Month: September 2016

Enlarge / Computer vision is a critical technology for smart, connected devices of the future. (Credit: Intel Corporation) (credit: Intel)

Last night, Intel announced that it will buy Movidius, an Irish company that makes computer vision processors used in devices such as drones and virtual reality systems. According to Intel's press release, the goal is to weave Movidius' technology in with Intel's RealSense cameras to enhance "computer vision and perceptual computing" in its devices.

Movidius has been around for nearly a decade, making low-power, high-performance SoCs that have been used by the likes of Lenovo, DJI, and others. It has also created algorithms for deep learning, depth processing, and navigation, so it's easy to see why Intel would want to use both of those pieces in its RealSense camera systems. While Intel has the "eyes" of the computer down with RealSense, Movidius' technology will likely become an integrated part of the computer's "brain" as the visual cortex.

Intel says it's particularly looking to integrate Movidius' work into augmented, virtual, and merged reality systems as well as robotics and security systems. Intel has been shopping around for companies that contribute to this bottom line; just last month, the company acquired the deep-learning company Nervana Systems to help it compete in the AI sphere. Recent acquisitions show how Intel has broadened its focus away from x86, turning its attention to new technology like virtual reality devices, drones, and smart home products.

(credit: Marc Falardeau)

Another major site breach from four years ago has resurfaced. Today, LeakedSource revealed that it had received a copy of a February 2012 dump of the user database of Rambler.ru, a Russian search, news, and e-mail portal site that closely mirrors the functionality of Yahoo. The dump included usernames, passwords, and ICQ instant messaging accounts for over 98 million users. And while previous breaches uncovered by LeakedSource this year had at least some encryption of passwords, the Rambler.ru database stored user passwords in plain text—meaning that whoever breached the database instantly had access to the e-mail accounts of all of Rambler.ru's users.

The breach is the latest in a series of "mega-breaches" that LeakedSource says it is processing for release. Rambler isn't the only Russian site that has been caught storing unencrpyted passwords by hackers. In June, a hacker offered for sale the entire user database of the Russian-language social networking site VK.com (formerly VKontakte) from a breach that took place in late 2012 or early 2013; that database also included unencrypted user passwords, as ZDNet's Zach Whittaker reported.

The Rambler database shows that its users had the same proclivity toward using weak passwords as users of other sites breached during the same period—the most common password, used by 723,039 users, was "asdasd," followed by 437,638 accounts that used "asdasd123." The majority of the top 50 passwords were simple numerical sequences. While that would be expected for "throwaway" passwords for sites with relatively low levels of privacy data (such as Last.fm), Rambler provides e-mail services—so the risk to user privacy of weak passwords was much higher.

Enlarge

Warner Brothers ordered Google to remove several of its own Web pages from search results on the grounds they infringed the media giant's copyright.

A posting on the Lumen database of cease and desist letters revealed the bizarre requests, which were sent by monitoring company Vobile on behalf of Warner Brothers.

It asked for the official pages of Batman: The Dark Knight and The Matrix films to be censored by Google under the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA.) A few days earlier,  according to TorrentFreak, Warner Brothers had requested that the official Web page for movie The Lucky One should be removed from Google's search results in the same way.