Facebook Launches Facebook Football Awards

Facebook has just launched its very own football awards which allow people all over the world to choose their favorite stars from the sports area.

If you are a big supporter, all you have to do is go on Football on Facebook (Soccer) or Mirror Football’s official Facebook pages, hit like and start voting for who’s got your attention during the Premier League season.

All fans now have the opportunity to vote for several categories, as follows: Player of the Year, Young Player of the Year, Premier League Club of the Year, Manager of the Year, and Content of the Year.

There is even a special category for devoted supporters, designed to show some gratitude towards the fans around the world who have proved their dedication to the sport.

You get to cast one vote per person and one vote per category, and anyone who has a Facebook account is free to express their preferences.

The voting opens today and ends on May 11, while winners will be announced during an awards ceremony on May 26.

Facebook Sports Partnerships' Glenn Miller announced that "The Facebook Football Awards are the only awards dedicated to celebrating the Premier League, where fans around the globe have the power to decide who deserves to win for their performance over the course of the season," The Independent reports

The Rise of the Hackbots

Stopping malicious hackers and securing software is extremely hard. But what if you could make software that hacks other software, finds bugs, and fixes it quicker than human hackers could?

The challenge boils down to an oft-repeated mantra in the world of information security (or cybersecurity, if you prefer the more sneezed-at term): attackers only have to win once—or find one bug—while defenders have to win all the time, with no margin for even one error. But automated security software could help: in essence, it would be a robot hacker that might actually really win all the time and stop its malicious counterparts.

That software doesn’t exist yet, but the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA

), the US military's research arm, believes that it’s only a matter of time.

“I believe the world series of hacking will soon be won by a machine,” Mike Walker, a program manager at DARPA, s​aid last year.

Walker was referring to the famed hacking competition known as “capture the flag,” where hackers compete trying to break into or defend systems. The most famous capture the flag competition is celebrated every year at Def Con, one of the world’s largest hacking conferences.

Next year, DEF CON will host the first capture the flag for computers only, where machines, instead of hackers, will compete against each other for a prize of $2 million in DARPA’s Cyber Grand Ch​allenge.

For this challenge, more than 100 teams of computer security pros all over the world are building machines that, one day, might very well replace their overlords.

"Cyber Grand Challenge is here to put hackers out of work."

“If you wanted to take the human obsolesce, ‘robots are here to steal our future’ view of the world, Cyber Grand Challenge is here to put hackers out of work,” Andrew Ruef, a researcher at Trail ​of Bits, one of the companies that are participating in the challenge, told Motherboard.

But for DARPA, automation is the only way toward a more secure future.

“The only effective approach to defending against today’s ever-increasing volume and diversity of attacks is to shift to fully automated systems capable of discovering and neutralizing attacks instantly,” Walker sai​d. (DARPA declined to comment for this story.)

The inherent advantage of machines, obviously, is that they never sleep, and that they can perform more calculations per second than humans. So having machines scan software or networks for vulnerabilities and bugs, in theory, can be more effective than having a team of hackers, even the most brilliant ones, do the same.

But in reality, Ruef said, the machines can only get you so far, as they still need those hackers to program them and tell them what to do and what kind of bugs to look for. In other words, you can teach a computer to calculate the best way to go from point A to B, but the machine can’t came up, by itself, with the idea of going to point B, Ruef said.

“Humans still play a role in this, in that we encode the goal,” he said.

Moreover, it’s hard to program machines to have a hackers’ intuition. That’s why a future in which we don’t need real hackers and security researchers to protect computers and networks is probably still far away.

"You always are going to need that human who is thinking up a new attack and then programming the computer."

​“Computers can do what we program them to do, but you always are going to need that human who is thinking up a new attack and then programming the computer,” David Brumley, the co-founder of the Pittsburgh-based startup For all Secure, and one of the early favorites of the challenge, recently told Next​Gov.

That’s why Ruef thinks that in a competition between machines and human hackers to find one bug in an extremely complicated program, a human hacker would probably win today.

Just like the research, DARPA’s challenge is also its early stages. This week, teams are going through a second dry-run to test their systems, ahead of the first official qualification event, which will be held on June 3. Those teams that make it through the qualification will then be evaluated by DARPA through the summer, and seven of them will make it to the final event in 2016.

One of the robot hackers will best the others and win its human overlords $2 million. Then, perhaps, one day, it will replace them.

Goodbye, Meatbags is a series on Motherboard about the waning relevance of the human physical form. Follow along here.

Can robots replace hackers? It's only a matter of time

New Delhi: In the age of robotics and wearables, it is not hard to imagine a situation where the software is itself the hacker-malicious and unmalicious. But how close are we to the future where we have no human hackers?

The US military's research arm, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), believes that there is a possibility of having robot hackers in near future and it is just a matter of time that they will replace conventional hackers in flesh and blood as automated security software or a robot hacker could help hack other software, find bugs, and fix it quicker than human hackers, with little or no margin for error.

Automated security software or a robot hacker could help hack other software, find bugs, and fix it quicker than human hackers, with little or no margin for error.

Mike Walker, a program manager at DARPA, said last year, "I believe the world series of hacking will soon be won by a machine," a Motherboard report quotes him.

DEF CON, which is one of the world's largest hacking conferences, next year will host the first 'capture the flag' for computers only, where machines and not hackers, will compete against each other for a prize of $2 million in DARPA's Cyber Grand Challenge.

For this one-of-its-kind challenge, more than 100 teams of computer security experts around the world are building machines that might replace the human hackers.

While conventional hackers see it as a way of making robots stealing the future of human hackers, for the US' military research wing, automation is the only way towards a more secure future.

Walker said that the only effective approach to defending against the modern-day hack attacks is to switch to fully automated systems capable of discovering and neutralizing attacks instantly.

Given the scale and intensity of modern cyber breaches, it makes more sense to have machines that never sleep and perform better, with calculations possible on per second rate, than humans.

However, the catch remains the same. You still require human hackers to program these mean machines to tell them what exactly to look for while scanning for bugs and how to treat them, lest they turn against their own bearers.