Month: August 2016

(credit: ThomasLife)

Our brains are apparently really good at divvying up heavy mental loads. In the decades since scientists started taking snapshots of our noggins in action, they’ve spotted dozens of distinct brain regions in charge of specific tasks, such as reading and speech. Yet despite documenting this delegation, scientists still aren’t sure exactly how slices of our noodle get earmarked for specific functions. Are they preordained based entirely on anatomy, or are they assigned as wiring gets laid down during our development?

A new study, published this week in Nature Neuroscience, adds more support for that latter hypothesis. Specifically, researchers at MIT scanned the brains of kids before and after they learned to read and found that they could pinpoint how the area responsible for that task would develop based on connectivity patterns. In other words, the neural circuitry and hookups laid down prior to reading determined where and how the brain region responsible for reading, the visual word form area, or VWFA, formed.

“Long-range connections that allow this region to talk to other areas of the brain seem to drive function,” Zeynep Saygin, lead study author and researcher at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, said in a news release.

(credit: Wired UK/Shuttershock)

Bleeping Computer, a longstanding popular discussion forum that helps people rid their computers of malware, has now countersued Enigma Software Group (ESG), which makes an antivirus software known as SpyHunter.

Bleeping now claims that ESG has been violating Bleeping’s trademarks by registering new domain names that include “bleepingcomputer” and posting some of the company’s webpage’s source code on other websites without its authorization, among other allegations.

ESG had sued Bleeping for libel earlier this year over a series of messages that it claims disparaged SpyHunter and the company as a whole.

(credit: Valentina Palladino)

There are a number of perks to having a robot vacuum, the biggest being you can clean your home without actually having to do anything yourself. You do pay for that convenience, though, as most robo-vacs cost just as much as elite handheld ones do. iRobot decided to try something different with the Braava Jet: it's half the size of its other Roomba vacuums, it costs just $199, and it doesn't actually vacuum—it mops.

The company made the Braava Jet with a certain kind of user in mind, one that likely doesn't live in a huge home, has primarily hardwood or tile floors, and doesn't want to dig deep into their wallets for an automatic vacuum. Though it's ideal for those living in small apartments, others should carefully consider their options before investing in this mopping robot.

Design: A cute, compact cleaner

The Braava Jet might be the cutest robot that iRobot has ever made. Measuring 6.7" × 7.0" × 3.3" and weighing 2.7 pounds, the tiny square mopping robot is slightly smaller than a lunchbox and it even has a handle like one, too. The device is mostly white with a few accents of ocean blue, particularly on the backlit "clean" button that sits prominently on its top. Blue also highlights the precision spray hole, on the side of the robot, where water shoots out to dampen the floor ahead of the Braava Jet's path.

Sling TV announced a much-anticipated pair of new channels to its TV streaming lineup. The company has added the NFL Network and NFL RedZone to its offerings; Sling Blue customers will automatically receive the NFL Network and those who want NFL RedZone can pay an extra $5 per month for the add-on "Sports Extra" package.

Those who have Sling Blue pay $25 per month, and there's no doubt that adding the NFL Network as standard in that lineup will make some existing customers very happy and likely entice new customers. In addition to watching on Sling TV, the press release states customers will also have access to NFL content on Watch NFL Network through NFL.com and the NFL app.

During the regular season, the NFL Network on Sling TV will show exclusive Thursday Night Football games, and other shows including NFL GameDay Morning, A Football Life, TIMELINE, and a new weekday morning show called Good Morning Football. NFL RedZone jumps around each game all Sunday afternoon, showing each touchdown and every important play so fans don't miss a thing.

The successors to Silk Road, the darknet drug market shut down by the FBI in 2013, are raking in tens of millions of pounds in total revenue every month, according to a new report.

British dealers apparently have a serious finger in the pie, taking home roughly 16 percent of the global revenues, or around £1.75 million, between an estimated 338 vendors.

The report, commissioned by the Dutch government to gauge the growth of darknet markets in the years following the demise of Silk Road, found some good news for beleaguered law enforcement: "cryptomarkets have grown substantially in the past few years, but not explosively," though the numbers of vendors and hosting sites have grown. In fact, researchers found around 50 of these markets in total, however, the total volume of listings is now only six times larger than in 2013.

(credit: Scott Beale)

A US District Judge in San Francisco dismissed a lawsuit against Twitter that claimed the social networking platform had provided “material support” to terrorists from ISIS. An American woman whose husband was working as a contractor in Jordan filed the suit after her husband and several others were shot and killed by a terrorist who allegedly was inspired by extremist propaganda disseminated on Twitter.

The lawsuit, Fields v. Twitter, claimed that Twitter violated the Anti-Terrorism Act by providing Twitter accounts to the terrorist group. The plaintiffs did not allege that any specific tweets instigated the terrorist to kill the US contractors, nor did they allege that ISIS recruited or trained the terrorist over Twitter. The plaintiffs did, however, say that the terrorist in question had been inspired by an execution publicized by ISIS, which crowd-sourced the method of execution on Twitter. The plaintiffs also accused Twitter of failing to “detect and prevent” violent, terroristic tweets on its platform.

Twitter argued that is protected from liability as a publisher of content by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Microsoft has inadvertently demonstrated the intrinsic security problem of including a universal backdoor in its software after it accidentally leaked its so-called "golden key"—which allows users to unlock any device that's supposedly protected by Secure Boot, such as phones and tablets.

The key basically allows anyone to bypass the provisions Microsoft has put in place ostensibly to prevent malicious versions of Windows from being installed, on any device running Windows 8.1 and upwards with Secure Boot enabled.

And while this means that enterprising users will be able to install any operating system—Linux, for instance—on their Windows tablet, it also allows bad actors with physical access to a machine to install bootkits and rootkits at deep levels. Worse, according to the security researchers who found the keys, this is a decision Microsoft may be unable to reverse.