The overall plan has been implemented and the upcoming operating system is called Huawei HongMeng. They also announced that they will launch Huawei’s first mobile phone with the Hongmeng operating system.
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There is a new malicious malware threat in town and its called Agent Smith.
Remember the movie Matrix and how there was this one agent called Smith? Agent Smith possessed some superhuman strength, super speed, and stamina. But that’s not all that Agent Smith possessed, the most dangerous thing about Mr. Smith was that he also possessed a secret power; it was the power to replicate himself by infecting other hosts in the Matrix system and replace them with his own kind.
Keeping the exact principle in mind, some cyber threat junkies have designed a similar app known as Agent Smith malware. Smith malware replaces legitimate installed apps like (Skype, WhatsApp, Facebook) with a malicious version of the app. Detailed research performed by the researchers at Check Point Research has found out that Smith infects the system to such an extent that it overheats and physically damage your Android smartphone.
According to Check Point blog, “Agent Smith” has infected more than 25 million devices.
Actually, the malware doesn’t steal any information from your smartphone. Instead, it just replicates legitimate installed apps such as WhatsApp with the malicious version.
About Agent Smith Malware
On one of the occasions, Check Point warned:
“Disguised as a Google-related app, the core part of malware exploits various known Android vulnerabilities and automatically replaces installed apps on the device with malicious versions without the user’s interaction,”
Basically, ‘Agent Smith’ uses its “broad access to the device’s resources to show fraudulent ads for financial gain.” According to Checkpoint, the malware is currently targeting different countries in the Asian region. To name a few, countries such as India, Pakistan & Bangladesh.
They further highlighted that the malware holds significant potential to harm a user’s device. However, for now, it is carefully designed to only perform credential thefts.
Check Point stated,
“However, it could easily be used for far more intrusive and harmful purposes such as banking credential theft, Indeed, due to its ability to hide it’s icon from the launcher and impersonates any popular existing apps on a device, there are endless possibilities for this sort of malware to harm a user’s device.”
Researchers at Check Point has warned Google and law enforcement units to assist them with their investigation. They have closely worked with Google to remove these malicious app replicas from the Play Store. And at the time of publishing their research, they made sure that Play Store contained no Smith agents infecting other platforms
Check Point said that it was warned Google and law enforcement units to facilitate further investigation. It said that it has worked closely with Google and at the time of publishing, no malicious apps remained on the Play Store.
There are multiple instances where users have found several malicious apps infecting the Google Play Store. Recent research performed by Bitdefender has revealed that there is a malware strain known as the Triout which runs massive surveillance alongside a privacy tool.
This malicious software can record information on phone calls, incoming text messages, videos, can take pictures and collect data on your location through tracking GPS coordinates. Just imagine if the controller of such software works for a federal organization or a terrorist one?
With Cyberthreat looming the horizon, it is important that businesses should be careful and protect their infrastructures at all costs. You never know when an Agent Smith drops in and say hello!
Now Instagram has also joined forces to compete and launched two new features that will help it fight to cyberbully.
Instagram’s new features will save many people from cyberbullying
Here are two new features of Instagram, and you should be careful when posting harmful and offensive comments:
Feature 1:
Instagram has introduced a new artificial intelligence feature that notifies them when they launch offensive comments.
Feature 2:
It is the most useful feature called restrict. It allows you to limit comments from unwelcome people in your profile. This feature is in beta and it will take some time to get started.
Also, people on the restricted list will not be able to see when you are online on Instagram.
You will receive this feature shortly; however, feature 2 is in beta and will be available later.
Paul Shales is a computer programmer by day and takes care of run-of-the-mill operations for a bank. By night though, he creates deepfakes that portray Kim Kardashian freestyle rapping, President Donald Trump as a tantrum-throwing pageant contestant on “Toddlers & Tiaras”; and Elon Musk as a weird, giggly baby.
Paul’s shenanigans are just for fun, not meant to scare or malign anyone. There do however exist, on the internet, a gazillion videos that portray people doing things they never even thought of doing. Real faces, real people, so close to photorealistic footage; caught up in entirely unreal events.
These “deepfakes” are videos fabricated using a particular kind of AI. Inevitably, they had their roots in a thriving online market for superimposing celebrity faces on porn actors’ bodies, but now they pose a bigger threat. People are increasingly voicing concerns over their impact on our already fervid political scenario. These concerns have prompted the US congress and the British government to look into ways of regulating them.
Check out this video purporting to show Kim Kardashian West mocking her fans for violating copyright and showing her support for a shadowy organization known as “Spectre”. Hopefully, you see a blank!
YouTube stepped up and took down the deepfake on Monday, which gives us some hope in the fight against deepfakes, but the method is unlikely to help much as such videos continue to target an ever-greater number of people every day. The video, posted by anti-advertising activists Brandalism, was removed only after a copyright claim by publisher Condé Nast, since the original was posted somedays back by the publisher’s Vogue magazine.
Henry Ajder, head of communications and research analysis at Deeptrace, an organization currently devising a system to detect deepfakes on the web, has raised concern over the increase of deepfakes being uploaded to YouTube. The Kardashian copyright claim sets a new precedent for when such videos can be removed, but the matter is more complex than it appears to be. Who decides if such manipulated videos are being used ‘fairly’? Taking videos like these make tech companies vulnerable to tirades of accusations of taking away freedom of expression.
He further added that,
“It certainly shows how the existing legal infrastructure could help,” Henry Ajder, head of communications and research analysis at Deeptrace, told Digital Trends. “But it seems to be available for the privileged few.”
But does this all mean that deep-fakes are subject to copyright claims? If so, like we have the Kardashian video to show for it, it would make for a simple reason to take down misleading fake videos. YouTube hasn’t yet confirmed that it is coming out a new policy to mitigate such deepfakes.
While this seems like a new weapon in our arsenal, there is still a long way to go before we can wage war against deepfakes. For one, a huge company like Condé Nast can effortlessly make a copyright claim on YouTube any day, but for me and you, we are not so fortunate. If someone made a deepfake of you, by recording you doing something but then manipulating it, there’s no copyright claim to make since they are the ones who have recorded the footage.
Even worse, what if someone takes your pictures off any social media platform and make a video of you doing or saying something you never did? Well, it’s already happening all over the world. Women have seen the worst of it so far, including those whose faces have been pasted on the bodies of adult stars. Once a video has gone viral, what can one do about it. According to Aider,
“The legal recourse to take down deepfakes of individuals are sparse. We don’t have the infrastructure in place to deal with these problems.”
We appreciate what YouTube has done but not everybody seems to be following up. For instance, Another Brandalism video deepfaking CEO Mark Zuckerberg as praising Spectre has garned over 100,00 views on Instagram. The original video was a Zuckerberg interview on CBS News. Even though CBS has requested Instagram to remove it on grounds of an “unauthorized use of the CBSN” trademark. However, its sad to see the Zuckerberg deepfake still online on Brandalism’s page, while the Kardashian video is still online on both Twitter and Instagram.
Another Doctored Pelosi video slurring her speech, highlights the threat of deepfake tech.
While Youtube did take it down, it remains on Facebook with a note tagging it as fake. Such a malicious video, focused on slighting one person, seems much more a threat than the Kardashian one, which some people found plain funny. YouTube will shut down misinformation when pushed, but Facebook would prefer not to be an arbiter of truth.
What chance does people like us stand!
Extracting and saving images from the web is generally a piece of cake. All you have to do is right click and choose ‘Save as.’. But have you ever tried to save or download an image from Google Docs? It’s a whole different story. It is downright exasperating to say the least. There is no apparent way to select and download a few images directly from a docs document. Fortunately, we have worked around this drawback. Here are 5 simple ways to download images from any Google Doc.
1. Publish to the Web, then Save Images One-by-One
If you only want to extract a few images, this method is your best bet:
- Open your document in Google Docs, click on File > Publish to the web found on the top left corner.
- Click on the blue Publish button. Does your doc incoprorate confidential data or private information. Remember to stop publishing once you have got your images.
- A pop-up window appears. Click OK to continue.
- See the link that appears? Copy and paste it into a new tab on your web browser. Hit the Return or the Enter key to load the page.
- A web page will appear with the content of your doc. Locate the images that you want, right click on each, click on “Save Image As…” Specify the destination where you wish to save those images.
- Voila. You have got your images, but the work isn’t finished yet. Go back to your Google Docs document, again click on File > Publish to the web, see the “Stop publishing” button under Published content & settings”? Click on it and check OK on the pop-up, to stop publishing your doc.
2. Save The Images to Google Keep
This option is by far the least hassle-some. Google Keep is a note taking app that has recently been integrated with Google Docs. This comes down to the fact that you can save docs document images directly to the sidebar, from where they can be downloaded and saved directly without any frills. Here’s how you can save an image to Keeps:
- Right-click on any image that you want to download in a Docs document, and click on the “Save to Keeps” option.
- Your picture is saved to the sidebar, as shown in the screenshot below.
- To save the image, simply right click on the image from Keep sidebar, and click on “Save as”, specify a destination for the image, press the save button, and you have successfully downloaded the image.
3. Use A Snipping Tool
You must be familiar with the Snipping tool if you use Windows, or maybe you know Grab if you have a Mac. Both let you select a portion of your screen and capture it. This can help you take a snapshot of the image you want to download and save it as a copy.
- Open the Google Doc from where you want to download the image. Also make sure the image is in the center of the screen for best capture.
- Fire up the snipping tool.
- Select New and outline the image with your mouse cursor. This tool lets you capture the snapshot of your selected image.
- Click on File>Save as, specify the destination where you wish to save the file, give it a meaningful name, and click on Save.
While this is a relatively easy way to download an image, the images need to be manipulated to resemble the original sometimes. So, we can’t really say we are downloading here, we are just making a copy. However, this method is one of the easiest and fastest, and if you only occasionally need to download images from Google Docs, why bother grappling with Doc add-ons to extract images from Google Docs, when you have such a great trick up your sleeve.
4. Extract Pictures from Documents With Add-Ons
If you frequently need to download images from Google Docs, install an add-on that extracts pictures from Docs. Image extractor is a great add-on you can use. Install this add-on to begin.
- Once downloaded and installed, fire up the document from where you wish to extract images. To start, click on Add-ons > Image Extractor > Start to open the sidebar.
- Select the image you wish to download from the doc.
- The Image Extractor add-on pops-up in your browser’s right sidebar. Choose the image you want to save, select it and click the “Download Image” button. The image will be downloaded to your browser’s download folder. Voila! Easy as a breeze.
5. Download as Office Word, then Reuse the Images
You can use this method whenever you want to reuse the images that you have downloaded from Google Doc in Microsoft Office Word. Here’s how to do it:
- Select File > Download as > Microsoft Word (.docx). This converts your Google Doc to a word format. The word Doc will retain all your content and formatting, including the images.
- Fire up the exported Word document and then cut, copy, or save the images as you want.
Do you own a MAC machine? Then you do know that it works in an entirely different way than a normal system powered by Windows. Every feature of the MAC OS X makes it a brand apart.
If there is one thing that Macintosh has made superbly easy to capture, they are screenshots.
By the way, have you noticed that there is no Print Screen button on your Macintosh keyboard?
Don’t worry! You can still take screenshots and that too from your Macintosh keyboard.
Here are some interesting ways to take screenshots on your Macintosh.
Press “Shift” + “3” + “Command”
You can take a quick screenshot of your screen by pressing ⌘ + Shift + 3
This method will allow you to take the screenshot of the whole screen. Once you screenshot it, it will automatically be saved on your Mac clipboard. Now choose where ever you wish to add the screenshot and simply paste it using the “Command” + “V.” It will paste the entire screen in location.
Press “Shift” + “4” + “Command”
You can take a quick screenshot of a portion of the screen by pressing, ⌘ + Shift + 4
This method will allow you to take the screenshot of a part of the screen. It will automatically change your pointer into a cross-hair. You can then drag and snip an area of a screen and capture it.
Once, you release the mouse button, the screenshot will automatically get saved as a PNG image.
While dragging, you can hold the “Shift,” “Option,” or “Spacebar,” to change the way selection works.
A Few Pre-Requisites to Keep in Mind Before Taking Screenshots
- These shortcuts will work across all Apple operating system versions including Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks, Yosemite, El Capitan, and macOS High Sierra.
- A few applications will restrict you to take screenshots of their windows.
- You can openscreenshots using any image-viewer of your choice.
- If you want to save a screenshot in your site clipboard, press Shift + Command + Control + 3.
In case, Your Mac OS Screen Capture Does Not Work
There are several reasons why screen capturing can stop working on your Mac OS. It usually happens when the following option is simply disabled in the background.
If you want to fix the following issue, then simply follow these five easy steps:
- Go to the System Preferences section from the Apple menu in the top left corner.
- Open a new window and then click on the Shortcuts option.
- Now, find Screenshot option within the left Apple Menu.
- Now, check if the shortcuts are active and have the same key combos discussed above.
- If they aren’t, then simply change them to the old ones or just learn the new combos.
How to Recover Lost Screenshots on Your MAC Device
Do you know that you can even recover your lost screenshots on MAC? The only condition of retrieval is that your MAC memory location where those screenshots were saved does not get overwritten.
If you want to recover your last screenshots, you should stop using your Mac system to avoid data overwrite. Instead, all you have to do is use a suitable file retrieval software and pull up information.
How your screenshots can get lost or deleted in several instances:
Format – Sometimes, screenshot data can get lost when a user accidentally format screenshots on MAC system by mistake. Formatting is usually done to avoid external threats harming the system.
Emptying Trash – Sometimes, when you empty the trash on your Macintosh device, your screenshot can end up getting deleted. If you haven’t cleared your trash, you can still easily retrieve it by restoring.
Other Reasons – Several other reasons such as file transfer failures, power outages, hard drive corruption, software malfunctions can contribute to the loss of screenshot data from Mac OS devices.
In case, if your Macintosh suffers from such vital threats of data loss, you can still easily retrieve that lost information using a retrieval tool. Disk Drill software is a great tool to help you.
It can help you retrieve all your valuable screenshot images, RAW images, photos, videos, audio files and other file formats from the MAC systems. It is a great tool to keep if you’re using a Macintosh.
Do You Have Any Questions?
I hope this article was an informative read. Do you have any questions?
Well, what are you waiting for! Go ahead and ask!
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StartRocket will demonstrate BILLBOARD-type promoting in the sky. They have completed a fruitful trial of showing ads on the night sky which highlighted McDonald’s and KFC logos to get the general population thoughtfulness regarding their intention to buy.
StartRocket will dispatch its first Orbital Display in 2020 to begin showing promotions by 2021 all around the globe. The single ad will be as large as 500 Kilometers (around 250 to 310 miles) and that advert will appear for 6 minutes as it were. Furthermore, from that point forward, the promotion will be supplanted with another commercial following 6 minutes.
How brands can apply or what nations they will dispatch at first are as yet vague, yet the dispatch date is affirmed which is 2020.
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump on Sunday horribly misquoted the loss of life in a progression of lethal blasts in Sri Lanka prior today to be “138 million individuals” yet erased and supplanted it practically thirty minutes after the fact.
The American head — known for his forceful tweeting propensities and regularly silly grammatical errors — offered “sincere sympathies” to the general population of Sri Lanka after the blasts at places of worship and inns in the island country murdered in excess of 200 individuals.
The tweet with the grammatical mistake was particularly appalling because of the way that Sri Lanka’s populace is a little more than 21 million individuals and his announcement saying the assaults “killed somewhere around 138 million individuals” made it resemble the loss of life was multiple times the nation’s absolute populace.
Very nearly 30 minutes after the fact, he supplanted the mistaken tweet and expressed: “138 individuals have been killed in Sri Lanka, with more that 600 seriously harmed, in a psychological militant assault on houses of worship and lodgings.
“The United States offers sincere sympathies to the incredible individuals of Sri Lanka. We stand prepared to help!”
Facebook continues fusing new things and this time the online networking monster has chosen to bring its very own Voice Assitant nearby. Indeed, Facebook needs to comprehend the need for things. Being submerged in the allegations of abusing its client’s information, the organization ought to, at any rate, clear up themselves instead of bringing new innovation. Returning to the point, the Facebook remote helper will be perfect to the point that it will contend with enormous names in the market: Alexa, Siri, Bixby, Cortana, and Google Assistant.
We definitely knew Facebook plans to dispatch its own remote helper as in mid-2018 had declared an obscure right hand naming it as M. In any case, Facebook M was accessible in Facebook detachment not at all like a legitimate machine carrying on computerized reasoning undertakings. All things considered, this time Facebook is late in presenting something new (Facebook voice right hand) as the market has numerous huge names and is as of now immersed with similar sorts of usefulness by a colleague. So as to make its feet firm in this specific market, Facebook needs to present something new that will urge individuals to go for its AI gadget.
Will Facebook Voice Assistant Able to Compete with its Rival?
Perhaps due to Facebook security outrage, individuals will abstain from getting it, so most likely it will be a noteworthy set back for an organization. With regards to protection, it ought to be uncovered that the internet based life mammoth is taking a shot at a reasonable history security apparatus, which will likely dispatch this year.
Google has now announced yet another product which will allow you to talk to your plant.
This product is called Google Tulip
This technology is accessible for everybody’s utilization from 1 April 2019. At present, Google Tulip just backings the English language yet Google is attempting their best to add more language backing to it, making it simpler for everybody to get this item.