Port scanning is the process of attempting to connect to various network ports on a computing endpoint to determine which ports are open and which services are running on them. It is a common method used by hackers to identify vulnerabilities in a network or system. By determining which ports are open, an attacker can identify which services and applications are running on a device and potentially exploit any known vulnerabilities in those services. Consequently, it is important to detect port scanning because it is often the first step in a cyber attack. By identifying port scanning attempts, cybersecurity professionals can take proactive measures to protect the systems and networks before an attacker has a chance to exploit any vulnerabilities. Against this background, researchers have worked for over a decade to develop robust methods to detect port scanning. One such method revealed by a recent systematic review is the random forest supervised machine learning algorithm. The review revealed six existing studies using random forest since 2021. Unfortunately, those studies each exhibit different results, do not all use the same training and testing dataset, and only two include source code. Accordingly, the goal of this work was to reproduce the six random forest studies while addressing the apparent shortcomings. The outcomes are significant for researchers looking to explore random forest to detect port scanning and for practitioners interested in reliable technology to detect the early stages of cyber attack.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Spain's National Court has agreed to the extradition to the U.S. of a British citizen who allegedly took part in computer attacks, including the July 2020 hacking of Twitter accounts of public figures such as Joseph Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Gates. A court statement Friday said requirements had been met for handing over Joseph James O'Connor to U.S. authorities for 14 charges covering crimes such as revelation of secrets, membership of a criminal gang, illegal access to computer systems, internet fraud, money laundering and extortion. O'Connor, 23, from Liverpool, England was arrested in the southern Spanish coastal town of Estepona in July 2021.

The Federal Trade Commission is opening a dedicated technology office that will place Silicon Valley under more scrutiny and help it stay on top of emerging tech and trends in a fast-moving market. Commissioners voted 4-0 on Thursday to create the office. Under the direction of chair Lina Khan, the FTC has trained its focus on tech companies. Last year, Epic Games agreed to a record $520 million settlement following FTC allegations that it violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. The agency has also attempted to block Microsoft's proposed takeover of Activision Blizzard and sued to stop NVIDIA from buying ARM (NVIDIA backed out of the deal).

In 1996 Nasa and the White House made the explosive announcement that the rock contained traces of Martian bugs. The meteorite, catalogued as Allen Hills (ALH) 84001, crashed onto the frozen wastes of Antarctica 13,000 years ago and was recovered in 1984. Photographs were released showing elongated segmented objects that appeared strikingly lifelike.

Technologist and researcher Aviv Ovadya isn't sure that generative AI can be governed, but he thinks the most plausible means of keeping it in check might just be entrusting those who will be impacted by AI to collectively decide on the ways to curb it. That means you; it means me. It's the power of large networks of individuals to problem solve faster and more equitably than a small group of individuals might do alone (including, say, in Washington). In Taiwan, for example, civic-minded hackers in 2015 formed a platform -- "virtual Taiwan" -- that "brings together representatives from the public, private and social sectors to debate policy solutions to problems primarily related to the digital economy," as explained in 2019 by Taiwan's digital minister, Audrey Tang in the New York Times. Since then, vTaiwan, as it's known, has tackled dozens of issues by "relying on a mix of online debate and face-to-face discussions with stakeholders," Tang wrote at the time.

U.S. safety regulators have pressured Tesla into recalling nearly 363,000 vehicles with its "Full Self-Driving" system because it can misbehave around intersections and doesn't always follow speed limits. The recall, part of part of a larger investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration into Tesla's automated driving systems, is the most serious action taken yet against the electric vehicle maker. It raises questions about CEO Elon Musk's claims that he can prove to regulators that cars equipped with "Full Self-Driving" are safer than humans, and that humans almost never have to touch the controls. Musk at one point had promised that a fleet of autonomous robotaxis would be in use in 2020. The latest action appears to push that development further into the future.

Of the time it takes to set up a machine learning project, 60% is actually spent performing infrastructure engineering tasks. That compares to 20% doing data engineering, Civo Chief Innovation Officer Josh Mesout, who has launched 300 machine learning (ML) models in the past two and a half years, said at the Civo Navigate conference here on Tuesday. Civo hopes to simplify machine learning infrastructure with a new managed service offering, Kubeflow as a Service, which it says will improve the developer experience and reduce the time and resources required to gain insights from machine learning algorithms. The Kubernetes cloud provider is betting that developers don't want to deal with the infrastructure piece of the ML puzzle. So its new offering will run the infrastructure for ML as a managed service, while supporting open source tools and frameworks. It believes this will make ML more accessible to smaller organizations, which it said are often priced out of ML due to economies of scale.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. A Texas woman accused of stabbing her online date in a Nevada hotel-casino in March 2022 for retaliation of the 2020 death of an Iranian military leader has been banned from attending classes at the University of Texas in Dallas while on house arrest, according to reports. Nika Nikoubin, 22, was charged with attempted murder, battery with a deadly weapon and burglary in March 2022, according to KLAS in Las Vegas. Nikoubin reportedly met a man on a dating website and the two rented a room together at the Sunset Station hotel.

On Wednesday the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced a massive recall of Teslas equipped with Full-Self Driving Beta, the technology that enables vehicles to control aspects of driving, such as turning and adjusting speed, in urban environments. The FSD package, which currently costs Tesla owners an additional $15,000 when they buy their cars, requires the driver to be watching the road at all times (although Tesla enthusiasts have figured out ways to trick the cars' attention guardrails for years). The NHTSA recall affects over 360,000 Teslas with FSD, which is pretty much all of them. Critics have long warned that FSD is dangerous, and the recall's language suggests they were right. According to NHTSA, FSD "may allow the vehicle to act unsafe [sic] around intersections, such as driving straight through an intersection while in a turn-only lane."

Future AI applications require performance, reliability and privacy that the existing, cloud-dependant system architectures cannot provide. In this article, we study orchestration in the device-edge-cloud continuum, and focus on edge AI for resource orchestration. We claim that to support the constantly growing requirements of intelligent applications in the device-edge-cloud computing continuum, resource orchestration needs to embrace edge AI and emphasize local autonomy and intelligence. To justify the claim, we provide a general definition for continuum orchestration, and look at how current and emerging orchestration paradigms are suitable for the computing continuum. We describe certain major emerging research themes that may affect future orchestration, and provide an early vision of an orchestration paradigm that embraces those research themes. Finally, we survey current key edge AI methods and look at how they may contribute into fulfilling the vision of future continuum orchestration.