Month: June 2016

Jacob Appelbaum in Berlin in 2014. (credit: re:publica)

Former Tor Project "Core Team" member Jacob Appelbaum took to Twitter on Monday morning to slam sex-related accusations against him that developed over the weekend. He also denounced the matter as a "calculated and targeted attack has been launched to spread vicious and spurious allegations against me."

"I want to be clear: the accusations of criminal sexual misconduct against me are entirely false," he wrote.

The Tor Project is the Massachusetts-based nonprofit that maintains Tor, the well-known open-source online anonymity tool.

Google's DeepMind AI division will face off against humanity's number one Go player, Ke Jie, according to Chinese state news agency Xinhua. Ke Jie is currently the top-ranked Go player in the world.

DeepMind's Go-playing program AlphaGo played against Go grandmaster Lee Se-dol in March. Lee lost to the computer 4-1. Although Lee was the world's top-rated Go player between 2007 and 2011 and is widely considered to be one of the greatest Go players the world has ever seen, he was only ranked number four in the world when he played against AlphaGo.

For the last couple of years the world's best Go player (by Elo score) has been Ke Jie, a Chinese child prodigy. Back in March, after AlphaGo had won the first game of the match with Lee, Ke said that “I don’t want to compete with AlphaGo because judging from its matches with Lee, AlphaGo is weaker than me. I don’t want AlphaGo to copy my style." He did some bragging on his Weibo account, too: “Even if AlphaGo can defeat Lee Se-dol, it can’t beat me."

A hacker or hacking group going by the name of "OurMine Team" briefly took control of Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg's Twitter and Pinterest accounts, apparently using information from a major LinkedIn security breech that occurred in 2012.

According to OurMine Team, the passwords to Zuckerberg's little-used Pinterest and totally dormant Twitter accounts were apparently the same as those for his LinkedIn login ("dadada"). Both Twitter and Pinterest rapidly restored control of the accounts over the weekend, and the rogue posts have now been removed—though not before they were screencapped:

Ouch. Mark Zuckerberg's social media accounts have been hacked pic.twitter.com/KvVmXOIg5s

— Ben Hall (@Ben_Hall) June 5, 2016

LinkedIn's 2012 breach was significant and embarrassing for the company, and resulted in the theft of millions of passwords and other user information. Users were warned at the time to change their LinkedIn passwords, and those on any other platform on which they were reused. This is clearly evergreen advice, as it isn't hard for a determined hacker to cross-reference someone's username and password information with other sites.

Crime Scene Live is an ongoing series of events, usually once per month, at the Natural History Museum in London. It's a very popular event and tickets sell out months in advance.

Lucy Orr

Our bold CSIs.

12 more images in gallery

I always knew there had to be a dark side to the seemingly sedate Natural History Museum, and lo and behold I recently received an ominous e-mail. There’s been a murder in a shed behind the museum, I'm told. My first thought is it might be one of the screaming children you often see outside the Dinostore, miserably whining about the size of their snuggler. But on closer inspection this murder was committed last year, and the case is now being reopened due to some gruesome new evidence.

I feel well prepared for my job as a trainee crime scene investigator (CSI) having binge watched Making a Murderer recently. I don my full SOCO (scene of crime officer) suit and—with cider in one hand, notepad in the other—I pay close attention to the initial briefing. Event organizer Lucy Minshall fills me in (along with 100 other novices) on some mysterious disappearances that have happened amongst the museum staff. Chillingly, we ponder whether the skeleton in the shed could be one of them.