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This Professor Has Invented a Pill That Eliminates Hangovers
The first of Nutt’s wonder drugs is “alscosynth,” a non-toxic inebriant drink that induces the same I-reeeeally-luuuurve-you-man effects of alcohol, but carries no risk of hangover, aggression, loss of control or any of the general mess that comes from hammering your liver with a toxic compound.
“It targets the parts of the brain that give the good effects of alcohol but not those that give the bad effects,” explains Nutt, who hopes the alcohol substitute will be marketed as a companion to regular alcoholic drinks, and be relatively cheap to buy.
Meet the Online Tracking Device That is Virtually Impossible to Block
A new, extremely persistent type of online tracking is shadowing visitors to thousands of top websites, from WhiteHouse.gov to YouPorn.com.
First documented in a forthcoming paper by researchers at Princeton University and KU Leuven University in Belgium, this type of tracking, called canvas fingerprinting, works by instructing the visitor’s Web browser to draw a hidden image. Because each computer draws the image slightly differently, the images can be used to assign each user’s device a number that uniquely identifies it.
Like other tracking tools, canvas fingerprints are used to build profiles of users based on the websites they visit — profiles that shape which ads, news articles, or other types of content are displayed to them.
Making end-to-end encryption easier to use
“End-to-end” encryption means data leaving your browser will be encrypted until the message’s intended recipient decrypts it, and that similarly encrypted messages sent to you will remain that way until you decrypt them in your browser.
“TrueCrypt is not secure,” official SourceForge page abruptly warns
"WARNING: Using TrueCrypt is not secure as it may contain unfixed security issues," text in red at the top of TrueCrypt page on SourceForge states. The page continues: "This page exists only to help migrate existing data encrypted by TrueCrypt. The development of TrueCrypt was ended in 5/2014 after Microsoft terminated support of Windows XP. Windows 8/7/Vista and later offer integrated support for encrypted disks and virtual disk images. Such integrated support is also available on other platforms (click here for more information). You should migrate any data encrypted by TrueCrypt to encrypted disks or virtual disk images supported on your platform."
Skype Translator, a real-time language translation tool, will begin rolling out later this year
Skype Translator results from decades of work by the industry, years of work by our researchers, and now is being developed jointly by the Skype and Microsoft Translator teams. The demo showed near real-time audio translation from English to German and vice versa, combining Skype voice and IM technologies with Microsoft Translator, and neural network-based speech recognition. Skype Translator is a great example of why Microsoft invests in basic research. We’ve invested in speech recognition, automatic translation and machine learning technologies for more than a decade, and now they’re emerging as important components in this more personal computing era.
Google Weighs Boosting Encrypted Sites in Its Search Algorithm
Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land and host of the conference where Cutts voiced support for encryption, thinks Google ultimately may not favor encrypted sites in its results.
“Rewarding sites for [encrypting pages] in the algorithm would be a huge step,” says Sullivan. “It also possibly causes an immediate change by all the wrong sites,” he says referring to sites that focus more on gaming Google results than developing good content.
