messages before they are relayed to the email recipient.

In an attempt to enhance privacy in the midst of concerns with regards to hacking and surveillance, Google, Yahoo together with other online firms has been moving to improve encryption of websites and email. Bloggers have confirmed that, to notify users of possible dangers, they have been developing in-product warnings for Gmail users which would display whenever they receive a message through a non-encrypted connection. The good news is that more email providers are providing email encryption on the board and most of them are using some types of authentication to lessen impersonation and phishing.

Most Providers do not Support STARTTLS

Though Gmail-to-Gmail messages are always encrypted, the company has revealed that around 57% of email that are sent from providers to Gmail is encrypted while 81% of outgoing Gmail to the other provider also. This would be great since unencrypted emails are good targets for the criminals.

Moreover the groups also found malicious DNS servers broadcasting false routing information to email servers on the lookout for Gmail. However simultaneously, these researchers also discovered that there were certain areas of the internet which were preventing message encryption by tampering with requests to start SSL connection.

 Most of providers do not support STARTTLS, which means that any email encrypted by the sender cannot be read when it is received on the other end. The focus of Google in warning Gmail users with regards to unencrypted connection is to caution them to such type of dangers.

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In The Rearview Mirror Car Designer Warns On Google Game Changer

Automobile sector had long enjoyed the success of the traditional and affordable segment of cars, which includes the popular Honda Civic and Toyota Corolla. But the times are about to take a huge turnaround for the automobile sector as tech giants like Apple and Google are making foray in the automobile sector with their revolutionary products. Both companies are determined to change the way people own and drive cars in the upcoming years.

Reasons to fear upcoming self-driving technology

Celebrated high-end car designer of Japanese origin Ken Okuyama who is famously known for Ferrari F 60 Enzo and the Porsche Boxster has given out the warning signs for the Japnases automobile industry. He believes that the bringing of game-changing self-driving technology in the cars will bring direct to the Japanese position as a major car producer.

Okuyama has asked the Japanese automakers to up their ante by bringing similar or advanced kind of cars, which are soon to be offered by the tech companies. Otherwise, Japanese automakers will end being just suppliers for these companies.

Google game changing cars

Google is developing a fleet of its own self-driving cars which even includes a highly modified model of the Toyota Lexus sport utility vehicle. Google has also presented a pod like and completely driverless car as a prototype. Both of these are going through various rounds of extensive road tests to ensure more security and better driving for the users in US. Apple on other hand has revealed its plan for launching the first driverless car in 2019 and it has also been doing a large amount of research and testing in the past few years.
Honda on other hand is developing a new automatic setting for its cars, which can be really helpful tool in the congested traffic. This technology can easily pre-program the cars to drive automatically during such scenarios.

Automobile market is all set to split in future

Okumaya presents a future where soon the rise of self-automated cars will split the automobile market into two different camps. One will comprise of the vehicles fulfilling the public transportation need and other will consist of the super luxury cars. Automated cars will find itself in the first camp while high-end models will see themselves in the second camp. This would result in the annihilation of car ownership for the affordable traditional cars like Honda Civic models.

Okumaya is urging the Japanese automakers to focus towards finding the different kind of new technologies, which can bolster their cars prospect in future and can bring it on the same ground to compete against self-automated cars. Self-driving cars are bound become common place in upcoming future and it will eat upon the sales and popularity of the traditional cars. Even companies like Toyota and Mercedes are looking for way to counter the sudden challenge for the futuristic breed of cars but Google had already gained a huge lead against them.

Tensorflow- Smarter Machine Learning, For Everyone

TensorFlow – Faster/Smarter/Flexible

TensorFlow, a faster, smarter and a much more flexible than the earlier system can be adapted easily to latest products and research. Moreover it is also highly accessible machine learning system which can run on an individual smartphone or through thousands of computers in data-centres.

Machine learning is yet in its initial stage and computers presently are unable to do what a 4 year old could do naturally such as knowing the name of an animal on seeing only a few examples. However with Tensorflow, it is a good start.

TensorFlow is utilised for all purpose, from speech recognition in Google app to Smart Reply in Inbox, to search in Google Photos. It has the potentials to build and train neural nets up to five times quicker than the first generation system and hence it could be used in improving the products in a quicker manner.

Deep Learning has had a great influence on computer science, with the possibility of exploring new areas of research and in the creation of incredibly useful products which millions of people tend to use daily. The internal deep learning infrastructure – DistBelief developed in 2011, enabled Googlers to create even bigger neural networks and scale training to thousands of cores in data centres.

Twice as Fast as DistBelief

In 2014, DistBelief has trained the Inception mode which had won Imagenet’s Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge, driving the experiments in automated image captioning and DeepDream. DistBelief had some limitation though it was very successful and was closely directed to neural networks.

To organise it, was difficult and it was firmly coupled to Google’s internal infrastructure thus making it difficult in sharing research code externally. The open source release of TensorFlow has been publicised, the second-generation machine learning system which has been designed in correcting shortcomings. TensorFlow is flexible, portable, general, easy to use and is a completely open source. On enhancing DistBelief, addition of speed, scalability together with production readiness has been done.

 TechFlow is twice as fast as DistBelief.TensorFlow tends to have all-encompassing built-in support for the purpose of deep learning though it is more general than any computation. One can express as computational glow graph and can compute with TensorFlow.

Any grade based machine learning procedure could profit from TensorFlow’s auto-differentiation and set of first rate optimizers. It tends to get easy in expressing new ideas in TensorFlow through the flexible Python interface.

Open-Sourced TensorFlow – Standalone Library

One can move their idea flawlessly from training the desktop GPU to running on the mobile phone. Moreover you could also get started rapidly with the powerful machine learning tech by utilising the state-of-the-art example model architectures.

However, the most important fact about TensorFlow is that it your own possession. It is an open-sourced TensorFlow as a standalone library associated with tools, tutorials and examples with the Apache 2.0 licence. Hence, the user is free to use TensorFlow at their institution, at any place of work.

TensorFlow has been utilised for all the experiments by deep learning researchers and the engineers tend to use it to permeate Google Search with signals from deep neural networks as well as to power the features of tomorrow. TensorFlow will continue to be used in serving machine learning in products and the research team has been committed in sharing its implementation of available ideas.

Iranian Military Hackers Focus on U.S. Administration Officials

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards – Hacking emails & Social Media Account -US Officials

Wall Street Journal had recently reported that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have come up with hacking of email and social media accounts of Obama administration officials in recent weeks in cyber-attacks, is said to be connected with the arrest of an Iranian-American businessman in Tehran.

The newspaper referring to unnamed U.S. officials stated that people working on Iran policy seemed to be the focus of cyber-attacks with personnel connected to the State Department’s office of Iranian Affairs and the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs among those who had been hacked.

 Besides these, other targets comprised of journalist and academics. The most recent reports in hacking attacks came up after a landmark international agreement in July which improved the severe economic sanction on Iran in compensation of Tehran curbing its nuclear program ensuring that it will not be utilised in the development of weapons.

Recently, a powerful branch of the Iranian military – the Revolutionary Guards, regularly made hacking attacks on U.S. government agencies, though a source informed the Journal that the hacking seemed to have increased after the arrest of Siamak Namazi in mid-October

Cyber-Attacks – Obtain Information/Get Connected with Targets of Interest

A senior administration official informed Reuters in response to the Journal story, that they were aware of certain reports involving Iran and while they have no comment on the specific reports, they are aware that hackers in Iran and other areas often tend to use cyber-attacks to obtain information or get connected with targets of interest.

 Namazi, head of strategic planning for Crescent Petroleum, which is an oil and gas company in the United Arab Emirates, had worked for think tanks in Washington. He had been apprehended and interrogated by the Revolutionary Guards, regularly prior to his arrest. Namazi had studied in the U.S. and had friendships at Washington which included the National Endowment for Democracy and the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars.

 He had earlier been the managing director of Atieh Bahar, a consulting firm promoting foreign investment in Iran. The fact sheet had indicated that he had studied at Tufts and Rutgers universities though had returned to Iran in late 1990s for the purpose of military service.

China/Russia Accused of Cyber-Attacks

It stated that he stayed out of discussion of U.S. or Iranian political queries in recent years with the exception of very public role he had played recounting the adverse impact of Western sanction on the Iranian population. A source had informed the Journal that U.S. officials are of the belief that some of the more recent attacks could have been linked to reports of detained dual citizens as well as the others.

The Journal had revealed that Namazi’s friends as well as business associates has informed that the Revolutionary Guards had confiscated his computer after raiding his family’s home in Tehran. According to a spokesman at Iran’s U.N. mission in New York informed newspaper that Tehran had been wrongly accused of cyber-attacks.

Over the past several months, China and Russia have been accused of cyber hacking administration officials in the United States and the countries have denied the charges too. As per LA Times it was said that the hackers were on the lookout for information on U.S. spies.

This Sprout Pencil Grows into a Tomato

Plantable Sprout Pencils – Grow into Vegetables/Flowering Plants/Herbs

Denmark based Sprout World has plans in eliminating waste from pencil stubs that are thrown away, which are not of much use and are tossed into the bin. According to CEO of Sprout World, Michael Stausholm, around 15 billion pencils are made every year with three million of them just in United States and these could be a good amount of them being thrown away.

The start-up tends to make plantable pencils which can grow into vegetables, flowering plants or herbs when it is not useful anymore. Stausholm stated that the pencils which are made from cedar in Pine City, Minnesota seem to be the perfect ecological product since one `dying product tends to give life to a new product.

Where an eraser would be, the wooden pencils tend to have a capsule which is made from biodegradable substance which comprises of a small combination of seeds and peat. The stub end of the pencil is used as a marker and the capsule is planted in pot of soil, which tends to dissolve and seed grows into a plant. These pencils are in a range of 14 varieties at a cost of $19.95 for a pack of eight which comprise of basil, green pepper, lavender, sunflower and tomato and had been developed by three MIT students in 2012.

Sprout Pencils – Kickstarter Campaign

Stausholm informed that while he was living in Denmark, he worked a lot on sustainable companies. However sustainability was hard to illustrate to consumers and he was searching for product which could do that easily. A year thereafter, he came across Sprout Pencils when it was a Kickstarter campaign.

He valued the idea and it was an appropriate way of explaining what sustainability was all about. He partnered with the students convincing them to permit him to sell the pencils in Denmark. He stated that around 70,000 pencils were sold in the spring of 2013 and realized that there was demand for them. The start-up had sold around a million pencils all across Europe by 2014.

He acquired the patents and rights to the brand later that year and became the CEO of Sprout World. He informed that Sprout World presently sells on an average around 450,000 pencils monthly and has logged more than $3 million by way of revenue.

Mission – Educate What to Purchase/Product Reusable

His next ambition is to overcome the U.S. market. In September, he had opened an office in Boston to get drive going with two employees there and 15 in Europe. He stated that with regards to embracing eco-friendliness, America is a couple of years behind Europe.

However he is of the belief that it is an impeccable market for Sprout World pencils since its makers are based in the U.S. The pencils are sold on Amazon – AMZN, Tech30 and in Whole Foods – WFM stores in U.S. Stausholm is keen in bringing the price down and eventually he would want all students across the globe to use Sprout World pencils.

The start-up plans are likely to roll out new products which include plantable greeting cards and coloured pencils in January. He had commented that he is aware that they cannot save the planet just with his product but their mission is to educate people on how to be more aware in what they purchase and look for products which are reusable.