You heard it right, Timmy. No more “abc123.”
Scary news this week – and not only regarding COVID-19.
On Wednesday, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) — the UK’s cyber-defence organ – warned the public about the ease with which baby monitors and other smart devices can be (and have been) hacked.
The usual culprit? Weak default passwords.
In one of the creepiest reported episodes, the attacker spoke to a young girl in Tennessee pretending to be ‘Father Christmas.’
Terrifying. And a good reminder for security experts to take the dangers of human oversight seriously, both at home and at work.
Meanwhile, tech conferences all over the world are being cancelled or going virtual over global infection fears. Oh, dear. This is shaping up to be another one of those coronavirus specials…
Facebook’s F8, Microsoft’s MVP Global Summit and Google I/O are among the affected events.
The latter two companies also announced that they’ll be making their professional conferencing tools available for free as a growing number of firms are encouraging their employees to work remotely.
You know what they say — If life gives you lemons, start promoting your products.
Still haven’t had enough coronavirus? Check out this story on how AI and robotics are helping fight the virus.
Faith in humanity (and robots) restored ?
—
And, speaking of robots…
Researchers at Google have created a robot that taught itself how to walk using reinforcement-learning algorithms.
It took the robot just a few hours to do what we humans need an average of a year to learn. A promising milestone for artificial intelligence.
So cute.
