Researchers with the University of Cambridge discovered a bug that affects most computer code compilers and many software development environments. At issue is a component of the digital text encoding standard Unicode, which allows computers to exchange information regardless of the language used. [...]
Specifically, the weakness involves Unicode's bi-directional or "Bidi" algorithm, which handles displaying text that includes mixed scripts with different display orders, such as Arabic — which is read right to left — and English (left to right).
Bidi strikes again!
/Film spoke with several Oscar-winning sound designers, editors, and mixers to learn why it has become tougher to understand what characters are saying.
On September 30th 2021, Slack had an outage that impacted less than 1% of our online user base, and lasted for 24 hours. This outage was the result of our attempt to enable DNSSEC.
It's always DNS.
But a great writeup from the Slack team on what went wrong.
AI voice cloning is used in a huge heist in the U.A.E., amidst warnings about cybercriminal use of the new technology.
A great look into the capabilities of Apple's new Cinematic Mode for iPhone 13 as well as some of the technology behind it. Don't miss the demo video for real-world examples.
The Intelligence Community has deployed ad-blocking technology, according to a letter sent by Congress and shared with Motherboard.
Today in not-surprising news...
Microsoft president Brad Smith describes Microsoft's efforts to detect and defend both itself and its customers during the Solarwinds attack earlier this year.
In the run-up to the 2020 election, the most highly contested in US history, Facebook's most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were being run by Eastern European troll farms. These pages were part of a larger network that collectively reached nearly half of all Americans, according to an internal company report, and achieved that reach not through user choice but primarily as a result of Facebook's own platform design and engagement-hungry algorithm.
I find the fact that Facebook was paying the troll farms through ad revenue very funny and very scary.
"For a select few members of our community, we are not enforcing our policies and standards," reads an internal Facebook report published as part of a Wall Street Journal investigation. "Unlike the rest of our community, these people can violate our standards without any consequences."
I'm thrilled to join Microsoft to take on one of the greatest challenges of our time, leading a newly formed engineering organization: Security, Compliance, Identity, and Management. As digital services have become an integral part of our lives, we're outstripping our ability to provide security and safety. It's constantly highlighted in the headlines we see every day: fraud, theft, ransomware attacks, public exposure of private data, and even attacks against physical infrastructure. This has been weighing on my mind and the best way I can think to describe it is "digital medievalism," where organizations and individuals each depend on the walls of their castles and the strength of their citizens against bad actors who can simply retreat to their own castle with the spoils of an attack. We all want a world where safety is an invariant, something that is always true, and we can constantly prove we have. We all want digital civilization. I believe Microsoft is the only company in a position to deliver this and I couldn't be more excited to work with this talented team to make the world safer for every person and organization on the planet.