Avoiding Blunders in Chess

By Edward Scimia, About.com Guide

It's impossible to avoid making blunders entirely during your chess career. Even the world's greatest players occasionally make grave errors during their games; grandmasters have even missed mate-in-one threats and instantly lost games that they were drawing or even winning!

However, you can try to control the frequency of your blunders. In fact, this is one of the best ways to improve your rating and become a stronger player; simply reducing how often you make major (and easily avoidable) errors will show big dividends in your results. Here are a few tips for avoiding blunders!

• Always look far enough ahead when analyzing a position. I've seen many beginners and young chess players miss winning tactics (for themselves, or for their opponents) simply because they gave up on a move after insufficient analysis. If there's a sequence of captures possible, make sure you analyze through the end of those captures, and try to go one move past the final capture, so that you can be sure the position really is settled in the end. A good rule of thumb is to make sure you try to analyze a variation one move deeper each time you see a check, capture, or major threat. Doing so may show that a seemingly safe move is actually quite dangerous once the dust settles.
• Just because a tactic doesn't appear to work at first glance doesn't mean it isn't dangerous. For one, you should always try changing the order of the moves in the potential tactic to see if that can make such an attack more successful; often, move order is key. Other times, a threat may truly be innocuous for now, but forgetting about it later could be deadly. Many games in scholastic tournaments are won this way, when a player who has been facing a mating threat for many moves suddenly removes a defender, allowing the checkmate to occur.
• Don't relax when you gain an overwhelming advantage; this is when you have the most to lose! Winning a big piece or simplifying to a winning position is a great time to slow down and reevaluate the position. Make sure you remove all of your opponents' chances to pull out a shocking win - make sure your king is in no danger whatsoever, and that your major pieces are safe. There's no need to rush for the fastest win; taking the safest route is always best when you're far ahead of your opponent.
• Similarly, make sure to take your time after you blunder. Don't get disheartened; a second evaluation of the position might show you that even though you've made a mistake, you're still ahead, or at least still in the game. Rushing out of frustration is a great way to make multiple blunders in a row, which are much harder to overcome.
• Finally, remember the basics. After every single move your opponent makes, ask yourself "why did they make that move?" Similarly, before making any move yourself, remember to ask yourself, "is this safe?" These simple questions will improve your thought process and help you avoid the mostbasic (and most frustrating) mistakes.

Simplification in Chess

By Edward Scimia, About.com Guide

One topic that is difficult for many new players to understand is that of simplification. In chess, simplification refers to the process of eliminating pieces from the board to reach an easily won position. Ideally, it’s a process that is taken by a player who is in a winning position, and one that is fiercely avoided by a player that’s behind.

Why Simplify?

The main goal of any simplification is to remove the presence of counterplay – the chances that the other player has of reversing the current situation through tactics. For instance, it is well-known even to many novice players that when you are way ahead, it’s okay to trade queens, while this is a bad idea when you are losing badly. This is due to the fact that queens vastly complicate the game of chess; even alone, they can prove extremely dangerous, and one wrong move when the opponent has a queen on the board could lead to a checkmate or the loss of material.

When the Best Move isn’t the Best Move

One of the puzzling aspects of simplification for beginners is the fact that the process often involves making moves that aren’t theoretically best. If you are far ahead in a game, many moves that any human grandmaster would recommend in a heartbeat will be rejected as not being best by a strong computer program. So who is right: the humans or the computers?

In this case, the answer is actually both. Computers have little use for simplification. Sure, they can’t see every possibility (at least until they reach an endgame with few pieces on the board, with the help of a tablebase), but they also will avoid any obvious blunders. Thus, when a computer has a winning position, they can safely continue playing the best moves even if they are quite sharp, confident that they will find their way out on the other side with a victory.

Humans don’t work in quite the same way. We can make mistakes at any time, and are much more likely to make such mistakes when a position is complicated. That means it’s usually better for a human player to simplify things into an easily winning position, even if that means they aren’t winning by as much material or they give up the chance for an uncertain mating attack that could end the game immediately.

Here’s an analogy that may help make the reasoning behind simplification make more sense to you. Imagine you are coaching an American football team. Early in the game, you’ll want to choose strategies that help your offense score the most points possible and stop your opponents from scoring. As the game winds to a close and you have the lead, however, your play will get more conservative. Up a couple touchdowns with just a few minutes to play, you’ll run safe plays with your offense in the hopes of avoiding turnovers and running out the clock. In the last minute or two, it makes sense simply to kneel on the ball rather than running any play, simply to allow the game to end with minimal risk. There’s no bonus for scoring more points and winning by a larger margin; trying to do so by throwing deep passes or running fancy trick plays will only risk allowing the other team to get the ball back and beat you.

In chess, simplification works much the same way. Sure, you could try to continue pressing your advantage and win with style, but by simplifying, you take away any risk of allowing your opponent to get back into a game they have no business winning. Just be sure you only do this when you are certain the simplified position you’ll reach still gives you a big enough advantage to win the game – there’s nothing worse than simplifying into a drawn (or even losing!) position when you had the advantage.

President's Cup

By Edward Scimia, About.com Guide

Perhaps the most prestigious team tournament in collegiate chess, the President’s Cup has often been referred to as the “Final Four of Chess,” in reference to the final rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament that also traditionally takes place during late March and early April. As suggested by its nickname, only four teams are invited to the President’s Cup, and the winner is often thought of as the national championship of college chess.

To qualify, teams must first compete in the Pan-American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship. Only the top four teams in turn qualify for the President’s Cup. However, since schools may enter more than one team into the Pan-Am tournament, there are sometimes cases in which the same school has two or more teams in the top four of the final standings. Only one team from any given school may participate in the President’s Cup, so in these cases, the next highest-ranked school or schools in the standings are given spots into the President’s Cup instead.

At the President’s Cup, each of the four school teams plays in three rounds of competition, playing one full match against each of the other schools. Each team fields a squad of four players, meaning that each team will play a total of 12 games. In this tournament, game points determine the overall winner, so it is possible for a team to win all three matches yet fail to win the title if their three match wins were all close.

In recent years, the President’s Cup has been dominated by schools that have fielded teams of recruited scholarship players. While some underdog teams have made runs to the President’s Cup, they usually fare poorly against teams fielding full squads of grandmasters and international masters, as a handful of the top teams are capable of doing.

Recent President’s Cup Results

When more than one team is listed with the same score, the first team finished first on tiebreakers.

2009: University of Maryland-Baltimore County (7.5/12), University of Texas-Dallas (7.5), University of Texas-Brownsville (6.5), Stanford University (2.5)

2010: University of Maryland-Baltimore County (8), University of Texas-Brownsville (7.5), Texas Tech University (4.5), University of Texas-Dallas (4)

2011: Texas Tech University (7), University of Texas-Dallas (6.5), University of Texas-Brownsville (6), University of Maryland-Baltimore County (4.5)

2012: Texas Tech University (8), University of Maryland-Baltimore County (7.5), University of Texas-Dallas (7.5), NYU (1)

Pan-American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship

By Edward Scimia, About.com Guide

In the United States, major professional sports are largely fed by college athletics, where top competitors are then drafted onto professional teams (or begin individual profession sports like tennis or golf) after their collegiate careers. Of course, this isn’t exactly how chess works, but the importance of collegiate competition helps explain why the Pan-American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship has become a relatively high profile event on the US chess calendar.

Normally hosted in December at a United States university, the Pan-American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship – also known as the World Series of College Chess – is a six-round, team Swiss System tournament where the team that scores the most team points (one point for a team win, a half-point for a drawn match) is declared the winner. The tournament also serves as a qualifier for the President’s Cup, which has become known as the Final Four of College Chess. Any college or university from North America, South America, Central America or the Caribbean can participate, though historically, only schools from the United States and Canada have won the tournament.

History of the Pan-American

The Pan-Am Intercollegiate Championship was first held in 1946 as a small tournament that mostly featured teams from the northeast – particularly those in and around New York City. In fact, the first nine tournaments featured seven winners from New York City (Columbia University three times, CCNY twice, and Fordham University and Brooklyn College once each), with only the back-to-back wins by the University of Chicago in 1956 and 1958 breaking the streak.

Originally held every two years, the tournament became an annual tradition in 1962, around the same time when the fields began to expand. Until that time, about a dozen teams normally competed, but then number doubled on average over the next decade. When Bobby Fischer rose to prominence, those numbers expanded to an even greater extent, with a record 123 teams participating in the 1975 Championship – one that saw the University of Nebraska and Harvard University share the top prize.

In more recent years, schools that offer scholarships to chess players have dominated the Pan-Am Championship. While this trend began as early as the 1970s, it truly blossomed in the 1990s when the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) began offering scholarships to outstanding chess players – including those who were not of the age of typical college student-athletes. Today, schools including UMBC, the University of Texas at Dallas, Webster University and Texas Tech field teams of titled players. While rules have been tightened to encourage college chess teams to field squads that better represent their student populations, these scholarship programs have still led to the creation of powerhouse teams for those few schools that do recruit chess talent.

Through 2012, UMBC and UTD share the record for most times winning or sharing first place in the Pan-Am, each having achieved the feat ten times.

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You Should Put Antivirus Software on Your Phone

There were nearly 15,000 new smartphone malware programs detected between April and June 2012. It's time to get some protection.

It seems like Android viruses have been more and more common lately, but I don't know anyone who's gotten one. Still, I don't want my phone getting infected. Is it worth installing antivirus software?

Short answer: yes. Longer answer: probably, unless you spend so much time vetting each app you install that you're completely confident it's legitimate and virus-free.

It was only a matter of time before malware makers started targeting smartphones, which emphasize Internet use—including downloading apps. According to a Pew Internet report released last July, 55 percent of cellphone owners go online using their phones. So for malware and spyware makers, getting onto smartphones is savvy business. Apple hasn't approved any antivirus software to be distributed through its App Store and insists that a combination of hardware, firmware, and OS features makes malware attacks virtually impossible—and so far, that closed system has kept viruses out. Meanwhile, malware is thriving on Android devices. There are two primary types of Android viruses: Trojans, which send SMS messages to premium numbers, and spyware, which sends information—contacts, for instance—from the phone to the spyware's developer. These kinds of viruses are proliferating quickly. According to Kaspersky Lab, a maker of antivirus software, there were 14,923 new smartphone malware programs detected between April and June 2012.

While there's nothing that will protect your phone completely, there are plenty of decent antivirus apps, and many of them are free. Last March, AV-Test, an independent antivirus research institute, tested the efficacy of 41 apps against 20 pieces of malware and spyware. Free apps from Avast, Dr.Web, Kaspersky, and Lookout were among the Top 10 most effective, detecting 90 percent or more of the malware introduced. In general, to guard against that other 10 percent—and for malware that hasn't yet been identified by app developers—don't download unofficial versions of apps, and try to get apps only through the Google Play store. In other words, use common sense.

TAGS: apple, google, Apps, cyber security, iphone, Android, smartphones, antivirus software

Read more: You Should Put Antivirus Software on Your Phone - Android Virus Malware - Popular Mechanics 

Surveillance State: Who's Spying on You?

Every move we make is subject to digital prying eyes, and once your data has been collected, there's no telling where it might end up. Here's who's looking at you, kid.

Read more: Surveillance State: Who's Spying on You? - Popular Mechanics 

Hackers

State-sponsored computer spies, hacker collectives, criminals, and random trolls all mine the Internet for personal data. Some hackers trick users into giving up personal info; others steal it from government and business databases.

Online Services

Searches and online email accounts provide rich sources of data for advertisers; weak password protection can also make personal online accounts prime targets for hackers.

Social Networks

Even if you are restrictive with your privacy settings, social services such as Facebook, Google+, and Twitter follow you beyond their own websites—everywhere there is a Like, Tweet, or other recommendation button, the sites can track you.

Personal Computers

The nexus for most online snooping, PCs can be watched to monitor your browsing habits or taken over outright by spyware, enabling remote access to all of your personal files and control of the device itself.

Law Enforcement

In the past 12 years, law enforcement agencies have been granted vast surveillance powers through changes in both the law and the technology available to them. Local, state, and federal authorities routinely access records about customers from private industry as well.

Cameras

Both the quantity and capability of surveillance cameras have increased dramatically in the past decade. Modern license plate readers can process 1800 plates per minute, and facial recognition systems such as the one used by the Pennsylvania Justice Network can automatically match faces from surveillance footage to mug shots in criminal databases.

Cell Towers

Cell companies collect data every time a mobile phone accesses a tower, whether or not a call is made. That leaves a time-coded trail of user movement accessible to law enforcement.

Smartphones

The gold standard of personal tracking devices, smartphones have embedded GPS, are Internet-connected, and can run software. They allow location and behavior to be tracked through your cellular provider, by the device manufacturer, and by the developers of the apps you install.

Companies

Customer data is big business—for targeted advertising, sales leads, and behavioral analysis. Some firms collect data directly from customers; others use data aggregators, which amass bigger, richer databases from multiple sources. That information is sometimes hacked due to substandard security, and much of it is subject to subpoena by law enforcement.

 

Online Stores

Retailers such as Amazon and Apple's iTunes have made customer profiling part of their business strategy. Many stores use cookies, pixel tags, and Web beacons to track you to other sites as well—so the product you browsed at one site shows up as an ad at another.

Credit Cards

Banks and credit card companies routinely sell your shopping data to marketers. Even the feds can sniff your purchases in real time via a warrantless "hotwatch" request.

Read more: Surveillance State: Who's Spying on You? - Popular Mechanics 

Have your accounts been compromised? Find out.

What is PwnedList?

PwnedList is a tool that allows an average person to check if their online accounts have been compromised. The site started out as small research project with a rather simple premise. To discover how many compromised accounts can be harvested programatically in just a couple of hours. Well, needless to say, the results were astonishing. In just under 2 hours we had close to 30,000 accounts, complete with logins and passwords. The truly scary part, however, was the quality of data we were able to collect in such a short amount of time. The accounts we were able to retrieve consisted of email services, social media sites, merchants and even financial institutions. It was clear that something had to be done.

At that moment PwnedList was born. We wanted to create a simple one-click service to help the public verify if their accounts have been compromised as a part of a corporate data breach, a malicious piece of software sneaking around on their computers, or any other form of security compromise. The purpose of this project is hopefully to raise security awareness, encourage users to be more proactive about handling their personal security in cyberspace and at the same time help people monitor their accounts for potential compromises.

About us

PwnedList is a quickly growing startup service created by a group of security researchers from various industries. You can contact us through our contact page our reach out to us via Twitter @PwnedList.

Frequently Asked Questions

• What does the word 'pwned' mean?
• The word pwned comes from the hacker jargon 'pwn', meaning to compromise or control, specifically another computer (server or PC), web site, gateway device, or application. It is synonymous with one of the definitions of hacking or cracking. The past tense and past participle of 'pwn' is often spelled as 'pwned'. Hence the name PwnedList, meaning compromised list, or in our case a list of compromised accounts. Read more.
• Is this a phishing site? How can I possibly trust you?
• No, this is not a phishing site. PwnedList was started as a project by security researchers who wanted address the current state of web security and raise public awareness of data breaches that have become a daily occurrence. You can read more about us in our "About Us" section, featured above. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions or concerns.
• Are the emails I enter stored on your servers?
• Absolutely not. Any data you enter into the search box is used once and only once, for our database lookup. The data never leaves our server and is never stored in any form. Don't believe us? You don't have to. The query box on our front page also takes SHA-512 hashes are input. So you never have to type in cleartext data if you don't want to. Go ahead and use any widely available SHA-512 generator to hash your data and use it as input. Here's a couple to try: one and two. Or find your own.
• Where does your data come from?
• We have two principal sources of data. One is the manual collection of data from account dumps made by various hacker groups. Every week we spend a fair amount of time researching possible new security breaches and trying to collect any resulting data dumps. The other source is our automated harvesting system that is able to spider certain places on the internet, identify potential account dumps and import them into our database, all without human intervention. In fact, almost 40% of our data comes from automated harvesting.
• How often do you update your database?
• We update our database at least once every 24 hours. In addition to manually collecting any hacker data dumps we can get our hands on we have built advanced automated harvesters that download and process new data every 24 hours without any human intervention.
• How many entries do you have in your database?
• As of Jan 21st, 2013, we have 29,301,864 entries.

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e-mail address & password combinations collected

2,118 credentials leaks collected
966,231,281 passwords collected
168,602,891 emails collected 

Use the largest database of stolen credentials to identify and secure vulnerable accounts before you become a victim of fraud.

Business

Individual

Have your accounts been compromised? Find out.

PwnedList is a tool that allows an average person to check if their accounts have been compromised. You can read more about where our data comes from here. Just enter an email address associated with any of your accounts to see if it's on our list. Data entered is not stored, re-used, or given to any third parties. Don't trust us? You can also use a SHA-512 hash of your email as input. Just don't forget to lowercase all characters first.

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