My Science School

Facebook is taking steps to make Instagram, the photo- and video-sharing app with more than 1 billion users, safer for teens. They include automatically defaulting teen users under 16 into private accounts, making it harder for suspicious adult accounts to find them, limiting the options advertisers have to reach younger viewers with ads, and using AI to detect users' ages. "We think private accounts are the right choice for young people, but we recognize some young creators might want to have public accounts to build a following," Instagram said in a blog post. "We want to strike the right balance of giving young people all the things they love about Instagram while also keeping them safe." However, critics say that even though Instagram appears to be addressing online predation, underage users, and advertising standards for teens, they also must be mindful of other issues including cyberbullying, self-harm and exposure to misinformation and adult content.

Giving users options has been frowned upon for years. The logic was simple enough: Most people won't change their default settings anyway, so the onus is on the product to get things right automatically. More algorithms, fewer settings. Less friction! Now, people are being given more choices and more tools with which to decide their experience.

Facebook acknowledged it's still trying to figure out the right way to verify people's age — because there's not much to stop new ones from just, you know, lying — and often, by the time someone reports a rule break, it's already too late. The only option for the platforms is to be more proactive and more careful. Doing that with young users is an obvious choice, because the stakes are so high and the relative business hit fairly low, but it'll be equally important and much harder to make the same decisions for the broader user base.

But whether it was Twitter serving the "Are you sure you want to share this article you haven't read?" pop-up or some of these privacy-focused tools that let people choose who can reach or read them, the focus has clearly shifted away from building the One Perfect System to letting users build it for themselves. At the scale at which these companies operate, that's the only way it's ever going to work.

Picture Credit : Google

Got a pile of Lego bricks lying around at home and have no idea what to build? Brickit uses an AI powered camera to rapidly scan the bricks and suggest things you can make. Spread out your Lego bricks, and let the app scan them. Seconds later, the app delivers options you can construct, without worrying about what to look for from the large number of bricks. Choose the project you want to build and follow the step-by-step building process on the app. The app doesn't just mark the bricks you need for a particular project but also tells you where they are in the pile of Lego pieces! You can share your project with other users on the app. Brickit is available for iOS for now, and will be available for Android soon.

For many of us however, Lego is a big box containing a jumble of random bricks, each belonging to structures that were dismantled long ago. With the instruction manuals long gone, building more than a simple house feels like a daunting prospect. But what if you could scan all of the random pieces and be told exactly what you could make with them? This was the dream for the team behind Brickit, a new app that is inspiring kids and adults alike to build new creations from their old Lego. The process is very straightforward: simply lay out your bricks, point your camera at the unruly heap, and let Brickit do all the work for you. It will scan each individual piece, identify it, and then figure out which of Lego’s many sets you can build from what you have on hand. It will even tell you which bricks are missing.

As well as identifying the various bits in the pile, it will also provide you with illustrations of them in a similar vein to the official Lego instruction manuals. If you’re unsure of where to find these pieces in the undoubtedly huge pile, fear not because the app will then highlight each one in the original photo. As a result, building the proposed sets – assuming you have the correct bricks – becomes a relatively quick and easy task. Though, if you don’t have the right pieces to make any of the sets, you can attempt them anyway, substituting missing pieces for others that you have in your arsenal. This stage might require a bit of thinking outside the box but, as Lego’s original tagline goes: “Just Imagine…”

Picture Credit : Google

Zero-click attacks, as the name suggests, are hacks that do not require any action from the target user in other words, these are attacks that can be executed without the victim carrying out any voluntary action There has been a lot of talk about zero-click attacks recently as a spyware found to be at the heart of a recent hack that targeted thousands of people operated in this manner.

Traditionally, hackers lay out a trap for the potential victim in the form of something like a phishing attack. Here, the victim is tricked into downloading an attachment or clicking on a link that is embedded with malware and initiates the Track

While these attacks require some form of action from the one being attacked - that eventually compromises the system, what makes zero-click attacks more dangerous is the fact that they bypass all these

Zero-day vulnerabilities

This means that zero-click attacks are any cyber attacks that exploit a flaw in the device and work their way into the system. Instead of exploiting human error, these identify potential zero-day vulnerabilities in the Operating System (OS)-flaws that haven't been identified, and hence are yet to be patched. Any device, be it iOS or Android. Windows or macOS, Can therefore fall prey to such an attack.

The recent attack that made news employed a powerful spyware called Pegasus. Once this spyware entered any device, it was able to install a module that enabled it to track call logs, read mails, messages, browsing history, calendars, and even track location data, before sending it to the attacker. Apart from these abilities, the spyware could also hide intelligently and self-destruct if necessary.

Hard to detect and trace

The fact that these zero-click attacks are currently both hard to detect and near impossible to trace poses serious difficulties as to how we surmount them. The only thing that we can do at the moment is to have the software and apps updated on our devices at all times, and also use only the official marketplaces to install any software.

Picture Credit : Google