One of the most active and notorious data-stealing ransomware groups, Maze, says it is “officially closed.” From a report: The announcement came as a waffling statement, riddled with spelling mistakes, and published on its website on the dark web, which for the past year has published vast troves of stolen internal documents and files from the companies it targeted, including Cognizant,…
Tag: Websites
Google’s AI Converts Webpages Into Videos
Researchers at Google say they’ve developing an AI system that can automatically convert webpages into short videos. From a report: It extracts assets like text and images and their design styles including fonts, colors, and graphical layouts from HTML sources and organizes the assets into a sequence of shots, maintaining a look and feel similar to the source page as it…
Brave Browser First To Nix CNAME Deception
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: The Brave web browser will soon block CNAME cloaking, a technique used by online marketers to defy privacy controls designed to prevent the use of third-party cookies. The browser security model makes a distinction between first-party domains — those being visited — and third-party domains — from the suppliers of things like…
Microsoft Overhauls Excel With Live Custom Data Types
Microsoft is overhauling Excel with the ability to support custom live data types. The Verge reports: You could import the data type for Seattle, for example, and then create a formula that references that single cell to pull out information on the population of Seattle. These data types work by cramming a set of structured data into a single cell in…
Java Geeks Discuss ‘The War for the Browser’ and the State of Java Modularization
Self-described “Java geek” nfrankel writes: At the beginning of 2019, I wrote about the state of Java modularization. I took a sample of widespread libraries, and for each of them, I checked whether: – It supports the module system i.e. it provides an automatic module name in the manifest – It’s a full-fledged module i.e. it provides a module-info The results…
Chrome Caught Exempting Google Sites From User Requests To Delete Data
This week the Verge reported: If you ask Chrome to delete all cookies and site data whenever you quit the browser, it’s reasonable to expect that this policy applies to all websites. Recently, though, a bug in the browser meant data wasn’t being removed for two sites in particular: Google and YouTube. This problem was first documented by iOS developer Jeff…
Virginia’s Voter-Registration Site Goes Offline on Last Day To Register
Virginia’s voter-registration website went offline Tuesday on the state’s last day to register before the Nov. 3 election, in what officials attributed to an accidental cutting of a fiber-optic cable. From a report: The Virginia Information Technologies Agency said that the Verizon cable was inadvertently struck during work for a roadside utilities project and that several agencies were affected. The Virginia…
Do the Faces of People In Long-Term Relationships Start To Look the Same?
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Working with her Stanford colleague, Michal Kosinski, [Pin Pin Tea-makorn, ]a PhD student at Stanford] scoured Google, newspaper anniversary notices and genealogy websites for photos of couples taken at the start of their marriages and many years later. From these they compiled a database of pictures from 517 couples, taken within two…
‘Google and Facebook’s Ad Business Might Not Survive Amazon’
“There’s a relatively new, rapidly growing player in the online advertising world,” warns Medium’s new consumer technology site Debugger — taking a close look at the “Sponsored Products” listed first in the results of Amazon searches. “Given its unique business model, its history of swallowing whole industries, and its sheer size, Amazon has the potential to massively disrupt the online ad…
Apple Removes Two RSS Feed Readers From China App Store To Please China’s Censors
Two RSS reader apps, Reeder and Fiery Feeds, said this week that their iOS apps have been removed in China over content that deemed “illegal” by the local cyber watchdog. TechCrunch reports: Apps get banned in China for all sorts of reasons. Feed readers of RSS, or Real Simple Syndication, are particularly troubling to the authority because they fetch content from…