This week, Saks Fifth Avenue, Saks Off 5th, and Lord & Taylor department stores—all owned by The Hudson’s Bay Company—acknowledged a data breach impacting more than five million credit and debit card numbers. The culprits? The same group that’s spent the last few years pulling off data heists from Omni Hotels & Resorts, Trump Hotels, Jason’s Deli, Whole Foods, Chipotle: A mysterious group known as Fin7.
Data breaches dog consumers every day, whether they’re ordering food from Panera, or tracking their nutrition with an Under Armour app. But if you’ve particularly had your credit card number stolen from a restaurant, hotel, or retail store in the past few years, you may have experienced Fin7 up close.
While lots of criminal hacking gangs are simply out to make money, researchers regard Fin7 as a particularly professional and disciplined organization. The group—which often appears to be Russian-speaking, but hasn’t been tied to a home country—generally works on a normal business schedule, with nights and weekends off. It has developed its own malware tools and attack styles, and seems to have a well-funded research and testing division that helps it evade detection by antivirus scanners and authorities more broadly. In the Saks breach, Fin7 used “point of sale” malware—software secretly installed in the cash register transaction systems customers interact with—to lift the financial data, a signature move.
This courthouse handles every eviction in Richmond, a city with one of the highest eviction rates in the country, according to new data covering dozens of states and compiled by a team led by the Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond.
Two years ago, Mr. Desmond turned eviction into a national topic of conversation with “Evicted,” a book that chronicled how poor families who lost their homes in Milwaukee sank ever deeper into poverty. It became a favorite among civic groups and on college campuses, some here in Richmond. Bill Gates and former President Obama named it among the best books they had read in 2017, and it was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
But for all the attention the problem began to draw, even Mr. Desmond could not say how widespread it was. Surveys of renters have tried to gauge displacement, but there is no government data tracking all eviction cases in America. Now that Mr. Desmond has been mining court records across the country to build a database of millions of evictions, it’s clear even in his incomplete national picture that they are more rampant in many places than what he saw in Milwaukee.
When piglets began dying on farms in southern China in late October 2016, their owners thought they knew what was going on. Baby pigs on farms are especially vulnerable to illness, and one particular disease, porcine epidemic diarrhea virus, causes exactly the symptoms the piglets were having—vomiting, severe diarrhea, death from dehydration, and stress. The farms had seen it before.
But when animal disease detectives swooped in, they found something puzzling. Early tests were positive for PEDV, but by January 2017, they began coming back negative—and piglets were still dying. The mystery epidemic had spread to four farms and was killing the piglets, almost 25,000 of them. By the time the outbreak burned out in May, it seemed to be something no one had seen before. They were right: The cause of the piglets’ illness, identified by the US-based EcoHealth Alliance and published in Nature last week, was a totally new virus.
Solving that microbial mystery is an accomplishment, but its origins should make us nervous.
Cambridge-based image processing specialist Spectral Edge has snapped up $5.3m (£3.72m) Series A from existing investors Parkwalk Advisors and IQ Capital.
Spectral Edge specialises in image processing. It combines image fusion with machine learning to help develop more of the colour, detail and clarity in a scene. This is done in real-time with a pixel-level, embeddable technology that can be implemented in software or in silicon.
The company will use the new funding to expand the R&D team to 12, with specialisms in image processing, machine learning and embedded software development.
Experts on human behavior and online privacy say people’s expectations of privacy may simply become a thing of the past. Here are a few key questions about online activity in the wake of this data breach:
Will people be less willing to share information online?
That’s highly unlikely, says behavioral economist George Loewenstein. There had already been a string of high-profile data breaches, including Equifax and Anthem Health. But most people haven’t suffered severe, personal consequences from those intrusions. Cumulatively, he says, these episodes “may have created a kind of boy-who-cried-wolf effect.”
It may sound like a futuristic device out of a spy novel, a computer the size of a pinhead, but according to new research from the University of New Hampshire, it might be a reality sooner than once thought. Researchers have discovered that using an easily made combination of materials might be the way to offer a more stable environment for smaller and safer data storage, ultimately leading to miniature computers.
“We’re really optimistic about the possibilities,” said Jiadong Zang, assistant professor of physics. “There is a push in the computer industry toward smaller and more powerful storage, yet current combinations of materials can create volatile situations, where data can be lost once the device is turned off. Our research points to this new combination as a much safer option. We’re excited that our findings might have the potential to change the landscape of information technology.”
During a particularly tense exchange with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), Facebook (FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg was pressed to name Facebook’s competitors.
The objective of Graham’s badgering was to prove Facebook’s status as a monopoly. But in getting Zuckerberg to eventually name adversaries such as Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL), Amazon.com (AMZN), Apple (AAPL), and Microsoft (MSFT), he may have elicited companies that might also be on the radar of regulatory-pushing lawmakers.
Data-intensive companies such as Google and Twitter (TWTR) were also top of mind for a handful of Congressional members, who appeared determined to broaden their regulatory efforts after skewering the biggest fish, Facebook, for two days and nearly 10 hours. A handful of Congressional members spoke of the role of social media in connection to Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.
A group led by scientists at Northwestern University, the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has reported a shortcut for discovering and improving metallic glass — and, by extension, other elusive materials — at a fraction of the time and cost.
The research group took advantage of a system at SLAC’s Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) that combines machine learning — a form of artificial intelligence where computer algorithms glean knowledge from enormous amounts of data — with experiments that quickly make and screen hundreds of sample materials at a time. This allowed the team to discover three new blends of ingredients that form metallic glass, and to do it 200 times faster than it could be done before.
Quantum radar would cut through polar energy interference and reveal low-observables.
The Canadian Department of National Defence is funding researchers at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, C$2.7 million to develop a new type of radar that can operate effectively in harsh Arctic conditions using quantum light. The new technology also would be able to unmask stealth aircraft, according to university scientists.
Thomson Reuters is again turning to AI tools, now with a contract remediation system to help companies review and repaper legal agreements ahead of Brexit. In this case it will be using AI company Logical Construct, which leverages a combination of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning techniques to achieve its extraction results.
The news follows the recent announcement it will be using US legal AI company, eBrevia, for document review also.
New York, NY May 4, starting at 1 p.m. “Please join us on Fri, May 4 for a special lecture from Prof. Wei Ji Ma, recipient of the 2018 Iakobachvili Faculty Science Award” at NYU [free]
Toronto, ON, Canada May 24-25 at The Fields Institute, University of Toronto. “A two day workshop focused on current methods, practices, and research in the increasingly popular area of sports analytics. The topics of the workshop will include the use of analytics on both the on-field performance as well as the business side and fan engagement.” [$$$]
Vancouver, BC, Canada Consortium date: August 11. “The SIGGRAPH Doctoral Consortium is a forum for Ph.D. students to meet and discuss their work with each other and a panel of experienced SIGGRAPH researchers in an informal and interactive setting.” Deadline for submissions is June 18.
“I have often responded that it is comparatively straightforward to fit such models using the MixedModels package for Julia. The cost of doing things in this way is installing and learning to use Julia.”
“Recently the R package JuliaCall has been added to CRAN. This package allows an R user to call Julia functions from within R.”
In our inaugural episode, Karen Lightman sits down with NYU Professor Neil Kleiman during his visit to Carnegie Mellon University. Prof. Kleiman discusses his new book A New City O/S: The Power of Open, Collaborative, and Distributed Governance.
