Saturday, December 21, 2019


Encryption. The return of the “one time pad.” Security depends on a unique cypher for each short message. Use any key too long and the message can be cracked.
New "uncrackable" security system may make your VPN obsolete
Researchers at the University of St Andrews, King Abdullah University of Sciences and Technology (KAUST) and the Center for Unconventional Processes of Sciences (CUP Sciences) have developed a new uncrackable security system which is set to revolutionize communications privacy.
The international team of scientists have created optical chips that allow for information to be sent from one user to another using a one-time unhackable communication that is able to achieve 'perfect secrecy' since confidential data can now be protected more securely than ever before.
The researchers' proposed system uses silicon chips that contain complex structures that are irreversibly changed in order to send information in a one-time key that can't be recreated or intercepted by an attacker.




A name I haven’t heard in twenty years.
Meet the Mad Scientist Who Wrote the Book on How to Hunt Hackers
Thirty years ago, Cliff Stoll published The Cuckoo's Egg, a book about his cat-and-mouse game with a KGB-sponsored hacker. Today, the internet is a far darker place—and Stoll has become a cybersecurity icon.




Next, let’s analyze politicians!
Artificial intelligence as behavioral analyst
… "To understand how the brain generates behavior, we need to know the "syllables," the building blocks of the behavior." Aided by artificial intelligence, Mearns and his colleagues from the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology have broken down the hunting behavior of larval zebrafish into its basic building blocks. They show how these building blocks combine to form longer sequences.
… Catching prey is such an innate behavioral sequence, fine-tuned by experience. However, how do neuronal circuits steer and combine the components of this behavior in order to lead to a successful prey capture?
The neurobiologists from the Baier department developed a high-tech assay to investigate the details of the fish behavior. High-speed cameras recorded eye, tail and jaw movements of the fish while the animals roamed freely in a small bowl. Specially designed computer algorithms then evaluated the recorded images and assigned them to a computer-learned behavioral component. The results of thousands of fish movements revealed three components of the prey capture behavior: orientation, approach and capture.




In case you wondered.
How Artificial Intelligence Is Totally Changing Everything
Back in Oct. 1950, British techno-visionary Alan Turing published an article called "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," in the journal MIND that raised what at the time must have seemed to many like a science-fiction fantasy.
"May not machines carry out something which ought to be described as thinking but which is very different from what a man does?" Turing asked.
How Artificial Intelligence Works
"AI is a family of technologies that perform tasks that are thought to require intelligence if performed by humans," explains Vasant Honavar, a professor and director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory at Penn State University, in an email interview. "I say 'thought,' because nobody is really quite sure what intelligence is."
AI works by combining large amounts of data with intelligent algorithms — series of instructions — that allow the software to learn from patterns and features of the data, as this SAS primer on artificial intelligence explains.




Perspective. Why can’t your kid do this?
The Highest-Paid YouTube Stars of 2019: The Kids Are Killing It
Anastasia Radzinskaya is an unlikely media star. Born in southern Russia with cerebral palsy, her doctors feared she would never be able to speak. To document her development through treatments, her parents posted videos of her on YouTube so friends and relatives could see the progress.
The videos are typical kid stuff: playdates with dad, jumping around on an inflatable castle and playing with her cat, each video accompanied by catchy jingles and voice-over giggles. She soon gained followers around the world. Her biggest hit was a 2018 trip to the petting zoo with her father Yuri that featured the two dancing to child favorite “Baby Shark,” milking a pretend cow and eating ice cream. That video has garnered 767 million views, the top draw for a growing media business that has funneled $18 million to the Radzinskayas between June 1, 2018, and June 1, 2019.
Anastasia, who goes by “Nastya,” now has 107 million subscribers across her seven channels who have watched her videos 42 billion times. She is No. 3 on the Forbes Top-Earning YouTube Stars ranking for 2019, which tallies pretax income collected from advertisements, sponsored content, merchandise sales, tours and more.



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