Month: April 2016

(credit: Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center/ Batelle)

With a paralyzing spinal cord injury, the biological wiring that hooks up our controlling brains to our useful limbs gets snipped, leading to permanent loss of sensation and control and usually a lifetime of extra health care. Researchers have spent years working to repair those lost connections, allowing paralyzed patients to sip coffee and enjoy a beer with robotic limbs controlled by just their minds.

Now, researchers have gone a step further, allowing a paralyzed person to control his own hand with just his mind.

In a study published Wednesday in Nature, researchers report using a “neural bypass” that reconnects a patient’s mental commands for movement to responsive muscles in his limbs, creating somewhat of a synthetic nervous system. The pioneering patient, Ian Burkhart, a 24-year-old man left with quadriplegia after a diving accident almost six years ago, can once again move his hand. In the pilot study he could control movement of individual fingers, grasp big and small objects, swipe a credit card, and play Guitar Hero. The advance may open the door to restorative treatments for paralyzed individuals, allowing them to have independent movement—and lives.

Enlarge / The number of zero days showed their sharpest rise ever in 2015, reaching a record 54. (credit: Symantec)

The number of attacks that exploited previously unknown software vulnerabilities more than doubled in 2015 as hackers raced against security defenders to find effective ways to infect end users with malware, according to a recently released report.

The number of "zero-day" exploits—a term that was coined because affected software developers have zero days to release a patch that keeps users protected—reached an unprecedented 54, according to researchers at security firm Symantec. That number compared with 24 in 2014, 23 in 2013, and 14 in 2012. The increase was partly caused by the breach of Italy-based zero day broker Hacking Team, which spilled six closely guarded zero days into the public domain. It also came as Adobe and other developers significantly reduced the time it took to release patches that plugged zero-day holes.

"It is difficult to defend against new and unknown vulnerabilities, particularly zero-day vulnerabilities for which there may be no patch, and attackers are trying hard to exploit them faster than vendors can roll out patches," Symantec researchers wrote in the company's annual Internet Security Threat Report. The report went on to say that the Angler exploit kit, a package sold in Internet crime forums, was able to quickly integrate the growing number of zero days into its arsenal.

I am delighted to sell you flowers. Please use this Messenger window to tell me where to deliver them. (credit: Caprica)

Facebook has become a social network for cyborgs. It happened yesterday at Facebook developer conference F8 while everyone was busy eye-rolling over Mark Zuckerberg's keynote about saving the world. The company has launched a bot revolution, and ironically (or not), these bots will eventually replace tech workers in the exact emerging markets that Zuck vowed to rescue with his largesse.

The core of Facebook's idea is to chase its ever-expanding audience, which is flocking to Messenger. Last year, Messenger was the fastest growing app in the US, and now it has almost a billion users. Though Facebook itself claims 1.59 billion monthly active users, it's obvious that Messenger has grown massively since becoming a standalone app in 2014. So Facebook is turning Messenger into a platform with open APIs. And just as developers once built apps on top of Facebook, they'll now build bots on top of Messenger.

What does that mean? Facebook obviously doesn't have the answer yet—that's why they're inviting developers to figure it out for them. That said, there are a few hints of the bot ecosystem to come. In its announcement of the Messenger Platform, the company explains:

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The human brain can still outperform our best algorithms for a variety of tasks. Some tasks, like object identification, aren't really surprising—our brain itself has been optimized through evolution to be pretty good at this. But there are other classes of problems that are a bit of a surprise, like some forms of optimization.

You might expect a computer to be pretty good at finding optimal solutions. But when it came to figuring out the optimal structure of a protein, people playing the game FoldIt managed to beat some of our best software. Now you can add a second task where our brains come out ahead: figuring out the best way to perform some quantum manipulations. All it took was turning quantum mechanics into a game.

Algorithms often come up short in optimization problems because of how they're structured. It's easiest to think of this idea as a landscape with peaks and valleys. The algorithm simply starts off by picking a large number of random locations within this landscape and then tries to move uphill from each of these locations. Once it finds a collection of peaks, it can compare them to find the highest peak that it has located, which can represent the optimal solution.

The US House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday approved legislation requiring that the authorities get a court warrant to obtain e-mail stored in the cloud.

There was no immediate date set for a floor vote on the Email Privacy Act, which would unwind a President Ronald Reagan-era law that allows the authorities to access e-mail from service providers without a warrant if the message is at least 180 days old. The 1986 e-mail privacy law, adopted when CompuServe was king, considered cloud-stored e-mail and other documents older than six months to be abandoned and ripe for the taking.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) said, "Reforming this outdated law has been a priority for me as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and I have worked with members and stakeholders for years to bring this law into the 21st century."

President Obama and FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. (credit: White House)

As Republicans in Congress push legislation that would gut the Federal Communications Commission's authority to enforce net neutrality rules, the White House today issued a policy statement threatening a veto.

"If the president were presented with H.R. 2666 [the bill number] his senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill," the statement said.

The bill is titled the No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act and was approved by the Energy and Commerce Committee over objections from Democrats last month. The bill would strip the FCC of authority to set broadband rates or review whether a rate is reasonable, and it's controversial mainly because it defines "rate regulation" so broadly that it could prevent the FCC from enforcing net neutrality rules against blocking and throttling. It could also limit the FCC's authority to prevent ISPs from applying data caps in discriminatory ways.