With Diwali just around the corner, you’re likely going to be doing a lot of online shopping soon. Be careful though, because it seems there’s been an uptick of hackers targeting checkout pages on websites to steal credit card data. Here’s what you need to know.

Beware! Hackers Can Now Steal Your Credit Card Data Through Online Forms, Thanks To Formjacking

The method being used is something called formjacking. This is when hackers inject malicious JavaScript code into the checkout links of shopping portals. That way, when you enter in your credit or debit card details to buy, the information first passes through their hands.  

There have been quite a few publicly reported cases in just this year so far, chief among them being those targeting Ticketmaster, British Airways, Feedify, and Newegg. All of these were carried out by a single group called Magecart. 

Symantec, the cybersecurity company behind Norton, say they’ve blocked 248,000 instances of formjacking since just mid-August. It’s not really a new technique to steal user data, but they say the drastic increase in its frequency of use this year is worrisome, especially since the attempts have been on a larger scale and more sophisticated than before.

How does formjacking work?

Suppose you’re on Flipkart, or Amazon, and decide to pay for a purchase with your credit card. You fill in all the details like your card number, code, name, and address. As soon as you hit ‘Submit’, the malicious JavaScript injected kicks in, siphoning off all that data you’ve entered and copying it to the attacker’s server. He or she can then use that information to pay for whatever the hell they feel like, or might even just turn around and sell it on the dark web.

What’s changed?

As it turns out, the majority (if not all) of this year’s formjackings are likely a single sustained campaign. They’ve also gotten more frequent in the September 13 to 20 week. Specifically, 36 percent of the almost quarter of a million blocked attempts occurred in that week. For the rest of us, that probably means the frequency of these instances will continue to grow.

Ticketmaster, British Airways, Newegg, none of these are small companies either, they’re all established e-commerce portals. No shopping site is safe really, if Magecart or its ilk can find an avenue of attack that lets them change the website’s code.

Sorry guys, but there’s nothing you can really do here to safeguard yourself, that’s all on the shoulders of whichever site you shop from. At the most, maybe stick to cash-on-delivery for a while?

In case travelling by road just doesn’t cut it for you anymore (needless to say for Indian commuters), you will soon be able to buy the world’s first practical flying car. 

World's First Flying Car Is Going On Sale And You Can Buy It Next Month For Rs 2.17 Crore!

'Transition', currently under development by Terrafugia, is all set to hit the market in 2019. As per recent reports, however, the pre-bookings for the flying car will start by as soon as next month.

TERRAFUGIA - FOLDABLE WINGS OF

One look at the Transition shows that it is just as intriguing as unique. Imagine a sleek and sporty two-seater that engulfs two fold-able wings enabling it to take off from the road as and when required. Even more interesting is the fact that it switches between these modes within a minute. Much like the ’Transformers’, eh?

The practicality compromises on speed though, limiting the top speed to 100 mph (~160 kmph) for a total flying range of 400 miles (~644 kms). On road, the speed further drops to the highway limits. This is also because of one of the biggest perks of the Transition, i.e., it runs on automotive gas, as opposed to the aviation fuel required for most of the flying vehicles known to mankind. The gas powers both the Rotax engine used for flying and the hybrid-electric motors for driving. 

The fact that it runs on automotive gas and can be easily parked in a home garage makes the Transition practical and to much extent, a prospective buy. But is it for the masses? No, says its price tags. At its current standing price, the Transition can only be owned by those willing to shell out upwards of $300,000 (~Rs 2.17 Cr). But if you think about it, flying has never been very pocket-friendly for humans.

A big challenge with all the man-made flying objects has always been to assure the safety of both the object as well as those around it. Terrafugia claims to have taken care of it by appointing an air-frame parachute on the Transition along with a sizeable crumple zone, airbags, advanced avionics and even rear-view cameras.

A relevant question might also have popped up in your head. Can I drive/fly the Terrafugia with my driver’s License? Well, technically no. This is also mentioned on the Terrafugia website which clarifies the need of a Sport Pilot Certificate to fly the Transition. Add to that, the absence of any laws governing such flying vehicles in most of the countries and the Transition still seems to be a distant dream as a successful commercial product.

That has not stopped Terrafugia from going ahead with the project though. In fact, the company has even started working on a successive model by the name of TF-2 which is “a three-part integrated transportation system” as mentioned by the company. The concept appoints two different approaches, one of a tilt-rotor with a performance advantage and another of lift-and-push configuration offering mechanical simplicity.

TERRAFUGIA - TF2

Both the scenarios will use a detachable pod that will be carried through a flying vehicle and a ground vehicle successively. Both the vehicles are idealised to use autonomous capabilities. To take care of the passengers’ entertainment, Terrafugia aims to use features like noise cancelling speakers, wireless charging, touchscreen controls as well as rotatable front seats.

per the description, If and when the concept is brought to reality, the TF-2 could possibly serve a vast range of purposes, hospitals and related emergencies being a major one of them. 

Also Read:Uber AIR: Here is everything you need to know

You can check out the Terrafugia Transition in its introductory video below:

The campaign has five strategic goals, including returning US astronauts to the surface of the Moon to demonstrating the capabilities required for human missions to Mars and other destinations.

NASA charts roadmap for human missions to Moon, Mars

NASA said it intends to transition from the current model of human space activities in low-Earth orbit to a model where the government is only one customer for commercial services. (Image: NASA)

Revealing its human explorations plans, NASA has told the US Congress that the agency is currently focusing on developing technologies and systems that enable a series of human and robotic lunar missions that are extensible to Mars. The “National Space Exploration Campaign” that NASA submitted to the Congress on September 24 calls for human and robotic exploration missions to expand the frontiers of human experience and scientific discovery of the natural phenomena of Earth, other worlds and the cosmos, the US space agency said in a statement on Thursday.

The campaign has five strategic goals, including returning US astronauts to the surface of the Moon to demonstrating the capabilities required for human missions to Mars and other destinations. NASA said it intends to transition from the current model of human space activities in low-Earth orbit to a model where the government is only one customer for commercial services. The US space agency is building a plan for Americans to orbit the Moon starting in 2023, and land astronauts on the surface no later than the late 2020s.

A key component of establishing the first permanent American presence and infrastructure on and around the Moon is the Gateway, a lunar orbiting platform to host astronauts farther from Earth than ever before, NASA said. Some elements of the Gateway already are under construction at NASA centers across the United States, including facilities in Ohio, Texas and Alabama, and at commercial partner facilities. The Gateway will be assembled in space, incrementally, using the Orion spacecraft and SLS, as well as commercial launch vehicles. The first element, providing power and propulsion, will launch from Florida in 2022, NASA added in the statement.

The lunar surface will serve as a crucial training ground and technology demonstration test site where we will prepare for future human missions to Mars and other destinations,” NASA said, adding that by the late 2020s, a lunar lander capable of transporting crews and cargo will begin trips to the surface of the Moon. NASA said its series of crewed missions to Mars, planned to start in the 2030’s and culminating in a surface landing, would be supported by the work it does on the Moon in the coming years.

One innovation the team included in its model was a specific pattern of hypothesised feedback connections between neurons

Scientists teach computers to see optical illusions

The researchers “tuned” the strength of the feedback excitatory or inhibitory connections so that model neurons responded in a way consistent with neurophysiology data from the primate visual cortex. (Image: Brown University)

Scientists have taught computers to see optical illusions, an advance that may help artificial vision algorithms to take context into account and be more robust. Understanding how human brains perceive optical illusions remains an active area of research, said scientists from the Brown University in the US. For one class of optical illusions, called contextual phenomena, those perceptions are known to depend on context. For example, the colour you think a central circle depends on is the colour of the surrounding ring. Sometimes the outer colour makes the inner colour appear more similar, such as a neighbouring green ring making a blue ring appear turquoise.

"There’s growing consensus that optical illusions are not a bug but a feature,” said Thomas Serre, an associate professor at the Brown University. “I think they are a feature. They may represent edge cases for our visual system, but our vision is so powerful in day-to-day life and in recognising objects,” Serre said.

The team started with a computational model constrained by anatomical and neurophysiological data of the visual cortex. The model aimed to capture how neighbouring cortical neurons send messages to each other and adjust one another’s responses when presented with complex stimuli such as contextual optical illusions. One innovation the team included in its model was a specific pattern of hypothesised feedback connections between neurons, said Serre.

These feedback connections are able to increase or decrease — excite or inhibit — the response of a central neuron, depending on the visual context. These feedback connections are not present in most deep learning algorithms, researchers said. Deep learning is a powerful kind of artificial intelligence that is able to learn complex patterns in data, such as recognising images and parsing normal speech, they said.

It depends on multiple layers of artificial neural networks working together. However, most deep learning algorithms only include feed-forward connections between layers, not Serre’s innovative feedback connections between neurons within a layer. Once the model was constructed, the team presented it a variety of context-dependent illusions.

The researchers “tuned” the strength of the feedback excitatory or inhibitory connections so that model neurons responded in a way consistent with neurophysiology data from the primate visual cortex. Then they tested the model on a variety of contextual illusions and again found the model perceived the illusions like humans. In order to test if they made the model needlessly complex, they lesioned the model — selectively removing some of the connections. When the model was missing some of the connections, the data didn’t match the human perception data as accurately.

"Our model is the simplest model that is both necessary and sufficient to explain the behaviour of the visual cortex in regard to contextual illusions,” Serre said. “This was really textbook computational neuroscience work — we started with a model to explain neurophysiology data and ended with predictions for human psychophysics data,” he said.

Scientists envisage that malaria could be eliminated within two decades if this method is as successful as laboratory tests have indicated.

How scientists plan to end malaria: by getting mosquitoes to self-destruct

A false-color scanning electron micrograph of an Anopheles gambiae mosquito. (Science Source via The New York Times)

By Nicholas Wade

Malaria is among the world’s worst scourges. In 2016, the disease, which is caused by a parasite and transmitted by mosquitoes, infected 194 million people in Africa and caused 445,000 deaths.

But biologists have now developed a way of manipulating mosquito genetics that forces whole populations of the insect to self-destruct. The technique has proved so successful in laboratory tests that its authors envisage malaria could be eliminated within two decades.

A team led by Andrea Crisanti, a biologist at Imperial College, London, altered a gene that disrupts the mosquito’s sexual development; the females become infertile, but the males remain able to spread the debilitating gene to an ever-dwindling number of progeny. Crisanti found that laboratory populations of mosquitoes can be driven to extinction within 11 generations, he and colleagues reported in Monday’s issue of Nature Biotechnology. Wild populations could be made to crash in about four years, according to computer models.

The technique involves equipping mosquitoes with a gene drive, a genetic mechanism that forces a gene of choice into all of an organism’s offspring. (Normally, sexual reproduction would pass the gene to only half the progeny.) Genes carried by a gene drive can spread very rapidly through a population, which makes the technique both powerful and potentially dangerous.

Previous efforts to reduce mosquito fertility using gene drives have failed because mutations arise in the stretches of DNA targeted by scientists, nullifying the engineered changes. These mutations are heavily favored by natural selection and permit the mosquitoes to escape the genetic trap.

Crisanti and his colleagues instead found a way to target a stretch of DNA that never varies from one mosquito to another, presumably because each DNA unit plays so vital a role that any mutations would kill the organism. This invariant DNA sequence occurs in a gene called doublesex; it determines sexual development in the mosquito species Anopheles gambiae, a major carrier of the malaria parasite in Africa.

Crisanti’s team devised a way to selectively disrupt the doublesex gene. Females that inherit it develop with ambiguous sexual features; cannot bite, because they have male-type mouthparts; and are infertile. But the males are unaffected and continue spreading the disruptive gene until no more eggs are laid.

In the lab, when males with the doublesex gene drive were placed in cages of wild mosquitoes, the populations were driven to extinction in as few as seven to 11 generations. No mutations could be found in the targeted sequence of DNA. “We are not saying this is 100 percent resistance-proof,” Crisanti said. “But it looks very promising.”

Kevin Esfelt, who studies the evolution of gene drives at MIT, indicated that the biological aspects of mosquito control are now closer to being solved. “With this achievement, the major barriers to saving lives are arguably no longer mostly technical, but social and diplomatic,” he said.

Starting a gene drive into the wild is a hard decision because, once released, a drive can’t be recalled or easily disabled if anything goes awry. Scientists have debated the possible dangers of the technology for several years, and they want to make sure the promising new technology doesn’t evoke the kind of public distrust that has surrounded genetically modified foods. In 2016, the National Academy of Sciences called for extensive tests and public consultation before any gene drive is released.

The theory of how gene drives could be used to control pest populations was laid out in 2003 by Austin Burt, a biologist at Imperial College, London, and a co-author on the new paper. Cristanti’s team conducted a larger experiment with the doublesex gene drive at a facility in Italy, but small-scale field trials in Africa are likely, at best, still several years away.

Such a program would entail releasing just a few hundred drive-carrying mosquitoes in each village. “We wouldn’t have to hit every village, maybe as few as 1 percent,” Burt said. Complete eradication isn’t necessary; the malaria parasite can’t maintain its populations once the number of mosquitoes falls below a certain number. “If there are no unexpected technical or regulatory delays,” Burt said, “it’s possible to envisage that gene-drive mosquitoes, in combination with other approaches, could have eliminated malaria in significant parts of Africa in 15 years.”

That estimate is probably optimistic. Eliminating malaria likely will require a continentwide agreement, since a gene drive, once released, probably couldn’t be confined to a single country, and biologists want to avoid any unintended consequences. All insects analyzed so far rely on the doublesex gene to direct their sexual development. It could be disastrous if an altered doublesex gene drive somehow jumped from mosquitoes to another insect species, such as bees.

Crisanti dismissed that possibility: Every insect species has its own version of the doublesex gene and the gene’s highly conserved region, he noted, so a gene drive aimed at one species wouldn’t work in any other. For that reason, the technique potentially could be aimed at a wide range of noxious insects. “These sequences might be an Achilles heel present in many insect pests,” Crisanti’s team writes in their paper.

Esvelt acknowledged the new gene drive could possibly spread to other insects but said, if it did, the most likely host would be other Anopheles mosquito species.

Preserving transmission quality in a form this thin is significant because it would allow antennas to easily be embedded - literally, sprayed on - in a wide variety of objects and surfaces without adding additional weight or circuitry or requiring a certain level of rigidity.

Spray-on antennas may turn objects into connected technology

The exceptional conductivity of the material enables it to transmit and direct radio waves, even when it is applied in a very thin coating. (Image Source: Drexel University)

 

Scientists have developed a method for spraying invisibly thin antennas on to flexible materials, an advance that could turn a variety of objects and surfaces into seamless Internet of Things. Researchers from Drexel University in the US used a type of two-dimensional, metallic material called MXene, that perform as well as those being used in mobile devices, wireless routers and portable transducers.

This is a very exciting finding because there is a lot of potential for this type of technology,” said Kapil Dandekar, a professor at Drexel. “The ability to spray an antenna on a flexible substrate or make it optically transparent means that we could have a lot of new places to set up networks – there are new applications and new ways of collecting data that we can’t even imagine at the moment,” said Dandekar. The study published in the journal Science Advances shows that the MXene titanium carbide can be dissolved in water to create an ink or paint.

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The exceptional conductivity of the material enables it to transmit and direct radio waves, even when it is applied in a very thin coating. "We found that even transparent antennas with thicknesses of tens of nanometres were able to communicate efficiently,” said Asia Sarycheva, a doctoral candidate at Drexel. “By increasing the thickness up to 8 microns, the performance of MXene antenna achieved 98 percent of its predicted maximum value,” said Sarycheva. Preserving transmission quality in a form this thin is significant because it would allow antennas to easily be embedded – literally, sprayed on – in a wide variety of objects and surfaces without adding additional weight or circuitry or requiring a certain level of rigidity.

“This technology could enable the truly seamless integration of antennas with everyday objects which will be critical for the emerging Internet of Things,” Dandekar said. “Researchers have done a lot of work with non-traditional materials trying to figure out where manufacturing technology meets system needs, but this technology could make it a lot easier to answer some of the difficult questions we’ve been working on for years,” he said. Initial testing of the sprayed antennas suggest that they can perform with the same range of quality as current antennas, which are made from familiar metals, like gold, silver, copper and aluminum, but are much thicker than MXene antennas.

Making antennas smaller and lighter has long been a goal of materials scientists and electrical engineers, so this discovery is a sizeable step forward both in terms of reducing their footprint as well as broadening their application.

ISRO Chief: India Will Get 100 Gbps Internet Speed In Few Years, With Launch Of 3 GSAT Satellites

The largest consumer of mobile data in the world, India ranks a woeful 109th globally when it comes to Internet access speed, according to a March 2018 report. The country's wired broadband speed is marginally better, but still embarrassingly low.

ISRO Chief: India Will Get 100 Gbps Internet Speed All Over, With Launch Of 3 GSAT Satellites

But all this will soon be history, according to ISRO Chief K Sivan, who claims India will soon get 100 Gbps internet across the country. 

Speaking at a convocation ceremony yesterday, K Sivan said high speed Internet connectivity is just around the corner for all Indians to enjoy, thanks to the launch of three new GSAT communication satellites within the next one year.

"India has the world's second largest Internet user base," K Sivan was quoted as saying. "But, our present broadband speed is 76th in the world. ISRO has already launched GSAT-19 in June 2017. This year, ISRO will launch GSAT-11 and GSAT-29 and early next year, GSAT-20 will be launched.

All these are high throughput satellites and together they will provide more than 100 Gbps high bandwidth connectivity across the country, he said.

REUTERS

More on GSAT-11, GSAT-20 and G-SAT 29 satellites.

GSAT-11 is an advanced communication satellite employing a new class of bus weighing 4000-6000 Kg. It includes a new Ka x Ku-Band Forward Link Transponders and Ku x Ka band Return Link Transponders for high speed data connectivity.

GSAT-29 is configured around ISRO’s Enhanced I-3K Bus and will be the payload for second developmental flight of GSLV-MkIII. It carries Ka x Ku multi-beam and optical communication payloads for the first time. The mission targets for Village Resource Centres (VRC) in rural areas to bridge the digital divide.

GSAT 20 is reportedly built on the I-6K unified modular bus and features a Ka-band high-throughput communications payload with 70 Gbps throughput utilizing multiple spot beams providing broadband services across the Indian region.

From the safety of their research vessel, scientists are exploring one of Earth’s last frontiers - the sea floor - to discover more about valuable minerals vital in the manufacture of smartphones.

Deep sea robots reveal mineral riches in the abyss

The scientists, from the University of Bergen in Norway, are sending robots 2,500 meters (8,000 feet) down into the waters between Norway and Greenland, to try to understand the environments potentially rich with rare earth minerals.

"The ocean sea floor on Earth is, for the most part, unknown,” scientist Thibaut Barreyre told Reuters.

FILE PHOTO: A bastnaesite mineral containing rare earth is pictured at a laboratory of Yasuhiro Kato, an associate professor of earth science at the University of Tokyo, July 5, 2011. REUTERS/Yuriko Nakao/File Photo

“It’s totally fair to say that we know much more about the surface of the moon and Mars - mapped by satellites and different devices - than we know about our own planet.”

The international team is using technology including autonomous robots and human-piloted submarines to explore the sea’s dark depths where zinc, gold and copper are also found.

The scientists hope the explorations will reveal why some areas have minerals and others do not, how much is down there and what damage mining them would have on the environment.

A viable new source of rare earths, a group of 17 elements used in the production of smartphone screens, magnets, camera lenses and X-ray machines could be highly lucrative. But it is not that simple, Barreyre said.

FILE PHOTO: A mud sample extracted from the depths of about 4,000 metres (13,123 ft) below the Pacific ocean surface where rare earth elements were found, is pictured at a laboratory of Yasuhiro Kato, an associate professor of earth science at the University of Tokyo, July 5, 2011. REUTERS/Yuriko Nakao/File Photo

“Some of them (waters) are rich in gold, copper, zinc and rare earths. And others have almost none of those. And that’s why it’s very important to us as scientists to understand it,” he said.

The team, which began exploring the area last year, will spend the next five years searching.

The Dynamics 365 AI suite is divided into three sections, Dynamics 365 AI for Customer Service, Dynamics 365 AI for Market Insights, and Dynamics 365 AI for Sales. 

Microsoft has launched two new AI and mixed reality apps for its Dynamics 365 AI business suite

Microsoft Dynamics 365 suite is available on Microsoft Power BI, Azure and the Common Data Service. (Image: Reuters)

Microsoft has announced two new easy to use cloud services which utilise artificial intelligence to get work done, Dynamics 365 Remote Assist and Dynamics 365 Layout. Both these apps were launched at Microsoft Ignite 2018, and come under the company’s Dynamics 365 business suite.

The company says both these new AI and mixed reality apps will help Microsoft take a step forward in helping organisations achieve more of their goals with the help of business applications.

The Dynamics 365 AI suite is divided into three sections, Dynamics 365 AI for Customer Service, Dynamics 365 AI for Market Insights, and Dynamics 365 AI for Sales. Dynamics 365 AI for Customer Service helps agents with the deployment of chatbots and deal with the existing and emerging issues.

Dynamics 365 AI for Market Insights helps marketers see the trends on all channels like search and social media. Lastly, Dynamics 365 AI for Sales provides users with delivery insights about individual sales representatives and deals logged in by them. It also shows sales opportunities listed in Salesforce, Oracle, and SAP.

Microsoft says Dynamics 365 AI is a class of AI applications that helps deliver business insights to organisations by unifying data and infusing it with artificial intelligence to help make them make informed actions and decisions. The suite is available on Microsoft Power BI, Azure and the Common Data Service.

Dynamics 365 with Mixed Reality is a new application of the online business software which will be put into use with the company’s own augmented-reality goggles HoloLens.