TechCrunch: Google Assistant’s ‘Continued Conversation’ feature is now live. “Google I/O was awash with Assistant news, but Duplex mystery aside, Continued Conversation was easily one of the most compelling announcements of the bunch. The feature is an attempt to bring more naturalized conversation to the AI — a kind of holy grail with these sorts of smart assistants. Continued Conversation is rolling out to Assistant today for users in the U.S. with a Home, Home Mini and Home Max.”
hardware
IEEE Spectrum: Build Your Own Google Neural Synthesizer
IEEE Spectrum: Build Your Own Google Neural Synthesizer. “NSynth uses a deep neural network to distill musical notes from various instruments down to their essentials. Google’s developers first created a digital archive of some 300,000 notes, including up to 88 examples from about 1,000 different instruments, all sampled at 16 kilohertz. They then input those data into a deep-learning model that can represent all those wildly different sounds far more compactly using what they call ’embeddings.’ That exercise supposedly took about 10 days running on thirty-two K40 graphics [PDF] processing units. Why do that? Well, with those results, you can now answer a question like ‘What do you get when you cross a piano with a flute?’ (Musicians: Insert joke here.)”
Wired: Millions Of Streaming Devices Are Vulnerable To A Retro Web Attack
Wired: Millions Of Streaming Devices Are Vulnerable To A Retro Web Attack. “IN MARCH, ARTIST and programmer Brannon Dorsey became interested in a retro web attack called DNS rebinding, teaching himself how to illicitly access controls and data by exploiting known browser weaknesses. It’s a vulnerability that researchers have poked at on and off for years—which is one reason Dorsey couldn’t believe what he found.”
Schneier warns of ‘perfect storm’: Tech is becoming autonomous, and security is garbage (The Register)
The Register: Schneier warns of ‘perfect storm’: Tech is becoming autonomous, and security is garbage. “With insecure computers in charge, the healthcare and transportation sectors have become a nexus of security problems, infosec veteran Bruce Schneier warned delegates at Israel Cyber Week. Schneier said that confidentiality attacks, such as leaks of personal information, are being replaced by more dangerous integrity and availability attacks.”
Ars Technica: Widely used D-Link modem/router under mass attack by potent IoT botnet
Ars Technica: Widely used D-Link modem/router under mass attack by potent IoT botnet. “Malicious hackers are mass exploiting a critical vulnerability in D-Link DSL routers in an attempt to make them part of Satori, the potent Internet-of-things botnet that is used to take down websites and mine digital coins, researchers said.”
Google Blog: Introducing VR180 Creator, simplifying the video editing process
Google Blog: Introducing VR180 Creator, simplifying the video editing process. “VR180 cameras allow creators to shoot three-dimensional, immersive photos and videos using affordable cameras that are small enough to fit in your pocket. And to make it even easier for you to create and edit high quality VR videos, we’re launching VR180 Creator on Mac and Linux. This desktop tool lets anyone edit VR180 footage with existing VR video tools.”
Ars Technica: VPNFilter malware infecting 500,000 devices is worse than we thought
Ars Technica: VPNFilter malware infecting 500,000 devices is worse than we thought. “Two weeks ago, officials in the private and public sectors warned that hackers working for the Russian government infected more than 500,000 consumer-grade routers in 54 countries with malware that could be used for a range of nefarious purposes. Now, researchers from Cisco’s Talos security team say additional analysis shows that the malware is more powerful than originally thought and runs on a much broader base of models, many from previously unaffected manufacturers.”
