Apple, which has resisted pressure from U.S. law enforcement to unlock encrypted iPhones, this month rehired a top expert in practical cryptography to bring more powerful security features to a wide range of consumer products. Jon Callas, who co-founded …
mac hacker – BingNews
12 more images in gallery
Shiv Integer is a bot whose entire purpose in life is to create bizarre objects for 3D printers. It has been living for several months on 3D printer project site Thingiverse, posting objects cobbled together out of dozens of other objects listed on the site. The results are art or spam, depending on your perspective. Last month, artists Matthew Plummer-Fernandez and Julien Deswaef finally came out as the humans behind Shiv Integer, showcasing the results of the bot’s work at an event called (appropriately) The Art of Bots in London’s Somerset House.
Taken on its own terms, Shiv Integer’s work is fanciful and amusing. Each piece looks like a mutant gadget, possibly unprintable, often with one recognizable item merging into another one. The best part is that even the names of the objects are a random salad of words taken from other objects on Thingiverse, creating inadvertent absurdist poetry like “quick cat near a jaw,” “disc on top of an e-juice golf,” “automatic event adapter,” and “customizable damage mask.” The bot is known to post several times per day, and in the “about” section of the entry it always credits users whose objects it has repurposed (the bot only works with objects that have been CC licensed for remixing).
Artists Plummer-Fernandez and Julien Deswaef explain the idea behind their project:
Apple has hired two security researchers who previously worked on viruses targeting Mac computers. LegbaCore founder Xeno Kovah revealed on Twitter in November that he and his partner, Corey Kellenberg, had been hired by Apple to do “low level security.
mac hacker – read more
Founded in 2007, CrunchBase is a website offering massive amounts of data about startup activity. Want to know who founded a startup, who invested in it, or who they’re competing with? CrunchBase has the answers. And in a marketplace that is somewhat frothy, CrunchBase is an increasingly heavily trafficked web property. The site contains over 650,000 profiles of individuals and companies and is a massive repository of data. As such, CrunchBase has a massive opportunity to monetize that data, and is accordingly concerned about people who seek to use that data for their own commercial aims.
I spent time talking with Kurt Freytag, head of product at CrunchBase, to have a look at the engineering work that goes into the site. As the site grew in size and traffic, Freytag noticed oddly shaped traffic and random spikes that were putting significant strain on its infrastructure. Of course, it could have simply thrown more horsepower at the site, but Freytag was keen to identify real root causes for the issues. He quickly concluded that bot traffic was hitting the site hard and crawling through its data. While this is a primary concern in terms of performance, it also introduces real commercial risk as third parties use the sites data elsewhere. People were literally stealing CrunchBases’s data and monetizing it. Something had to be done.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here