Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Douglas L Beck

Yi-Min Wang

Chad E Verbowski

Ming Ma

Chun Beng Goh

Youhong Lu

Bradford Daniels

Jia Hua

Ilya Khorosh

Architectures of numbers of microphones and their positioning in a device for sound source direction estimation and source separation are presented. The directions of sources are front, back, left, right, top, and bottom of the device, and can be determined by amplitude and phase differences of microphone signals with proper microphone positioning. The source separation is to separate the sound coming from different directions from the mix of sources in microphone signals. This can be done with blind source separation (BSS), independent component analysis (ICA), and beamforming (BF) technologies. The device can perform many kinds of audio enhancements for the device. For example, it can perform noise reduction for communications; it can choose a source from a desired direction to perform speech recognition; and it can correct sound perceiving directions in microphones and generate desired sound images like stereo audio output. In addition, with source separation, 2.1, 5.1, 7.1, and other audio encoding and surround sound effects can be straightforward.

Microphone placement for sound source direction estimation

A network can be explored to investigate exploitive behavior. For example, network sites may be actively explored by a honey monkey system to detect if they are capable of accomplishing exploits, including browser-based exploits, on a machine. Also, the accomplishment of exploits may be detected by tracing events occurring on a machine after visiting a network site and analyzing the traced events for illicit behavior. Alternatively, site redirections between and among uniform resource locators (URLs) may be explored to discover relationships between sites that are visited.

Honey monkey network exploration

An exemplary method includes providing a typographically erroneous domain name, tracing the domain name where tracing includes entering the domain name as part of a URL and recording one or more subsequent URLs, identifying a domain parking service for the domain name based at least in part on information in one of the recorded URLs, determining client identification information in at least one of the recorded URLs where the client identification information identifies a customer of the domain parking service and blocking one or more domain names based at least in part on the client identification information. Other exemplary technologies are also disclosed.

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Bothell, WA, United States of America

Douglas L Beck