Kyt Dotson
Latest from Kyt Dotson
US Military Members Had More than 15,600 Accounts on MegaUpload
Megaupload proved to be an astoundingly useful resource for many people and fell quickly when they caught up in a feud with the big media industry in the form of the MPAA and RIAA. The picture painted by the entertainment industry is that Megaupload was a fraud site existing primarily to move illegal copies of ...
Data Scientist Hilary Mason Speaks about Bit.ly’s Dragoneye and Real Time Social Data
Bit.ly is a URL shortener best known for living in a niche alongside such powerful contenders as Tinyurl, Google’s variant, and many others—the debate over the use of URL shorteners continues to be heated—but with services such as Twitter requiring less than 140 characters they’re here to stay with us. As a result, their use ...
Bitcoin May Find a Fulfilling Market in Africa
As Internet technology continues to make deeper inroads into regions that lack infrastructure to support a strong banking system, very quickly virtual currencies can become more successful than banks. One region of the world that reflects this is Africa, where banks are weak, but mobile devices are becoming more and more ubiquitous in everyday life. ...
The Anonymous Impact: Hacktivism in 2011 Exceeded Criminal Breaches
While 2011 wasn’t the beginning of hacktivism, it was when the global media caught fire with attention for the phenomenon—and, according to a report [PDF link] released by American mobile company Verizon, 2011 is also the year that security breaches and data losses due to hactivism surpassed those from actual criminal enterprise. Last year’s cybercrime ...
How Can We Use Big Data to Enable Better Cybersecurity?
The path to 2011 has been filled with numerous new security threats—and some old ones that have learned new tricks—as the Internet continues to expand, computers get faster, storage gets smarter, and connectivity increases these threats will continue to evolve and security must do so as well. This is the classic Red Queen’s race and ...
8,000 Student E-mails Leaked in Loan Company Security Blunder
It’s not always the hackers that you need to worry about: ordinary human error can do just as much damage. This is the moral of a story coming out of England from a student loans facilitator named Student Finance England who inadvertently leaked the details of over 8,000 students during a mass e-mail distribution blunder. ...
The Power of Augmented Reality and Gamification to Get Better Pictures
Nowadays smartphones and devices with cameras embedded are ubiquitous and users take pictures of almost everything—they snap shots of their everyday life, buildings, and landmarks—and this can be extremely useful for the big data and visualization crowd. After all, everything a tourist photographs that goes online can be used to produce high fidelity collages of ...
Duqu Mystery Programming Language Solved
It’s been a strange road to understanding the Trojan-worm hybrid malware Duqu that started spreading numerous spybots and rootkits across the Internet last year. It was even caught exploiting an unknown bug in Microsoft Word in order to get a beachhead on the computer to download spyware. This month, security researchers at Kaspersky Labs broke ...
Social Payment Startup Venmo Adds Instant Bank Payments to Their Arsenal
The ability to use your smartphone as a wallet is an extremely useful addition to mobility and even helps reduce the number of cards we have to carry and helps alleviate the number of credit cards and payment cards we need to carry (just don’t lose your phone.) We’ve seen a few different payment vendors ...
Microsoft Demonstrates “Beamatron” Augmented Reality via Kinect-Projector Duo
As a device that “sees” the world, Microsoft’s Kinect peripheral has been providing a lot of potential methods for delivering augmented reality. In this particular demo, Andy Wilson from Microsoft Research shows off the “Beamatron”—a Kinect attached to a motorized pan-tilt armature affixed to a projector (which he says, “You might find one of these ...
