Ken Garen, CPA, Co-Founder and President, UBCC

Visiting space will be "just like going on a cruise" says space hotel architect Tom Ravenscroft  |  29 August 2019 The first commercial  space  hotel will be more like a cruise ship than Stanley Kubrick's sleek space station from 2001, says Tim Alatorre, senior design architect of the Von Braun Space Station. The  Gateway Foundation  is designing the world's first space  hotel  – the Von Braun Space Station – with the aim of making visiting space accessible to everyone. It will have gravity, full-working kitchens, bars, and interiors made with natural materials and colours. "Eventually, going to space will just be another option people will pick for their vacation, just like going on a cruise, or going to Disney World," Alatorre told Dezeen. "The goal of the Gateway Foundation is to have the Von Braun operational by 2025 with 100 tourists visiting the station per week, he continued. "Because the overall costs are still s...

Google says hackers have put ‘monitoring implants’ in iPhones for years   Visiting hacked sites was enough for server to gather users’ images and contacts Alex Hern Fri 30 Aug 2019  03.03 EDT Last modified on Fri 30 Aug 2019  09.25 EDT ·         An unprecedented  iPhone  hacking operation, which attacked “thousands of users a week” until it was disrupted in January, has been revealed by researchers at Google’s external security team. The operation, which lasted two and a half years, used a small collection of hacked websites to deliver malware on to the iPhones of visitors. Users were compromised simply by visiting the sites: no interaction was necessary, and some of the methods used by the hackers affected even fully up-to-date phones. Once hacked, the user’s deepest secrets were exposed to the attackers. Their location was uploaded every minute; their device’s keychain, containing all their passwo...

How one teenager took out a secure Pentagon file sharing site By:  Andrew Eversden    August 29, 2019 600 By last October, the Pentagon’s Vulnerability Disclosure Program had processed thousands of loopholes in the Department of Defense’s websites. Then it received a report from Jack Cable. On Oct. 25, Cable, who worked for the Defense Digital Service and was a freshman at Stanford University, reported a problem to the department through the Pentagon’s HackerOne vulnerability disclosure page. Typically, vulnerabilities sent to the DoD through a disclosure program operated by HackerOne, an ethical hacking company that manages reporting programs for various organizations, require a simple reconfiguration or software patch. Of the 16 problems reported to the DoD on the average day, 11 tend to require action by the Pentagon, Kris Johnson, director of the Vulnerability Disclosure Program (VDP) at the DoD’s Cyber Crime Center (DC3), told Fifth Domain in an excl...

AI-powered cameras become new tool against mass shootings   By IVAN MORENO August 31, 2019 In this July 30, 2019, photo, Paul Hildreth, emergency operations coordinator for the Fulton County School District, works in the emergency operations center at the Fulton County School District Administration Center in Atlanta. Artificial Intelligence is transforming surveillance cameras from passive sentries into active observers that can immediately spot a gunman, alert retailers when someone is shoplifting and help police quickly find suspects. Schools, such as the Fulton County School District, are among the most enthusiastic adopters of the technology. (AP Photo/Cody Jackson) Paul Hildreth peered at a display of dozens of images from security cameras surveying his Atlanta school district and settled on one showing a woman in a bright yellow shirt walking a hallway. A mouse click instructed the artificial intelligence-equipped system to find other images of the woman, ...

Company behind Foxit PDF Reader announces security breach Foxit Software said hackers breached website accounts and stole user information. By  Catalin Cimpanu  for  Zero Day  | August 30, 2019 -- 14:09 GMT (07:09 PDT) Foxit Software, the company behind the Foxit PDF reader app, said today that hackers breached its servers and have made off with some user information. ZDNet learned of the breach from a Foxit customer who shared a copy of the email the company is sending out to affected users, asking them to choose new passwords when logging in the next time. According to this email, the security breach impacted the company's website, and, namely, information stored in the My Account section. Foxit web accounts are how the company manages its existing customers and is where users can access trial software, download purchased products, and access order histories. Foxit said hackers managed to access MyAccount data such as email addresses, passw...

Walmart’s robot army has arrived The last machines to invade people’s space at scale were cars; now, it’s Walmart’s robots. How’s that going? [Photo: courtesy Bossa Nova] BY KATHARINE SCHWAB 4 MINUTE READ 08.29.19 7:00 AM As robots start to move into more public places, like streets and stores, the people who encounter them won’t have any kind of instruction manual on how to engage with them. One of the main places this is happening? The aisles of your local Walmart. For years, Walmart has been  automating its warehouses  with robots that can pack and sort items as they zoom along conveyor belts. But the company has also slowly been rolling out robots that roam around store aisles alongside customers, launching  in 50 stores in 2017  and rolling out to 350 in 2019. These bots are designed to scan shelves looking for items that are out of stock, eliminating a time-intensive chore that human workers no longer have to do—though worke...