#crosland

A new source of art treasures was provided by the confiscation of church property and by the decision to transfer objets d'art from several royal palaces to the Louvre. A valuable collection of paintings, including Leonardo da Vinci’s La Gioconda (Mona Lisa), was acquired from the royal palace at Versailles, but not without the resistance of the local municipality. Under the direction of a commission temporaire des arts, a collection of furniture, porcelain, and paintings of varying merit was assembled, thus converting the Louvre into a kind of warehouse. In the spring of 1796 the German visitor F. J. L. Meyer found one gallery of the Louvre open to the public. This was filled with a miscellaneous collection of objects ranging from scientific instruments to tables, and his impression was one of “indescribable chaos.” The gallery was closed later that year.

Under the Convention there began a systematic policy of confiscation of art treasures from territory conquered by the French armies. In 1794 the first convoy of paintings from Belgium arrived in Paris, providing a magnificent representation of the Flemish school. The Décade philosophique described this event as the arrival of the paintings in their “true country” where they would be displayed and appreciated. It was fitting that Paris should be the European metropolis of the arts.

[Italics in original]

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Today Apple issued a statement saying that after a 40-hour investigation they found celebrity accounts had been hacked — but a flaw in iCloud was not to blame.

Rather, targeted attacks on user names, passwords, and security questions led to those accounts being compromised. “None of the cases we have investigated has resulted from any breach in any of Apple’s systems including iCloud or Find my iPhone,” the company said.

To protect against these types of attacks, Apple recommends using two-step verification.

Security and user experience have long been at odds. Many users just don’t want to use security protocols, whether its adding a few extra steps to online banking logins or putting anti-virus software on a PC. Nearly 40% of Americans think encryption isn’t a successful tool against hackers, according to a new study from YouGov. And the ones who are skeptical about encryption are not using security any stronger than simple password protection.

Unfortunately, as AuthEntry told VentureBeat, “Relying on plain password protection is like using a piece of string to tie your bike to a meter in NYC and expecting it to be safe.”

Password protection is only so strong, which means a dedicated hacker can breach this security, given enough time. It also means that Apple has a vulnerability issue, if only because password-only security is easily breached.

I sat down with Keith Stewart, VP of product at cybersecurity firm vArmour to talk about the difficulty of securing cloud computing. He says that part of the problem is that service providers forget that keeping files secure is not just about securing a main database full of personal or sensitive information: You need to secure the periphery too.

“Bad guys don’t go after the database. They know, unless you’re a complete idiot, you put some walls around it. They go after all the stuff that’s near the database, because they’re going to find stuff in there that you don’t want them to find,” says Stewart. He calls it attacking rings around the asset.

Which is probably how hackers were able to drag up supposedly deleted photos of Jennifer Lawerence and flash them all over 4chan; once a hacker infiltrates a system, it’s not difficult for them to access backup storage and other files.

It’s nice that Apple’s is using this experience to push users to setup two-step authentication. However, Apple should really make this security feature mandatory, as well as create tougher security settings. Only if it’s serious about security, that is.

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Apple designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. Apple software includes t... read more »

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Home Depot is the latest in a string of U.S. retailers to be broadsided by a brutal hack attack.

But while news of the hack has only surfaced today, the initial breach may have occurred in the spring. The likely culprits are the usual suspects: Eastern European hackers from Ukraine or Russia, according to the lead of the malware intelligence team Adam Kujawa of Malwarebytes.

Kujawa told VentureBeat there is a strong suspicion the perpetrators were linked to the same group responsible for inserting Trojan malware into Point of Sale machines at U.S. retailer Target in December, where over 70 million customers saw their credit cards hit with more than $100 million in fraudulent charges.

The enormity of that breach cost the Target CEO at the time, Gregg Steinhafel, his job.

Incredibly, this newly discovered breach, which is thought to have put millions of Home Depot customers’ credit card data at risk, happened earlier this year. It wasn’t until American and European banks noticed that millions of credit cards appeared on cyber criminal websites like Rescator.cc for sale, which were then traced back to Home Depot, that the colossal hit was uncovered.

Customers at Home Depot’s 2,200 American outlets have been affected, various media reports stated.

Home Depot did not respond to VentureBeat’s request for comment.

Kujawa said Rescator.cc is a known cyber criminal marketplace that traffics in stolen credit cards, boosted PayPal logins, Botnets, drugs, computer ransoms, and even murder-for-hire schemes, among other nefarious offerings, according to Kujawa.

As for the Russian connection, it is, for now, mere speculation, according to Kujawa.

“You can definitely speculate this is related to the POS Target malware breach. It was the banks themselves that discovered the cards for sale and then traced them back to Home Depot,” he said.

The astonishing breach may be the result of intensifying hostilities between Russia and the West that crystalized when the Russian military encircled Ukraine and began arming separatist fighters battling the Crimean government earlier this year. The U.S. and European governments recently initiated a series of hard-hitting sanctions on Russian banks and companies.

Kujawa said it’s possible the Russian government was involved — or at least deliberately disregarded the scam possibly originating from its territory. The U.S. has long suspected that Russia, under autocratic leader Vladimir Putin, is behind cyber breach attacks against Western companies and governments. Putin has long denied it.

“You never really know. The Russian’s have a long history of looking the other way or turning a blind eye to this kind of stuff after getting their cut. It’s very possible the attack was either inspired or orchestrated by Russia,” Kujawa said.

If the attack happened months ago, and Home Depot is only finding out about it now, the company could be in big trouble. At least CEO Frank Blake could see his job on the line. Instead of leading the way in credit card security and customer trust, apparently Home Depot is trailing.

Image Credit: Jason Tester Guerilla Futures/Flickr

Uber is at it again, improving its alternative-cab service app after analyzing data on usage from its customers. This time, data scientists have come up with ways to figure out where exactly riders are headed, even in a densely packed city.

The researchers determined the accuracy of their model by comparing its predictions with anonymized information on more than 3,000 Uber passengers’ rides in San Francisco this year, according to a blog post today from Uber’s Ren Lu.

The system makes certain assumptions, taking into consideration a rider’s previous destinations, places Uber riders have gone to, and other factors, Lu wrote.

Uber has previously used data science and even artificial intelligence, to optimize its operations. Recently, for instance, the company concluded that drivers wishing to optimize their earnings would do better than to stay put in one place than to drive around. That observation came from a simulation from the company’s science team. As the company expands into more cities around the world, efficiency is key, and Uber is one of many companies both large and small that draw on their data to achieve that objective.

For this project, Uber drew on more conventional Bayesian statistics to take a good guess about the destination based on geolocation coordinates, Lu wrote. However, the system can predict a rider’s destination correctly 74 percent of the time.

The model should come in handy as Uber keeps growing and adding services like the UberPool car-sharing feature, he noted:

As we introduce UberPool, the carpool option of our app, where drivers make multiple pickups and dropoffs, these occurrences will only happen with increasing frequency … which means that any Uber rider destination popularity analysis is susceptible to be inaccurate due to noise.

Read Lu’s full blog post for much more detail on the approaches for solving its “uniquely Uber problem.”

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Uber Technologies Inc is known as Everyone's Private Driver. Uber operates an on-demand car service used all over the world. With the touch of a button from your phone, you can experience your own private driver. Sign-up quickly, g... read more »

Imagine sitting in front of your laptop or desktop computer, pulling out your smartphone, and boom — a few clicks and taps later, you’re playing a video game using your phone as a controller.

A few weeks ago, a group that included college and even high school students, gathered up at Y Combinator’s locale in Mountain View, Calif. for a two-day long hackathon, and one team hacked a web framework for exactly that.

With Nunchuck.js, you can turn your mobile phones into video game controllers and play games running on a browser, with less than 15 lines of JavaScript and without having to write native iOS or Android apps. Just navigate to a web link from your phone, and it will transform into a controller.

During its presentation to the judges, the team showed off one of the demos it built, a simple flying game. While some team members stood offstage, each controlling a plane with their smartphone, the planes flew around obstacles on the desktop browser being projected.

The other demo was actually at the origin of hack’s idea, which came out of a brainstorm while traveling to the hackathon.

“One such fun idea was to be able to play Mario Kart on your computer using your smartphone as a controller. Even though there are plenty of remotes and emulators already on the market, we thought, ‘Hey, what if you could play, but without having to download any apps?’” said team member Kathryn Siegel in an email to VentureBeat.

Using JavaScript and HTML5 on the client and Node.js and Socket.io on the backend, Nunchuck.js enables you to transmit and receive mobile hardware data in real-time, so you can play a game.

The framework also works with games of various complexities. For example, the planes game is entirely in JavaScript, using a modified version of of of the CutJS demos to make it into a multiplayer game. On the other hand, the Mario Kart game used the open source SNES9x emulator (written in C++), which the team then compiled into JavaScript and tweaked for multi-player support, as Siegel explained.

“Hardware data is primarily thought of as a realm for native code. However, our framework provides an easy interface for device hardware data and its transmission across devices, which we believe can help enable web developers to create new, rich web experiences and potentially rethink the way we develop for the web,” said Siegel.

Siegel added that while a few web developers here and there have also used hardware data from the browser, there hasn’t been much buzz about this. Also, it can get pretty messy to work with without a clean framework like Nunchuk.js.

“That means that developers who do use hardware data from the browser end up creating their own solutions, which are extremely specific to their use case and [are] limited. We wanted to create a super simple interface for developers to quickly get this data without worry and wrap otherwise messy code up in neat JavaScript callbacks,” she said.

While the team used gaming applications to demo its hack to the judges, Nunchuck.js is a multi-device solution for hardware data synchronization that could be used for a variety of applications, gaming included.

While the team put this together during a weekend, theNunchuck.js team does plan on cleaning up the library, adding more documentation, and creating more demos and features. If you’re interested in the framework, stay tuned.

The Nunchuck.js team was comprised of Kathryn Siegel, Ankush Gupta, Anubhav Jain, and Edwin Zhang, all current students at MIT and members of the HackMIT organizing team.

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Above: Netflix's newest feature lets you share movie recommendations with Facebook friends.

Image Credit: Netflix

Allowing my friends to see everything I’ve recently viewed on Netflix might prove embarrassing, (as sadly most people would just never appreciate the number of cartoons I watch). And until now, that was pretty much the only integration offered between Netflix and Facebook.

Today, however, Netflix pushed out a new integration for Facebook aimed at making it easier for you to make recommendations for TV shows and movies to friends. The new integration happens after a video ends, which makes sense, since that’s usually when I would pass judgement on the film I just watched.

If you do decided to share a movie, you’ll see a row of friend’s photos to choose from and have the option of attaching a short message as well. Also, the friends you’ve made a recommendation to won’t see it until they log back into Netflix. Hopefully this will help cure the “what to watch” bug that myself (and probably many others) get during long bouts of boredom on a lazy weekend afternoon. But don’t worry, the recommendations you make won’t be shared publicly via your Facebook profile.

The new Netflix integration works best if everyone has already connected their accounts to Facebook. But anyone who hasn’t done so will still get the recommendation in the form of a private message that’s accessible via Facebook’s reviled standalone messenger app. (I haven’t played with the integration yet, so I don’t know whether you can also see those messages from the regular desktop website as well.)

Check out the demo video below for a closer look at the new Netflix/Facebook integration.

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With more than 25 million members in the United States, Canada and Latin America, Netflix, Inc. [Nasdaq: NFLX] is the world's leading Internet subscription service for enjoying movies and TV shows. For US$7.99 a month, Netflix members ... read more »