Algorithm ranks world's top football talent
A chemical and biological engineer at Northwestern University, who is also a self-proclaimed football fanatic, has unveiled an algorithm to determine the world's top football talent, says CNet.
Professor Luis Amaral goes out on a limb by practically ignoring a variety of measures often considered crucial in understanding a player's power, including penalty cards, shots, misses, and assists.
Instead, he and his colleagues treat teams as networks and individual players as nodes, analysing not so much individual play as the flow of passes between players.
San Francisco to pass phone radiation law
San Francisco is set to be the first city in the US to require mobile phone retailers to post radiation levels next to handsets they sell, reveals the BBC.
The board of supervisors, or council, voted 10-1 to approve the measure, with final approval expected next week.
"This is about helping people make informed choices," says the law's chief sponsor, supervisor Sophie Maxwell.
Eastern European banks under attack
Banks in Russia and Ukraine are under continued siege by criminal gangs wielding a sophisticated, next-generation exploitation kit that hacks the financial institutions' authentication system and then hits it with a denial-of-service attack, writes The Register.
The attacks are being carried out with the help of a top-to-bottom revision of BlackEnergy, a popular hack-by-numbers toolkit that until recently was used primarily to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks.
Eastern European criminal gangs are using the expanded capabilities of BlackEnergy 2 to siphon funds out of electronic bank accounts, and then assault the financial institutions with more data than they can handle, says Joe Stewart, a researcher with security firm SecureWorks' Counter-Threat Unit.
File-sharing service sued
A coalition of eight music publishers sued the file-sharing service LimeWire on Wednesday, accusing it of copyright infringement, reports The New York Times.
The lawsuit comes after a federal judge's ruling last month in a similar case brought by record companies that LimeWire and its creator, Mark Gorton, were liable for copyright infringement.
David Israelite, chief executive of the publishers' association, said his organisation had decided to bring the complaint because most publishers were not represented in the record company lawsuit, and they were now confident they had a winning case. The suit says the “knowing and deliberate infringement is massive, as is the harm”.
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