According to Bloomberg, Apple is working on a processor devoted specifically to AI-related tasks. “The chip, known internally as the Apple Neural Engine, would improve the way the company’s devices handle tasks that would otherwise require human intelligence — such as facial recognition and speech recognition,” reports Bloomberg, citing a person familiar with the matter. From the report: Engineers at Apple are racing to catch their peers at Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc. in the booming field of artificial intelligence. While Siri gave Apple an early advantage in voice-recognition, competitors have since been more aggressive in deploying AI across their product lines, including Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home digital assistants. An AI-enabled processor would help Cupertino, California-based Apple integrate more advanced capabilities into devices, particularly cars that drive themselves and gadgets that run augmented reality, the technology that superimposes graphics and other information onto a person’s view of the world. Apple devices currently handle complex artificial intelligence processes with two different chips: the main processor and the graphics chip. The new chip would let Apple offload those tasks onto a dedicated module designed specifically for demanding artificial intelligence processing, allowing Apple to improve battery performance.

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Source: Slashdot – Apple Is Working On a Dedicated Chip To Power AI On Devices

Earlier this year, Chipotle announced that the their payment processing system was hacked. Today, the company has released more information about the hack, identifying the malware that was responsible and releasing a new tool to help customers check whether the restaurant they visited was involved. The company did not say how many restaurants were affected, but it did tell The Verge that “most” locations nationwide may have been involved. The Verge reports: “The malware searched for track data (which sometimes has cardholder name in addition to card number, expiration date, and internal verification code) read from the magnetic stripe of a payment card as it was being routed through the POS device,” Chipotle said in a statement. “There is no indication that other customer information was affected.” We browsed through the tool and found that every state Chipotle operates in had restaurants that were breached, including most major cities. The restaurants were vulnerable in various time frames between March 24th and April 18th, 2017. Chipotle also operates another chain called Pizzeria Locale, which was affected by the hack as well. (The list of identified restaurants can be found here, which includes locations in Kansas, Missouri, Colorado, and Ohio.) Chipotle noted that not all locations have been identified, but it’s a starting guide to check whether your visit lines up with the breached period.

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Source: Slashdot – Chipotle Says ‘Most’ of Its Restaurants Were Infected With Credit Card Stealing Malware

Napster co-founder Sean Parker has been working on his new service called Screening Room, which when becomes reality, could allow people to watch the latest Hollywood blockbusters in their living room as soon as they premiere at the box office. This week we get a glimpse at the kind of technologies Parker is using to ensure that the movies don’t get distributed easily. From a report: Over the past several weeks, Screening Room Media, Inc. has submitted no less than eight patent applications related to its plans, all with some sort of anti-piracy angle. For example, a patent titled “Presenting Sonic Signals to Prevent Digital Content Misuse” describes a technology where acoustic signals are regularly sent to mobile devices, to confirm that the user is near the set-top box and is authorized to play the content. Similarly, the “Monitoring Nearby Mobile Computing Devices to Prevent Digital Content Misuse” patent, describes a system that detects the number of mobile devices near the client-side device, to make sure that too many people aren’t tuning in. The general technology outlined in the patents also includes forensic watermarking and a “P2P polluter.” The watermarking technology can be used to detect when pirated content spreads outside of the protected network onto the public Internet. “At this point, the member’s movie accessing system will be shut off and quarantined. If the abuse or illicit activity is confirmed, the member and the household will be banned from the content distribution network,” the patent reads. […] Screening Room’s system also comes with a wide range of other anti-piracy scans built in. Among other things, it regularly scans the Wi-Fi network to see which devices are connected, and Bluetooth is used to check what other devices are near.

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Source: Slashdot – Sean Parker Is Going To Great Lengths To Ensure ‘Screening Room’ Is Piracy Free, Patents Reveal

NASA published the following media advisory moments ago: NASA will make an announcement about the agency’s first mission to fly directly into our sun’s atmosphere during an event at 11 a.m. EDT Wednesday, May 31, from the University of Chicago’s William Eckhardt Research Center Auditorium. The event will air live on NASA Television and the agency’s website. The mission, Solar Probe Plus, is scheduled to launch in the summer of 2018. Placed in orbit within four million miles of the sun’s surface, and facing heat and radiation unlike any spacecraft in history, the spacecraft will explore the sun’s outer atmosphere and make critical observations that will answer decades-old questions about the physics of how stars work. The resulting data will improve forecasts of major space weather events that impact life on Earth, as well as satellites and astronauts in space.

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Source: Slashdot – NASA To Make Announcement About First Mission To Touch Sun