OpenPDS - The privacy-preserving Personal Data Store. eBay to buy payments company Braintree for $800M. E-commerce giant eBay Inc. reached a deal to buy online and mobile payments technology provider Braintree for $800 million in cash. The move comes as eBay's PayPal unit works to evolve from its roots as an online payments provider, expanding its offline, mobile and online offerings to stores, restaurants and other business. Braintree's payments technology is used by popular startups such as vacation rentals site Airbnb, cab-hailing app Uber and restaurant reservations site OpenTable. The company charges businesses a fee of 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per each transaction, and expects to process about $12 billion in payments this year.
San Jose, California-based eBay Inc. said Thursday that it will operate Braintree as a separate business. "Braintree will continue to do what it's currently doing," Marcus said, adding that PayPal will help the company to grow and to expand internationally. Braintree's roughly 200 employees are staying with the company.
Bringing 'common sense' to text analytics. Bringing "common sense" to artificial intelligence is one of the biggest challenges in computer science: It entails equipping computers with the shared knowledge that humans use to infer meaning, make connections and communicate, among other things. Catherine Havasi '03, MEng '04 dedicated more than a decade to such research, amassing an enormous knowledge base from around the Web. In 2010, she used that research as the technological foundation for Luminoso Technologies, a startup whose commercial software is helping bring common sense to text analytics. Luminoso's technology aims to quickly mine and analyze vast quantities of online text and—using a database of world knowledge—quickly identify opinions, patterns and underlying themes in the text.
"It has this 'backbone' of common sense that allows our technology to spontaneously infer meaning" from text, Havasi says. In a few short years, Luminoso has earned big-name clients, including Mars, BP and Scotts. The 'demo or die' mentality. Twitter IPO marks end, beginning in social media era. Is Twitter's stock offering the end of the social media era, or just the beginning? While Twitter appears to have carved out its niche in the social Internet, a big question now is how much growth and innovation remains in the space. Charlene Li at Altimeter Group sees a "last call" mentality around Twitter's initial public offering (IPO). "Twitter is the last of the Big Four to go public," she said on her blog. "In the social networking ecosystem, Twitter is seen as a must have in terms of a social strategy, and is the only major player left that is still up for grabs—YouTube (owned by Google), LinkedIn (IPO), and Facebook (IPO) are all spoken for.
Other upstarts like Pinterest are just getting started so Twitter is going to be the talk of the town into 2014. " Trip Chowdhry at Global Equities Research said Twitter may be the final social media IPO. "The Twitter IPO symbolizes this industry is coming to an end, and future investments will be in some industry we don't know," he told AFP. Stanford trio explore success formula for Reddit posts.
(Phys.org) —Marketers and other new media workers hoping for traffic payoffs will want to study a paper by three Stanford University scientists who have pulled apart the nature of Reddit posts to determine what, beyond quality of content, constitutes success. "What's in a name? Understanding the Interplay between Titles, Content, and Communities in Social Media," shows what a clever use of mathematics can do in getting to the secret sauce of a successful post. The study by Himabindu Lakkaraju, Julian McAuley, and Jure Leskovec found that important factors include where you post on Reddit, when you post on Reddit, and last but not least what title you give the post on Reddit.
"Creating, placing, and presenting social media content is a difficult problem. In addition to the quality of the content itself, several factors such as the way the content is presented (the title), the community it is posted to, whether it has been seen before, and the time it is posted determine its success. " IT news, technology analysis and how-to resources | ITworld. How ‘Social Intelligence’ Can Guide Decisions. By offering decision makers rich real-time data, social media is giving some companies fresh strategic insight. In many companies, marketers have been first movers in social media, tapping into it for insights on how consumers think and behave.
As social technologies mature and organizations become convinced of their power, we believe they will take on a broader role: informing competitive strategy. In particular, social media should help companies overcome some limits of old-school intelligence gathering, which typically involves collecting information from a range of public and propriety sources, distilling insights using time-tested analytic methods, and creating reports for internal company “clients” often “siloed” by function or business unit. Today, many people who have expert knowledge and shape perceptions about markets are freely exchanging data and viewpoints through social platforms. Exhibit 1: From identifying data to mapping people and conversations Exhibit 2: Notes 1. 2. SecLists.Org Security Mailing List Archive.
Google. Internet Census 2012. Internet Census 2012 Port scanning /0 using insecure embedded devices Carna Botnet Abstract While playing around with the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) we discovered an amazing number of open embedded devices on the Internet. Many of them are based on Linux and allow login to standard BusyBox with empty or default credentials. We used these devices to build a distributed port scanner to scan all IPv4 addresses.
These scans include service probes for the most common ports, ICMP ping, reverse DNS and SYN scans. We analyzed some of the data to get an estimation of the IP address usage. All data gathered during our research is released into the public domain for further study. 1 Introduction Two years ago while spending some time with the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) someone mentioned that we should try the classic telnet login root:root on random IP addresses. 2 Proof of Concept To further verify our sample data, we developed a small binary that could be uploaded to insecure devices. 3.1 Be Nice. Whole internet probed for insecure devices. 21 March 2013Last updated at 07:34 ET The project probed millions of devices connected to the net A surreptitious scan of the entire internet has revealed millions of printers, webcams and set-top boxes protected only by default passwords.
An anonymous researcher used more than 420,000 of these insecure devices to test the security and responsiveness of other gadgets, in a nine-month survey. Using custom-written code, they sent out more than four trillion messages. The net's current addressing scheme accommodates about 4.2 billion devices. Only 1.3 billion addresses responded. The number of addresses responding was a surprise as the pool of addresses for that scheme has run dry. The scan found half a million printers, more than one million webcams and lots of other devices, including set-top boxes and modems, that still used the password installed in the factory, letting almost anyone take over that piece of hardware.
Guerilla researcher created epic botnet to scan billions of IP addresses. In one of the more audacious and ethically questionable research projects in recent memory, an anonymous hacker built a botnet of more than 420,000 Internet-connected devices and used it to perform one of the most comprehensive surveys ever to measure the insecurity of the global network. In all, the nine-month scanning project found 420 million IPv4 addresses that responded to probes and 36 million more addresses that had one or more ports open. A large percentage of the unsecured devices bore the hallmarks of broadband modems, network routers, and other devices with embedded operating systems that typically aren't intended to be exposed to the outside world.
The researcher found a total of 1.3 billion addresses in use, including 141 million that were behind a firewall and 729 million that returned reverse domain name system records. There were no signs of life from the remaining 2.3 billion IPv4 addresses. Continually scanning almost 4 billion addresses for nine months is a big job. The Science of Why Comment Trolls Suck. Mark Matcho Everybody who's written or blogged about climate change on a prominent website (or, even worse, spoken about it on YouTube) knows the drill.
Shortly after you post, the menagerie of trolls arrives. They're predominantly climate deniers, and they start in immediately arguing over the content and attacking the science—sometimes by slinging insults and even occasional obscenities. To cite a recent example: What part of "we haven't warmed any in 16 years" don't you understand? Heh. "Cherry-picking" as defined by you alarmists: any time period selected containing data that refutes your hysterical hypothesis. It was reasonably obvious already that these folks were doing nothing good for the public's understanding of the science of climate change (to say nothing of their own comprehension).
The researchers were trying to find out what effect exposure to such rudeness had on public perceptions of nanotech risks. The upshot of this research?