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Super skyscrapers, “eartherscrapers” and underwater cities predicted in a new Internet of Things report
The Internet of Things (IoT) could help us take space holidays, live underwater and printer food in the next 100 years.
According to a report commissioned by Samsung’s smart home SmartThings subsidiary, people will be living either in mega-tall buildings or “Earthscrapers”, huge structures that tunnel 25 storeys underground. Some of us could even get in the sea and live in underwater cities, using the water itself to create breathable atmospheres and generating hydrogen fuel through the process.
A world of the future report wouldn’t be complete without flying cars. It said that personal flying drones would replace cars of today and could be strong enough to carry entire homes around the world for holidays.
The report predicts that in the future, we will print out homes and furniture from locally recycled material. Not only that, but we will also be able to print out Michelin-starred meals in minutes.
Our homes, powered by the Internet of Things, will be filled with smart walls that change according to our moods. Home “medi-pods” will diagnose us when we are ill and supply medicine or a remote surgeon if needed.
Internet of Things changing lives
The SmartThings Future Living Report was authored by a team of leading academics including TV presenter and one of the UK’s leading space scientists, Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, award-winning futurist architects and lecturers at the University of Westminster Arthur Mamou-Mani and Toby Burgess, as well as pioneering urbanists Linda Aitken and Els Leclerq.
Space scientist Maggie Aderin-Pocock, who co-authored the report, said: “Our lives today are almost unrecognisable from those a century ago. The internet has revolutionised the way we communicate, learn and control our lives.
“Just 25 years ago, technology like SmartThings would have been inconceivable, yet today, developments like this let us monitor, control and secure our living spaces with the touch of a smartphone.
“Over the next century we will witness further seismic shifts in the way we live and interact with our surroundings – working on The SmartThings Future Living Report with a panel of industry experts, has allowed me to explore what these could be.
James Monighan, UK managing director of Samsung SmartThings, which commissioned the report, says: “The smart home revolution will have massively positive implications on how we live. Our homes are becoming smarter and can now detect the presence of things like people, pets, smoke, humidity, lighting, and moisture. And this is just the beginning.
“Just as the technology driving the Internet has spread to smartphones and smart homes, the smart home revolution is destined to spread to larger communities and countries. By simply turning lights and heating off when we don’t use them, we can reduce emissions.
“By being able to better monitor and secure our homes, we can reduce crime. By better monitoring the habits of aging relatives, we help them to achieve greater independence and a higher quality of life.”
The Internet of Things report was published to co-incide with the announcement that SmartThings will begin to work with hundreds of products from a wide range of brands, as well as working with all of Samsung’s TVs as well as refrigerators, washer machines, ovens, and robot vacuum cleaners.
Ron Lifton, senior enterprise solutions manager at Netscout, told Internet of Business that within the next few years, IoT and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) will become very large and very complex IT infrastructures, supporting mission critical systems and billions of devices.
“Companies cannot afford mistakes that will impact communications, processes, productivity, or the security of workers. Having the right service assurance platform in place to quickly identify and trace the root cause of a performance problem will be essential to the success of IoT and IIoT,” he said. | <urn:uuid:e4847409-8fd1-4640-901e-c02117dd0e1d> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://internetofbusiness.com/the-internet-of-things-could-help-us-live-underwater/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501170823.55/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104610-00364-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931792 | 851 | 2.640625 | 3 |
Body sensors are small electronic sensors that may be implanted in the human body and can collect and relay information about the health state of the body to a computer, often using wireless signals. The amount of information that can be collected is growing and the types of information is highly varied. The information is being collected by individuals about themselves and by groups, often with the intent of improving body condition or performance.
Modern man is surrounded by a multitude of sensors. Today’s sensors are simple and made for specific purposes, like measuring temperature, balance, build-up of smoke, or tyre pressure. The common trait of the sensors is that they are all embedded in a closed system.
Now researchers at the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, are developing sensors for the future. Their size decreases. They are more robust than today’s sensors, communicate wirelessly, and even reduce energy consumption to a minimum. But more important: The researchers are connecting all sensors to the Future Internet.
Almost everything we do today generates data. We can learn a lot about ourselves by tracking that data. In the past this type of data-collection was possible but difficult, but today capturing data about ourselves is often trivially easy.
Self-tracking is not new. We kept track of our weight or other metrics by writing it down. Today we can measure and record those kinds of things much easier, more precisely and sometimes automatically — like using a scale that transmits our weight to a spreadsheet wirelessly, or wearing an always-on glucose meter.
A University of Maine track and field coach has teamed up with exercise science and mechanical engineering researchers to improve the performance of his athletes.
A study being conducted on the UMaine campus is employing scientific methods to identify the timing and magnitude of muscle activation during a variety of weight room exercises, as well as movement during competition. The data being collected will help determine the relativity and effectiveness of current training methods and aid in their modification to increase effectiveness. | <urn:uuid:2c22769f-b7ec-4406-acbe-28b0a3bc75fb> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.hackingtheuniverse.com/singularity/knowledge-engineering/body-sensors | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501169776.21/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104609-00360-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956189 | 402 | 3.71875 | 4 |
Even as some argue exactly what it is, functional programming keeps attracting developers. And three of the most popular functional languages -- Clojure, F#, and Scala -- are on tap for improvements.
Functional programming has a core appeal for some developers, says Scala founder Martin Odersky: "The programmers in that segment like functional programming because it makes code clearer, better structured, and it prevents many classes of errors." But some argue that functional programming leads to less-efficient software.
Functional programming also requires thinking about programming in a new way, says David Stephens, Microsoft's program manager for .Net and a spokesman for F#. Abstractions can be an issue: "When you make code more abstract, when you're moving further away from manipulating bits and explicitly going through loops, it can take more time to understand these abstractions."
What is a functional language, exactly?
In its most basic terms, functional programming is about treating computation as mathematical functions. In addition to languages billed as functional from the start, the likes of Java and C# have become more functional by adding support for lambda expressions.
But a precise definition of functional programming can be hard to pin down. The Clojurefun blog cites several definitions it believes are incorrect, including defining functional programming as enabling a functional style with higher-order functions or a language supporting lambdas. It says the correct definition is a language emphasizing functions and immutable data.
But the Clojure blog's preferred definition isn't necessarily correct, others say. "The author picks one, which incidentally fits Clojure best -- no wonder, this is a Clojure blog," Scala's Odersky says. "I have an interpretation that is close to his, but not the same."
A function, Odersky says, is a piece of code that maps inputs to outputs and has no other effects beyond that. "It's the mathematical definition of function we are using here. Sometimes these functions are called 'pure,' to distinguish them from, say, functions in C." A functional language focuses on programming with pure functions, making it easy and powerful to do so, says Odersky, who founded Typesafe, the provider of the Typesafe JVM application development platform.
Functional programming can be combined with other paradigms, he notes. "For instance, functional goes really well with object-oriented. Scala is a functional language in that sense. I agree that just having lambdas does not make a language functional; it is necessary but not sufficient."
Clojure developer Rich Hickey, who's also CTO at systems developer Cognitect, concurs with a main contention of the Clojure blog. "The article correctly points out that first-class or higher-order functions are not what functional programming is all about. Functional programming is about making programming more like mathematics," he says. That says, there still remains a spectrum of definitions for functional programming, Hickey says.
Microsoft's Stephens sees functional capabilities extending beyond languages alone. "The most popular functional programming language in the world is Excel," he says. A simple Excel worksheet might have a column with a bunch of values in it, such as A1 X 2. "That's a pure function on A1, and A1 doesn't change, so you're computing values from that existing data."
Microsoft's Language-Integrated Query (Linq) technology also provides for functional programming, he says. "Almost every programming language now is adopting features from functional languages."
Stephens cites immutable data as critical to functional programming. Concurrency -- programs with multiple threads operating on data simultaneously -- also benefits from immutable data, he notes. "We call [F#] a functional-first language because it comes from a heritage of other languages." It also supports object-oriented programming and operates with C# and Visual Basic, he says.
Clojure's Hickey sees adoption of functional languages as a response to the increasing pressure facing developers, who have to take on bigger problems these days. "To do so, they must reduce the incidental complexity of their programs. It is now widely recognized that pervasive state and side effects are a primary source of complexity and bugs in programs," Hickey says. "While it is possible to reduce the amount of state in programs written in nonfunctional languages, it is dramatically easier and faster to do so in a language that makes functional programming idiomatic and the default."
What's next for the three top functional languages
The 13-year-old Scala is a primary language in data science, says Scala founder Odersky. Supported on the JVM, it has an estimated 400,000 to 500,000 users. Plans in the short term call for it to be optimized for Java 8, in which bytecode instructions from the latest standard Java upgrade would enable Scala to generate more efficient code.
The nine-year-old Clojure, also based on the JVM, has been used in finance, retail, software, and entertainment, Hickey says. "It's been applied in diverse application areas such as transaction processing and analysis, big data, network operations, predictive analytics, search, security, and consumer offerings."
The 11-year-old F# was founded by Microsoft Research by Don Syme and is overseen by the F# Foundation. It is used in a wide range of applications and runs on Linux, OS X, Android, iOS, Windows, and browsers. "What we're working on now is the make it work with .Net Core," an open source, cross-platform modular version of the .Net Framework, Stephens says. String interpolation, making it easier to write strings, is on the drawing board.
This story, "Functional languages: What they are, where they're going" was originally published by InfoWorld. | <urn:uuid:1187a373-bf55-4999-a0b1-2e7142131cb8> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.itnews.com/article/3033912/application-development/functional-languages-what-they-are-where-theyre-going.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171416.74/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00412-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941269 | 1,177 | 2.71875 | 3 |
Scientists are working with nanoballoons that are popped by lasers to target chemotherapy treatments directly at cancerous tumors.
The new nanotechnology-based treatment could make chemotherapy treatments more effective, reduce harm to healthy tissue and capture proteins and molecules that aid in cancer growth.
Researcher Jonathan Lovell, right, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University at Buffalo, is working on a way to deliver chemotherapy drugs with nanoballoons that are popped with a laser. Here he works with undergraduate student Kevin Carter. Photo: Douglas Levere/University at Buffalo)
"Why PoP-liposomes, or nanoballoons, open in response to an otherwise harmless red laser is still a bit of a mystery to us, but we have definitely unearthed a new and unique phenomenon," said Jonathan Lovell, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University at Buffalo, part of the State University of New York, in a statement. "Its potential for improving how we treat cancer is immense."
The nanoballoons, which are about 1,000 times thinner than a human hair, are made of porphyrin, an organic compound, and phospholipid, a fat similar to vegetable oil. The balloons are designed to hold chemotherapy drugs and are delivered to the patient intraveneously.
Researchers then hit the nanoballoons with a red laser when they reach the cancer target. When hit with the laser, the balloons pop open, delivering the drugs.
According to the university, since the chemotherapy drugs travel through the patient's system enclosed in nanoballoons, the drugs' interaction with, and damaging effects on healthy tissue are greatly diminished.
However, the nanoballoons don't just deliver medication.
Once the chemo drugs are released, the balloons then capture proteins and molecules that might induce cancer growth, the university said.
Doctors could then retrieve the nanoballoons and their contents by drawing the patient's blood or taking a biopsy.
"The nanoballoon is [like] a submarine," Lovell said. "The drug is the cargo. We use a laser to open the submarine door, which releases the drug. We close the door by turning the laser off. We then retrieve the submarine as it circulates through the bloodstream."
So far the treatment has only been tested on mice, though the university said human trials can start within five years.
Researchers have been using nanotechnology in other ways to fight cancer.
Last fall, scientists from Cornell University and MIT announced that they were using nanotechnology to treat cancer.
The Cornell team paired nanoparticles with infrared heat to kill colorectal cancer cells. At MIT, scientists were focused on breast cancer, using nanoparticles to carry chemotherapy drugs along with a genetic messenger to weaken the cancer's resistance to the medicine.
A year earlier, another MIT research team reported using nanotechnology to detect cancer sooner, increasing the odds of beating the disease.
This article, Scientists battle cancer with nanoballoons and lasers, was originally published at Computerworld.com.
Sharon Gaudin covers the Internet and Web 2.0, emerging technologies, and desktop and laptop chips for Computerworld. Follow Sharon on Twitter at @sgaudin, on Google+ or subscribe to Sharon's RSS feed. Her email address is email@example.com.
Read more about emerging technologies in Computerworld's Emerging Technologies Topic Center.
This story, "Scientists Battle Cancer with Nanoballoons and Lasers" was originally published by Computerworld. | <urn:uuid:f8c12d2c-debd-4878-8548-a63a4c43baa2> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.cio.com/article/2377359/healthcare/scientists-battle-cancer-with-nanoballoons-and-lasers.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171706.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00588-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938853 | 727 | 3.390625 | 3 |
Machine Learning: Why Should You Care?
Learning, at the heart of it, is what has helped advance our civilization in all arenas. We learnt what worked and what didn’t and applied those lessons in ways that brought out both incremental improvements and disruptive innovations. Human learning has been the center-piece, the guiding beacon, if you would, in training our minds how to think smarter and act wiser: one step at a time. Machine learning really stems from that philosophy that is grounded in learning on the go, guided by data. Distinction here is that application of lessons learnt or insights captured from past behavior to improve future performance is done without human intervention. Development of an algorithm oriented or mathematical formula based approach lends itself to fine tuning when it comes to machines learning. The bias is clearly towards experimentation before instrumentation. Expected benefits could include self-improvement and self-healing techniques and principles, suggested by data, in a guided fashion.
Why Should It Be Now?
In ‘The Attacker’s Advantage: Turning Uncertainty into Breakthrough Opportunities’, renowned business guru and bestselling author Ram Charan argued that digitization and integration of technologies through software and hardware have significantly impacted many businesses. But, much more is to come. He went on suggesting that specific skills would be required to spot the disruption on their way and take advantage of those by taking appropriate next steps. Although not entirely comfortable with it yet, we have grudgingly begun to recognize uncertainty as being ubiquitous – in the ways we consume products and services, perform transactions, expect interactions, collaborate with each other, and make decisions. Structural changes along many dimensions are moving rapidly and nature of interplay among them is at best unknown.
Humans, with their limited processing capability, in the face of such a powerful combination of forces of change, will struggle to meet business demands at the pace expected. The bedrock of models leveraged by human experts to help predict outcomes comes from innovations in the field of statistics dating back to 19th and 20th centuries. That was a time when data was limited. Modern world presents an entirely different scenario with petabytes and exbaytes of data moving at a very high speed. This is where machine learning could provide a helping hand to our mission: predict customer churn, identify next segment to launch a product for, or create a drug in preparation of an anticipated outbreak. Machine learning algorithms are inherently not constricted by any preset assumption of statistical models of past centuries when size of data sets was much smaller.
How Could It Actually Help?
In a McKinsey report, titled, “An Executive Guide to Machine Learning” it is stated that European banks have built micro-targeted models to accurately forecast service cancellation or default on their loans, and then determine how best to intervene. Report goes on to state that more than a dozen banks have already replaced older statistical modeling approaches with machine learning techniques. Most of them have seen improvements between 10 and 20 percent in new sales or reduced churns.
Genetic algorithms and neural networks were early path-setters of machine learning technology with advanced heuristic based search algorithms. Heuristic, or best guess based search technique, essentially evaluates all available paths one could take from a specific point and suggests the option that has the highest likelihood of success. However, such an approach focuses on finding an acceptable solution, where an optimal or perfect solution is either impossible or improbable given complexity of the environment and data sets. Speed is of the essence in finding such a solution or determining immediate next step in the overall path. When we encounter big data realm, we come across similar complexity challenges. Cutting through the noise to find the signal within a reasonable amount of time and cost could drive our efforts more than finding the perfect solution at a great cost. Even the concept of ‘reasonable time’ varies based on use cases; but no matter what, demand for detecting insights faster is increasing with every passing day.
Prerequisite: Let’s Visit Data Quality, Again!
In order to have a successful machine learning strategy and program deployed, an organization needs to develop a robust algorithmic and/or mathematical approach for the best heuristic type capability. This in turn requires availability of a huge set of data that is useful and reliable to train the algorithm in the first place. Without such reliable data in huge supply, the learning capability will be limited to the vagaries of data velocity. Development and implementation of a trusted machine learning capability will require an end to end data management strategy. Such an approach will ensure access to troves of data from all sources and sizes and then make it useful in a clean, safe, and connected fashion. Aided with this capability, an organization will go on leveraging data from describing a story to predicting how the story might unfold to finally prescribing what to do under different scenarios.
For all of the high end capability that data could help with, one thing is for sure, that without clean and trusted data, this journey won’t be fruitful. Implementing an exotic data mining algorithm or connecting to newer data sources would only provide marginal benefits as compared with what can be made useful with reliable data. Machine learning technique when paired with such data management hygiene and quality of available data, will truly yield the competitive benefits to an organization – spotting the opportunities to disrupt and seizing on them. Is your organization ready for machine learning? Do you have any current plans? | <urn:uuid:65c1f7c9-f041-454e-83ae-0d2a198779a4> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://blogs.informatica.com/2015/06/30/machine-learning-why-should-you-care/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171706.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00588-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951707 | 1,102 | 2.640625 | 3 |
Nearly half of all Americans are looking forward to the time when they can live in a city where all the vehicles are driverless.
And one-third think that might happen in the next decade .
Those are the results of a study conducted by Intel that surveyed 12,000 people in eight countries, including the U.S., Brazil, China, France and India, in July and August 2013.
According to the survey, 44% of U.S. respondents said they would like to live in a city, where cars, buses and trains operate autonomously. Forty percent said they thought driverless vehicles would cut down the number of traffic accidents, while 38% said it would decrease traffic congestion and 34% said it would reduce carbon emissions.
Just over a third of the U.S. respondents, 34%, said they expect to see driverless cars on the roads by 2023.
Steve Brown, Intel's chief evangelist, told Computerworld he was surprised by the survey results.
"They're probably overly optimistic, but it's nice to see that they're excited about the idea and think it will happen soon," Brown said. "I think it tells us that people are excited about a future that has some intelligence in it to make the world more convenient, more efficient and safer. They like having the ability for cars to talk to each other on the road, sharing information about traffic jams, about accidents and changing routes."
While Americans have a long history of loving their cars and being sticklers about privacy, many say they are willing to not only let their cars do the driving, but they're also willing to forfeit some privacy to see a better commute, Brown said.
According to the Intel study, 54% of those surveyed would be willing to let an intelligent system determine what route everyone on the road would take to their destinations if it meant overall commute time would be reduced by 30%. That response held even if it meant the respondent's own commute time would increase.
"The survey found that Americans are willing to share information with and relinquish control to their city for the common good," Intel noted. "If ambulances, fire trucks and police cars could use the fastest route based on real-time data, 59% would opt into a city program that puts a sensor on their car."
Fifty percent of Americans also said they would allow the government to put a sensor on their cars to help them with intelligent parking.
"It's nice to save yourself time, but from the city's point of view, there's some percentage of traffic that's just people circling around just trying to find parking," Brown said. "Think of the efficiency you could get if there's a parking space booked ahead for you. Your car would know your calendar and would plan ahead and book a place in a parking spot that meets your personal criteria, based on safety, cost and distance from your target."
Brown also talked about a future in which cars would also communicate with traffic signals.
"You car can talk to the lights and say, "Hey, I'm coming your way. Are you green or red?" noted Brown. "And the light might respond, "I'm currently red but I'll be green in five seconds." That way the car can hit the right speed to hit all the green lights."
In its study, Intel also noted that 60% of Americans initially said they had privacy concerns about living in a city where buildings, vehicles and other physical surroundings gather and use anonymous information about what people do and how they do it.
However, if people are told that the information shared would reduce city costs, improve air quality and cut down on energy consumption, then 61% said they would get behind it.
"I think when it comes to privacy, really what we're talking about is an exchange of data," Brown said. "If I'm willing to give up information, I want to make sure who I'm giving it to is trustworthy. And if I perceive that the value I get back in return is worth it, then people are more willing to opt in. It's all about that value exchange. It has to be fair and trusted. And if it is, then people will do it."
This article, Half of Americans want to live in a smart city with driverless cars, was originally published at Computerworld.com.
Sharon Gaudin covers the Internet and Web 2.0, emerging technologies, and desktop and laptop chips for Computerworld. Follow Sharon on Twitter at @sgaudin, on Google+ or subscribe to Sharon's RSS feed. Her email address is firstname.lastname@example.org.
Read more about emerging technologies in Computerworld's Emerging Technologies Topic Center. | <urn:uuid:08b6c0f5-96d7-4c1f-8eba-0eca7fc168ef> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/538548/half_americans_want_live_smart_city_driverless_cars/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501173405.40/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104613-00288-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980962 | 963 | 2.546875 | 3 |
Intel unveils experimental 'cloud computer' chip
- By Herb Torrens
- Dec 07, 2009
Intel pushed the outer limits of computing this week by unveiling a new experimental processor it described as a single-chip cloud computer.
The chip features 48-core processor technology developed by Intel's Tera-scale Computing Research Program. It was co-created by Intel labs in India, Germany and the United States.
The company hopes to engage researchers in the coming year by providing more than 100 of the experimental chips for research and development. Those efforts will include developing new software and programming models based on the chip's technology.
Microsoft is also involved in the research, said Dan Reed, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Extreme Computing Group. The company is exploring market opportunities in "intelligent resource management, system software design, programming models and tools, and future application scenarios," Reed said in a released statement.
The chip's connection to cloud computing was rather vaguely expressed in Intel's announcement. It states that computers and networks can be integrated on a single piece of 45 nanometer, high-k metal-gate silicon, which is about the size of a postage stamp.
The smaller size might be useful for crowded data centers. In addition, the chip might introduce new data input, processing and output possibilities.
"Computers are very good at processing data, but it requires humans to input that data and then analyze it," said Shane Rau, a program director at analyst firm IDC. "Intel is looking to speed up the computer-to-human interaction by basically getting the human element out of the way."
According to Intel, that kind of interaction could lead to the elimination of keyboards, mouse devices and even joysticks for computer gaming. Intel's announcement even suggested that future computers might be able to read brain waves, allowing users to control functions by simply thinking about them.
However, Rau said there's still room for slowed-down human processes.
"This process needs to be thought out very carefully, and that's one area where the slow [input/output] of humans may be an advantage," he said.
Intel developed the chip based on the company’s recognition, mining and synthesis (RMS) approach, Rau said.
"The technology announcement today is similar to Intel's announcement regarding an 80-core processor last year," Rau said in a telephone interview. "It's basically an effort known as RMS by Intel that puts silicon in the hands of the people and institutions that can create the building blocks for future computing devices and software."
The chip is only designed for research efforts at the moment, an Intel spokesperson said.
"There are no product plans for this chip. We will never sell it, so there won't be a price for it," the Intel spokesperson wrote in an e-mail message. "We will give about a hundred or more to industry partners like Microsoft and academia to help us research software development and learn on a real piece of hardware, [of] which nothing of its kind exists today."
Herb Torrens is a freelance writer based in Southern California. | <urn:uuid:c47aab38-17d6-47bd-8793-eecc9a7f63f3> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://gcn.com/articles/2009/12/07/intel-48-core-cloud-computer-chip.aspx | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501174276.22/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104614-00464-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957103 | 642 | 2.640625 | 3 |
NASA projects could speed transmissions from the final frontier
- By Michael Hardy
- Jan 27, 2010
While social-media mavens and space buffs thrilled to the first Tweets from outer space last week, NASA was working on the kind of network improvements that will be necessary if astronauts are to use any online tools more demanding than Twitter.
According to Space.com, a news Web site that covers NASA and other space-related topics, NASA is trying to fuse its three aging networks into a faster, more efficient data carrier. Until it increases bandwidth, space explorers, whether human or robotic, will have to forgo things such as posting high-definition videos to YouTube.
The overhaul is expected to increase data rates from space by a factor of 50, "so that a Mars mission squeaking by on a few megabits per second might someday get as much as 600 megabits per second, if not more," Jeremy Hsu wrote on Space.com.
The speed increase isn't just for providing exciting images to earthlings. It will also advance NASA's scientific mission, Hsu reported.
"Imagine what you can accomplish with a single mission instead of several spacecraft flying over several years to collect the data," said Badri Younes, NASA's deputy associate administrator for Space Communications and Navigation, who was quoted in the article.
NASA has also been working to improve communications on other fronts. Late last year, the agency announced the first successful tests of an "interplanetary Internet," through a partnership with Google. Using software called Disruption-Tolerant Networking, engineers transmitted dozens of space images to and from a NASA science spacecraft that was about 20 million miles from Earth, according to an article in SatNews Daily.
Technology journalist Michael Hardy is a former FCW editor. | <urn:uuid:b8036e30-fc73-4382-95a2-af90e10600a5> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://fcw.com/articles/2010/01/27/interplanetary-internet.aspx | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501170249.75/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104610-00056-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953775 | 366 | 2.890625 | 3 |
I'm currently a student working on my Bachelor's in Network management. I have a few certifications and I'm working towards MCTS, and MCITP. Although I've had some experience (very little really) and I passed the exams for these certifications, I really don't know anything at all.
Anyway as I've gone through the study material for these certifications (Security+ Network+ and now 70-680 windows exam). I've become very interested in IPv6 and how it works.
So in order to resolve some of the addressing issues associated with IPv4 we've been using network address translation. So in reality most internal networks and home networks etc only have one public IP address, or very few public addresses.
With IPv6 in theory could each device have it's own public address?
Could this address then remain static? Windows 7 doesn't really take advantage of IPv6 technology yet, and while you seem to 'dual-stack' your Ipv4 address alongside an Ipv6 address. It appears that there is also a link-local address for IPv6 which would imply to me that it would work similarly to Ipv4 (using NAT on internal networks, with a separate public address).
However, given that the amount of addresses available in IPv6 is incomprehensibly large couldn't each device have it's own static public address? The implications of that are pretty staggering. Similar to a MAC address, but rout-able on the Internet. Could each device's NIC be hard-coded with a public IPv6 address?
If such a system was implemented could every device with IPv6-public addresses be setup for a direct-connection with other devices? In a global WAN ad-hoc network.
Sorry if my questions seem silly, I'm still learning. I am interested to here your thoughts, so thanks for any replies. | <urn:uuid:e822f624-0fb3-4a77-a11f-c8df4fa06336> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://networking-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=69&t=28356&view=next | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501170613.8/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104610-00232-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975002 | 387 | 2.65625 | 3 |
Thanks to NASA's now-crippled Kepler space telescope, astronomers say they now know there are tens of billions of potentially habitable, Earth-size planets in the Milky Way galaxy.
Thanks to NASA's now-crippled Kepler space telescope, astronomers say they now know there are billions of potentially habitable, Earth-size planets in the Milky Way galaxy.
That finding is a game changer, says NASA scientists, who add that it has ushered in a new era of astronomy.
"It's been nearly 20 years since the discovery of the first extrasolar planet around a normal star," said Andrew Howard, an astronomer with the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii.
"Since then, we have learned that most stars have planets of some size orbiting them, and that Earth-size planets are relatively common in close-in orbits that are too hot for life. With this, we've come home, in a sense, by showing that planets like our Earth are relatively common throughout the Milky Way Galaxy," he added.
The telescope, launched in 2009, has given scientists enough data to keep scientists busy for another two to three years.
"The Kepler mission has been spectacularly successful," said William Borucki, Kepler's principal science investigator, in a statement earlier. "The most exciting discoveries are going to come in the next few years as we analyze this data."
Those words are ringing true this week as NASA reveals information about Earth-like planets at the second Kepler Science Conference at the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif..
At the Kepler conference in 2011, the mission team announced its first confirmed planet in a habitable zone -- Kepler-22b. Since then, four more habitable zone candidates have been confirmed, including two in a single system.
A habitable zone is a relatively small area around a star in which it's not too hot or too cold for life and water to be present in liquid form if conditions are right.
This year, the Kepler team outlined data on the discovery of 833 new Earth-like candidates. Ten of the planets are less than twice the size of Earth and orbit in their sun's habitable zone.
And according to scientists at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Hawaii, Manoa, one in five of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way have planets about the size of Earth with surface temperature conducive to life.
"When you look up at the thousands of stars in the night sky, the nearest sun-like star with an Earth-size planet in its habitable zone is probably only 12 light years away and can be seen with the naked eye," said U.C. Berkeley graduate student Erik Petigura, who led the analysis of the Kepler data. "That is amazing."
Geoffrey Marcy, a professor of astronomy at Berkeley, cautioned, though, that simply because a planet is relatively close to the size of Earth and orbits in a habitable zone, doesn't mean it will hold life or even be hospitable to life.
"Some may have thick atmospheres, making it so hot at the surface that DNA-like molecules would not survive," added Marcy in a statement. "Others may have rocky surfaces that could harbor liquid water suitable for living organisms. We don't know what range of planet types and their environments are suitable for life."
For NASA, though, the data compiled by Kepler is invaluable for planning future missions that hunt for Earth-like planets that could hold life.
"For NASA, this discovery is really important, because future missions will try to take an actual picture of a planet, and the size of the telescope they have to build depends on how close the nearest Earth-size planets are," Howard said. "An abundance of planets orbiting nearby stars simplifies such follow-up missions."
Kepler may no longer be operating but its data is changing scientists' view of the galaxy.
"Stars are the building blocks of the galaxy, driving its evolution and providing safe harbors for planets," said William Chaplin, professor for astrophysics at the University of Birmingham. "To study the stars, one truly explores the galaxy and our place within it. These are data we could only have dreamed of a few years ago."
Sharon Gaudin covers the Internet and Web 2.0, emerging technologies, and desktop and laptop chips for Computerworld. Follow Sharon on Twitter at @sgaudin, or subscribe to Sharon's RSS feed . Her email address is firstname.lastname@example.org.
Read more about emerging technologies in Computerworld's Emerging Technologies Topic Center.
This story, "Earthshaking news! Milky Way may hold billions of Earth-like planets" was originally published by Computerworld. | <urn:uuid:ffccdafe-8952-4bba-a705-6e2adf95e075> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.networkworld.com/article/2171525/big-data-business-intelligence/earthshaking-news--milky-way-may-hold-billions-of-earth-like-planets.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501170613.8/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104610-00232-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939303 | 966 | 3.578125 | 4 |
The heart is a beautiful pump. While lacking the poetry of most odes to the heart, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center's project, Alya Red, pays homage to the organ by trying to model it. The task of simulating the way electrical impulses make the heart muscles contract to pump blood takes 10,000 processors.
These particular computing nodes are located in one of the world's 500 most powerful computers, which itself sits within a deconsecrated 19th-century chapel at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia.
This very 2013 arrangement came to my attention through a post by Emily Underwood at the science blog, Last Word on Nothing. An old friend of Underwood's pacemaker failed, causing him to have a stroke that robbed the man of his ability to speak.
Hundreds of thousands of computations simulate the organ's geometry, and the orientation of long muscle fibers that wring the heart when they contract. Now for the horrifying part: this requires the supercomputer to do so much math that it must break up the work among 10,000 separate processors. Even Fernando Cucchietti, a physicist who helped create the video, agrees that the heart's complexity has a dark side. At first, the video conveyed "too much wonder," he says "It was almost appalling."
Appalling wonder -- that just about says it. On good days, when I try to write about such things, I feel like an industrious housewife, tidying up cluttered corners and making clean, lemon-scented sentences. Maybe this new supercomputer model will make better pacemakers, or help devise new ways to mend my friend's broken heart. Then there are days like this, when I think about the tiny metal object that both enabled and derailed his life, and just feel speechless.
Some days, the mechanism fails. | <urn:uuid:4edfbfe1-53d3-4758-aaff-d4004d5d57bd> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.nextgov.com/health/2013/01/video-computational-model-human-heart/60439/?oref=ng-HPriver | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501170875.20/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104610-00408-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946561 | 377 | 2.78125 | 3 |
The Cloud Comes To Research Papers
Advances in cloud computing have been grabbing headlines and exciting tech lovers more and more frequently over the past few years. But much of the focus on advances in cloud computing has centered in the corporate sector (data sharing and storage capabilities, information processing systems) or in the entertainment sector (streaming music and video services et al.). While these areas do command the majority of the attention when it comes to what’s innovative in cloud computing these days, one area that is seeing a rapid influx of cloud computing is the high school classroom.
While many schools are still limited, through funding gaps or other factors, in the technologies they can offer to most students, a rapidly growing number of schools are jumping on board with various cloud computing services as new solution to a number of timeless problems in the classroom. For both teacher and student, cloud computing is rapidly becoming a new method of communication, assessment, and assignment completion, on a daily basis.
The 21st Century English Classroom
Perhaps nowhere are the effects of cloud computing felt more thoroughly than in the high school English classroom. Long a place that has resisted technological innovation and adaptation (it is the place of Shakespeare, after all), intuitive English teachers around the country are only beginning to tap into the potential for introducing cloud computing programs like Google Drive into their own instruction and projects. From daily reading checks (fill out this Google Form with your answers, kids!) to the bane of many English students’ lives, the research project, many of the common practices of the traditional literature or composition classroom are being transferred into the cloud.
What problems does this solve? For starters, student organization and accountability. With revision histories that track edits, teachers can actually visualize a student’s writing process, sometimes as it is happening live. This allows for active “coaching” of writing and grammar, a process that would otherwise not be possible in a traditional lecture setting. Aside from the ability to communicate and collaborate during the drafting of a paper, students can also store everything from sources, to works cited or bibliographies, to drafts of their paper together in their Drive folder. This allows them to work on any of those elements either at school or at home, removing the possibility of materials being left at one place or another.
Repercussions Outside the Classroom
The advances in the classroom are just one part of the story, however. Perhaps the bigger implication in the explosion of cloud computing in American education is the massive new market it would open to heavyweights like Google (who has been taking significant steps to monopolize the market already) and Apple. This has further added to the rumbles surrounding Apple’s recent struggles, as CNBC recently noted. From the portable music player, to the smartphone, to the tablet, these companies have battered each other senseless and knocked out countless also-rans along the way (Blackberry, anyone?) and seem geared toward a collision in bringing cloud computing services to schools across America. It is an interesting situation to watch develop, and the surprises should rival the rapidly growing instructional uses and organizational systems enabled by cloud computing being put in place in classrooms across the country.
By Adam Hausman
(Image Source: Shutterstock) | <urn:uuid:d34bf30b-41de-48f2-8f0c-fb3031fc8969> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://cloudtweaks.com/2013/06/the-cloud-comes-to-research-papers/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501173761.96/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104613-00636-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955028 | 657 | 2.671875 | 3 |
The statistical programming language R is the most popular statistical programming language in the world. It is used by 70 percent of data scientists, according to a Rexer Analytics study, including those at big data gravity centers such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter. In addition, thousands of university students around the world use R, and thousands more take R courses on Coursera.
Joseph Kambourakis, lead data science instructor at EMC Corporation, fielded questions from Data Informed about R’s popularity, strengths, weaknesses, and what he sees ahead for the open-source programming language.
Data Informed: Why is R so popular?
Joseph Kambourakis: It’s popular primarily because it works well and is free. R is also slightly better adapted to the way data scientists think when compared to tools such as Java or Python, which are more adapted to the way computer scientists think. The vast number of libraries and packages (available for R) really make anything possible.
What advantages does being open source give R over proprietary software?
Kambourakis: Being open source makes it much more agile and fast growing. Users can write new packages and functions at any time and much quicker than a company. There is also no limit to the number of people who can do so, whereas a proprietary software company is limited by their current number of employees. There is no hassle or time spent negotiating, updating, or maintaining software licenses. The download size is also a fraction of the size.
How quickly are user-created tools and libraries being created? Is this creation accelerating over time?
Kambourakis: In R, the user created tools and libraries are in the form of packages. There are multiple new R packages created every day. This graphic shows how dramatic this growth has been lately:
What are some business use cases R is best suited for?
Kambourakis: R is best suited for developing data models or building graphics. At this point, every business has data they should be modeling, and everyone needs graphics to help explain the models.
What are some of R’s shortcomings?
Kambourakis: Some companies don’t allow the use of open-source tools for security reasons. There is a lack of certification and product specific trainings that a company like SAS or Oracle would typically administer. There isn’t customer support, so if something goes wrong there is no one to call or help aside from message boards. (Revolution Analytics recently announced AdviseR, the first commercial support program for R – ed.)
What are some of the ways users are misusing R?
Kambourakis: I think the two biggest misuses are in how and where they use it. Using R without an integrated development environment (IDE) or graphical user interface (GUI) makes everything much harder than it needs to be. The other misuse is putting it right into production. It really should be used for developing and testing a model. Then, for production, something faster should be implemented.
Are there potential business consequences of using this tool for the wrong business problems?
Kambourakis: Thankfully, I haven’t seen this problem before. I’m sure it exists, but I haven’t heard any real horror stories comparable to things I’ve heard about other tools such as Excel and the London Whale scandal at JPMC.
Is there a simple way to evaluate if R is the proper tool for a particular business challenge?
Kambourakis: I think the data size and speed dictates most of the decisions. If it’s small data, then R is a great tool. If you have multiple gigabytes of data, then you’re likely to run out of memory. R is much slower than compiled languages such as C or Python. If you need the algorithm to run in microseconds, R likely will be too slow.
What do you see as the future of R?
Kambourakis: In the future, I really see R being the most popular and most commonly used language for any kind of mathematics or statistics. The fact that it is being taught in universities means that in the future there will be more and more students and future employees using it. The availability of functions will only continue to expand. I also think many of the problems that R currently has will be worked out. The community behind R is very dedicated and passionate.
Related on Data Informed:
Subscribe to Data Informed for the latest information and news on big data and analytics for the enterprise. | <urn:uuid:56ef1c53-1059-4c61-a4af-38cdb5be731b> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://data-informed.com/backed-passionate-users-r-enjoys-widespread-adoption/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501170253.67/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104610-00404-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943932 | 945 | 2.96875 | 3 |
One problem that every information security organization faces is how to accurately quantify the risks that they manage. In most cases, there is not enough information available to do this, but there is now enough known about data breaches to let us draw interesting conclusions, some of which may even have implications in other areas of information security.
The risk associated with an event is traditionally defined to be the average loss that the event causes. This is the basis for the annual loss expectancy (ALE) approach to risk management. Almost everyone in the field of information security learns about the ALE approach. It's even part of the CISSP Common Body of Knowledge. On the other hand, almost nobody actually uses it.
The ALE approach tells us to calculate the risk of an event by multiplying the loss that you get when the event happens and the probability of the event happening. For example, an event that causes $1 million in loss and has a 1 in 1,000 chance of happening each year represents $1,000 in risk per year, which we get by multiplying the $1 million and the probability of 1 in 1,000. (Editor's note: See Bruce Schneier's analysis of ALE in Security ROI: Fact or Fiction?)
The biggest problem with using the ALE approach in information security is that we usually know neither the loss that a particular event causes nor the chances of the event happening. The chances are probably very good that any web server has an exploitable weakness that security researchers haven't found yet, but what are the chances of one of these bugs being found in the next year? And if one is found, exactly how do you measure the damage caused by hackers exploiting it? It's hard to get good answers to questions like these, so traditional risk-management approaches have found very limited uses in information security.
In the case of data breaches, however, there is now lots of data available. The Open Security Foundation (OSF) (http://datalossdb.org/) has done an excellent job of tracking down the details of over 2,000 data breaches, and their data shows some interesting patterns. Here's a graph that shows of the history of data breaches since January 1, 2006.
It's not easy to see a pattern in this graph, but if we take logarithm of the data, we find that it's a very good match to data that you'd expect from a normal distribution, what's sometimes called a "bell curve." In particular, the logarithm of the size of data breaches is a very good match to data that has a normal distribution with a mean of 3.4 and a standard deviation of 1.2. This is shown in following graph that compares the observed sizes of data breaches with what the normal distribution predicts.
There is definitely a pattern in the number of records exposed by data breaches, and it follows a so-called lognormal distribution. It doesn't follow the normal distribution, but its logarithm does.
Interpreting this information
Knowing that the size of data breaches follows a lognormal distribution tells us some of the things that we'd like to know, but it still doesn't tell us everything that we'd like to know. This is much like what knowing the probabilities associated with flipping a coin tell us.
If we flip a coin 100 times, for example, we expect to get about 50 "heads," although we can't predict exactly which flips will come up "heads" or exactly how many of the flips will come up that way. We can also accurately estimate bounds for how many "heads" we'll see. It lets us calculate the probability of having more than 70 "heads" out of our 100 flips, for example.
Similarly, knowing that the size of data breaches follows a lognormal distribution doesn't let us predict when the next data breach will occur or how many records will be exposed when it happens, but it does let us predict what we'll see over a period of weeks or months. It lets us predict how often we'll see a data breach that exposes 1 million or more records, for example, or it lets us estimate the chances of at least one data breach happening in the next year that exposes 1 million records or more, and that's very useful information to have.
The fact that the size of data breaches follows a lognormal distribution might even tell us something about the way in which breaches happen. We get a lognormal distribution when the value that we observe is the result of the multiplication of one or more values that have a random component. Because this is true, it's natural to think that data breaches are caused by the failure of one of more security mechanisms, the effects of which multiply together to get the total effect of the breach.
This is actually a reasonable model, but lognormal distributions also occur in many other situations, and some of these can't really be interpreted this way. In particular, the following list of values follows a lognormal distribution (Eckhard Limpert, Werner Staehel and Markus Abbt, "Log-normal Distributions across the Sciences: Keys and Clues," BioScience, May 2001, Vol. 51, No. 5, pp. 341-352, available at http://stat.ethz.ch/~stahel/lognormal/bioscience.pdf), and in some of these cases it's not clear that there's some sort of multiplication of effects happening.
- The concentration of gold or uranium in ore deposits
- The latency period of bacterial food poisoning
- The age of the onset of Alzheimer's disease
- The amount of air pollution in Los Angeles
- The abundance of fish species
- The size of ice crystals in ice cream
- The number of words spoken in a telephone conversation
- The length of sentences written by George Bernard Shaw or Gilbert K. Chesterton
So although thinking of data breaches as being caused by one or more security failures that multiply in effect may actually be a useful point of view, there are also cases where the lognormal distribution appears that don't seem to have a meaningful connection to this model.
It turns out that the size of data breaches also follows Bedford's law (http://www.benfordonline.net/).
The initial digits of data that follows Benford's law aren't equally likely. Smaller initial digits are more likely than larger ones. Starting with a '1' is the most common and happens about 30 percent of the time. Starting with a '9' is the least common and happens about 5 percent of the time.
Not all data follows Benford's law, but the size of data breaches does, as the following graph shows.
Data that comes from repeated multiplications tends to follow Benford's law. To convince yourself that this is true, try tracking the growth of an investment with a 10 percent compound annual growth rate over a 30-year period. If you do this, you'll see that the value of the investment follows Benford's law. Because the size of data breaches also follows Benford's law, this might lead us to believe that the idea that data breaches are caused by a series of security failures that multiply in effect is actually a reasonable one.
Using this information
Now that we know that some aspects data breaches are predictable, how can we use this information? One way is to measure the effectiveness of industry-wide efforts to reduce data breaches. We might see the mean of the logarithm of data breach sizes decrease from 3.4 to 3.0 over time, for example. If this happens, then we have evidence that we're winning the fight against breaches. If this number increases, on the other hand, that's evidence that we're losing.
The idea that it's possible to model information security as a set of one or more mechanisms whose effects multiply together is also one that might have further applications. There's not much data available for security incidents other than data breaches, but we shouldn't be too surprised if we were to learn that the damage from other security incidents also follows a lognormal distribution. Maybe we'll have enough data one day to see if that's actually true.
What we can learn from the information that's available about data breaches doesn't quite get us to the point where we can use traditional risk management methodologies, but it gets us closer than we've ever been in the past. Don't be surprised if we learn enough about other security incidents in the next few years to make the ALE approach useful in the field of information security. Understanding the patterns in data breaches is a good first step in that direction. ##
Luther Martin is author of Introduction to Identity-Based Encryption (Information Security and Privacy Series) ; the IETF standards on IBE algorithms and their use in encrypted e-mail; and numerous reports and articles on varied information security and risk management topics. He is interested in pairing-based cryptography, and the business applications of information security and risk management. Martin is currently chief security architect at Alto, CA-based Voltage Security, Inc. (www.voltage.com). | <urn:uuid:19e14f2b-4ce6-4d9d-a8d9-b8ca636ee90c> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.csoonline.com/article/2124327/metrics-budgets/data-breaches--patterns-and-their-implications.html?source=rss_metrics_budgets | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171781.5/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00632-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949259 | 1,863 | 3.09375 | 3 |
Robots' potential to take over the world is a commonly expressed fear in the world of AI, but at least one Turing Award winner doesn't see it happening that way. Rather than replacing mankind, technology will create a new kind of human that will coexist with its predecessors while taking advantage of new tech-enabled tools.
So argued Raj Reddy, former founding director of Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute and 1994 winner of the Turing Award, at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany last week.
"I could not have predicted much of what has happened in AI," Reddy told an audience of journalists at a press conference. "Four or five things happened in AI in the last decade that I didn't think would happen in my lifetime," including achievements in language translation and AI's triumph at the game of Go.
Such victories have arrived early largely because computing power has advanced so rapidly, Reddy said, enabling capabilities that had been rejected as impossible not so long ago. Next, there will be a new step in human evolution where Homo sapiens evolves into what one might call "Homo connecticus," he said.
The new species will likely look just like us, but will be enabled in new ways by artificial intelligence and other technologies. "It might not be genetic, but rather external, through tools," Reddy said.
The next 30 to 50 years will usher in at least one more giant leap in computing power, he said. While futurist Ray Kurzweil has predicted the "singularity" around that time, leading to the demise of today's humans, "I don't think so," Reddy said.
Instead, we'll eventually see the emergence of Homo connecticus.
"They could theoretically kill everyone else, but we don't go around killing all the chimps and monkeys, even though we evolved from them," he said. "The same will be true with AI."
This new species won't be competing for the same resources the way Homo sapiens and Neanderthals did. Accordingly, "they'll leave the rest of the people alone."
Reddy doesn't expect this shift to happen within the next 100 years, but it may in the next 1,000, he said.
"We should be prepared, but we shouldn't worry about it at this point," he said. "When it happens, it will be a peaceful coexistence." | <urn:uuid:008cfc66-847e-4b3e-a8ff-9bc3d8fd20d2> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.itnews.com/article/3124467/forget-the-robocalypse-homo-connecticus-may-be-whats-coming.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501172077.66/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104612-00156-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970857 | 491 | 2.875 | 3 |
The computer virus that could cause a nuclear explosion.
Stuxnet is a major computer virus, first discovered in June 2010, which was designed to attack Siemens Step7 software running on a Windows operating system.
The worm was at first identified by security firm VirusBlokAda in mid-June 2010, and was originally called ‘Rootkit.Tmphider’.
However, Symantec called it "W32.Temphid", then later altered the name to ‘W32.Stuxnet’. Its current name comes from a splicing of keywords in the software (.stub and mrxnet.sys).
The virus was found when it accidentally spread beyond its intended target (the Natanz nuclear powerplant in Iran) due to a programming error introduced in an update. This led to the worm spreading to an engineer’s computer that had been connected to the centrifuges, then spreading further when the engineer returned home and connected his computer to the Internet.
Kaspersky Lab experts at first estimated that Stuxnet started spreading around March or April 2010, but the first variant of the worm appeared in June 2009. On 15 July, 2010, the day the worm’s existence became widely known, a distributed denial-of-service attack was made on the servers for two leading mailing lists on industrial-systems security. This attack from an unknown source, but likely related to Stuxnet, disabled one of the lists and interrupted an important source of information for power plants and factories.
Recently, though, researchers at Symantec uncovered a version of the Stuxnet computer virus that was used to attack Iran’s nuclear programme in November 2007 – developed as early as 2005 when Iran was still setting up its uranium enrichment facility.
The second variant, with substantial improvements, appeared in March 2010, apparently because its authors felt Stuxnet was not spreading fast enough. A third version, with minor improvements, appeared in April 2010. The worm contains a component with a build time-stamp from February 3, 2010. In the UK on November 25, 2010, Sky News reported that it had received information from an anonymous source at an unidentified IT security organisation that Stuxnet, or a variation of the worm, had been traded on the black market.
It is speculated to have been created by US and Israeli agencies to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.
In May 2011, the PBS program Need To Know cited a statement by Gary Samore, White House Coordinator for Arms Control and Weapons of Mass Destruction, in which he said, "we’re glad they [the Iranians] are having trouble with their centrifuge machine and that we – the US and its allies – are doing everything we can to make sure that we complicate matters for them", offering "winking acknowledgement" of US involvement in Stuxnet.
According to The Daily Telegraph, a showreel that was played at a retirement party for the head of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Gabi Ashkenazi, included references to Stuxnet as one of his operational successes as the IDF chief of staff.
On 1 June 2012, an article in The New York Times said that Stuxnet is part of a US and Israeli intelligence operation called ‘Operation Olympic Games’, started under President George W. Bush and expanded under President Barack Obama.
On 24 July 2012, an article by Chris Matyszczyk from CNET reported how the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran e-mailed F-Secure’s chief research officer Mikko Hyppönen to report a new instance of malware.
On 25 December 2012, an Iranian semi-official news agency announced there was a cyberattack by Stuxnet, this time on the industries in the southern area of the country. The virus targeted a power plant and some other industries in Hormozgan province in recent months.
According to expert Eugene Kaspersky, the worm also infected a nuclear powerplant in Russia. Kaspersky noted, however, that since the powerplant is not connected to the public Internet, the system should remain safe. | <urn:uuid:db5788e3-67a0-4faf-b6bf-871153f2341b> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.cbronline.com/news/security/everything-you-need-to-know-about-stuxnet-4206019 | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171629.84/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00152-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971494 | 850 | 3.171875 | 3 |
4D Printing: Manufacturing Intelligent Machines
Each week, 3D printing seems to be behind yet another breaking news headline, revolutionizing industries from aerospace to biomedical research. In light of recent breakthroughs in stem cell and live-tissue printing, it feels like we've only just now realized the depth of additive manufacturing's potential.
But a new idea from MIT may have given us a glimpse of the shape of things to come: not 3D, but 4D printing.
You may be asking yourself “Well, what is the fourth dimension you can print in?,” The answer? Time.
Okay, so maybe you can't print “time.” But what a team of MIT researchers has been able to print is a strand of materials that will continue to evolve into different forms after the printing process is completed, without any human intervention. This evolution of the object over time adds to the product the extra dimension that gives this technology its name.
MIT's 4D printing process actually begins with a Stratasys 3D printer that produces a string of multi-layered materials. Each part is comprised of a rigid plastic inner layer, topped by an outer layer of absorbent materials. When submerged in water, the outer layer absorbs water to expand and distort until the strand folds in on itself at certain joints to form a predetermined shape.
We've now seen these self-assembling objects arrange themselves into cubes and even the MIT logo, but the eventual goal is to manufacture objects that can continue to change form multiple times. This would effectively extend the temporal lifespan of the 4D printing process from a matter of minutes to hours, days, or perhaps even years.
This research was presented at this year's TED conference in Long Beach by MIT professor and director of the university's Self-Assembly Lab, Skylar Tibbits, who hopes to one day print materials that will take advantage of their extended longevity to self-assemble and self-repair.
For anyone who remembers Bio 101, this process may sound familiar on a number of levels. Not only would these products be able to adapt to their environment, but the act of self-assembly bears resemblance to protein folding. In both cases the environment acts on the flattened self-folding strand (either a chain of amino acids or a 3D printed string) which then reacts by folding itself into a specific origami-like structure.
This demonstrates what that extra dimension – time – brings to the table that 3D printing has overlooked: allowing technology to evolve to the point where it resembles natural systems. In a recent TED interview, Tibbits defined the technology in terms of basic instinctual drives that are inherent in all organisms but almost universally lacking in man-made systems.
Bringing Intelligence to the Machines
Tibbits explains, “Natural systems obviously have this built in – the ability to have a desire. Plants, for example, generally have the desire to grow towards light and they generate energy from the translation of photosynthesis, carbon dioxide to oxygen, and so on.
“This is extremely difficult to build into synthetic systems – the ability to “want” or need something and know how to change itself in order to acquire it, or the ability to generate its own energy source. If we combine the processes that natural systems offer intrinsically (genetic instructions, energy production, error correction) with those artificial or synthetic (programmability for design and scaffold, structure, mechanisms) we can potentially have extremely large-scale quasi-biological and quasi-synthetic architectural organisms.”
But Tibbits was quick to point out that 4D printing is not copying directly from nature. He noted that outright mimicry can lead to fundamental design flaws, because natural systems have evolved over millions of years to function under highly specific conditions. One cannot simply translate these systems to other scales and functions and expect the same results.
Instead of trying to reproduce living systems, Tibbits says that his approach involves embedding “dead” materials with information to give it more “active characteristics.”
“I’m trying to discover how much information can they store, how can they replicate inherently, how can they move and assemble themselves, and so on. None of these properties are necessarily found within the materials themselves. Rather, it’s a different way of looking at the materials and at the way we build things.”
Tibbits' ultimate goal is to create 4D printed components that will serve as building blocks in architecture, although this project is still a ways off from reaching the skyscraper scale. In the meantime, his efforts are centered around seeding growth in defining constraints in his 4D objects in hopes of creating an even more dynamic system.
But why do we need self-assembling pieces? Why not just directly print the desired end result? According to Tibbits, there was no other way to build certain structures at small scales, especially when wandering into the realm of nanotechnology. Instead, they had to work on the materials' terms, which meant self-assembly.
Furthermore, by using materials that can generate their own directives and act of their own volition, we are opening the door for objects and even large-scale structures such as buildings that can one day construct and repair themselves.
As for why self-assembly came about in the first place in the face of all the possibilities offered by 3D printing, Tibbits sees two main possibilities. It's possible that we've pushed ourselves to the limits of existing materials and processes, forcing the creation of a new technology such as his. Or this simply came about to serve designers in need of something novel to spark their inspiration.
Either way, what is clear from this technology is that while 4D printing may have a significant presence in the future of manufacturing, it by no means replaces 3D printing. Instead, each technology will likely have its own spheres of influence, and will build upon and complement one another. So no matter how close to nature, this shouldn't become a case of 'survival of the fittest.' | <urn:uuid:624bdd2d-96ce-411d-84b0-45fc5fc7ac27> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://www.enterprisetech.com/2013/03/01/4d_printing_manufacturing_intelligent_machines/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501174135.70/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104614-00028-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950998 | 1,242 | 3.078125 | 3 |
DIY remote imaging system, courtesy of USGS
- By Kevin McCaney
- Jan 11, 2013
Agencies have been making a lot of use of remote monitoring systems, for everything from monitoring snowfall and other weather data to bridge monitoring and even tracking airborne drug smugglers.
One of the most active users of remote monitoring systems is the U.S. Geological Survey, which deploys monitoring systems for a variety of programs. So active, in fact, that a team of USGS scientists built their own solar-powered, automated imaging system, using inexpensive off-the-shelf parts.
In a paper published on USGS’ website, the team -- Rian Bogle, Miguel Velasco and John Vogel -- offer a detailed, illustrated account of putting together the system, which has been used for environmental monitoring in locations such as the South Pacific and Mojave Desert.
The system described is one type the team created, the authors write, and is intended to be “easily replicated, low-cost, highly robust, and is a stand-alone automated camera designed to be placed in remote locations, without wireless connectivity.”
There are four basic components to the system, the authors write: a data logger, imager (camera), sensors and power subsystem. The data logger provides the system’s main functionality, acting as clock, programmatic controller and environmental interface, with a programmable software stack at its core, the team writes.
They used a Campbell Scientific CR200-series data logger as the system’s controller and a Canon EOS Digital Rebel camera as its imager. The team notes that the camera supports a persistent power source and, no small consideration for remote work, a power switch that can be left on. It also allows for electronic image triggering. Images are stored on an 8G flash card in the camera, which the team said would typically be good for a few months’ worth of images.
Sensors for the system depend on how and where it’s going to be used. This system has been used, for instance, to measure wind speed and direction (with a Davis Instruments 7911 anemoeter), soil moisture (Campbell tipping buckets) and air temperature (Campbell temperature sensors). The system runs on the Campbell Scientific PakBus operating system, with a script written in CR-Basic, and it uses Campbell’s pc400 development software to communicate with the data logger.
For power, the team typically used a 10-watt solar panel and a 7-amp 12-volt battery, which delivered enough juice for the camera to take pictures as often as every 10 minutes during daylight hours.
For any other agencies thinking of building such a system of their own, the team’s paper goes into great detail, with pictures and diagrams, on how they assembled it, operated it and deployed it.
Agency research teams deploying remote monitoring systems could use this template to build their own, particularly if they don’t have experience constructing such devices. The idea was to take advantage of commercial products to build a system from “readily available, low-cost components, powered entirely by solar energy, highly flexible in scheduling and automation, and requires no remote communication, minimal maintenance and only occasional visitation for data retrieval,” the team writes.
“The ultimate goal of the design of this system is that it be easily replicated by others who may have minimal technical or electronic experience.”
Kevin McCaney is a former editor of Defense Systems and GCN. | <urn:uuid:446159cc-6521-430e-b3ac-08b308c2f99e> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://gcn.com/articles/2013/01/11/usgs-team-builds-remote-imaging-system.aspx | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171629.92/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00500-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935788 | 730 | 2.71875 | 3 |
If you ever travel through the Oxfordshire countryside in the UK you may come across the Harwell Scientific and Innovation Campus and the Rutherford Appleton laboratory. Named after those two exceptional scientists Ernest Rutherford one of the great experimentalists, the first to model the atom and nuclear reactions and Edward Appleton, winner of the Nobel prize for physics. The Harwell Science and Innovation Park has seen some dramatic changes with the appearance of something that looks like a giant silver flying saucer (UFO) in the fields near the facility. Frankly it looks like something out of a science fiction movie, but it is very real, and has a purpose that delivers amazing benefits to mankind.
This giant silver flying saucer is in fact a Synchrotron run by Diamond Light Source Ltd. Which I know probably doesn't mean anything, but a Synchrotron is another type of particle accelerator. A Synchrotron is designed to produce brilliant flashes of light. These flashes of light are 10 billion times brighter than our sun and are produced by accelerating and bending beams of electrons in magnetic fields. Like we used to do with Cathode Ray Tubes in our old TV sets and computer monitors - remember them !!! http://www.diamond.ac.uk/Home.html
It is the beams of light, or beamlines, that the physicists are after. So brilliant is the light produced that it can be used to analyze materials in ultra fine detail from infra-red right up to X-Rays. Revealed is the structure right down to the molecular level. The outcome is a device that is 10,000 times more sensitive than a standard microscope. The Synchrotron is therefore an incredibly powerful research tool into areas such as deceases, new vaccines and analysis of aircraft engine parts.
As with all particle accelerators the amounts of data generated are huge. Have a look at our previous success story from the LHC at CERN for an example of data volumes produced by these beasts.. http://www.netapp.com/us/company/news/press-releas
Critical to the operation is the time required to post process and analyse the data from the beamline reaserch, and produce the results. To accelerate this process Diamond Light Source were looking for a solution that would provide fast caching for data coming from the detectors on the beamlines, destined for their central storage. They selected 2 x NetApp EF540 All Flash Arrays to do the job as they needed a solution that could service the performance driven applications with very low latency and a high level of resiliency.
They found that the EF540 provided the extreme performance they were looking for, delivering over 300,000 IOPs and 6GBps throughput. Space, power and cooling were cut by up to 95%. While other key factors in the selection process were the ease with which the EF540 can scale to meet future expansion requirements.
In Summary the EF540 All Flash Array benefits checked in as:
There is a clear trend here as NetApp EF Series All Flash Arrays help scientists with extreme performance and latency requirements get to results quicker. Another example can be found in my previous Blog where the NetApp EF540 is helping the pharmaceutical scientists at UCB rapidly turnaround clinical trial results.
EF540 All Flash Array: http://www.netapp.com/uk/products/storage-systems/
EF550 All Flash Array: http://www.netapp.com/uk/products/storage-systems/
Diamond Light Source Success Story: See attached pdf
Follow me on Twitter @lozdjames | <urn:uuid:1041ba98-f446-4cfe-ab61-6c2c6d235468> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://community.netapp.com/t5/Pan-EMEA/Flashes-of-light-and-Flash-Storage-help-unlock-the-secrets-of-matter/ba-p/83797 | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501172447.23/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104612-00200-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932249 | 736 | 2.921875 | 3 |
In 2016, people witnessed the digital and physical worlds continue to merge as everyday objects, commercial and industrial equipment, and entire cities became smart and connected to the cloud. Analysts expect that by 2020 more than 50 billion devices – wearables, store inventory sensors, autonomous vehicles, medical equipment, city infrastructure and more – will be connected to the internet and each other.
And human relationships with technology – how it’s used, the experiences it enables and the benefits they derive from it – are shifting dramatically.
Not since the transition from analog to digital has there been the potential for transformation of this magnitude. Networks are evolving faster to accommodate the intense bandwidth demands created by the explosion of smart and connected devices.
In 2016, Intel worked with policymakers, the industry and industrial leaders to evolve four areas spurring industries and consumers: artificial intelligence (AI), 5G, automated driving and virtual and merged reality.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The roots of AI, machine learning, is already in use everywhere, from the commonplace (talk-to-text, photo tagging and fraud detection) to the cutting-edge (precision medicine, injury prediction and autonomous cars). We’re creating AI that will enable machines to augment human capabilities, automate tedious or dangerous tasks, unleash scientific discovery, and address challenging societal problems.
The global robotics and AI markets are estimated to grow to $153 billion by 2020, made up of $83 billion for robotics and $70 billion for AI-based analytics.
In 2017, technology will become more cost-effective and pervasive, new applications will emerge across a wide range of industries, creating efficiencies for businesses and consumers. The technology supporting some nascent AI applications, such as natural language processing and bots will greatly improve, paving the way for more widespread adoption of AI.
Furthermore, machine and deep learning will become more acutely integrated into Internet of Things (IoT) connected devices, which will uncover access to richer and more powerful layers of insights. This will lead to breakthrough technologies offering unprecedented compute density with high-bandwidth interconnects.
5G is not just 4G 2.0. More than just a faster iteration of its predecessors, 5G is expected to deliver extremely low latency combined with incredibly high bandwidth. This means that 5G will provided the ability to manage an unprecedented demand for data and more connected devices.
Powerful, agile networks can also route network traffic intelligently to give priority to safety-critical devices, such as self-driving cars and medical wearables. In geographical areas where connected infrastructure is not as fast or reliable as needed, 5G will also open a world of possibilities currently unavailable, with the global 5G network expected to support an estimated 100 billion devices.
In 2017, 5G will move from conception and testing to meaningful plans for deployment, accelerating support across the industry. The need for faster connectivity will increase pressure for the industry to align around global standards with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and 3rd Generation Partner Project (3GPP), and will also address key challenges around interoperability, backward compatibility and future proofing.
Automated driving will change our lives and societies. The car of the future will crash less, provide transport and mobility for more people than ever and create reduced congestion in the world’s busiest and most polluted cities.
The global market for fully autonomous vehicles could reach $42 billion by 2025; self-driving cars may claim one-quarter of worldwide auto sales by 2035.
In 2017, significant advancements will be made to further the operation of driverless cars but also advance every part of the infrastructure – from connectivity, to use of AI, to more powerful methods of data processing. More companies will enter the autonomous driving market, new partnerships and collaborative efforts will emerge, and the industry will be standardised.
The industry will continue to learn through testing in 2017, but this will be the first year that automated systems in cars gain mainstream access, such as through advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) or automated ride-sharing fleets.
Virtual and merged reality
Where today’s experiences rely on engagement with a screen, tomorrow’s will completely immerse users through sight, sound and touch. The next frontier of compute will empower people to build, solve, create and play in a world where the barrier is diminished between the physical and virtual worlds. Virtual technologies hold tremendous potential for the future, but industries have only begun to scratch the surface of what’s possible.
In 2017, VR experiences will move beyond the nascent phases in industries like healthcare, education and travel, employing the latest in VR technology to create fully immersive experiences. Technology and sports will become even more deeply integrated in the next year, transforming the way people train, watch and interact with sports.
Merged reality, a new way of experiencing physical and virtual interactions and environments, will come to the forefront with five technological advances (6 degrees of mobility, integrated tracking, more natural manipulation, untethered, digitised real-world content) and is expected to come to market in this year.
Intel is inventing foundational technologies for amazing new experiences based on all four of these key areas, which will shape the future of Intel and our industry. We expect to see a number of new developments in each of these areas which will contribute to the gradual evolution of everything becoming smart and connected to the cloud, changing the way humans and technology interact forever.
Markus Weingartner is EMEA PR Manager at Intel.
Image Credit: Jamesteohart / Shutterstock | <urn:uuid:11ffa185-969d-41a8-9bb4-f76ac1f53d63> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.itproportal.com/features/a-smart-and-connected-world-in-2017/?utm_content=buffera2929&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171232.43/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00020-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93268 | 1,135 | 2.640625 | 3 |
I made it back from DEFCON with both my phone and tablet intact, but I'm happy I didn't bring a light bulb. You see, if had brought a light bulb, and that light bulb was a smart LED bulb running Linux, it might be running someone else's software by now.
Right now, there are hundreds of companies churning out "Internet of Things" (IoT) devices as fast as they can. The people slapping these devices together are often doing things on a shoestring budget, with an incomplete understanding of the full potential of their components, and rarely any eye toward security.
The result so far has been millions of devices reaching the market with Clinton-era network, web and physical security. Today we're seeing IoT devices, even medical devices, ship with:
- default passwords such as "1234"
- vulnerable services such as "telnet" enabled
- firmware updates that depend on (easy to spoof) HTTP calls
- web applications that allow users to easily bypass authentication
- ...and other vulnerabilities that we (as a security community) thought we addressed more than a decade ago.
Is help on the way?
Some companies and communities are starting to realize that many IoT devices pose a threat to their security and privacy, but most still do not. However, there are some organizations with the courage and foresight to swim against the tide of insecure IoT devices.
- For developers and IoT vendors, there is a "Top 10 IoT Vulnerability" guide now available from OWASP (the organization that previously brought you the "Top 10 Web Vulnerability" list) and a resource site called "BuiltItSecure.ly" that digs into security best practices on several popular IoT platforms.
- For consumers and businesses, organizations such as the Internet of Things Security Laboratory promise to list and rate devices by their "hackability," allowing people to make informed decisions before buying insecure devices.
But how does this affect established security practices?
As an IT professional concerned about security, you are already probably familiar with several secure best practices, each backed up with millions of man-years of actual use in high value environments. Three of these secure best practices include:
- Putting your internal resources behind a good firewall
- Putting your Internet-communicating applications in the DMZ, proxying your outbound web traffic and relaying your email
- Centralizing credential management and using shared authentication services (a.k.a. "single sign on" or "unified login")
One of the popular attributes of IoT technology is that it's "disruptive" technology. Normally, when you hear that term, it means that it threatens the market share of an established player, or that it may replace a different kind of application used for a similar purpose. But when "disruptive" is applied to IoT, it also means that IoT threatens a number of well-established security practices. With that in mind, here are three security best practices that are being threatened by IoT:
IoT vs. Internal resources behind a firewall
The most common network topology we see in homes and businesses today looks like this:
- Internet --- Firewall --- Internal Network
- all of the devices on the Internet are untrusted and prevented from connecting to the Internet Network.
- all of the devices on the Internal Network are allowed to talk together using "internal" protocols like SMB.
This works, but only as long as all the devices on the Internal Network can be trusted to talk to each other, or at least are protected with other good security practices like regular patching and using antivirus.
The "BYOD" ("bring your own device" - really mostly smart phones and tablets) movement that began around 2010 lobbed the first grenade into this orderly world, and led many businesses (and a few consumers) to build a separate "guest" or "mobile" network for devices their employees, partners and contractors brought into the home or office. Today, IoT devices threaten to completely upend this model.
Many people install IoT devices (such as security cameras) for business purposes and expect them to be readily available on their Internet Network. Others install new devices (such as smart TVs, kitchen appliances and light bulbs), without expecting them to have any computing abilities or need to talk to anything else. The wide range of intentions and business purposes can quickly lead to a chaotic Internal Network environment where cheap, easily hackable devices may share signals with core storage and database servers.
A solution to this problem exists in the form of network segmentation (by business purpose and class of device), but deploying separate cables and wireless access points consistently across a business campus can strike many companies as cost-prohibitive.
Cost-driven compromises and the common error that people make when installing the wrong device in the wrong network mean that untrusted IoT devices will continue to have access to critical data across Internal Networks. However, the massive exposure weak segmentation creates gives me hope that the outdated practice of "just putting Internet Network resources behind the firewall" may soon be a thing of the past.
IoT vs. DMZs, web proxies and email relays
It is accepted best practice in larger organizations to use DMZ network segments to isolate outbound traffic emitters, including web proxies for all internally-initiated web traffic and email relays for all internally-composed email messages. IoT devices disrupt this model in several ways.
- IoT devices are almost never installed in DMZ segments, so typical DMZ firewall rules provide no protection.
- Some IoT devices do not support a web proxy configuration, so people are forced to abandon their devices or make web proxy exceptions for them.
- Some IoT devices can use cellular network services to "dial out" for updates and new information, rendering DMZ and all other firewall rules useless.
- Rather than send email alerts and messages locally, some IoT devices "phone home" (connect to a web service) and use their home service to send email back to the installer's email account across the Internet.
To defend against behavior that challenges established DMZ, proxy and relay practices, device capabilities must be researched before they are purchased. Specifically, you need to know if your IoT device:
- Needs to connect to the Internet using web services.
Ë If it does, whether it supports a configured web proxy. (If it doesn't, avoid it.)
- Connects to a cellular network for Internet services or SMS (text) access. (If it uses cellular services, allow it to connect to your Internet Network with care.)
- Sends email alerts or other messages.
Ë If it does, whether these messages are sent locally or across the Internet from a vendor's remote service. (Either case may be OK if the emails are not sensitive; otherwise internal-only systems should be preferred.)
IoT vs. Centralized credential management and shared authentication services
A movement toward centralized credential management built on shared authentication services (such as Active Directory) has long been a central tenet of system architecture. Network security has benefited from this as well, since access to multiple systems can be quickly revoked from a central console, and users have fewer incentives to reveal "post-it" passwords when they can use the same credential on multiple systems.
The early days of cloud services provided a direct challenge to central management, but this challenge has largely been beaten back by cloud services that support "external authentication" (such as Active Directory agents or SAML). The BYOD movement also challenged this tenet, but is being defeated through integrations that require common credentials to access email, IM and file servers.
Now a similar challenge to centralized credential management is being mounted by the onslaught of IoT devices -- most of which only allow local user management -- and associated IoT management systems, which frequently also only allow local user management.
Business-facing cloud services were brought to heel eventually because their "freemium" business strategies required business customers to buy the premium services, and businesses demanded integration with their local authentication systems. However, it remains to be seen if IoT devices will face the same pressure, especially in arenas such as kitchen appliances, light bulbs and security cameras where so many of the potential buyers are home consumers (who don't value centralized authentication).
In the meantime, it is worth seeking out devices and management consoles that support Active Directory, SAML, RADIUS and other well-established "external authentication" methods that allow you to control access to IoT functionality with your existing systems
Conclusion: Three security practices shaken by IoT, but only one will fall
As we saw, IoT devices will disrupt three well-established security practices, but only one is likely to fall permanently into the dustbin of history.
- SHAKEN BUT SAFE: Using DMZs, web proxies and email relays.
- SHAKEN BUT SHOULD EVENTUALLY BE SAFE: Using centralized credential management.
- SHAKEN AND FALLING: Using one big Internal Network behind a firewall.
Nonetheless, it pays to do your research on the security attributes and integration points of any IoT device before purchasing it. Without certain key features (like web proxy support and external authentication), the workarounds required to support IoT devices may end up disrupting the security of your network.
This story, "Three security practices that IoT will disrupt" was originally published by CSO. | <urn:uuid:5cfeaf33-9dd0-40ed-88af-972875a79117> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.itworld.com/article/2694127/data-protection/three-security-practices-that-iot-will-disrupt.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171632.91/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00196-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941568 | 1,931 | 2.625 | 3 |
I have to thank Frank Scavo for making me think harder about what context means . I and several people I know use the term liberally , and perhaps not very consistently .
Here is my hypothesis –
Answer to every question has a core (which has great precision) and a context (less precise , but without it -core cannot be meaningfully interpreted).
1. Additional questions maybe needed to get context
If all I ask you on phone is “should I turn right or left to reach your office” , you probably will ask me something in return like “are you coming from north or south”. Without this additional information, you cannot help me . Right or left is a precise answer , what is on my right might be on your left or right . Without extra information – you cannot help me with a precise answer .
2. You can infer all or part of the context from historical information .
Maybe you know from your morning commute that I could never be driving from south side on that street given that side of road is blocked for construction . So you can give me a precise left or right answer without asking me anything further.
3. Context can change with time
Perhaps turning right will be the shortest distance to your office , yet you might ask me to turn left since you know rush hour traffic going on now will slow me down . If I had asked you two hours later – you could have given me the exact opposite answer , and still be correct .
4. Multiple things together might be needed to provide context
It is very seldom that one extra bit of information is all you need to make a determination . When I called you during rush hour , if it was raining – you might have asked me to take a left turn so that I will get covered parking and a shuttle to ride to your office . On a sunny day, you could have pointed me to an open lot from where I could have walked a short distance to reach you .
5. Context is progressively determined
As the number of influencing factors increase – you have to determine trade offs progressively to arrive at a useful context . You might know exactly all the right questions to ask to give me the best answer , but if you were pressed for time – you could have told me an answer without considering the entire context . It would have been precise, but probably of limited use to me .
6. Context is user dependent
If I reached your assistant instead of you , she probably would need a whole different context to be provided before she could tell me which way to turn . She might have never taken the route you take to work , and hence might not have seen southbound traffic is closed off . She might not have realized it is raining outside given she was in meetings all day .
If I am your vendor and you know I am coming there to make a pitch that you have limited interest in – you probably won’t think through all the contextual information . If I am your customer – maybe you will go outbid your way to tell me not just to turn right , but also that the particular turn comes 100 yards from the big grocery store I will find on my right .
7. More information does not always lead to better context
If I over loaded you with information – you probably could not have figured out all the trade offs in the few seconds you have before responding . Your best answer might not be optimal . And if you take very long to respond , I might pass the place to make the turn and then have to track back – making it needlessly harder for both of us .
8. Context maybe more useful that precision
Instead of giving me a precise left or right answer , you might tell me to park in front of the big train station and wait for your company shuttle to pick me up. That was not the precise answer to my question – but it still was more useful to me .
This was just a simple question with only two possibilities as precise answers . Think of a question in a business scenario . “How are our top customers doing?” is a common question that you can hear at a company . However , you can’t answer that question in any meaningful way without plenty of context .
The eventual precise answer is “good” or “bad”. What makes the question difficult is that it could mean a lot of different things .
1. What is a top customer ? Most volume ? Most sales ? Most profit ? Longest history with company ? Most visible in industry ? Most market cap?
2. Who is asking ? CMO and CFO might not have the same idea on what makes a top customer
3. How many should you consider as top customers amongst all your customers ?
And so on ..
Information systems in majority of companies do not have the ability to collect context of a question . And hence they may or may not give useful answers without a human user doing most of the thinking and combining various “precise” answers to find out a “useful” answer .
That is a long winded way of saying “context is what makes precision useful”.
Ok I am done – let me know if this makes any sense at all , and more importantly whether it resonates with your idea of what context means | <urn:uuid:4a36b101-fd96-4c3f-b6ea-16c2b0fd21a3> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://andvijaysays.com/2013/09/06/what-on-earth-do-you-mean-by-context/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171632.91/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00196-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96666 | 1,084 | 2.96875 | 3 |
Best Practices for Wireless Security
The ability to defend today’s businesses from information security threats is largely based on protocols and technologies that support a wired infrastructure. However, the proliferation of mobile devices and wireless communication is introducing new security gaps that must be addressed. As the saying goes, security is only as good as your weakest link—and wireless systems are the weak links in business infrastructure. Security practitioners need to better understand wireless technologies, protocols and standards, and develop policies to address wireless security to ensure that these technologies are not the “gaps” exploited by hackers. These are some of the best practices that security practitioners should be familiar with as they deploy wireless technology.
Getting Started: Wireless Site Survey and Assessment
Performing a wireless site survey before deploying the wireless infrastructure is key to successful implementation. The objective of the wireless site survey is to understand the architecture of access points, cable routes and electrical needs. It also establishes transmission coverage area and identifies security issues. A detailed report is typically developed that documents all necessary parts and equipment, as well as diagrams that exhibit the proper placement of components.
Scan the Network
Security practitioners should review vulnerabilities on the wireless infrastructure on a periodic basis. Tools such as NetStumbler, Kismet and others can be instrumental in learning more about the risks to the wireless network and infrastructure.
NetStumbler is an active network scanner that sends out probe requests and watches for responses to these packets. It is a free utility and is available at www.netstumbler.com. It provides information about wireless networks in range including: SSID (service set identifier), MAC address, vendor wireless in use, type of device (e.g., access point), encryption (e.g., whether wireless equivalent privacy, or WEP, is in use) and channels being used. NetStumbler also provides information about signal strength and noise. While NetStumbler is a simple beacon scanner, it is a good tool for detecting and monitoring wireless networks.
Kismet is an advanced diagnostic tool for wireless networks. It is a passive network scanner that detects traffic from access points and wireless clients. Kismet is a free utility and can be downloaded from www.kismetwireless.com. Kismet monitors traffic sent from its users to find “closed” networks and logs all 802.11 frames. Kismet can track systems with multiple wireless cards. For wireless clients, Kismet displays MAC address, IP address and manufacturer information. Kismet saves all recorded frames to a standard pcap format. This allows you to use Ethereal or AirSnort to analyze the data.
Next Step: Develop a Wireless Security Policy
Once they understand the vulnerabilities on their wireless networks, security practitioners should develop a policy for securing wireless devices and transmissions. The scope of this policy covers all wireless data communication devices (e.g., personal computers, cellular phones, PDAs, etc.) connected to any of the organization’s networks. This includes any form of wireless communication device capable of transmitting packet data.
The policy should include specific recommendations, such as:
- Wireless implementations must maintain point-to-point hardware encryption of at least 128 bits.
- Wireless devices must maintain a hardware address that can be registered and tracked (i.e., a MAC address).
- Wireless devices must support strong user authentication that checks against an external database, such as TACACS+, RADIUS or something similar.
- Laptop/PDA users must select strong passwords and must have anti-virus software installed with automatic updates.
- Screensavers must be activated after two to three minutes of idle time.
- Encryption must be used to store sensitive information on laptops.Wireless Design Best Practices
The key here is to understand the risk to the infrastructure if the access point is compromised. The core objective in the design of the wireless network must be to minimize the number of access points, as each represents a potential area of vulnerability. Further, the access points should be installed away from exterior walls so that the strength of the signal is reduced for access from outside of the physical facility. The access point also should not be installed on the same network as other critical network resources. It should typically be separated from the wired network, and the design should require communication to go through a firewall system.
The enterprise wireless infrastructure should be based on the following guidelines:
- Configure a firewall between the wireless network and the wired infrastructure.
- Ensure that 128-bit or higher encryption is used for all wireless communication.
- Fully test and deploy software patches and updates on a regular basis.
- Deploy intrusion detection systems (IDS) on the wireless network to report suspected activities.Consider the following best practices for the deployment of wireless access points:
- Maintain and update an inventory of all access points and wireless devices.
- Locate access points on the interior of buildings instead of near exterior walls and windows as appropriate.
- Place access points in secured areas to prevent unauthorized physical access and user manipulation.
- The default settings on access points, such as those for SSIDs, must be changed.
- Access points must be restored to the latest security settings when the reset functions are used.
- Ensure that all access points have strong administrative passwords.
- Enable user authentication mechanisms for the management interfaces of the access point.
- Use SNMPv3 and/or SSL/TLS for Web-based management of access points.
- Turn on audit capabilities on access point, and review log files on a regular basis.To ensure security on all wireless and mobile end devices, install anti-virus and personal firewall software on every client, and disable file sharing between wireless clients.
Security practitioners should:
- Upgrade firmware (develop a patch management policy and practice it).
- Disallow remote management.
- Use static IP addresses, if possible.
- Restrict range of IP addresses—configure the access point to allow only a limited range of IP addresses.
- Enable MAC filtering on the access point. These filters let you specify which WLAN cards will be granted access and which will not.From WEP to WPA and 802.11i
Wired equivalent privacy (WEP) has been the standard 802.11 wireless security protocol for data encryption. It uses a key to encrypt wireless data transmitted through the radio waves, and supports a 40-bit key and a 128-bit key. However, attackers have been able to compromise both WEP key lengths. If you do not use any encryption, then the advice is to at least use WEP.
With WEP, you should use the longest key the hardware supports. Key lengths may be 64-bit ASCII (five characters), 64-bit hexadecimal (10 characters), 128-bit ASCII (13 characters) or 128-bit hexadecimal (26 characters). You also should use a non-obvious key and plan to change keys often. It also is important to use WEP with other security capabilities.
The Wi-Fi protected access (WPA) specification replaced WEP. It was developed by the Wi-Fi Alliance as a stepping-stone to the IEEE 802.11i standard, also referred to as WPA 2. WPA was based on the early draft of the 802.11i standard. The IEEE 802.11i standard has been developed to ensure message confidentiality and integrity. It incorporates the IEEE 802.1x port authentication algorithm to provide a framework for strong | <urn:uuid:d30f37e2-6111-4be3-9438-47770173bebd> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://certmag.com/best-practices-for-wireless-security/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171933.81/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00372-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.908063 | 1,542 | 2.625 | 3 |
Want some perspective on the $397 billion F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program? Check out its cost and timeline versus the cost and time it took to develop the atomic bomb in World War II.
The total bill for development of the A-bomb came to $2 billion in 1940s dollars, which the smart folks at Wikipedia computed at $26 billion in 2013 dollars.
This means the cost to develop and buy just fewer than 2,500 F-35s comes in at staggering 15 times the bill for the A-bomb, a far more challenging, and truly scientific task.
Government-backed research and development of the A-bomb lasted slightly more than five years, from June 1941 until July 16, 1945, when the first bomb was successfully tested at the “Trinity” site, east of Socorro, N.M.
The Government Accountability Office reported Tuesday that the F-35 will not be ready for combat operations – or full production – until 2019, 23 years after Lockheed Martin won its first contract for the plane in a fly-off competition with Boeing.
That fly-off cost far more than the original investment in the A-bomb – Lockheed and Boeing each received $750 million development contracts, versus the initial funds committed to A-bomb research in 1941, a mere $167,000, or a rounding error in the Defense Department today.
Too bad J. Robert Oppenheimer, who managed the A-bomb research, and Army Gen. Leslie Grove, who ran the overall Manhattan Project, aren’t around today to provide some assistance on the F-35. | <urn:uuid:4bfa74c5-bf8c-4fb0-a15e-b7916a77ed19> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.nextgov.com/defense/whats-brewin/2013/03/-bomb-and-f-35-debacle/61886/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171933.81/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00372-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93766 | 328 | 2.78125 | 3 |
Scripting languages are the hot technology today for application and Web development -- no longer the backwater afterthought of the early days running in a pokey interpreter. Nor are scripting languages any longer merely the tool used for quick-and-dirty patching (someone once called Perl the duct tape of the Internet, and it stuck so well that Perl lovers wear the label proudly). No, today, scripting languages are popular for "real" programming work. In fact, entire systems and large-scale enterprise-grade projects are built from them.
To confuse matters more, many so-called compiled languages are now bundled with just-in-time compilers that make them as agile as scripting languages. First, Java got Java Server Pages, allowing programmers to tweak Web pages just like PHP and Cold Fusion programmers could. Lately Java programmers have been using Groovy, a language that's structurally integrated with Java and runs on the JVM. The main draw? It has more of a scripting language syntax.
[ Find out which 7 programming languages are on the rise and verse yourself in the 12 programming mistakes to avoid. | Keep up on key application development insights with the Fatal Exception blog and Developer World newsletter. ]
Not-hot scripting language: ActionScript
The iPhone remains a challenge for Adobe and ActionScript lovers. Apple's long resistance to the platform means that ActionScript authors can't write ActionScript and expect it to work in the iPhone's browser. Of course, that doesn't mean the platform is completely closed. The clever programmers at Adobe built a "packager" that turns the ActionScript in Flex and AIR bundles into something that runs in a native app.
Will this be enough? A startup called Ansca also makes Corona, a framework for building iPhone apps that uses Lua, a language the company promotes as being very close to ActionScript. The ideas live on even if they're not called exactly the same name.
Not-hot scripting language: Perl
This former giant laid the foundation of some of the best sites on the Web -- one of several accomplishments that earned Perl its worthy comparison to duct tape. Slashdot, the trendsetting blog, was coded in Perl more than 14 years ago. As the website grew, and stayed up, people began to realize that C++ was not the only way to write fast code.
There are numerous practical indicators of Perl's fading from its heyday, but one of the most prominent may have been the lack of success for MovableType. The tool was one of the first content management systems, but its first-mover enthusiasm didn't translate into a flood of plug-ins. Some might point to MovableType's architecture, but Perl should share some of the blame. Other CMSes, like WordPress, get 35 times as many searches on Google Trends. Is it any wonder why people are spending plenty of time on the forums asking how to embed PHP code inside a MovableType template?
The long downward trend is also found in searches for the language itself. The word "perl" may be one-tenth as trendy on Google as it was only eight years ago. (Search results are normalized according to worldwide traffic, so the rise in overall traffic exaggerates the dip.)
To make matters worse, it's harder and harder to find the latest State of the Onion talks online. In the early years, these discussions were touchstones for developers, with some enthusiasts reading them like dispatches from the Kremlin to decipher hidden indications about how the next version of Perl might behave. Others read them for the jokes, which Larry Wall, Perl's creator, includes in a way that is not very Kremlinesque. No one seems to have transcribed them, and furtive searches reveal little. To make matters worse, sites like Perl.org don't even seem to offer search.
Hot scripting language: Python
In a sense, the tipping point for Python came when the housing market crashed.
For those stuck trying to decode bond market prospectuses to figure out who got paid what when the bankruptcy dominoes were done falling, one thing became clear: English is a weaselly language, and some weaselly folks revel in its ambiguities to profit from complicated derivatives.
Enter one smart group that offered a compelling solution: Force every bond to come with a Python program that defined who got paid and when they were paid. While they may have been a bit too hopeful about the power of computer languages, the proposal spoke to Python's growing acceptance in the greater world of smart people who aren't computer geeks. Relatively easy to pick up, Python is becoming increasingly popular in economic research, science departments, and biology labs.
The popularity of Python has been noted by O'Reilly Books, which groups Python with top-selling languages like Java and C. Web searches like "python -monty" show healthy trend lines, and searches for the Python-based CMS "django -jazz" are rising, albeit not as fast as better-known tools such as Drupal or WordPress.
No doubt Python's appeal to the casual programmer is its lack of brackets. While many long-term programmers have grown used to letting the editor handle indentation, Python uses it to signify the beginning and end of blocks. Whatever the reason, it's easy to find Python lovers who prefer indentation over brackets.
Lukewarm scripting language: Ruby
Yukihiro Matsumoto developed Ruby way back in 1995 because he wanted to do his system chores with objects instead of just strings. But the language that marries the structure of object-oriented programming with the quick and easy development cycle of scripting didn't really take off until 2004, when David Heinemeier Hansson added the Rails database access layer and produced Ruby on Rails.
These days, most Ruby development consists of website prototypes crafted with Ruby on Rails. Ruby without Rails is rare, but that dominance is starting to crack, thanks to Web frameworks like Sinatra, as well as Matsumoto's focus on flexibility and agility.
This agility is perhaps most evident in the Ruby Gems repository of open source modules. By December 2010, the Ruby community reported it was adding 18 new modules to Ruby Gems a day, a pace that meant it would surpass Perl's CPAN collection within weeks. The most popular modules continue to be ones like Rack for juggling HTTP requests and mime types, a tool for wrapping the data delivered over the Web with the right tag.
Ruby programmers have many of the latest platforms available to them. Heroku, for instance, is a leader in Ruby hosting, and many people continue to run Ruby wherever Java's JVM can operate through the magic of JRuby.
Ruby's syntax is remarkably clear of punctuation. The structure is simple and direct. The biggest strength may be the Rails framework's idea of coding by convention, a bundle of assumptions that saves the programmer a number of hassles like aligning objects with database tables. This idea has been adopted by Java programmers who used a Ruby-like dialect with the JVM to build Grails.
Hot scripting language: Scala | <urn:uuid:bf1f3edf-0ca7-4df1-a955-0ec162b7c903> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.itworld.com/article/2735626/enterprise-software/from-php-to-perl--what-s-hot--what-s-not-in-scripting-languages.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501170521.30/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104610-00492-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942617 | 1,449 | 2.640625 | 3 |
When Schrodinger Materials Science tools wanted to test out 200,000 different organic compounds to see which ones could be a good fit to be used in photovoltaic electricity generation, the amount of data it had to deal with was an inhibiting factor, to say the least.
The company wanted to design, synthesize and experiment various combinations to find just the right fit. The job would have taken about $68 million worth of infrastructure, or almost 200 years if ran on a single machine. Instead, Schrodinger hired Cycle Computing, which specializes in large-scale distributed high performance computing to do it all in Amazon's public cloud.The job ran across 156,000 virtual cores, and exceeded 1.21 petaflops of computing capacity. Using a distributed system of virtual machines across eight regions of Amazon Web Servcie's public cloud around the world for a total of 18 hours.
Cycle says it was a record-breaking petabyte-scale analytics job. So big it has dubbed it the "Megarun."
Cycle Computing has a software management platform that controls the hundreds of thousands of virtual machines that are needed to run these types of jobs. Life science testing is a perfect fit for this software because of the massive amounts of options that are available to scientists to test a broad range of theories.
Cycle uses it software to make the job as least expensive as possible. Using cloud-based resources that are spun up and then deprovisioned as soon as the job is finished, the total cost came to just $33,000. Cycle used more than 16,700 AWS Spot Instances, which are virtual machines that are not reserved or dedicated resources, but instead are made available to customers when they are available. The Cycle software also schedules data movement, encrypts the data and automatically detects and troubleshoots some errors, such as failures to a machines, zones or regions.
While the 156,000 core run is an impressive accomplishment for Cycle, the company has been doing this sort of thing before. Between 2010 and 2013, it has run analytic jobs of 2,000; 4,000; 10,000; 30,000 and 50,000 cores. This one was so big that Cycle calls it its "MegaRun." In addition to using the Cycle software, named Jupiter, it also used Chef automated configuration tools. | <urn:uuid:cd7d34c2-ce6f-48d0-b8db-1212a74f5cad> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.networkworld.com/article/2225781/-68-million--200-year--150-000-core-analytics-job-run-on-amazon-s-cloud-in-18-hours-for--33-000.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501170521.30/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104610-00492-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947888 | 479 | 2.71875 | 3 |
Automakers from Tesla to Volkswagen have used Nvidia's graphics chips to power infotainment systems and displays in their cars. Now the tech firm sees an opportunity to expand into another field -- driver-assist technologies and even self-driving cars.
Driver-assist features include things like sounding an alarm when you're reversing into a wall or drifting too close to a car in the next lane. Key to Nvidia's plan is its new Tegra K1, which combines four CPU cores and 192 GPU cores on a single chip that the company says can do the work of several.
"We're going to see a consolidation of several driver assistance processors capable of being replaced by one Tegra K1," said Danny Shapiro, senior director of automotive at Nvidia.
We saw the Tegra K1 in action at Nvidia's headquarters in Santa Clara, California. The chip processed data in real time from a car's front-facing camera to detect vehicles and other objects and to recognize traffic signs and lane markings.
The K1 was also used to process data from a Lidar sensor -- the rotating sensor often seen on top of self-driving cars to map the vehicle's surroundings.
The computerization of the auto industry has been a huge boon for chip companies. Features like anti-lock braking systems and passenger air bags are all controlled by microchips, and data from sensors and the Web is creating demand for more computing power.
Nvidia, best known for its graphics cards, says its mobile processors can bring "supercomputing horsepower" to cars. Automotive has become the fastest-growing segment in its Tegra division -- Nvidia says there are 5.1 million cars on the road with its processors, more than double the number in 2012.
Car computers will soon be "more powerful than any computer you will ever own in your life," according to Shapiro. They'll run dozens of applications -- "many of which might not even exist when you buy the car, but the ability to update the car with new software, much like you do with your phone and tablet, is the way it's going to move in the future." | <urn:uuid:29fb2673-1c67-4b0d-ba2d-d0c7a095101a> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.computerworld.com/article/2489868/computer-processors/driverless-cars--is-that-an-nvidia-chip-under-the-hood-.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171043.28/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00192-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964171 | 433 | 2.53125 | 3 |
Online social networks are gathering information about their users that those people never intended to disclose, and government regulation may be the only way to stop the practise, a researcher said Tuesday.
People deliberately disclose a great deal of their personal data to social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn already -- but the networks can use that information, and data about users' online behavior, to infer even more, allowing them to build extensive user profiles, said Christian Zimmermann, a researcher at the University of Freiburg in Germany, at the Amsterdam Privacy Conference.
For users to regain control over what the networks know about them would require the networks to be more transparent about their methods. That's unlikely to happen without regulation or an economic incentive, because transparent processes would be hard to implement and knowing less about their users is not in the networks' interest.
Existing techniques already allow the social networks to determine the purchasing power, ethnicity or political affiliation of users who did not intend to disclose such information, Zimmermann said. Making such inferences without informing the users constitutes a severe threat to privacy, and allows unprecedented user profiling, he said.
"Knowing someone's political affiliation might not be so important here, but it might be very important in countries like Syria," said Zimmermann, who added that kind of inferred data might have a big impact on someone's life there.
Indications of a user's purchasing power can also be useful for companies, he said. "Recently it was discovered that a hotel booking site showed more expensive hotels to Mac users that visited the site," Zimmermann said, referring to online booking site Orbitz, which showed site visitors rooms in more expensive hotels depending on the computer they used.
Similar techniques could benefit social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, which offer a mostly free service to users, and generate the lion's share of their revenue by selling advertising space. The highest price is paid for targeted advertising that matches the user's interest and purchasing power, and inferred data could help a lot in targeting ads, Zimmermann said.
"Revenues from data-centric service providers depends directly on the data they gather from users," he said.
The problem is that social network users have no idea what information is pieced together about them, while from a privacy perspective, it should really be the user who is in control of the data, not the social network, Zimmermann said. "Of course there is a privacy risk, because there is derived data that you really did not intend to disclose. From a user prospective it is a black box."
People can't know what data is inferred about them because they don't know what rules are used to build the extensive user profiles, he said. Moreover, the rule sets used by social networks evolve constantly. As users publicize new information and the provider gathers new data, new patterns emerge causing old patterns to change and it is impossible for a user to predict these changes, he said.
One way to prevent inferences being made from data is not to disclose it in the first place, but that is very hard for users to do when they don't know how an online service is combining information about them. Besides that, others might be disclosing the very information that they are trying to keep secret.
Because of these challenges it is obvious that profile building based on user behavior rather than the information that is disclosed by the user cannot be prevented, but it can be limited, said Zimmermann.
Users could for instance use privacy enhancing technologies like The Onion Router (TOR), or use pseudonyms to hide their online identities. "They can be really helpful but cannot solve the problem," Zimmermann said. Using those technologies doesn't stop social networks from gathering inferred data, he said.
Another possibility is to enhance transparency. Social networks could disclose what information about users is tracked, said Zimmermann. The main problem with transparency is that social networks lack the incentive to make inferred data available users, he said.
A possible solution is to take regulatory action and force monitoring on the provider, he said. "But that is not easy to do," he said. If the European Union's 27 member states were unable to agree a single regulation, then social networks would have to figure out a way to apply a patchwork of national regulations to users' data.
Making the process transparent is not sufficient to stop the services from building profiles based on inferred data, though, he said. A combination of preventive data disclosure and transparency can tame the inference problem, said Zimmermann, but still cannot prevent inferences completely. It will, though, give users the means with which to limit the threat in the long run.
Loek covers all things tech for the IDG News Service. Follow him on Twitter at @loekessers or email tips and comments to email@example.com | <urn:uuid:becad2ea-e01b-4091-8e40-8ebbbaa40578> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.cio.com/article/2391448/security-privacy/more-regulation-only-way-to-stop-social-networks-learning-more-than-we-wish--says-r.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171251.27/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00368-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955898 | 984 | 2.609375 | 3 |
Video Game Development as a Degree
Video game developers never have been in such high demand as the emergence of video games themselves becomes the preferred medium for a diverse array of consumers.
This phenomenon is akin to the wave of film schools and film students in the ’60s — although most scoffed at the time, these institutions and individuals would go on to bring film to cultural heights never thought possible. Video game developers who go to school for their craft are poised to make a similar breakthrough and prove their discipline belongs in academia.
Just as Steven Spielberg and his peers were members of the first generation to go to school specifically for making movies, a new crop of talent is going to school for the sole purpose of designing video games.
As with the previous generation with its new medium, there is limitless potential for video games to grow and evolve under educated leadership.
The specifics of earning such a degree still fluctuate depending on the school
Michigan State University, one of the more traditional schools to have a video game program, offers a master’s degree in telecommunications, which includes a course in “serious” game design (this is defined as games with a purpose beyond entertainment).
The degree description says these “serious” games increasingly become more common in the military and corporate training, which corresponds to the increased need for personnel to design such games. Students from a wide variety of academic backgrounds, from computer science to political science, all are welcomed to apply for the degree.
Video game degree programs are especially popular in cities where studios have design hubs, including Los Angeles and Seattle, which ideally creates a steady stream of new employees coming into the workforce every year. An example of this phenomenon is students in the game-development degree program at the University of Southern California going to work for Electronic Arts’ Los Angeles design office. No such pipeline, conversely, can hurt an area with a thriving game industry.
For example, a community such as Austin, Texas — a large game design hub — lacked any specific degree program at a nearby university. With companies acknowledging the need to hire people who graduate from specific game-related programs, the broad degrees large universities offer often aren’t as attractive to employers.
Austin Community College (ACC), however, is beginning to lay groundwork for such a system that has worked so well elsewhere. By offering a certificate in video game design, ACC fills the need for a specific program.
The University of Central Florida, by contrast, has a specific video gram program, as well as a major local work opportunity called the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy (FIEA).
As of December 2006, FIEA graduated its first class of master’s degree candidates, most of whom will go on to work at the nearby Electronic Arts’ Tiburon, Fla., studios.
The common theme with video game degree programs is their prevalence is based on the community’s need for those particular skills. It’s only a matter of time, however, that the need for video game programmers reaches beyond finding someone to design the city trash cans in the next “Grand Theft Auto” entry. | <urn:uuid:27fb8766-3567-445f-aff0-0a4270a2d68d> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://certmag.com/video-game-development-as-a-degree/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501169769.33/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104609-00013-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966093 | 639 | 2.53125 | 3 |
Gas analyzers are process analytical instruments designed with the purpose of determining the qualitative and quantitative composition of elements in a gas mixture. They provide vital data to many manufacturing, processing, and materials research industries.
Gas analyzers are typically employed for safety purposes, such as preventing toxic exposure and fire. As these detectors measure a specified gas concentration, the sensor response serves as the reference point of scale. When the sensors response surpasses a certain pre-set level, an alarm will get activated to warn the user.
Gas analyzers can be used for trace gas measurement in various processes having detection limits at levels as low as part per million (ppm), part per billion (ppb), and even part per trillion (ppt). While many of the older instruments units were originally fabricated to detect one gas, modern devices are capable of detecting several gases at once.
This research report covers the entire spectrum of gas analyzers used across various industry verticals such as power, chemical, pharmaceutical, semiconductor processing, water & wastewater treatment, and others. Among all the analyzers catalytic and infrared analyzers are more commonly used to detect combustible gases, while other analyzers like electrochemical and MOS are installed for the detection of toxic gases. The entire market is segmented by technology into electrochemical, infrared, paramagnetic, zirconia, laser, catalytic, metal oxide semiconductor, photo ionization detectors, and others. The different geographical regions covered in the report include North America, Europe, APAC, and RoW.
The report also highlights all the factors currently driving the market as well as restraints and opportunities for the global market. It also profiles all major companies involved in this segment covering their entire product offerings, financial details, strategies, and recent developments.
Please fill in the form below to receive a free copy of the Summary of this Report
Please visit http://www.micromarketmonitor.com/custom-research-services.html to specify your custom Research Requirement | <urn:uuid:ec7fca8c-8e62-4dfe-8415-47bc8be13b12> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.micromarketmonitor.com/market-report/gas-analyzers-reports-5125475481.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501170823.55/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104610-00365-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.924421 | 407 | 2.640625 | 3 |
Kaspersky Lab Discovers Security Flaws in Connected Cars
. Updated February 22, 2017.
In order to examine the security of connected cars, Kaspersky Lab researchers tested seven remote car control applications developed by major car manufacturers. The research discovered that each of the examined apps contained several security vulnerabilities.
This is according to a research report by Kaspersky Lab researchers, which examines the security of applications for the remote control of connected cars from several famous car manufacturers. As a result, the security company's experts discovered that all of the applications contain a number of security issues that can potentially allow criminals to cause significant damage for connected car owners.
Upon successful exploitation, an attacker can gain control over the car, unlock the doors, turn off the security alarm and, theoretically, steal the vehicle, reveals the report.
The list of the security issues discovered includes:
* No defense against application reverse engineering -- as a result, malicious users can understand how the app works and find a vulnerability that would allow them to obtain access to server-side infrastructure or to the car's multimedia system;
* No code integrity check, which is important because it enables criminals to incorporate their own code in the app and replace the original program with a fake one; * No rooting detection techniques. Root rights provide Trojans with almost endless capabilities and leave the app defenseless;
* Lack of protection against app overlaying techniques. This helps malicious apps to show phishing windows and steal users' credentials;
and * Storage of logins and passwords in plain text. Using this weakness, a criminal can steal users' data relatively easily.
"The main conclusion of our research is that, in their current state, applications for connected cars are not ready to withstand malware attacks. Thinking about the security of the connected car, one should not only consider the security of server-side infrastructure. We expect that car manufacturers will have to go down the same road that banks have already gone down with their applications. Initially, apps for online banking did not have all the security features listed in our research. Now, after multiple cases of attacks against banking apps, many banks have improved the security of their products.
"Luckily, we have not yet detected any cases of attacks against car applications, which means that car vendors still have time to do things right. How much time they have exactly is unknown. Modern Trojans are very flexible -- one day they can act like normal adware, and the next day they can easily download a new configuration making it possible to target new apps. The attack surface is really vast here," says Victor Chebyshev, security expert at Kaspersky Lab.
This year the CES 2017 featured a variety of technologies that support the future of autonomous or automated driving, including parking assist, collision avoidance, emergency braking and much more.
The entire convention hall was filled with carmakers showcasing new models, self-driving tech, and wild concepts from BMW, Ford, Hyundai, Toyota, Nissan and more. Ford became the first automaker to bring Amazon Echo into their cars, while BMW, Intel, and Mobileye announced that they will have self-driving cars on the road later this year. Fiat Chrysler announced its first all-electric, self-driving concept car. Google and Fiat Chrysler have partnered to build a new infotainment system on top of Android.
Kaspersky Lab researchers advise users of connected car apps to keep the OS version of their device up to date to reduce vulnerabilities and install a proven security solution in order to protect their device from cyber attacks. | <urn:uuid:b2b5aadc-4032-4e62-b9f7-f6030230636e> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.cio-today.com/article/index.php?story_id=10100393KU47 | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501172831.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104612-00593-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953123 | 725 | 2.578125 | 3 |
Windows 7 hides certain files so that they are not able to be seen when you exploring the files on your computer. The files it hides are typically Windows 7 System files that if tampered with could cause problems with the proper operation of the computer. It is possible, though, for a user or piece of software to set make a file hidden by enabling the hidden attribute in a particular file or folder's properties. Due to this it can be beneficial at times to be able to see any hidden files that may be on your computer. This tutorial will explain how to show all hidden files in Windows 7.
To enable the viewing of hidden and protected system files in Windows 7 please follow these steps:
You will now be at your desktop and Windows 7 will be configured to show all hidden files.
If you have any questions about this tutorial please feel free to post them in our Windows 7 forums.
By default Windows hides certain files from being seen with Windows Explorer or My Computer. This is done to protect these files, which are usually system files, from accidentally being modified or deleted by the user. Unfortunately viruses, spyware, and hijackers often hide there files in this way making it hard to find them and then delete them.
Windows 8 hides certain files so that you are not able to view them while exploring the files and folders on your computer. Windows has two types of files that Windows will classify as hidden and hide from the user. The first type are actually hidden files, which are ones that are given the +H attribute or specified as Hidden in a file or folder's properties. The second type of file are System ...
Windows 7 allows you to have multiple users sharing the same computer under their own individual accounts. This allows each individual user to have their own location on the computer where they can store their personal documents, pictures, videos, saved games, and other personal data. This also allows the owner of the computer to assign certain accounts the ability to perform administrative tasks ...
If you use a computer, read the newspaper, or watch the news, you will know about computer viruses or other malware. These are those malicious programs that once they infect your machine will start causing havoc on your computer. What many people do not know is that there are many different types of infections that are categorized in the general category of Malware.
Windows Vista has made it a little harder to find the Folder Options settings than it had in previous versions. The easiest way is to use the Folder Options control panel to modify how folders, and the files in them, are displayed. You can still show the Folder Options menu item while browsing a folder, but you will need to hold the ALT key for a few seconds and then let go to see this menu. | <urn:uuid:720f7e1f-a653-4e27-95cd-401461191f54> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/show-hidden-files-in-windows-7/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501172831.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104612-00593-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930532 | 555 | 2.890625 | 3 |
I've seen a few headlines about the habitable planet (or planets) orbiting a star called Tau Ceti in which the words "neighboring" and "nearby" were used.
OK, on a universal scale, 12 light years might qualify as "next door." But in terms of our ability to cover vast distances in space ... well, we just can't do it. And we won't be able to in our lifetimes.
The numbers are sobering. A light year measures 5.88 trillion miles. That's trillion, space fans. For some perspective, the moon is 240,000 miles from Earth, while Mars is (on average) 140 million miles from Earth. And it currently takes anywhere from six to nine months or so to travel to Mars.
To cover one light year -- or 5.88 trillion miles -- you would have to travel back and forth from Mars more than 40,000 times.
And that's just one light year. Our "neighboring" Earth-like planet orbiting Tau Ceti is 12 light years away. I looked around a bit online for how long it would take to travel a light year at current space-travel speeds. The number I kept coming up with was around 35,000 years. Multiply that by 12 and you discover it would take 420,000 years to reach Tau Ceti. How many times will the commander of that flight hear, "Are we there yet"?
Let's say I'm off on my multiplication and division (about a 50-50 shot) by a factor of 100: It still would take 4,200 years to reach Tau Ceti under current travel speeds. Does that really sound more doable?
The truth is, interstellar travel is a pipe dream until we find a radically new source of fuel or way to travel.
It turns out, though, that NASA is working on a faster-than-light "warp-drive" that would reduce a trip to Alpha Centauri -- the nearest star to our sun, about 4.3 light years away -- to a mere two weeks. So figure about six weeks to reach Tau Ceti.
Of course, this is all in the theoretical stage. There's a good article from late November on the science website io9 about NASA's efforts (including an interview with NASA physicist Harold White) that explains the warp concept:
It takes advantage of a quirk in the cosmological code that allows for the expansion and contraction of space-time, and could allow for hyper-fast travel between interstellar destinations. Essentially, the empty space behind a starship would be made to expand rapidly, pushing the craft in a forward direction — passengers would perceive it as movement despite the complete lack of acceleration.
Bottom line: They're working on it, but don't hold your breath. And don't run out and book a flight going beyond our solar system: You'll have a long, long wait. | <urn:uuid:2bb6c62a-f729-4be0-92d7-7f27862682c8> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.itworld.com/article/2717166/hardware/don-t-count-on-visiting-the--nearby--earth-like-planet.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501174215.11/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104614-00117-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960925 | 605 | 3.3125 | 3 |
What Is Multifactor Authentication?
Multifactor authentication simply refers to the requirement of a second piece of information before allowing access to an account. By adding another authentication step, you are requiring that the user enter two forms of data – typically the first being something the user knows, like a username and password, and the second being something the user has physical access to, like an app on a mobile phone that generates one-time codes or a device that plugs into the computer to scan a fingerprint. After enabling multifactor authentication, the user is required to enter both pieces of data (username/password + generated piece of data) each time they login to the account or service.
Why It Matters
Good security is about being proactive and mitigating risk. Multifactor authentication increases security by adding another barrier to entry, decreasing the likelihood that a “pretender” can break in. It makes it harder for someone who has stolen the password to gain entry to the account. Unfortunately, many websites don’t implement this second form of authentication, which is why implementing it with your LastPass account is critical – and arguably more effective.
If you enable multifactor authentication with LastPass, you have significantly increased the security of your LastPass account itself, which is the hub of your online life. If someone compromises your master password, they can’t gain access to your account without the second form of authentication. Since LastPass gives you the tools to generate secure, non-guessable passwords for all your accounts, if you then launch all of your sites from LastPass, you are eliminating risks of phishing attacks and other threats because you are going directly to your sites and logging in with LastPass. By enabling a mutifactor authentication device, you are by effect enabling it for each of the sites in your vault as well. For Enterprise, if your Identity Provider utilizes multifactor authentication, as LastPass does, you also get the full benefit of multifactor authentication without passwords at all sites that you’ve implemented it on.
How It Works With LastPass
Once you enable multifactor authentication with LastPass, you’ll be required to first enter your email address and master password, then the multifactor authentication data. LastPass offers support for several multifactor authentication methods:
- Google Authenticator (Free): Utilizes a Google app, available for Android, iOS, and BlackBerry, which will generate a code every 60 seconds that you will enter when prompted.
- Grid (Free): A unique, generated spreadsheet of random values that resemble a Battleship grid, each section containing a different letter or number. Once enabled, you’ll be prompted to find and enter four values from the spreadsheet.
- Sesame (Premium): Generates unique One Time Passwords (OTPs) each time you login. The feature can be run from a USB thumb drive, and you have the choice to copy the OTP to the clipboard or launch the browser and pass the value automatically.
- YubiKey (Premium): A key-sized device that you can plug into your computer’s USB slot, and generates a unique, One Time Password each time it’s pressed. YubiKeys are immune from replay-attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, and a host of other threat vectors. The key can be purchased from Yubico and bundled at a discounted rate with LastPass Premium. No batteries, waterproof, and crush safe.
- Fingerprint Reader (Premium): LastPass has support for a small selection of fingerprint readers, including Windows Biometric Framework, UPEK, and Validity.
- SmartCard Reader (Premium): LastPass has experimental support for SmartCard readers. See our help article for more details and limitations.
With all multifactor security options, you have the ability to mark the computer as “trusted”, leaving multifactor enabled but not requiring it on that particular “safe” location.
Passwords are not going anywhere soon, and because sites have implemented different security standards and requirements, we strongly recommend enabling a form of multifactor authentication with LastPass. This will help you better protect and mitigate risks for your LastPass account, and your online life as a whole.
The LastPass Team | <urn:uuid:14985bb6-ce69-4f87-9569-e235b0a3eda3> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://blog.lastpass.com/2013/05/multifactor-authentication-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters.html/?showComment=1367951116224 | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501170864.16/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104610-00061-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.890437 | 876 | 2.765625 | 3 |
1940: Creating the Handie-Talkie Radio
Motorola traces its origins of portable two-way radio technology to the World War II Handie-Talkie military radio. Prior to the U.S. entering the war, Galvin Manufacturing Corporation anticipated the need for a handheld portable two-way radio that would “follow man in combat.”
Anticipating the need
The most famous radio of the World War II era, the Handie-Talkie SCR536 handheld two-way radio, almost never came to be. Former Motorola President Elmer H. Wavering recalled that engineer Donald Mitchell recognized the strategic value of portable communications after he observed a National Guard training exercise and saw how radios installed in vehicles were abandoned in the mud and confusion of battle. He returned to the company convinced that military communications had to follow man to the greatest degree possible and immediately began to engineer a radio that could be carried in the hand.
Designing a portable radio
The U.S. Army Signal Corps was not interested and considered it a stopgap radio because of its short range of about one mile (1.6 km). But Mitchell continued to improve the design. He and his team developed a two-way AM radio that a single person could carry and operate with one hand. Tuned using sets of crystals for transmitting and receiving, it was battery-powered and weighed just 5 pounds (2.2 kg). The Signal Corps soon realized that the light weight was ideal for a new type of soldier--the paratrooper--and by early 1941 awarded Galvin Manufacturing Corporation a contract for an experimental quantity.
In the soldier's hands
When the United States entered the war in December 1941, the company stepped up production to ship thousands of radio units to the front lines. Handie-Talkie radiotelephones became standard equipment for infantrymen as well as for paratroopers. By the time World War II ended, Motorola's handheld SCR536 Handie-Talkie two-way radio was an icon. | <urn:uuid:b77e4787-e11e-40eb-9bde-3097433b3965> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://www.motorolasolutions.com/en_us/about/company-overview/history/explore-motorola-heritage/handie-talkie-radio.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501172017.60/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104612-00113-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955957 | 413 | 3.875 | 4 |
The health care industry has a lot to gain from the fruits of big data. There’s more potential than ever before as we begin to analyze and use the wealth of data that is available to us today.
Careful and timely collection of massive data as it relates to person, place, and population can reveal new and exciting insights that will result in more intelligent and effective patient care globally.
In the near future, a full set of all available information from multiple systems should be in place at the individual patient level. This should include all clinical encounter data, personal health, and genetic information.
Genomic sequencing tests are predicted to be as low as $100. Therefore, this affordability will create a new paradigm whereby crunching genetic data sets to generate precision and personalized treatments will become common practice.
At the point of care, we’ll be able to compare our genetics with “patients like us” for real-time clinical decision support to make the most appropriate decisions in our care plan. We’ll know what to expect and how to better care for ourselves and our loved ones.
A complete set of de-identified data should be available for population health assessment and identification of trends for research, planning, and population health management.
Ultimately, data-driven intelligence — including predictive models that are generated from correlations and commonalities across person, place and population — will help us to create new prevention and treatment innovations that capitalize on previously untapped insights.
This article is published as part of the IDG Contributor Network. Want to Join? | <urn:uuid:afff9b1e-a554-4b8f-8817-3160f18a3591> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.cio.com/article/3027645/analytics/concentric-use-of-information.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501173405.40/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104613-00289-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.925669 | 319 | 2.515625 | 3 |
Hidden Behavior Includes Everything from Adult Content to Cheating on School Work, Up from 45% since 2010
Study Reveals Top 10 Ways Teens Are Fooling Their Parents
22.8% of Parents Are Overwhelmed by Technology and Just Hope for the Best
SANTA CLARA, Calif. – June 25, 2012 – McAfee, the world’s largest dedicated security technology company, today released findings from the company’s 2012 Teen Internet Behavior study. The study investigates the online habits, behaviors, interests, and lifestyles of the first generation to truly grow up online, and discloses how teens are not only engaging in risky behaviors, but how they are hiding it from their parents, many of whom don’t realize they are being fooled. The study also exposes ten ways teens are hiding their online activities from their parents.
Despite their awareness of online dangers, teens continue to take risks by posting personal information and risky photos online, unbeknownst to parents. Many teens are accessing inappropriate online content, despite 73.5% of parents whom trust their teens to not access age-inappropriate content online. Specifically 43% of teens have accessed simulated violence online, 36% have access sexual topics online, and 32% have accessed nude content or pornography online.
Nearly half of parents believe their teens tell them everything they do online and insist they are in control when it comes to monitoring their teen’s online behaviors. However, the study reveals that teens deceiving their parents are on the rise, as over 70% of teens have found ways to avoid parental monitoring, compared to 2010, where 45% of teens have hidden their online behavior from a parent. The top 10 ways teens are fooling their parents include:
As teens continue to outsmart their parents online, more and more teens are participating in dangerous and even illegal activities. Surprisingly, 15% of teens have hacked a social network account, 30.7% access pirated movies and music, and 8.7% have hacked someone’s email online, while less than 15% of parents are aware their children are engaging in any of these behaviors. Instant access to information has also made it easier than ever for teens to cheat in school with 16% of teens having admitted to looking for test answers on their phone, and 48.1% of teens having looked up answers online. Meanwhile 77.2% of parents said they were not very or not at all worried about their teens cheating online, again showing the disconnect.
“While it is not necessarily surprising that teens are engaging in the same types of rebellious behaviors online that they exhibit offline, it is surprising how disconnected their parents are,” says Stanley Holditch, Online Safety Expert for McAfee. “There is a major increase in the number of teens finding ways to hide what they do online from their parents, as compared to the 2010 study. This is a generation that is so comfortable with technology that they are surpassing their parents in understanding and getting away with behaviors that are putting their safety at risk.”
In addition to putting themselves in risky situations, teens are finding that much of this online behavior is attributing to personal problems. In fact, over half of teens with a social network account have already experienced negative consequences as a result of being on a social network account, such as arguing with friends (35.4%), getting into trouble at home or school (25.2%), ending friendships (20%), fearing for their safety (6.8%), and physical fights (4.5%). Conversely, many parents live in denial, with only 22% claiming that their teens can get into that much trouble online.
Despite the classic “not my kid” denial, many parents are starting to up the ante with online monitoring to help keep their kids safe online by: setting parental controls (49%), obtaining email and social network passwords (44%), taking away computer and mobile devices (27%), and using location-based devices to keep track of teens (10%). But there are still some parents so overwhelmed by technology that they are throwing up their hands and hoping for the best. In fact, 23% of the surveyed parents disclosed that they are not monitoring their children’s online behaviors because they are overwhelmed by technology.
“Parents need to get informed about their children’s online behavior,” says Robert Siciliano, McAfee Online Security Expert. “The fact is that allowing teens to participate in unmonitored online activity exposes them to real dangers with real consequences, and these dangers are growing exponentially with the proliferation of social networks.”
Other key findings included:
TRU conducted a total of 2,017 online interviews in the U.S. among teens ages 13-17 and parents of teens ages 13-17. These interviews were split evenly among 1,004 teens and 1,013 parents of teens. The parent/teen samples yield a margin of error of + 3.1 percentage points. The total sample of 2,017 yields a margin of error of + 2.2 percentage points. The interviews were conducted from May 4th through May 29th, 2012.
Interviews among teens were split evenly by age and gender. Interviews among parents were split fairly evenly by gender, as well as by age and gender of their teen. The sample was comprised of 15% Hispanic and 15% African American respondents and achieved geographic distribution according to the US census.
To learn more, please visit:
About McAfee, Inc.
McAfee, a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC), is the world's largest dedicated security technology company. McAfee delivers proactive and proven solutions and services that help secure systems, networks, and mobile devices around the world, allowing users to safely connect to the Internet, browse and shop the Web more securely. Backed by its unrivaled Global Threat Intelligence, McAfee creates innovative products that empower home users, businesses, the public sector and service providers by enabling them to prove compliance with regulations, protect data, prevent disruptions, identify vulnerabilities, and continuously monitor and improve their security. McAfee is relentlessly focused on constantly finding new ways to keep our customers safe. http://www.mcafee.com
NOTE: McAfee is a registered trademark or trademark of McAfee or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. Other marks may be claimed as the property of others. | <urn:uuid:60ac6c45-5831-4e1a-bc1c-0cb4be11edf9> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://www.mcafee.com/au/about/news/2012/q2/20120625-01.aspx | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501173405.40/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104613-00289-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958705 | 1,305 | 2.515625 | 3 |
Today, almost everybody in the developed world interacts with personal computers in some form or another. We use them at home and at work, for entertainment, information, and as tools to leverage our knowledge and intelligence. It is pretty much assumed whenever anyone sits down to use a personal computer that it will operate with a graphical user interface. We expect to interact with it primarily using a mouse, launch programs by clicking on icons, and manipulate various windows on the screen using graphical controls. But this was not always the case. Why did computers come to adopt the GUI as their primary mode of interaction, and how did the GUI evolve to be the way it is today?
In what follows, I?ll be presenting a brief introduction to the history of the GUI. The topic, as you might expect, is broad, and very deep. This article will touch on the high points, while giving an overview of GUI development.
Like many developments in the history of computing, some of the ideas for a GUI computer were thought of long before the technology was even available to build such a machine. One of the first people to express these ideas was Vannevar Bush. In the early 1930s he first wrote of a device he called the "Memex," which he envisioned as looking like a desk with two touch screen graphical displays, a keyboard, and a scanner attached to it. It would allow the user to access all human knowledge using connections very similar to how hyperlinks work. At this point, the digital computer had not been invented, so there was no way for such a device to actually work, and Bush's ideas were not widely read or discussed at that time.
However, starting in about 1937 several groups around the world started constructing digital computers. World War II provided much of the motivation and funding to produce programmable calculating machines, for everything from calculating artillery firing tables to cracking the enemy's secret codes. The perfection and commercial production of vacuum tubes provided the fast switching mechanisms these computers needed to be useful. In 1945, Bush revisited his older ideas in an article entitled "As We May Think," which was published in the Atlantic Monthly, and it was this essay that inspired a young Douglas Englebart to try and actually build such a machine.
The father of the GUI
Douglas Engelbart in 1968
Douglas Englebart completed his degree in electrical engineering in 1948 and settled down in a nice job at the NACA Institute (the forerunner of NASA). However, one day while driving to work he had an epiphany: he realized that his real calling as an engineer was not to work on small projects that might only benefit a few people. Instead, he wanted to work on something that would benefit all of humanity. He recalled Bush's essay and started thinking about ways in which a machine could be built that would augment human intellect. During the war he had worked as a radar operator, so he was able to envision a display system built around cathode ray tubes where the user could build models of information graphically and jump around dynamically to whatever interested them.
Finding someone to fund his wild ideas proved to be a long and difficult task. He received his PhD in 1955, and got a job at the Stanford Research Institute, where he received many patents for miniaturizing computer components. By 1959 he had earned enough recognition to receive funding from the United States Air Force to work on his ideas. In 1962, Douglas published his ideas in a seminal essay entitled "Augmenting Human Intellect." In this paper, Douglas argued that digital computers could provide the quickest method to "increase the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems." He envisioned the computer not as a replacement for human intellect, but a tool for enhancing it. One of the first hypothetical examples he described for this technology was of an architect designing a building using something similar to modern graphical CAD software.
This was a huge leap in thinking for 1962. The only computers that existed at the time were giant mainframes, and typically users would interact with them using what was called "batch processing." A user would submit a program on a series of punch cards, the computer would run the program at some scheduled time, and then the results would be picked up hours or even days later. Even the idea of having users enter commands on a text-based terminal in real-time (called "time-sharing" in the jargon of the day) was considered radical back then.
Douglas and his growing staff worked for years to develop the ideas and technology that finally culminated in a public demonstration in front of over a thousand computer professionals in 1968. | <urn:uuid:e41775ae-c86e-4121-b0ef-4a2b0d14d472> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/05/gui/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501174276.22/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104614-00465-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980255 | 949 | 3.546875 | 4 |
In recent years, the cost of launching a DDoS attack has reduced – so the volume of attacks has rapidly increased. At the same time, attacks have become more sophisticated – and that has made them difficult to guard against and harder for businesses to recover from. Simple prevention techniques – that were effective a few years ago – are no longer adequate to protect against today’s complex DDoS attacks. Because the threats have become more devious, your protection has to be more rigorous.
Unlike virus attacks that tend to propagate automatically, DDoS attacks rely on human expertise. The cybercriminal will usually research the business they’re targeting. They’ll assess vulnerabilities within the target business’s online presence – and preselect the attack tools that are most likely to achieve their malicious objectives. Then, working in real time during the attack, the criminal will constantly adjust their tactics and select different tools in order to maximize the damage they inflict. | <urn:uuid:e9d98628-d9d8-4d46-a556-74372b5e7a11> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://www.kaspersky.com.au/enterprise-security/ddos-protection | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501170249.75/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104610-00057-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972459 | 191 | 2.5625 | 3 |
Earlier in my career I was a C programmer. Not a C++ programmer, a C programmer. The reason I didn’t program in C++ is because it didn’t exist yet. I thought that C, and then C++ when it entered the scene, were incredibly strong and versatile programming languages. Having previously programmed in various other languages, I thought it was interesting that I could increment a counter by putting two plus signs before or after it. For those not in the programming world, “x = x + 1” and x++ are equivalent statements.
I remember asking the person who was teaching me how to program in C why this new syntax existed. He told me four things:
1. It provides greater flexibility when forming computations because you can refer to and increment the value of “x” in the same statement 2. If you place the “++” after the “x” it increments after its use and if you place the “++” before the “x’ it increments before its use 3. This syntax assists the compiler in creating efficient assembly language code (compilers were not as advanced at that time) 4. It looked really cool and people using other programming languages wouldn’t know what it meant.
I then asked him if the “x = x + 1” format would still work. He told me that yes, it would, but never use it in C programs because the other C programmers will make fun of you. Real C programmers only use the “x++” format.
When asking people why they like one programming language over another, one of the following themes, best described in memorable TV commercials and great classic songs, comes to mind:
• Less Filling, Taste Great: This theme illustrates that sometimes more than one programming language can appropriately do the job, it just comes down to a decision between two great options. (Ok, yes, I’m thinking about Java versus .NET). • Love the one you’re with: This is the case that sometimes the language you know always seems to be better than the language you don’t know. • Try it you’ll like it: This is often the theme brought forward by technical evangelists, rightly so, trying to get you to learn a new emerging technology. Remember, there was a time when C++, Java, .NET, PHP, and even COBOL were brand new languages. • I heard it through the grapevine: This is when a new language, or other technology, gets incredible hype within the industry and everyone starts (or wants to) hop on the bandwagon. • My dog is better than your dog: This is the case when people get entrenched in a specific technology and feel like it is the solution to all problems. Another way to state this phenomenon is that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
My reason for telling you this story, other than the fact that I always smile when I think of it, is because it takes an increadible amount of time, effort, and commitment to truly become expert in a specific programming language. As a result, you should think carefully before selecting a language to be sure it's the right language for your marketability, interest, and long term career.
Consider the following questions in making the decision to learn a new programming language.
• How marketable is this language in my geographic location? For example, if you work in Boston, how many local companies hire people with knowledge of this language? • Is this language used within the industry in which I would like to work? For example, if you want to work in the video game industry, you should learn the languages most often used in the creation of software for video games. • To use this language effectively, what other technologies will I have to learn? For example, if you are considering learning .NET, then you may also want to learn how to use SourceSafe and SQL Server. • How large is the job market for people knowing this language? Alternatively stated, is this language generally used in all industries and for many purposes, or is it a nitch language only used for specific purposes? • How much competition is there for jobs using this technology? That is to say, are there more people than jobs or more jobs than people. As an aside, if there are more jobs than people, the average pay of everyone knowing that language will generally go up because the demand for this skill set is larger than the supply of people who have it. • What is the language's future? Is it growing or shrinking in popularity? That is to say, in two years and/or five years will there be more jobs or less jobs available for people who know this technology.
I chose a programming language as my example, but I could have used any technology or any IT related job. There are a lot of great technologies out there, programming languages, analytical tools, software packages, hardware devices, and software tools. As technologists, whether you are a programmer, a help desk professional, a software tester, or any other hands-on techie, carefully choose the technologies you learn and the technologies you decide not to learn. These decisions, whether through good luck or bad, deep analysis or wild guess, will help frame your professional future. Be careful and choose wisely.
If you have any questions about your career in IT, please email me at eric@ManagerMechanics.com or find me on Twitter at @EricPBloom.
Until next time, work hard, work smart, and continue to grow.
Read more of Eric Bloom's Your IT Career blog and follow the latest IT news at ITworld. Follow Eric on Twitter at @EricPBloom. For the latest IT news, analysis and how-tos, follow ITworld on Twitter and Facebook. | <urn:uuid:6bd8ef3b-9aad-41a7-9566-a7fc63e9a7f1> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.itworld.com/article/2713362/careers/selecting-the-best-programming-language--a-k-a-less-filling--taste-great-.html?page=3 | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501170875.20/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104610-00409-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950089 | 1,209 | 2.859375 | 3 |
Digital certificates were originally designed to help authenticate, provide non repudiation, and to sometimes ensure integrity and confidentiality for written communication. They of course became the rage for securing Internet based transactions.
Today some people take for granted that digital certificates are intrinsic to any web based transaction and that the transactions are therefore safe. But are the transactions safe? By the way I stand corrected – I just did a quick pole of 10 people who regularly do e-transactions on the Internet and one of the ten even knew the existence of digital certificates.
Here is what digital certificates are and how they work. Digital certificates are electronic documents, much like an electronic version of a passport. In fact they contain very similar boiler plate information about both the owner and the issuer of the certificate. The issuer is hopefully a certificate authority, analogous to an issuing Country of a passport, which is widely recognized and in whom everybody else has complete confidence.
The digital certificate also contains a secret known, again hopefully, only to the certificate owner and to the issuer. The secret is called a private password. The certificate authority also publishes a public key or password for every certificate holder. Both the public and private keys used only together can unlock the secrets otherwise encrypted by one of the keys.
For example, if Bob wants to send a confidential email to Sally, then Bob would encrypt the email with Bob’s private key and then again with Sally’s public key. Sally would decrypt Bob’s email with Bob’s public key and with her secret private key. Bob’s public key will only decrypt emails from Bob, and Sally’s private key will only decrypt emails encrypted with her public key. So confidentiality and fairly strong authentication of sender is provided.
Another example. If Bob wanted to send an open email to many people, but needed everybody to be sure that Bob was the sender, Bob would encrypt with his private key and anybody receiving the email would decrypt and read it with Bob’s public key. Bob must have been the sender, so authentication of sender is provided to some degree.
Online vendors use digital certificates in combination with the SSL protocol for their encryption algorithm, in order to protect the validity, integrity, and confidentiality of each transaction. Any visitor to a validly secured online e-transaction site should be able to view the associated digital certificate including details of the hashing algorithm used to protect their transaction. In this case, the validation only goes in one direction; only the transaction site is identifying itself conclusively to any visitor.
Yikes! SSL Meltdowns
We’ve probably all read about a recent SSL certificate validation problem stemming from a hashing algorithm. This is not the first problem with SSL. There was a doozey in 2009. And in 2008. And so on. Each time there is a problem, someone finds a resolution, such as changing a hashing algorithm.
Whether industry uses SSL or TLS there will undoubtedly be developing security vulnerabilities and remediation for them.
The big issue is how to take reasonable precautions to protect ones-self from SSL meltdowns. Here is a simple precautionary SSL check-list.
· Do verify the URL you are visiting is what you expected and not a similar URL with slashes and asterisks where they don’t belong.
· If in doubt phone the vendor’s or site.
· Do take the time to verify the digital certificate on a web site.
· If in doubt, research the certificate authority.
· Remember that not all portions of a web site are secured with SSL. Users can stray to an unprotected area of a site.
Have a secure week. | <urn:uuid:e7334a1e-8932-412b-8e2a-7084dfb9378f> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.infosecisland.com/blogview/4491-Are-you-Using-or-Abusing-Digital-Certificates.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501170614.88/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104610-00581-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940139 | 746 | 3.359375 | 3 |
You should update several programs on your hard drive regularly, usually for security reasons. Many of them, including your antivirus and Windows itself, probably update automatically. (For questions about automatically updating Windows, see Should I Turn Off Automatic Updates?)
[ FREE DOWNLOAD: 68 great ideas for running a security department ]
But the BIOS is different. It's not even on the hard drive. And you should only update it with good reason.
Unlike other programs, the Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) sits on a chip on the motherboard, and is the first code to run when you boot your PC. It tells the processor where to look for the operating system. It continues working after the bootup, facilitating communication between the OS and the hardware.
Although you can update today's BIOSes, doing so is more dangerous than updating drive-based software. If something goes wrong, it could render the PC completely unbootable; you won't even be able to boot a live Linux flash drive or reinstall Windows. There's probably a way to bring the PC back to life, but it won't be easy.
So when should you update your BIOS? Only if there's a problem--especially a hardware-related one--and your research suggests that the BIOS may be the cause.
Research is the key to a safe BIOS update. First, find the current version of your BIOS:
- Select Start (Start>Run in XP), type regedit, and press ENTER.
- Navigate the Registry Editor's left pane, as if it were Windows Explorer, to Computer/LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE\DESCRIPTION\System.
- In the larger, right pane, note the data fields for SystemBiosDate and SystemBiosVersion.
Armed with that information, go to your PC or motherboard manufacturer's Web site to see if there's a new version available. If there is, double and triple-check to make sure it’s actually for your particular hardware. Read the description to see if it might fix your problem.
The Web site may offer two versions of the BIOS-updating tool--a Windows program and a special, bootable version you put on a CD or flash drive. If both are available, go with the bootable one.
And follow the instructions to the letter.
Read the original forum discussion.
Contributing Editor Lincoln Spector writes about technology and cinema. Email your tech questions to him at firstname.lastname@example.org, or post them to a community of helpful folks on the PCW Answer Line forum. Follow Lincoln on Twitter, or subscribe to the Answer Line newsletter, e-mailed weekly.
This story, "Should I update my BIOS?" was originally published by PCWorld. | <urn:uuid:78459ef6-d85f-4b3b-98cd-a2d1c81dc202> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.itworld.com/article/2723622/enterprise-software/should-i-update-my-bios-.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171163.39/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00281-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.886917 | 570 | 2.71875 | 3 |
Let’s see what is UDP – User Datagram Protocol. Inside the computer world, term “networking” is denoted to the physical joining of two machines for different purposes like communication and data distribution. But mesh of this hardware and computer’s software can communicated with each other with the help of specially designed protocols. Moreover, computer networks can be categorized on the basis of such communication languages (protocols) used by a network.
The UDP (User Datagram Protocol) is one amongst the core constituents of the internet protocols suite. This network protocols set is specially introduced for the internet in the year 1980. So computer applications over internet can correspond through messages with User Datagram Protocol’s help. In such cases, these are also known as datagram.
UDP is simply an OSI model’s transport layer’s protocol that is designed for client/server networking applications. UDP can be used as the main alternative to another protocol TCP.
In order to obtain the higher performance, UDP protocol is being used in establishing live connection with the help of videoconferencing applications. But this protocol provides good results in the computer games as well. For enjoying synchronized performance, UDP will drop down the individual datagram packets exclusive of any revision. And as a result, UDP packets are reached to their destination in an orderly form other than those were sent by communicating application. Well! UDP is a connectionless (no link establishment) Transport layer’s protocol. But it provides the same consistency as another protocol named as TCP does.
Function of UDP is quite like a postal mail service. Datagram packets are just launched without any tracking of them. Furthermore, no acknowledgement is made by the receiver. Similarly, sending device might not be aware of that they are either reached to destination or get lost anywhere on the way. Main benefit of this protocol usage is just its fast speed because there is less checking throughout the sending course of action than TCP.
Besides video/audio streaming and online game, some other applications where connection reliability isn’t important UDP can be used simply.
UDP Datagram’s structure
UDP traffic is sent in the form of datagrams and a single datagram unit is consisted on only one message. But remember, its 1st eight bytes are containing header information while left over bytes are consisted on the data relating to message. Datagram header is enclosed 4 fields of: source port number, destination port number, datagram size and checksum. Furthermore, in order to create a host-to-host connection for communication, UDP applications can be used datagram sockets. These applications can as well bind sockets to their ending points of data (an IP address plus a service port) ready for transmission.
Another thing to be noted is that, UDP is implemented a simply designed transmission model with no implicit practice like handshaking dialogues which provides reliability and data ordering etc. Briefly, UDP datagrams can be arrived to their destination out of order too. That means a stream of packets can contain duplicate data too. But efficiency in transferring data is its plus point over the TCP protocol. | <urn:uuid:7ac529aa-fbf6-474a-a516-2ae37f66a752> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://howdoesinternetwork.com/2011/udp | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171608.86/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00457-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.927229 | 644 | 3.546875 | 4 |
Cloud computing has been very slow to catch in the EU, not because they didn’t know about it or didn’t have the resources to make use of it, but because most Europeans are considerably more paranoid about the security of their data.
Because of this many European firms still use off-grid data servers or even old-fashioned and excruciatingly slow physical filing systems to store their sensitive data. Not only is confidence in data security low, it’s getting lower. Constant news of sensitive data being hacked into by various cyber-groups and then occasionally leaked through groups like Wikileaks makes people considerably less willing to trust new always-accessible cloud systems.
The Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance act gives the US government the right to perform physical and electronic surveillance on people and businesses inside the US. It was passed in 1978 and amended in 2002 to allow for domestic wiretapping without a warrant and in 2007 to allow for warrantless surveillance of foreigners outside the US, which means anyone, anywhere, regardless of if they’re under American authority or law. That, however, is a topic we could write a whole book about. The important part is that under American law the US can do just about anything it would like to collect private information from anyone in the world.
Because most developed countries have strict laws prohibiting governments from spying on sensitive personal and corporate data EU governments are now often less knowledgeable about their own countries than the US. You see, the US government considers it to be its business to gather data from any US based firms, which includes their EU subsidiaries, regardless of whether those subsidiaries actually conduct business in the US. This means that the US government can (and does) make a lot of money by selling information about EU corporations to their own countries.
Data Security Measures
While cloud systems and cyber-security firms have been working for decades to build secure spaces on the web, the government can often simply pressure media giants like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, or Amazon into releasing data about themselves and others. Additionally the threat of cyber-terrorism is steadily increasing as the incidences of major cyber attacks increase and bring down or compromise huge sites both in the public and private sectors.
The Impact on Business
Since it’s considerably more expensive as well as politically dangerous to run physical surveillance inside foreign countries it’s still possible for these companies to protect their information by simply keeping it off of the web. However as a result of this they naturally miss out on the vast benefits that come from having their data available anywhere at the drop of a hat. Besides that it’s also considerably more expensive to host internal data banks and pay an in-house team of IT professionals to keep everything running smoothly and up to date. The end question is whether the benefit of data security is greater than the cost of highly efficient SaaS ERP technology.
About the Author
Richard Turkel writes about all aspects of business technology, database management to IT leadership. He currently writes for BMC, a company that offers IT management software. | <urn:uuid:432ecca0-7054-4ada-89b0-bcaaa088ea6b> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://www.hpcwire.com/2013/03/22/why_cloud_computing_hasnt_taken_off_in_the_eu/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171781.5/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00633-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955037 | 613 | 2.8125 | 3 |
The U.N.'s civil aviation body will recommend creating a cybersecurity task force at a meeting next week in Canada, as new technologies introduced into aviation systems are increasing the risk of cyberattacks.
The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) said a task force is needed due to an increasing reliance on interconnected IT systems with operating systems such as Microsoft Windows and Linux, and protocols such as IPv6 and Avionics Full Duplex Switched Ethernet (AFDX), according to a working paper.
"Currently cyber security is a relatively minor issue in civil aviation, but this is changing," the ICAO wrote. "Although the adoption of new technology is an ongoing activity in civil aviation, the current pace and extent of new information technologies is notably increasing the risk from cyber attacks."
Earlier this year, Cyprus-based researcher Andrei Costin showed at the Black Hat security conference major problems in ADS-B (automatic dependent surveillance broadcast), a next-generation protocol used by air traffic control systems to track aircraft positions.
Costin, who also gave his presentation at the Power of Community (POC2012) security conference on Friday in Seoul, described weaknesses in the ADS-B protocol, which has been adopted so far in Australia and in busy flying areas in the U.S. It allows for more precise aircraft tracking, which allows more planes to fly closer together in the sky, carrying more passengers and bringing in more revenue.
Costin showed how it was possible to tamper with ADS-B tracking data for planes in the sky and also make planes that aren't flying appear to be in the sky to air traffic controllers. The equipment needed for such an attack costs as little as US$1,500. The weaknesses in ADS-B have been known for years, but Costin showed on Friday a practical attack.
"Basically, we kind of helped them [the ICAO] understand that there's a real problem and a real risk in this," Costin said.
But while an ICAO cybersecurity task force would be good development, it won't mean a fix for the ADS-B protocol, Costin said. Fixing ADS-B will be difficult and could cost billions of dollars, he said, an effort that has no business incentive and wouldn't bring in new revenue.
"Nobody will do it [fix ADS-B] for the next 50 years for sure unless there is a big attack," Costin said.
The ICAO cited Costin's research as well as other vulnerabilities, such as jamming of GPS signals, and malicious incidents, as justification for a cyber security task force. In one example, the ICAO wrote three software engineers were accused of sabotaging code in June 2011 at a new airport terminal, allegedly because they didn't get a pay increase from a subcontractor.
Three days later, check-in services failed at the terminal, with 50 flights delayed. Cyberattacks could have "an effect analogous with the recent Icelandic volcanic ash problems, shutting down air travel across parts of Europe for several days. In that case estimated costs run into the billions of dollars or euros," the ICAO wrote.
ICAO's 12th Air Navigation Conference is scheduled to run from Nov. 19-30 in Montreal.
Send news tips and comments to email@example.com. Follow me on Twitter: @jeremy_kirk | <urn:uuid:62e6ac33-875b-48d5-a694-b69e09559bb0> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.itworld.com/article/2717715/security/un-s-civil-aviation-body-recommends-cybersecurity-task-force.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501173872.97/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104613-00333-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964996 | 694 | 2.65625 | 3 |
No matter what images we have from the Borg on Star Trek or the Cylons on Battlestar Galactica, NASA says the future of space exploration is all about human and robotic cooperation.
"In space it will be robots and humans, not robots versus humans", said Rob Ambrose, chief of the Software, Robotics and Simulation Division at NASA's Johnson Space Center. "We have a vision for Mars that definitely includes robots. Apollo did not have the technology to pre-deploy food and supplies for the moon. Everything they took had to fit into that lunar module. If they could have pre-deployed, they might have stayed more than two days."
Ambrose was the opening speaker at today's RoboticBusiness conference in Boston.
The focus of his keynote was building robots that will work hand-in-hand with humans to extend our reach into deep space.
The NASA scientist noted that the space agency has put together a list of what technology it will need for exploration over the next 20 years. Along with life support systems and heavy-lift engines, NASA has made it clear that it also needs robotics if we're going to explore Mars and distant asteroids.
Specifically, Ambrose said NASA needs advances in autonomy, sensing and perception, mobility and manipulation. And one of the greatest robotics needs involves advances in human/robotic interactions.
"Why would humans need robots to explore?" he asked the audience of several hundred people. "We see a larger view of how robots can help us. First they'll act as precursors to human arrival. Exploration of Mars has already started robotically... Imagine if Magellan had a robot to go ahead and explore? They can be caretakers running a facility before humans get there. And between crews, they can be left as caretakers, running the facility and waiting for the next crew to arrive."
Already, the robotic rovers Curiosity and Opportunity have been working on Mars for years, studying the makeup of Martian soil and looking for clues as to whether the Red Planet once could sustain life, even in microbial form.
Robots also have been working on the International Space Station for years, with multiple large robotic arms grabbing onto approaching spacecraft, unloading cargo and even giving astronauts rides as they work outside the space station.
This, said Ambrose, is just the beginning.
"We see a number of roles, especially on the space station today, where the crew is overly subscribed," he said. "Any time we can offload from the crew and focus more on their scientific exploration is a huge time savings to us. Robots could do housekeeping and maintenance."
Ambrose showed video of robotic machines that are being used in space or one day might be.
A six-wheeled rover, which has only been tested on Earth so far, could be used to carry astronauts or to serve as a scientific rover on another planet, like Mars, he said. With a lot of torque and an active suspension system, the robotic vehicle is able to easily climb over ridges taller than its own tires and over obstacles.
"It's a beast. It can climb vertical steps and carry more than its own weight on its back," said Ambrose. "No matter what happens, the rover will be able to get the astronauts back to the lander. That's critical, since you're trusting your life to that rover getting you back."
He also discussed Robonaut 2, also known as R2, which is a humanoid robot working on the space station.
"We wanted a robot that could safely work around people," said Ambrose. "If you're going to work side-by-side with a machine that strong, you really have to trust it.... That's what we got in the Robotnaut 2 system. An astronaut is allowed in the space of a robot with nobody watching it. Nobody is on the red button. If you want to stop the robot, you just touch it. It went through the most rigorous safety review of any robotic system I've ever seen."
If the robot senses that it's touched a human, it simply stops. This large, powerful robot has triple redundancies built in to make sure it can work beside humans and not hurt them.
That level of trust is critical to getting humans comfortable with working with robots. And that comfort is key to moving forward with human/robotic cooperation, especially in the dangerous and lonely regions of space.
"We need machines to fly, to go above 20 miles per hour," said Ambrose. "Why not use machines to explore?"
This story, "NASA: Robots Are Our Friends" was originally published by Computerworld. | <urn:uuid:c75a75bc-27bd-449a-93c5-de501634c46a> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.cio.com/article/2834580/robotics/nasa-robots-are-our-friends.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501170696.61/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104610-00625-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969303 | 950 | 3.140625 | 3 |
You'd need an umbrella made of kryptonite if you were to go walking on Mars apparently.
NASA scientists using images from the space agency's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) have estimated that the planet is bombarded by more than 200 small asteroids or bits of comets per year forming craters at least 12.8 feet (3.9 meters) across.
Using MRO's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera, NASA researchers spotted 248 new impact sites on parts of the Martian surface in the past decade, using images from the spacecraft to determine when the craters appeared - MRO has been looking at Mars since 2006. The 200-per-year planet wide estimate is a calculation based on the number found in a systematic survey of a portion of the planet, NASA stated.
These asteroids or comet fragments typically are no more than 3 to 6 feet (1 to 2 meters) in diameter. NASA noted that space rocks too small to reach the ground on Earth cause craters on Mars because the Red Planet has a much thinner atmosphere. NASA also added that the meteor over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in February was about 10 times bigger than the objects that dug the fresh Martian craters.
The rate is equivalent to an average of one each year on each area of the Martian surface roughly the size of the U.S. state of Texas. Earlier estimates pegged the cratering rate at three to 10 times more craters per year. They were based on studies of craters on the Moon and the ages of lunar rocks collected during NASA's Apollo missions in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Counting the rate at which new craters appear serve as researcher's best way to estimate the ages of exposed landscape surfaces on Mars and other worlds.
HiRISE operations are based at The University of Arizona in Tucson. According to the school, the HiRISE camera is the most powerful camera ever to orbit another planet. It has taken thousands of black-and-white images, and hundreds of color images, since it began science operations in 2006. A single HiRISE image will often be a multigigabyte image that measures 20,000 pixels by 50,000 pixels, which includes a 4,000-by-50,000 pixel region in three colors. It can take a computer up to three hours to process such an image.
Check out these other hot stories: | <urn:uuid:d91a8b3b-f1f2-4bb4-b342-9d73d9238424> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.networkworld.com/article/2224643/data-center/nasa--mars-hit-by-some-200-small-asteroids-or-bits-of-comets-per-year.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501170696.61/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104610-00625-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946677 | 494 | 3.921875 | 4 |
Studying Can Be MURDER
Studying is perhaps the only sphere for which “murder” can have a positive connotation. That’s because the term serves as an acronym for a study system employed by many meticulous learners: mood, understand, recall, digest, expand and review. See? M-U-R-D-E-R, she wrote. Here’s an explanation of the system and how it works.
M is for Mood
This refers to creating the right environment for effective study. Of course, finding an appropriate setting for studying is a personal affair. People have to employ the things that work best for them, and individuals being individuals, this will fluctuate wildly. But no matter your preference, the main thing to keep in mind is concentration — the ideal environment will be one you hardly even notice as you study.
First, consider the location itself and your own immediate reaction to it. Is there a great deal of external stimuli around to distract you (TV, Internet, other people, etc.)? What you’ll be using to study also influences where you’ll be doing it. Think about what tools and materials you’ll need to use most during that time. Generally speaking, you shouldn’t have more than the bare necessities, as too much stuff can drive you to distraction.
U is for Understand
You’re bound to come across some unfamiliar topics and terms as you study a new subject. When you find yourself not comprehending a particular concept while reading a print or virtual resource, make a note of it and move on.
Also, keep a dictionary on hand so you can look up unknown words, understand them in their context and then move on to the next point. If the terms are so technical or cutting-edge that they won’t be found in a standard unabridged dictionary, try to find some kind of technology reference book that explains the ones you don’t understand.
R is for Recall
After you’ve finished going through the material, try to remember as much of it as you can. Even better, see how much you can write down in your own words. If you’re having trouble recollecting the information — or worse, are drawing a blank — go back to the first step and start over.
D is for Digest
Once you’ve recalled what you know, revisit the stuff you didn’t quite get. Go back and re-read the terms and concepts you had trouble with to see if you can make sense of it. If not, try to find another source or a knowledgeable expert who can explain it better.
E is for Expand
Once you’ve got all that down, move to broaden your knowledge of the topic even further by thinking critically about it. Proponents of the MURDER system recommend starting out with three rhetorical questions:
1) If I could speak to the author, what questions would I ask or what criticism would I offer?
2) How can I apply this material to what I am interested in?
3) How could I make this information interesting and understandable to others?
R is for Review
Finally, consider everything you’ve learned in a final review session. Although this obviously includes the topic (or topics) you studied, it also constitutes an evaluation of what study techniques and strategies you used and how well those worked. Figure out what suits you best, and just throw out the rest. | <urn:uuid:1ba2d2ec-7f60-43ed-ba4e-46abe45fff14> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://certmag.com/studying-can-be-murder/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501174154.34/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104614-00377-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956125 | 720 | 3.125 | 3 |
Sick of spending all your money on your cell-phone bill? The Energy Department plans to boost energy savings for laptop and phone chargers, and it's betting the new standards will save you money.
The department will strengthen energy-efficiency standards for external power supplies, products that take the form of cell-phone and laptop chargers as well as power cords for a host of other electronic devices, including video-game consoles, in homes across the country, the administration announced Monday.
DOE estimates that the standards will put close to $4 billion back in the pockets of American consumers, while lowering carbon emissions by 47 million metric tons over the next 30 years. The EPS standards will build on 2007 standards that are designed to boost the efficiency of the devices by nearly a third.
The department is no stranger to energy-efficiency. It recently finalized energy-efficiency standards for metal halide lamps, a type of light fixture commonly used in parking lots and big-box stores. It has also set out energy-savings standards for household and commercial appliances.
DOE emphasized that the external power supply standards fall under the heading of the president's larger climate-change agenda.
"Building on President Obama's State of the Union address, which called for reducing carbon pollution and helping communities move to greater energy efficiency, the Energy Department today announced new efficiency standards for external power supplies," a press release stated.
These latest efficiency standards come as the administration faces heightened scrutiny from environmental advocates looking to judge the president's commitment to acting on climate change in the lead up to a final decision on the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline.
Debate over the pipeline intensified last week, when the State Department released a report concluding that approving the project would not significantly speed oil sands development in Canada, a finding that environmental groups have contested. | <urn:uuid:58ad35ae-1db7-429f-94fa-0728e52f1af9> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.nextgov.com/mobile/2014/02/energy-department-wants-make-your-phone-charger-more-efficient/78080/?oref=ng-dropdown | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501174154.34/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104614-00377-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944553 | 367 | 2.703125 | 3 |
Millions of mobile phones may be vulnerable to spying due to the use of outdated, 1970s-era cryptography, according to new research due to be presented at the Black Hat security conference.
Karsten Nohl, an expert cryptographer with Security Research Labs, has found a way to trick mobile phones into granting access to the device's location, SMS functions and allow changes to a person's voicemail number.
Nohl's research looked at a mobile phones' SIM (Subscriber Identification Module), the small card inserted into a device that ties it to a phone number and authenticates software updates and commands sent over-the-air from an operator.
More than 7 billion SIM cards are in use worldwide. To ensure privacy and security, SIM cards use encryption when communicating with an operator, but the encryption standards use vary widely.
Nohl's research found that many SIMs use a weak encryption standard dating from the 1970s called DES (Data Encryption Standard), according to a preview posted on his company's blog.
DES has long been considered a weak form of encryption, and many mobile operators have upgraded now to more secure forms. It is relatively easy to discover the private key used to sign content encrypted with DES.
In its experiment, Security Research Labs sent a binary code over SMS to a device using a SIM with DES. Since the binary code wasn't properly cryptographically signed, it would not run on the device.
But while rejecting the code, the phone's SIM makes a crucial mistake: it sends back over SMS an error code that carries its own encrypted 56-bit private key, according to the company. Because DES is considered a very weak form of encryption, it's possible to decrypt the private key using known cracking techniques.
Security Research Labs did it in about two minutes on a regular computer with the help of a rainbow table, a mathematical chart that helps convert an encrypted private key or password hash into its original form faster.
With the private DES key in hand, it is then possible to "sign" malicious software updates with the key, and send those updates to the device. The device believes the software comes from a legitimate source and then grants access to sensitive data.
The company outlined an attack scenario against SIM cards that run some form of Java virtual machine, a software framework for Java applications.
Using the SIM's private key, an attacker could force the SIM to download Java applets, which are essentially very small programs that perform some function. Those applets would be "allowed to send SMS, change voicemail numbers, and query the phone location, among many other predefined functions."
"These capabilities alone provide plenty of potential for abuse," the company wrote.
Possible remedies to the problem including ensuring SIM cards use state-of-the-art cryptography and also using Java virtual machines that restrict applets' access to certain information.
Nohl's presentation, "Rooting SIM cards," will take place at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas on July 31.
Send news tips and comments to firstname.lastname@example.org. Follow me on Twitter: @jeremy_kirk | <urn:uuid:540ab225-6d30-4288-ac39-62722ec14547> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.itworld.com/article/2707218/security/sim-cards-vulnerable-to-hacking--says-researcher.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171232.43/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00021-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936938 | 643 | 3.15625 | 3 |
In an effort to deliver renewable energy to residential customers, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) struck a deal with waste-to-energy company BioEnergy Solutions, under which the company will deliver up to 3 billion cubic feet of renewable methane gas - enough to supply electricity to approximately 50,000 PG&E customers in central and northern California.
Manure from 3,000 dairy cows will be flushed into covered lagoons that will trap the methane gas produced as the manure decomposes. The gas will be "scrubbed" to remove carbon dioxide and corrosive materials to meet PG&E's industry environmental standards for power plants then delivered to PG&E through the utility's pipeline. - Pge.com
New Mexico is taking the fight against drunk driving into men's restrooms. The state ordered 500 talking urinal cakes that will deliver a recorded message warning against drunk driving to bar and restaurant patrons who make one last pit stop before getting behind the wheel.
The state spent $21 for each talking urinal cake for the pilot, but will ask bars and restaurants to pay for future orders if the idea catches on. The cakes have enough battery power to last approximately three months. - The Associated Press
Dozens of dolphins and sea lions trained to detect and apprehend waterborne attackers could be sent to patrol a military base in Washington state.
Dolphins' astonishing sonar abilities make them excellent at patrolling for swimmers and divers. When a Navy dolphin detects a person in the water, the dolphin drops a beacon, which tells a human interception team where to find the suspicious swimmer. Sea lions can carry special cuffs attached to long ropes in their mouths, which they can use to clamp around a person's leg. The individual can then be reeled in for questioning. - NavyTimes.com
A team of astronomers, led by Carl Grillmair from the Spitzer Science Center and David Charbonneau from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, measured the first spectrum from the atmosphere of HD 189733b, a planet orbiting a distant sun-like star.
"In a sense, we're getting our first sniffs of air from an alien world," said Charbonneau. "And what we found surprised us. Or more accurately, what we didn't find surprised us."
They expected to see water, methane or carbon dioxide, Grillmair said. "But we didn't see any of those. The spectrum was flat, with no molecular fingerprints that we could detect."
Astronomers speculate that these molecules are present but hidden behind a high layer of silicate clouds. - Spitzer Science Center
Photo credit: David A. Aguilar (CfA)
Minnesota is requiring utilities to generate a quarter of their power from renewable sources by 2025. Considering where the state stands now - about half the power produced there is from coal, and only 8 percent from renewable sources - the legislation signed by the governor in February is the most aggressive in the country, analysts say.
The Minnesota law pushes for the use of renewable sources - such as wind, water and solar energy - and cleaner burning fuels.
The law comes as states around the country stake out far-off goals for renewable energy. More than 20 states have some type of renewable requirement or good-faith objective. Colorado
is moving toward a standard of 20 percent by 2020, while New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch challenged lawmakers to adopt a 25 percent requirement by 2025. - Businessportal24.com
70 percent of businesses' or noncommercial entities' Web sites are at a serious and immediate risk of being hacked, according to Acunetix.
Electronic medical record (EMR) use is growing in public health-care facilities, according to a study by Citrix. When state health executives were asked if they currently use EMRs, the responses were as follows.
In the planning phase 71 percent
Using EMRs 19 percent
Not using/not planning 10 percent
Those in the planning phase were asked how long to deployment:
Two years or more 80 percent
Less than two years 20 percent
Business people who visited Business.gov, the new one-stop federal compliance Web site for businesses, confirmed the site saves them time and money. Of businesses surveyed, 72 percent said they saved up to 25 hours. Almost half of surveyed businesses reported saving money.
Though children ages 6 to 11 - also known as "tweens" - tend to play video games during the majority of their time online, doing homework and research is still in the top three activities, according to a survey of U.S. children's online activities in fall 2006.
Played online games 48 percent
Visited favorite Web sites 25 percent
Research/homework 21 percent
Listened to music 19 percent
E-mail 14 percent
Downloaded music 9.7 percent
Instant messaging 9 percent
Blogs (reading/writing) 5.6 percent
Downloaded software 4.3 percent
Other activities 18 percent
None of these 16 percent
Source: Experian Simmons, Feb. 2007 | <urn:uuid:102d92a4-af82-450f-a78b-4f778a7acad7> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.govtech.com/magazines/gt/100493359.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171933.81/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00373-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941379 | 1,039 | 2.703125 | 3 |
The cloud is an abstract notion of a loosely connected group of computers working together to perform some task or service that appears as if it is being fulfilled by a single entity. The architecture behind the scenes is also abstract: each cloud provider is free to design its offering as it sees fit. Software as a Service (SaaS) is a related concept, in that the cloud offers some service to users. The cloud model potentially lowers users' costs because they don't need to buy software and the hardware to run it — the provider of the service has done that already.
Take, for example, Amazon's S3 offering. As its name implies, it is a publicly available service that lets Web developers store digital assets (such as images, video, music, and documents) for use in their applications. When you use S3, it looks like a machine sitting on the Internet that has a hard drive containing your digital assets. In reality, a number of machines (spread across a geographical area) contain the digital assets (or pieces of them, perhaps). Amazon also handles all the complexity of fulfilling a service request to store your data and to retrieve it. You pay a small fee (around 15 cents per gigabyte per month) to store assets on Amazon's servers and one to transfer data to and from Amazon's servers.
Rather than reinvent the wheel, Amazon's S3 service exposes a RESTful API, which enables you to access S3 in any language that supports communicating over HTTP. The JetS3t project is an open source Java library that abstracts away the details of working with S3's RESTful API, exposing the API as normal Java methods and classes. It's always best to write less code, right? And it makes a lot of sense to borrow someone else's hard work too. As you'll see in this article, JetS3t makes working with S3 and the Java language a lot easier and ultimately a lot more efficient.
S3 at a high level
Logically, S3 is a global storage area network (SAN), which appears as a super-big hard drive where you can store and retrieve digital assets. Technically though, Amazon's architecture is a bit different. Assets you choose to store and retrieve via S3 are called objects. Objects are stored in buckets. You can map this in your mind using the hard-drive analogy: objects are to files as buckets are to folders (or directories). And just like a hard drive, objects and buckets can be located via a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI).
For example, on my hard drive, I have a file named whitepaper.pdf, which is in the folder named documents in my home directory. Accordingly, the URI of the .pdf file is /home/aglover/documents/whitepaper.pdf. In S3's case, the URI is slightly different. First, buckets are top-level only — you can't nest them as you would folders (or directories) on a hard drive. Second, buckets must follow Internet naming rules; they can't include dashes next to periods, names shouldn't contain underscores, and so on. Lastly, because bucket names become part of a public URI within Amazon's domain (s3.amazonaws.com), bucket names must be unique across all of S3. (The good news is that you can only have 100 buckets per account, so it's doubtful there are squatters taking hundreds of good names.)
Buckets serve as the root of a URI in S3. That is, a bucket's name becomes part of the URI leading to an object within S3. for example, if I have a bucket named agdocs and an object named whitepaper.pdf, the URI would be http://agdocs.s3.amazonaws.com/whitepaper.pdf.
S3 also offers the ability to specify owners and permissions for buckets and objects, as you can do for files and folders on a hard drive. When you define an object or a bucket in S3, you can specify an access-control policy that states who can access your S3 assets and how (for example, read and write permissions). Accordingly, you can then provide access to your objects in a number of ways; using a RESTful API is just one of them.
Getting started with S3 and JetS3t
To begin using S3, you need an account. S3 isn't free, so when you create your account you must provide Amazon with a means of payment (such as a credit card number). Don't worry — there are no setup fees; you only pay for usage. The nominal fees for the examples in this article will cost less than $1.
As part of the account-creation process, you also need to create some credentials: an access key and a secret key (think username and password). (You can also obtain x.509 certificates; however, they are only needed if you use Amazon's SOAP API.) As with any access information, it is imperative that you keep your secret key ... secret. Should anyone else get hold of your credentials and use them to access S3, you'll be billed. Consequently, the default behavior any time you create a bucket or an object is to make everything private; you must explicitly grant access to the outside world.
With an access key and a secret key in hand, you can download JetS3t and use it with abandon to interact with S3 via its RESTful API via.
Programmatically signing into S3 via JetS3t is a two-step process. First, you must
AWSCredentials object and then pass it into a
S3Service object. The
AWSCredentials object is fairly straightforward. It takes your access and secret keys as
S3Service object is actually an interface type. Because S3 offers both a RESTful API and a SOAP API, the JetS3t library offers two implementation types:
SoapS3Service. For the purposes of this article (and indeed, most, if not all of your S3 pursuits), the RESTful API's simplicity makes it a good choice.
Creating a connected
RestS3Service instance is simple, as shown in Listing 1:
Listing 1. Creating an instance of JetS3t's
def awsAccessKey = "blahblah" def awsSecretKey = "blah-blah" def awsCredentials = new AWSCredentials(awsAccessKey, awsSecretKey) def s3Service = new RestS3Service(awsCredentials)
Now you are set to do something interesting: create a bucket, say, add a movie to it, and then obtain a special limited-time-available URL. In fact, that sounds like a business process, right? It's a business process associated with releasing a limited asset, such as a movie.
Creating a bucket
For my imaginary movie business, I'm going to create a bucket dubbed bc50i. With
JetS3t, the process is simple. Via the
S3Service type, you have a few options. I prefer to use the
getOrCreateBucket call, shown in Listing 2. As the name implies, calling this method either returns an instance of the bucket (represented by an instance of the
S3Bucket type) or creates the bucket in S3.
Listing 2. Creating a bucket on a S3 server
def bucket = s3Service.getOrCreateBucket("bc50i")
Don't let my simple code examples fool you. The JetS3t library is fairly extensive. For
instance, you can quickly ascertain how many buckets you have by simply asking an instance of an
S3Service via the
listAllBuckets call. This method returns an array of
S3Bucket instances. With any instance of a bucket, you can ask for its name and creation date. More important, you can control permissions associated with it via JetS3t's
AccessControlList type. For instance, I can grab an instance of my bc50i bucket and make it publicly available for anyone to read and write to, as shown in Listing 3:
Listing 3. Altering the access-control list for a bucket
def bucket.acl = AccessControlList.REST_CANNED_PUBLIC_READ_WRITE
Of course, via the API, you are free to remove buckets too. Amazon even allows you to specify in which geographical areas you'd like your bucket created. Amazon handles the complexity of where the actual data is stored, but you can nudge Amazon to put your bucket (and then all objects within it) in either the United States or Europe (the currently available options).
Adding objects to a bucket
Creating S3 objects with JetS3t's API is just as easy as bucket manipulation. The library is also smart enough to take care of some of the intricacies of dealing with content types associated with files within an S3 bucket. For instance, imagine that the movie I'd like to upload to S3 for customers to view for a limited time is nerfwars2.mp4. Creating an S3 object is as easy as creating a normal
java.io.File type and associating the
S3Object type with a bucket, as I've done in Listing 4:
Listing 4. Creating an S3 object
def s3obj = new S3Object(bucket, new File("/path/to/nerfwars2.mp4"))
Once you've got a
S3Object initialized with a file and a bucket, all you need to do is upload it via the
putObject method, as shown in Listing 5:
Listing 5. Uploading the movie is a piece of cake
With the code in Listing 5, you're done. The movie is now on Amazon's servers, and the key for the movie is its name. You could, of course, override that name should you feel the need to call the object something else. In truth, the JetS3t API (and by relation the Amazon S3 RESTful API) exposes a bit more information for you when you create objects. As you know, you can also provide access-control lists. Any object within S3 is capable of holding additional metadata, which the API allows you to create. You can later query any object via the S3 API (and by derivation, JetS3t) for that metadata.
Creating URLs to objects
At this point, my S3 instance has a bucket with a movie sitting in it. In fact, my movie can be found at this URI: http://bc50i.s3.amazonaws.com/nerfwars2.mp4. Yet, no one other than me can get to it. (And in this case, I can only access it programmatically, because the default access controls associated with everything are set to deny any noncredentialed access to it.) My goal is to provide select customers a way to view the new movie (for a limited time) until I'm ready to start charging for access (which S3 can facilitate as well).
Figure 1 shows the default access control in action. The XML document returned (and accordingly displayed in my browser) is informing me that access is denied to the asset I was trying to reach (http://bc50i.s3.amazonaws.com/nerfwars2.mp4).
Figure 1. Amazon's security in action
Creating a public URL is a handy feature exposed by S3; in fact, with S3, you can create a public URL that is only valid for a period of time (for instance, 24 hours). For the movie I've just stored on the S3 servers, I'm going to create a URL that is valid for 48 hours. Then I'll then provide this URL to select customers so they can download the movie and watch it at will (provided they download it within two days).
To create a time-sensitive URL for an S3 object, you can use JetS3t's
createSignedGetUrl method, which is a static method of the
S3Service type. It takes a bucket name, a object's key (the movie's
name in this case, remember?), some credentials (in the form of JetS3t's
AWSCredentials object), and an expiration date. If you know the desired bucket name and the object's key, you can quickly obtain a URL as shown in the Groovy code in Listing 6:
Listing 6. Creating a time-sensitive URL
def now = new Date() def url = S3Service.createSignedGetUrl( bucket.getName(), s3obj.key, awsCredentials, now + 2)
With Groovy, I can specify a date 48 hours in the future quite easily via the
+ 2 syntax. The resulting URL looks something like this (on a single line):
Now, with this resultant URL, browser requests will honored, as shown in Figure 2:
Figure 2. The URL facilitates downloading
Wasn't this process a piece of cake? With a few lines of code, I've created a secure asset in the cloud that can only be downloaded with a special URL.
Leveraging S3 for time-sensitive downloads
S3 makes a lot of sense if your bandwidth and storage needs aren't constant. For example, imagine the business model I'm demonstrating — one in which movies are released at specific times throughout the year. In the traditional storage model, you'd need to buy a bunch of space on a rack somewhere (or provide your own hardware and pipe leading to it) and most likely see spikes of downloads followed by lulls of relatively low activity. You'd be paying, however, regardless of demand. With S3, the model is satisfied based on demand — the business pays for storage and bandwidth only when it's required. What's more, S3's security features let you further specify when people can download videos and even specify who can download them.
Achieving these requirements with S3 turns out to be quite easy. At a high level, creating a limited publicly available download for a movie requires four steps:
- Sign into S3.
- Create a bucket.
- Add a desired video (or object) to that bucket.
- Create a time-sensitive URL for the video.
A smart move
S3's pay-as-you-go model has some obvious advantages over the traditional storage model. For instance, to store my music collection on my own hard drive, I must buy one — say a 500GB unit for $130 — up front. I don't have nearly 500GB of data to store, so in essence I'm paying roughly 25 cents per gigabyte for unneeded (albeit fairly inexpensive) capacity. I also must maintain my device and pay to power it. If I go the Amazon route, I don't need to fork out $130 up front for a deprecating asset. I'll pay about 10 cents less per gigabyte and needn't pay to manage and maintain the storage hardware. Now imagine the same benefits on an enterprise scale. Twitter, for example, stores the images for its more than 1 million user accounts on S3. By paying on a per-usage basis, Twitter is spared the high expense of acquiring a hardware infrastructure to store and serve up those images, as well as ongoing labor and parts costs to configure and maintain it.
The cloud's benefits don't end there. You also gain low latency and high availability. The presumption is that the assets stored on Amazon's cloud are physically located around the globe, so content is served up faster to varying locations. What's more, because your assets are distributed to various machines, your data remains highly available should some machine (or portion of the network) go down.
In summary, the benefits of Amazon's S3 are simple: low cost, high availability, and security. Unless you're a SAN guru and enjoy maintaining hardware assets for storing digital items, Amazon probably does a better job than you. So why spend the up-front money on hardware (which loses value over time, don't forget) when you can borrow someone else's?
- Amazon S3: Visit home base for the Amazon Simple Storage Service.
- JetS3t: Learn more about the JetS3t toolkit and application suite.
- Cloud Computing: Visit IBM Cloud Computing Central for a wealth of cloud resources.
- Browse the technology bookstore for books on these and other technical topics.
- developerWorks Java technology zone: Find hundreds of articles about every aspect of Java programming.
Get products and technologies
- JetS3t: Download JetS3t.
- developerWorks Cloud Computing Resource Center: Access IBM software products in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) virtual environment. | <urn:uuid:ab00e50e-eb6f-4365-bd50-f4af43422248> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-s3/index.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171933.81/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00373-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.92768 | 3,521 | 3.109375 | 3 |
New cyber tool learns network behavior to sniff out malware
- By William Jackson
- Aug 20, 2013
Network administrators and security officials could soon have a new tool to help detect malicious traffic on their networks by sifting out the command and control traffic of infected computers from the background noise.
Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology tested a prototype of the tool, called ExecScent, on live networks and identified dozens of previously unknown command and control domains while discovering hundreds of infected hosts on the networks.
ExecScent spots the traffic by using templates of common command and control protocols used by malware. What sets it apart is that it also uses machine learning to understand the normal traffic patterns of the network on which it is working.
“It learns to adapt to normal background traffic,” said Mustaque Ahamad, professor at Georgia Tech’s College of Computing. By spotting traffic that is both similar to known examples of C&C communication but different from normal traffic, it reduces the number of false positives and increases the value of the results.
The tool was developed over the past year by Terry Nelms, a doctoral student at Georgia Tech and director of research at Damballa, Inc.; and Roberto Perdisci, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Georgia and adjunct professor at the Georgia Tech School of Computer Science; along with Ahamad.
The three presented the results of their work at the USENIX Security Symposium in Washington. ExecScent is being commercialized by Damballa.
Modern malware on an infected host typically communicates with a command and control server to send home stolen data and receive instructions. Tracing this traffic can be a way of spotting infections and identifying their source, but because attackers often use multiple servers on rapidly shifting domains, identifying the traffic is not always easy.
ExecScent takes advantage of the fact that command and control protocols often are reused in multiple variants of malware, which can make them easier to spot. Looking for known patterns and signatures is not new, but distinguishing them in real time in high volumes of network traffic can be a challenge. The ability to learn and adapt to network norms helps expose the malicious traffic.
“The idea at the high level sounds intuitive,” Ahamad said. “But making it work took a lot of effort. There is a lot of engineering in the system.”
The tool can automate much of the process of identifying malicious traffic to produce actionable results. “Overall, within the entire two-week test period ExecScent generated a quite manageable number of false positives, in that a professional threat analyst could analyze and filter out the false C&C domains in a matter of hours,” the authors wrote in their paper.
The developers used a commercial security service to gather malware-generated HTTP network traces associated with known malware and used the data to create templates of the common command and control protocols. Normal traffic on the network where the templates are deployed was studied for several days before going into operation. If a C&C template pattern closely matches legitimate traffic on that network, that pattern is given less weight in making a match.
The prototype was tested with more than 4,000 templates for two weeks on two university networks and one large financial institution. The networks generated from 35 million to more than 66 million HTTP requests a day.
In one university network, “we detected a total of 66 C&C domains, of which 34 are new, previously unknown C&C domains,” the authors wrote. They also detected 105 infected hosts, 90 of which were new infections related to 34 previously unknown C&C domains. The prototype match engine on the second university network, which was operating on hardware together with other production software that had a higher priority, could not keep up with the higher volume of traffic. An optimized version tested later ran eight times faster.
Only two new C&C domains were found on the financial institution’s network, which was not surprising because of its multiple layers of security. “However, our findings confirm that even well-guarded networks remain vulnerable,” the authors wrote.
Sixty-five of the newly discovered C&C domains were monitored on six ISP networks, and 25,584 IP addresses were found querying them.
ExecScent is not perfect, the authors said, but it produces actionable results. Also, efforts by attackers to hide from or mislead the tool probably would be time consuming and impractical, and ExecScent would interfere with bot operations.
William Jackson is a Maryland-based freelance writer. | <urn:uuid:f753f241-be25-4592-9be0-d289888d7fb0> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://gcn.com/articles/2013/08/20/georgia-tech-execscent-malware.aspx?admgarea=TC_EmergingTech | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501172649.58/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104612-00549-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953599 | 943 | 2.546875 | 3 |
The principles of corporate governance are a collection of non-binding values that have been drafted to provide useful guidance to a business in terms of their business activities and association with their stakeholders. Following these principles will help a firm improve itself in terms of following the legal rules and regulations of business activities and turning itself into a more ethical firm. The key corporate governance principles are described below.
This is the most basic and initial step that companies should take. Board of directors and company officials should build a proper corporate governance structure and delegate duties and authorities to everyone till the last level of the hierarchy. Ensure that all the employees in the organization understand their duties and the amount of flexibility and decision-making power that has been allotted to them. This will make it easier to monitor employees and their progress as well as identify employees who are not fulfilling their responsibilities.
This implies that shareholders belonging to the same class will receive equal treatment. They will be given all the rights that they have been promised. Some of the fundamental rights of shareholders include voting in shareholder meetings, receiving information and feedback about necessary changes required for the firm, transferring shares, obtaining relevant business material regularly and election or exclusion of board members.
Stakeholders focus on the development of employees and keep an eye on the company with regard to their compliance of established regulations. They are responsible for reporting any unethical actions that take place in the firm or any concerns regarding it. Moreover, stakeholders alert creditors and shareholders of the company in case the company is at a risk of insolvency or if the firm is unable to pay their dues on time. This will ensure that the company is complying with all rules and regulations and is not indulging in unethical business practices. As a result of this, employee performance and productivity will also increase as employees will be aware of working in an ethical environment.
To implement good corporate governance in the firm, it needs to adhere to the full disclosure principle which necessitates the company to disclose or publicly reveal all ownership and shareholder rights, company’s financial statements, the business objectives of the company and the amount of salary paid to the key executives of the company. The company is also obligated to reveal its corporate governance policies, accounting procedures and risk factors relevant to the company’s business activities. Mostly, such information is mentioned in the annual reports of firms.
Companies that are more transparent and follow the best practice principles of good corporate governance are usually liked by shareholders and customers. Customers prefer buying products or services of an ethical company as they are aware of its importance. Employees too, like working in such companies as they know that they will be given their appropriate rights and that their health and safety will be taken care of in the workplace environment. | <urn:uuid:5247f8e5-7b71-4699-aa8f-5c2a1f045f29> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.best-practice.com/compliance-best-practices/corporate-compliance/the-key-principles-of-corporate-governance/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501174159.38/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104614-00073-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965755 | 545 | 2.84375 | 3 |
Gpcode is a trojan that encrypts files with certain extensions on local and remote drives and then asks a user to contact its author to buy a decryption solution.
Once detected, the F-Secure security product will automatically disinfect the suspect file by either deleting it or renaming it.
More scanning & removal options
More information on the scanning and removal options available in your F-Secure product can be found in the Help Center.
You may also refer to the Knowledge Base on the F-Secure Community site for more assistance.
F-Secure Anti-Virus is able to detect and decrypt files encrypted by the Gpcode trojan. To find and decrypt such files, please scan ALL files on the hard disk.
Basically, the trojan takes the user's files as hostages and asks for a ransom to "free" them, making this a form of ransomware.
The trojan's file is a PE executable about 56 kilobytes long, packed with UPX file compressor.
After the trojan's file is run by a user it creates a startup key for its file in Windows Registry:
- [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run] "services"="[file name]"
where [file name] is the name of the trojan's file.
The trojan starts to scan local and remote drives for files with the following extensions:
When a file with any of these extension is found, the trojan reads it to memory, encrypts file's data with a simple algorithm, saves encrypted data into a new file (the name of this file is 'coder' + original file's name: for example for FILE.PGP the trojan will create the CODERFILE.PGP file), deletes the original file and then renames the newly created file with the name of the original file.
After that the trojan creates a text file named ATTENTION!!!.TXT in the same folder where the encrypted file is located. This .txt file contains the following text:
- Some files are coded.
- To buy decoder mail: firstname.lastname@example.org
- with subject: PGPcoder 000000000032
All encrypted files have the following 21 byte text string in their beginning:
- PGPcoder 000000000032
The encryption algorithm is quite simple - the trojan uses ADD operation on the original file's data with a single byte encryption key. The original value of the encryption key is 58 (0x3a) and it is modified using 2 fixed byte values which are 37 (0x25) and 92 (0x5c) after encryption of each next byte of the original file's data.
While the trojan scans local and remote drives, it keeps a track of all found folders and files in the AUTOSAVE.SIN file that is created in a temporary folder.
After all files are encrypted the trojan terminates its process, deletes its executable file, AUTOSAVE.SIN file and its startup key from the Registry.
F-Secure Anti-Virus detects Gpcode.b trojan with the following update: | <urn:uuid:1a36596e-1917-49f9-b82a-c8348ab64aad> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/gpcode.shtml | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501172783.57/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104612-00245-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.867479 | 662 | 2.53125 | 3 |
Novel molecules could help flash memory move beyond its storage limits, allowing for massive amounts of data to be recorded in small spaces, according to European scientists.
Metal-oxide clusters that can retain electrical charge and act as RAM could form a new basis for data cells used in flash memory, the researchers from the University of Glasgow’s Schools of Chemistry and Engineering and Rovira i Virgili University in Spain wrote in a letter published in Nature.
The group of 13 researchers said that polyoxometalate (POM) molecules can act as storage nodes for MOS flash memory. They used tungsten to synthesize POM metal-oxide clusters and added selenium to their inner cores, in a process known as doping, to create a new type of memory they call “write-once-erase.”
The research addresses the limits of the size of data cells in flash memory, which is widely used in mobile devices such as smartphones, memory sticks and cameras.
The notion of using individual molecules to take the place of traditional flash memory components isn’t new, but previous research has struggled with problems such as low thermal stability and low electrical conductivity. This has made it difficult to apply molecular models to MOS technologies.
The researchers wrote that realistic, industry-standard device simulations validated their approach at the nanometer scale, referring to objects with dimensions measured in nanometers. They added that POMs have the potential to be used as a realistic nanoscale flash memory.
“One major benefit of the POMs we’ve created is that it’s possible to fabricate them with devices which are already widely used in industry, so they can be adopted as new forms of flash memory without requiring production lines to be expensively overhauled,” Lee Cronin, a chemist involved in the research, said in a University of Glasgow release. | <urn:uuid:cc284cdd-1461-4344-a45b-982c127fa3a3> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.cio.com/article/2851033/molecular-flash-memory-could-store-massive-data.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501174163.72/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104614-00421-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949369 | 390 | 3.4375 | 3 |
GCN LAB IMPRESSIONS
High-speed wireless via...laser pointers?
- By Greg Crowe
- May 07, 2012
Here’s more news in the “Further Evidence That We Are, Right Now, Living In The Future” department. A group of scientists in Taiwan has invented a way to transmit data using commonly available laser pointers.
In an abstract and full paper, the researchers from the National Taipei University of Technology explain how they used the pointers to achieve faster-than-Wi-Fi speeds.
They set up a Visible Light Communication system for demonstration using equipment that cost $600. They used red and green laser pointers because they were cheap and easy to acquire. Hai-Han Lu, one of the project leaders, even said that “hobbyists could do this at home.”
Gigabit Wi-Fi speeds on the way, but beware the draft
The part that might take more than a “hobbyist” level of skill to implement, however, was the replacement of the batteries in the laser pointers with a power source that could switch the lasers on and off rapidly — about 500 million times per second.
The two laser pointers then flashed their red and green beams into the receivers positioned 10 meters away, and a multiplexer combined the two signals.
What they ended up with was a 500 megabits/sec. transmission over 10 meters with an error rate of one in 1 billion. That is pretty impressive.
From a practical standpoint, this technology could be used in places where radio transmissions (like wireless devices emit) are a no-no, like in a hospital or laboratory. So, where you can’t use Wi-Fi, you can use laser pointers.
You can’t walk through the beams without breaking the transmission, but at least you won’t get fried or disintegrated or anything.
With a successful demonstration of practical and efficient laser beam communications, another staple of science fiction writers is now reality. That leads to the question, what’s next? Personally, I’m hoping for hyperspace travel.
Greg Crowe is a former GCN staff writer who covered mobile technology. | <urn:uuid:5521683b-a89a-4fad-a890-3a4c023f67a8> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://gcn.com/articles/2012/05/07/high-speed-wireless-laser-pointers-researchers.aspx | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501170823.55/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104610-00366-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.928043 | 457 | 3.0625 | 3 |
So I've been doing a lot of wireless related stuff lately. Mainly audits of wireless environments. Lots of passive sniffing and packet analysis, so it's necessary to have a solid understanding of 802.11 Framing and the various packet types. By simply looking at the packets you can determine a great deal about the network in question.
A typical packet is made up of the following:
Frame Control [2 bytes] – This defines the options in the header fields and specifies the type of frame (management, data or control) in use. The frames format changes depending on the options specified in this Frame Control field.
Duration/ID [2 bytes] – This defines the amount time that the transmission medium is expected to be busy for the duration of the data transmission.
Address 1 [6 bytes] – This is the destination/receiving address.
Address 2 [6 bytes] - This is the source address. The address of the device that sent the frame.
Address 3 [6 bytes] – This is a filtering address. It is used to filter traffic on the same frequency as other BSS networks.
Sequence Control [2 bytes] – This is used for fragmentation in management and data frames and contains the sequence number and fragment number fields. Frames with payloads larger than 2312 bytes will be fragmented. Fragmentation is seldom used, as the maximum size of an Ethernet frame is 1500 bytes.
Address 4 [6 bytes] – This address is only used in WDS (Wireless Distribution Systems) to specify the source address. This is the station that sent the packet over the WDS.
Data Frame [variable] – This contains the payload. In management frames the structure is strictly ordered and contains fixed length parameters followed by variable length parameters in any order.
Frame Check Sequence [4 bytes] – This is a CRC32 checksum and is used to provide message integrity against accidental corruption of the frame in transit.
Obviously this is a very simple breakdown of an 802.11 frame.
In the Frame Control header field, which defines the options for the remainder of the header fields, there are two bits called the ‘To DS’ and ‘From DS’ bits. These are the 8th and 9th bits respectively. The To Distribution System and From Distribution bits are important for analysis as, depending on the combination of these flags, they identify the type of network the packet originated from.
The distribution system can have various definitions but it’s easiest to define the distribution system as that which connects the wireless network to other networks. In most cases this will be the wired network. By looking at which bit is set we can determine the source and destination MAC addresses in use.
To DS bit is set – The packet is coming from a wireless station to the wired network
From DS bit is set – The packet is coming from the wired network, or possibly the AP itself and is destined for a wireless station.
From DS and To DS are cleared – The packet is from an Ad-hoc network.
From DS and To DS are set – The packet is from a WDS network. Most often a WDS network is used to connect networks together. An example would be a bridge between buildings.
WDS networks are the only ones that will have a value set for all four address fields. When analyzing a packet from a WDS network it is important that you don’t mix up the Receiver Address (address 1), the Transmitter Address (Address 2), the Destination Address (Address 3) and the Source Address (Address 4).
The Receiver Address is the MAC address of the device at one end of a WDS network (I.e.: a bridge) that bridges the wireless connection to the wired network.
The Transmitter Address is the MAC address of the device at the other end of the WDS network that bridges the traffic from the wired network to the wireless network.
Node ←→Wired Network ←→ AP/bridge ←→ AP/bridge ←→ Wireless Network ←→ Node
The Transmitter and Receiver neither create the frame or are the intended recipient of the frame, they merely receive and forward the frame on. The frame is created by the device identified by the MAC address in the source address field. The destination address field identifies the final recipient of the frame.
Hopefully this has clarified how addressing works in a 802.11 frame. | <urn:uuid:76c03a3b-b45d-49d7-80fc-517331958a59> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://carnal0wnage.attackresearch.com/2007/05/addressing-in-80211-frames.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171053.19/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00542-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.918691 | 906 | 2.953125 | 3 |
Many of us fell in love with Excel as we delved into its deep and sophisticated formula features. Because there are multiple ways to get results, you can decide which method works best for you. For example, there are several ways to enter formulas and calculate numbers in Excel.
Five ways to enter formulas
1. Manually enter Excel formulas:
Long Lists: =SUM(B4:B13)
Short Lists: =SUM(B4,B5,B6,B7); =SUM(B4+B5+B6+B7). Or, place your cursor in the first empty cell at the bottom of your list (or any cell, really) and press the plus sign, then click B4; press the plus sign again and click B5; and so on to the end; then press Enter. Excel adds/totals this list you just “pointed to:” =+B4+B5+B6+B7.
2. Click the Insert Function button
Using the Insert Function button found under the Formulas tab, you can select a function from Excel’s menu list:
=COUNT(B4:B13) Counts the numbers in a range (ignores blank/empty cells).
=COUNTA(B3:B13) Counts all characters in a range (also ignores blank/empty cells).
3. Select a function from a group (Formulas tab)
Whittle down your search a bit by choosing from formula subsets for Financial, Logical, or Date/Time, for example.
=TODAY() Inserts today’s date.
4. The Recently Used button
Click the Recently Used button and, as the name suggests, it'll show you functions you've used recently. It's a welcome timesaver, especially when wrestling with an extra-hairy spreadsheet.
=AVERAGE(B4:B13) adds the list, divides by the number of values, then provides the average.
5. Auto functions under the AutoSum button
Auto functions are my editor's personal favorite, because they're so fast. You select a cell range and a function, and your result appears with no muss or fuss. Here are a few examples:
=MAX(B4:B13) returns the highest value in the list.
=MIN(B4:B13) returns the lowest value in the list.
Note: If your cursor is positioned in the empty cell just below your range of numbers, Excel determines that this is the range you want to calculate and automatically highlights the range, or enters the range cell addresses in the corresponding dialog boxes.
Bonus tip: With basic formulas, the AutoSum button is the top choice. It’s faster to click AutoSum>SUM (notice that Excel highlights the range for you) and press Enter.
Another bonus tip: The quickest way to add/total a list of numbers is to position your cursor at the bottom of the list and press Alt+ = (press the Alt key and hold, press the equal sign, release both keys), then press Enter. Excel highlights the range and totals the column.
Five handy formulas for common tasks
The five formulas below may have somewhat inscrutable names, but their functions could save you time and data entry on a daily basis.
Note: Some formulas require you to input the single cell or range address of the values or text you want calculated. When Excel displays the various cell/range dialog boxes, you can either manually enter the cell/range address, or cursor and point to it. Pointing means you click the field box first, then click the corresponding cell over in the worksheet. Repeat this process for formulas that calculate a range of cells (e.g., beginning date, ending date, etc.)
This is a handy formula to calculate the number of days between two dates (so there’s no worries about how many days are in each month of the range).
Example: End Date October 12, 2015 minus Start Date March 31, 2015 = 195 days
This similar formula calculates the number of workdays (i.e., a five-day workweek) within a specified timeframe. It also includes an option to subtract the holidays from the total, but this must be entered as a range of dates.
Example: Start Date March 31, 2015 minus End Date October 12, 2015 = 140 days
TRIM is a lifesaver if you’re always importing or pasting text into Excel (such as from a database, website, word processing software, or other text-based program). So often, the imported text is filled with extra spaces scattered throughout the list. TRIM removes the extra spaces in seconds. In this case, just enter the formula once, then copy it down to the end of the list.
Example: =TRIM plus the cell address inside parenthesis.
This is another keeper if you import a lot of data into Excel. This formula joins (or merges) the contents of two fields/cells into one. For example: In databases, dates, times, phone numbers, and other multiple data records are often entered in separate fields, which is a real inconvenience. To add spaces between words or punctuation between fields, just surround this data with quotation marks.
Example: =CONCATENATE plus (month,”space”,day,”comma space”,year) where month, day, and year are cell addresses and the info inside the quotation marks is actually a space and a comma.
Formula: For dates enter: =CONCATENATE(E33,” “,F33,”, “,G33)
Formula: For phone numbers enter: =CONCATENATE(E37,”-“,F37,”-“,G37)
DATEVALUE converts the above formula into an Excel date, which is necessary if you plan to use this date for calculations. This one is easy: Select DATEVALUE from the formula list. Click the Date_Text field in the dialog box, click the corresponding cell on the spreadsheet, then click OK, and copy down. The results are Excel serial numbers, so you must choose Format>Format Cells>Number>Date, and then select a format from the list.
Three more formula tips
As you work with formulas more, keep these three bonus tips in mind to avoid confusion:
Tip 1: You don’t need another formula to convert formulas to text or numbers. Just copy the range of formulas and then paste as Special>Values. Why bother to convert the formulas to values? Because you can’t move or manipulate the data until it’s converted. Those cells may look like phone numbers, but they’re actually formulas, which cannot be edited as numbers or text.
Tip 2: If you use Copy and Paste>Special>Values for dates, the result will be text and cannot be converted to a real date. Dates require the DATEVALUE formula to function as actual dates.
Tip 3: Formulas are always displayed in uppercase; however, if you type them in lowercase, Excel converts them to uppercase. Also notice there are no spaces in formulas. If your formula fails, check for spaces and remove them.
This story, "Your Excel formulas cheat sheet: 15 tips for calculations and common tasks" was originally published by PCWorld. | <urn:uuid:64319226-5f0e-4dfc-9a3f-26e3083eaa65> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.computerworld.com/article/2907515/your-excel-formulas-cheat-sheet-15-tips-for-calculations-and-common-tasks.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171670.52/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00242-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.827791 | 1,564 | 3.203125 | 3 |
Introduction to Video CODECs : MJPEG, MPEG-4, H.264Author: John Honovich, Published on Jun 13, 2008
CODECs are a critical element of choosing, designing and using video surveillance systems. CODECs can lower the price of overall systems and increase the usability of systems. As such, having a basic understanding of what a CODEC is and why CODECs are used is important.
Fundamental Principle of CODECs
The most important factor to understand in video CODECs is that CODECs help balance off different costs.
For instance, let's say you want to go to the mall and to the supermarket. A few years ago, when gas was cheaper, you might have done this in 2 separate trips. Now that gas prices have increased dramatically, you might want to combine those trips. What's happening here is that as gas has become more expensive, you are willing to trade off lower convenience for savings in cash.
Likewise, using CODECs is a balance between the cost of storage, bandwidth and CPUs. Specifically:
As such, selecting a CODEC always requires you to understand the tradeoffs in cost between using less bandwidth and storage or using less CPU cycles. Generally CPU cycles are cheaper than bandwidth and storage so more advance CODECs save you money. Sometimes, CODECs can be too demanding, especially with megapixel cameras and can potentially cost you more in CPU than you save in bandwidth and storage.
Please read our basic bandwidth tutorial for a review of it's impact on video surveillance.
Video must be digitized for it to be used and viewed on a computer. CODECs are means or choices in how we make the video digital.
CODECs or compression / decompression technologies are used to modify the video that is being digitized. Similar to how you might ZIP files on your PC, the video is compressed on its way into the computer. And just like with opening a ZIP file, the video is decompressed before you use or view the video. Unlike ZIP files, the compression of video losses some of the information (engineers refer to this as lossy compression). However, with the appropriate settings, a user cannot tell the difference visually.
Just like in the movies or TV, video is a series of images that are displayed rapidly one after the other. In the US, TV consists of displaying a series of 30 images per second. When we view these 30 images per second, it's “video” and it looks smooth. The fact that video is made up of a stream of images is quite important for understanding CODECs.
When you use a CODEC, you can compress the video in two fundamental ways:
- Compress the individual image by itself
- Compress a series of images together
When you compress an individual image by itself, you simply take the image, run the compression and output the saved file (technically called intraframe compression). Just like when you use Microsoft Paint and save as a JPEG, video compression of individual images works quite similarly. The difference with video is that you need to do these for a continuous stream of images. As such, rather than simply being a JPEG, it is called Motion JPEG or MJPEG.
The benefit of MJPEG is that it requires very low CPU use. The downside is that storage and bandwidth use can be quite high.
When you only compress an individual image, you ignore what's going on between multiple images in a sequence and often send redundant information. If you are streaming video at multiple frames per second, you often are sending basically the same image over and over again. This can be quite wasteful. It's similar to someone calling you up every minute to tell you nothing changed. It would be far better for the person to only call you when news occurred. You can simply assume during the rest of the time that the status is the same.
When people talk about the benefits of MPEG-4 and H.264, not sending repetitive information is the core source of their strength. Evey so often these CODECs will send a whole image (often called an i frame). The rest of the times they only send updates describing what parts of the image have changed (technically called interframe compression). Since it is common that large parts of the image remains the same, this can result in very significant reductions in storage and bandwidth. For example, where MJPEG may send image after image at 100 KB, codecs like MPEG-4 or H.264 may send the first image at 100 KB but the next 3 or 4 images at only 10 KB each. This can approach can reduce bandwidth and storage use by 50 – 90%.
The downside with this approach is that it takes more work for the computer to do this. When you are simply compressing individual images, you do not need to worry about what happened before or what the next image will contain. You simply apply the compression rule and execute. With MPEG-4 or H.264 you need to examine groups of images and make complex calculations of what changed and what did not. You can imagine this can become very complicated and consume lots of CPU resources.
H.264 and MPEG-4 are similar in that they both reduce bandwidth and storage by examining groups of images when they compress video. A key difference with H.264 is that it uses much more complex and sophisticated rules to do the compression. Because H.264's rules are more sophisticated, they can reduce bandwidth and storage even more than MPEG-4. However, the trade-off is that it takes more CPU cycles to do it.
Looking at Current Video Surveillance Systems
The general trend in video surveillance has been a continuous movement to CODECs that save bandwidth and storage. Historically, you have seen products move from MJPEG to MPEG-4 to H.264. The reason why this has happened is because the cost of CPUs to compress the video has decreased faster than the cost of bandwidth and storage. Most experts expect this trend to continue.
Recently, the biggest challenge using CODECs in video surveillance systems has occurred with the rise in megapixel cameras. For years, the maximum resolution of security cameras was constant.However, with megapixel cameras, the resolution of security cameras has increased by 400% or more. The greater the resolution, the harder the CPU needs to work and the more cycles that need to be allocated.
The huge increase in resolution is similar to the jump in gas prices. It has changed the economics of CODECs. Whereas historically, for standard definition security cameras, CPU cycles were cheaper than bandwidth and storage. Now, since so much more CPU cycles are needed, it can cost way more in CPU than what you save in bandwidth and storage. As such, most commercial megapixel cameras use MJPEG, especially if they are multi-megapixel (more than 1.3 MP).
One of the most important elements in the next few years will be the development of new approaches and use of new CPUs to reduce the cost of using H.264 for megapixel cameras. Much like alternative energy development hopes to bring the cost of energy down, new approaches are being sought to reduce the use of CPU cycles in compressing megapixel camera feeds.
Understanding the basic choices in CODECs and rationale for choosing CODECs is a key element in video surveillance systems. Please share your questions or feedback below.
Most Recent Industry Reports
The world's leading video surveillance information source, IPVM provides the best reporting, testing and training for 10,000+ members globally. Dedicated to independent and objective information, we uniquely refuse any and all advertisements, sponsorship and consulting from manufacturers. | <urn:uuid:9da3469d-e1b4-4307-829b-ab9c049c1629> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://ipvm.com/reports/introduction-to-video-codecs--mjpeg-mpeg4-h264 | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171706.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00590-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945036 | 1,592 | 3.484375 | 3 |
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) continues to warn the public not to rely on text messages to reach 911 in emergencies because the technology is only available to 59 of the more than 6,000 emergency communications centers nationwide.
On its official website, the FCC notes that "the ability to contact 911 using text is only available on a limited basis in a few markets. For this reason, you should not rely on text to reach 911."
The agency instead urges calling 911 in an emergency, "even where text-to-911 is available."
In recent years, the FCC has urged public safety officials and wireless carriers to implement text-to-911 to help serve deaf and speech-disabled people who might not be able to call 911. Also, during some major hurricanes and catastrophes, voice calls to 911 have failed while smartphone users were still able to send texts to friends and others.
The FCC has posted a document ( download PDF) listing the 59 emergency communications centers that had deployed text-to-911 as of May 9 in 16 states. Many on the list were ready last year; the state of Iowa is listed as having all its emergency communications centers allowing text-to-911 as early as August 2009.
There are more than 23,000 public safety communications centers in the U.S., but many are regional and not designated to take either 911 calls or texts. There are more than 6,000 Public Safety Answering Points, the FCC's designated name for a communications center that takes emergency calls.
Nearly all the emergency communications centers on the May 9 list are served by Verizon Wireless, while T-Mobile is listed as serving one county in New York and AT&T is listed as serving two centers in North Carolina and Vermont.
May 15 was the date that the four largest wireless providers -- AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon -- voluntarily committed to make texting to 911 available in those areas where the local 911 center is prepared to receive the texts. The FCC said that delays in the text-to-911 service could be due to several factors, including coordination between phone companies, equipment vendors and state and local public safety agencies.
The agency doesn't post a timeline when more emergency communications centers will come online with text-to-911, but adds on its site that the service "is likely to become more widely available over time as wireless phone companies provide text-to-911 capability and 911 centers modernize their systems to accept text messages."
The FCC doesn't have the authority to issue rules regulating 911 centers and can't require those centers to accept text messages. But it is seeking public comment on a proposed rule that would require phone companies and some text message providers to begin transmitting text messages to 911 centers by the end of 2014.
Even when a text-to-911 message is sent, the FCC said most emergency personnel won't automatically know the texter's location, which means the location needs to be texted as well. Before Enhanced 911 calls (E911), all 911 calls weren't automatically associated with an address as they typically are now.
Police and other emergency responders often say they appreciate 911 voice calls because it's possible to learn more information about an emergency by voice than in a short text. Still, text is seen as a way for some people with disabilities to seek help or for others when a "voice call to 911 might otherwise be dangerous or impossible," the FCC said.
"But if you are able to make a voice call to 911, and it is safe to do so, you should always make a voice call to 911," the FCC reiterated.
Matt Hamblen covers mobile and wireless, smartphones and other handhelds, and wireless networking for Computerworld. Follow Matt on Twitter at @matthamblen or subscribe to Matt's RSS feed. His email address is firstname.lastname@example.org.
Read more about wireless carriers in Computerworld's Wireless Carriers Topic Center. | <urn:uuid:52311976-8813-411e-bdf0-30361d24c362> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/545381/fcc_warns_it_still_better_call_911_instead_texting/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501173405.40/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104613-00290-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956101 | 805 | 2.78125 | 3 |
Cryptography researchers at MIT and Harvard have developed software called Sieve that is designed to help users keep track of encrypted personal data and better manage it in the cloud.
The Web infrastructure concepts behind Sieve could have significant implications for government searches of data, such as in the Apple-FBI case, or for companies using personal data from fitness bands and other devices for marketing and other purposes.
With Sieve, a Web user on a smartphone, smartwatch or other device could store personal data in encrypted form in the cloud, according to an MIT statement on Friday.
Then, when any app wants to use specific data items, like a name or address, it would send a request to the user, and, if granted, would receive a secret key to decrypt only those items kept in the cloud account of the user. In addition, if the user wanted to revoke the app's access, Sieve would re-encrypt the data with a new key.
The idea for Sieve first came more than a year ago to Frank Wang, a Ph.D candidate in computer science at MIT. Wang was using his Fitbit and was concerned about where his fitness data was stored and how it would be accessed by him or by others, he said in an interview. "I don't want people to hack my data and get more than I want," he said.
"With Sieve, we want users to securely store and selectively access that data for Web services and Web apps. We want the data to remain secure and give subsets to Web services. In theory that's easy, but in practice, it's difficult," Wang said. "With Sieve, the user has more control over how his or her data flows to different parties."
Wang spoke by phone just prior to giving a talk on Friday about Sieve at the Usenix Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation on Santa Clara, Calif. Wang, 26, has worked to develop Sieve with MIT associate professors of electrical engineering and computer science Nickolai Zeldovich and Vinod Vaikuntanathan as well as James Mickens, associate professor of computer science at Harvard University.
Apps used on everything from smart thermostats to smartphones "collect a lot of user data, and you don't know what the [app developer] will do with it," Wang said. "Our goal is to say it's the users' data, and they should say how it's used."
He gave one practical example of how Sieve would work. If a sleep monitor has sleep data that is better than what a fitness band could provide, a user could permit the sleep data to be ported to the fitness band, which might give better tips on fitness than the sleep monitor would provide. "It makes it very easy with all the data in one location," Wang said.
"Part of my motivation for Sieve was that fitness data may need to be regulated, since how different, really, is fitness data from medical records? " Wang said. "People can guess a lot about my health with a small amount of data."
Concerns about uses of fitness data and other seemingly innocuous information have come to the attention of the Federal Trade Commission and other regulators. During an appearance at CES in January, FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez said that devices are "gathering increasingly sensitive information about us and how it is used or shared, and the potential for unintended uses is a concern."
Ramirez said she was so personally concerned about sharing her own fitness data that she uses an older, unconnected pedometer to measure her steps. "I don't want to share," she said.
Sieve could also better protect a person's data from a court-ordered warrant. If the FBI brought a search warrant to Facebook or Amazon for a person's data, the companies would be able to say that they don't have any of the user's important data. "If somebody told Amazon, give me all of Frank's data, Amazon can say, 'Ask Frank,' " Wang said.
Wang is well aware of the FBI-Apple dispute in federal court over gaining access to a secure iPhone used in a terror attack. "Maybe Sieve would raise the hackles of the intelligence community, I don't know," Wang said.
But Sieve could be a means to simplify things for users, he said. In another example, he said a user signing up with a new insurance company could give the insurer a specific key to access a subset of the user's personal data in the cloud. After the access was finished, the key would be changed to prevent further access.
While part of the idea for Sieve came out of Wang's concerns over his personal data on Fitbit, it also came from the latest direction of study in the computer science field. "A lot of people in computer science are excited by users managing their own data, instead of Web services doing it," Wang said.
"There's a lot of user distrust about using Web services and the cloud and finding some way to interact in a secure way," he said. "People are concerned about privacy and many don't know that Facebook and Fitbit have a lot of data on us."
Wang received his undergraduate degree in computer science at Stanford University. He envisions three components for Sieve: software that a user installs on a device, software installed on apps and software installed in the cloud.
"It would be great if Sieve was a product, but it's more of a model of a new Web infrastructure," he said. Meeting with tech companies and app developers will help determine the path forward for Sieve.
"All of this is about making data access seamless for users," he said. "I hate the way we get data from Web services."
This story, "MIT, Harvard researchers push new way for users to control access to personal data" was originally published by Computerworld. | <urn:uuid:b307b3a0-d9ea-44dd-a8a1-ef4541733eba> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.itnews.com/article/3045974/encryption/mit-harvard-researchers-push-new-way-for-users-to-control-access-to-personal-data.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501174276.22/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104614-00466-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974734 | 1,208 | 2.671875 | 3 |
Virginia Tech College of Engineering Professor Wu Feng has a vision to broadly apply parallel computing to advance science and address major challenges. A recent expose on Feng’s work details his involvement with the NSF, Microsoft, and the Air Force using innovative computing techniques to solve problems.
“Delivering personalized medicine to the masses is just one of the grand challenge problems facing society,” said Feng. “To accelerate the discovery to such grand challenge problems requires more than the traditional pillars of scientific inquiry, namely theory and experimentation. It requires computing. Computing has become our ‘third pillar’ of scientific inquiry, complementing theory and experimentation. This third pillar can empower researchers to tackle problems previously viewed as infeasible.”
He addresses the question of why bolstering these disciplines is no longer a matter of throwing more FLOPs at the problem.
“In short, with the rise of ‘big data’, data is being generated faster than our ability to compute on it,” he explains. “For instance, next-generation sequencers (NGS) double the amount of data generated every eight to nine months while our computational capability doubles only every 24 months, relative to Moore’s Law. Clearly, tripling our institutional computational resources every eight months is not a sustainable solution… and clearly not a fiscally responsible one either. This is where parallel computing in the cloud comes in.”
“…Rather than having an institution set-up, maintain, and support an information technology infrastructure that is seldom utilized anywhere near its capacity… and having to triple these resources every eight to nine months to keep up with the data deluge of next-generation sequencing, cloud computing is a viable and more cost effective avenue for accessing necessary computational resources on the fly and then releasing them when not needed.”
Much of his work centers on the promise of parallel computing, which he sees as analogous to the Internet in terms of its ability to transform the way people interact.
In the mid-2000s, Feng was part of a team that created an ad-hoc supercomputing cloud to process genomics data. They were able to reduce the time it took to identify missing gene annotations in genomes from a period of three years down to two weeks by adopting added parallelism. This project is now being formalized and expanded with funding from NSF and Microsoft with the aim of commoditizing biocomputing in the cloud.
To facilitate this important research, Feng founded a new center at Virginia Tech — Synergistic Environments for Experimental Computing (SEEC). The center is co-funded by Virginia Tech’s Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science (ICTAS), the Office of Information Technology, and the Department of Computer Science. Under Feng’s leadership, the research center seeks to democratize parallel computing through the codesign of algorithms, software, and hardware to accelerate discovery and innovation. Emphasis will be placed on five areas, each with varying degrees of “big compute” and “big data” requirements: cyber-physical systems where computing and physical systems intersect; health and life sciences, including the medical sciences; business and financial analytics; cybersecurity; and scientific simulation. | <urn:uuid:41e22e46-54af-46d1-87d4-519a4546bfee> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://www.hpcwire.com/2014/08/20/democratization-parallel-computing/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501174276.22/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104614-00466-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932446 | 661 | 2.546875 | 3 |
Samsung Electronics plans to use advanced antennas to boost the bandwidth in mobile networks by what it said was "several tens of Gbps per base station", but the improved bandwidth won't be commercially available until 2020.
The company said it can now transmit data at up to 1.056Gbps over distances of up to 2 kilometers using the 28GHz spectrum band.
Spectrum bands that high, which are called millimeter-wave because of the short wavelengths, have both pros and cons. They allow for access to lots of spectrum, which means higher speeds, but signals are not transmitted well over long distances.
Samsung thinks it can overcome that problem with a new adaptive array transceiver that uses 64 antenna elements. The company hasn't provided much detail on how the array works. But, in general, adaptive arrays are used to electronically control the direction of a signal, according to Jens Zander , professor and dean at KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
However, Zander isn't convinced that Samsung can overcome the poor signal propagation characteristics.
"At these frequencies the wavelengths are so short that all obstacles become massive. Even your own body casts a large shadow. That has been shown by a number of studies," Zander said.
The key to building faster networks, especially indoors, lies in coming up with better ways of putting a larger number of smaller base stations closer to users, according to Zander.
Today, millimeter-wave spectrum is increasingly being used in cellular networks, but for wireless backhaul links. They are used to connect base stations of all sizes with the rest of the operator's network. The market is set to double in 2013, fueled by the growth of LTE networks, according to Infonetics Research.
Here adaptive arrays can be used simplify network configuration. Instead of having personnel in the field manually setting up the antenna it can configure itself, Zander said.
Samsung isn't the only company experimenting with next-generation networks. Earlier this year, NTT DoCoMo announced it and the Tokyo Institute of Technology had transmitted data at 10Gbps, using 400MHz of spectrum in the 11GHz band. The amount of spectrum compares to current LTE networks, which use up to 20MHz.
To make the higher speed it too used multiple antennas: eight to transmit the data and 16 antennas to receive it. The underlying techology is multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), which is already used in current LTE networks, but with fewer antennas.
Interestingly, the Japanese operator never used the 5G term in its announcement, instead referring to "super-high-bit-rate mobile communications."
But more announcements regarding 5G advancements will surely come, because even though it will take many years before the first networks become commercially available the race between vendors and countries is very much on. For a vendor like Samsung -- whose mobile network equipment isn't as well known as its devices -- it is important to show technological prowess and that the company is in it for the long haul.
"Samsung is still small, but did really well last year compared to the market. It has the ambition to grow and part of that is wanting to be seen," said Sylvain Fabre, research director at Gartner.
Others have also announced 5G plans, including the European Commission. In February, vice president Neelie Kroes announced a a!50 million (US$65 million) investment in research to deliver 5G mobile technology by 2020, with the aim of putting Europe back in the lead of the global mobile industry.
NTT DoCoMo's experiment, meanwhile, was sponsored by Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.
Send news tips and comments to email@example.com | <urn:uuid:96876b9a-61fa-43be-adb1-1c1d7f969c81> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.cio.com/article/2385918/mobile/samsung-takes-first-5g-steps-with-advanced-antenna.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501170613.8/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104610-00234-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953519 | 764 | 2.65625 | 3 |
Position your UI controls and other elements inside the UI of your application.
You can use layouts to specify the arrangement of controls on the screens of your app. You can choose from several layout types to find the one that's right for you. For example, you can use a stack layout to make sure that controls are always positioned next to each other, ether horizontally or vertically. Or, you can use an absolute layout to specify the exact positions of your controls, down to the pixel. You can also handle margins, alignment, and the direction of your layouts.
To learn more about layouts and how to use them in your apps, visit the Layouts documentation.
- AbsoluteLayout -
A Layout that allows you to set X and Y coordinates for controls.
- AbsoluteLayoutProperties -
LayoutProperties that can be assigned to controls in an AbsoluteLayout.
- DockLayout -
A Layout that docks children to a specified area of the container.
- FlowListLayout -
A layout used to fill rows and columns based on available space.
- FlowListLayoutProperties -
Layout properties that are assigned to controls in a FlowListLayout.
- GridLayout -
A layout that arranges a container's children in a grid.
- GridListLayout -
A layout used with ListView to lay out items in a grid.
- HorizontalAlignment -
Ways to horizontally align a control within its parent container.
- Layout -
Abstract base class inherited by all layouts.
- LayoutOrientation -
The different orientations that can be used for layouts.
- LayoutProperties -
Abstract base class inherited by all layout properties classes.
- LayoutUpdateHandler -
Used for listening to layout and sizing changes on a control.
- ListHeaderMode -
Specifies header modes for list layouts.
- ListLayout -
Abstract base class for list layouts.
- PageLayoutUpdateHandler -
Used for listening to layout and sizing changes on a page.
- StackLayout -
A layout that is used to position a container's children in a stack.
- StackLayoutProperties -
LayoutProperties that are assigned to controls within a StackLayout.
- StackListLayout -
A layout used with ListView to lay out children in a simple stack.
- VerticalAlignment -
Ways to vertically align a control within its parent container. | <urn:uuid:707d82a1-41db-4202-b3b0-3789f380861c> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://developer.blackberry.com/native/reference/cascades/user_interface_layouts.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501173761.96/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104613-00638-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.766162 | 496 | 3.125 | 3 |
Some ask the big questions about the Internet of Things. Will it free up human potential? Will everyone share in its benefits, or just those who capitalize on it?
These are the types of issues that may be raised at the Philosophy of the Internet of Things conference in July at York St. John University in the U.K. Beginning July 3, this may be the first such conference organized around this topic. One of its organizers, Justin McKeown, head of the program for Fine Art and Computer Science at York St. John, explained some of the issues in an interview conducted via email.
Computer science and fine art are separate programs, but the university has introduced mandatory computer programming classes for all first year fine arts students with the "aim to produce creative and innovate individuals who are able to affect and adapt to changes," he said.
What makes the Internet of Things important enough to warrant such a conference? The conference was prompted by the shared understanding between myself and my co-organizers -- Joachim Walewksi and Rob Van Kranenburg -- that the Internet of things is not only a technological revolution, but also social revolution. Yet its technological development is being spurred on primarily by business and commerce concerns. We need to think about the social aspects of the technology, as well. Just because we can build something doesn't necessarily mean we should.
Is this increasing automation freeing up human potential? Is there a downside risk that it could diminish human potential? This is a question I think about a lot. If we look at the first industrial revolution, we see that it did free up human beings by relieving many of them of the burden of their jobs, through mechanization. While it freed humans up, it didn't relieve the economic problems brought about by lack of income caused by lack of work. So in the short term, based on prior historical evidence, it's not guaranteed that this will free up all human potential. However, if we reflect on the long term benefits of the first industrial revolution, we can see that it did eventually take us to a place where human potential was free enough to engage in other things. Hence the need to start thinking about the philosophical implications now.
This is exactly the type of thinking that needs to happen so that the IoT benefits the maximum number of people and not just those smart enough to capitalize upon it.
Is there concern that the IoT may change man's relationship to machines in a way we haven't experienced before? IoT technology will change humans' relationship to machines in a way we haven't seen before in the way that other recent technological innovations have already done so. For example the proliferation of communication mediums via smartphones has already given us new ways to organize ourselves both socially and politically.
What are the implications of this change? The function of technology has always been to make human aspirations more obtainable by making tasks easier to perform. It's already been demonstrated that the brain maps tools as part of the body and not as separate entities, so our relationship with machines is already much more intimate than most people realize. IoT offers us a level of automation that will bring us into closer working relationships with machines and AI. IoT technology has the potential to allow us to live more sustainable lives, predict and treat illness, as well as automate certain forms of labor. Some of this will have a positive effect, some of it may not. The potential is great, the value of the reality lies in its implementation -- hence the need to ask philosophical questions now.
Can you imagine a world where people have genuine emotion for machines, robotics in particular? And if that's possible, should those machines then have rights of some type? I think people already do have emotional attachments to machines. For example, how much do you love your smartphone? Should machines have rights? I'm not against this idea at all. This comes down to a wider and deeper debate around what constitutes life and sentience. One need only think about how harshly human beings have treated other human beings because of difference of sex, race, color and/or creed to see how narrow minded we can be as a species about the lives of others. If we add to this thinking how we treat animals, then this point is made even more obvious.
What do you hope this conference accomplishes? We need to find the language and ideological frameworks to consider and debate the potential impact of IoT technologies upon our lives and upon the planet. We need these debates to have currency, not only in academia but also industry and policy. The conference is a step towards achieving these things.
What can people who deploy, develop and work with technology gain from considering the philosophical issues associated with it? The answer to that is very simple: a better world for themselves, their families and friends by making systems that work to encourage the expansion of human knowledge and experience rather than simply things that make our lives more efficient. Efficiency is not necessarily better for us as beings.
Is this conference just for academics, professional philosophers? Can technologists, people in the industry, attend and participate as well? The conference is open to all and we've made a point of making the conference tickets affordable to try and encourage as many people as possible from industry, government, academia and any other walk of life to come and join in the discussion.
There is a "submit questions" form on your Web site -- can anyone submit a question? And what will you do with the material generated by the conference? Will it be available online? The question form is primarily for people inquiring about the conference. However, we have a twitter account, @iotphilosophy and we'd encourage people to use that to communicate with us during the conference. Also, we plan to put documents of the conference online, so hopefully people can interact with those as well.
Patrick Thibodeau covers cloud computing and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues for Computerworld. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @DCgov or subscribe to Patrick's RSS feed. His e-mail address is firstname.lastname@example.org.
Read more about emerging technologies in Computerworld's Emerging Technologies Topic Center.
This story, "The philosophy of IoT: Will it help or hurt?" was originally published by Computerworld. | <urn:uuid:b5398032-d0f9-4420-b9d0-bc94ba0de5cb> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.itworld.com/article/2699220/networking/the-philosophy-of-iot--will-it-help-or-hurt-.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501170253.67/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104610-00406-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960751 | 1,274 | 2.59375 | 3 |
Cloud computing, as defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is a model for enabling “… convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”
NIST is implying the economies of scale that go with cloud computing when it refers to a pool of configurable computing resources.
Cloud computing is often referred to as a technology. However, it is actually a significant shift in the business and economic models for provisioning and consuming information technology (IT) that can lead to a significant cost savings. This cost savings can only be realized through the use of significant pooling of these “configurable computing resources” or resource pooling.
According to NIST, this capability is an essential characteristic of cloud computing. Resource pooling is the ability of a cloud to serve multiple customers using a multi-tenant model with different physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and reassigned according to demand.
Cloud computing economics depends on four customer population metrics:
- Number of Unique Customer Sets (n)
- Customer Set Duty Cycles (λ,f)
- Relative Duty Cycle Displacement (t)
- Customer Set Load (L)
These metrics drive the cloud provider’s ability to use the minimum amount of physical IT resources to service a maximum level of IT resource demand. Properly balancing these factors across a well characterized user group can lead to approximately 30-percent savings in IT resources, and enables the near real-time modification of the underlying physical infrastructure required for the delivery of the desired “illusion of infinite resources” synonymous with a cloud computing user’s experience.
When implemented properly, the cloud computing economic model can drastically reduce the operations and maintenance cost of IT infrastructures. A 2009 Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH) study concluded that a cloud computing approach could save 50 to 67 percent of the lifecycle cost for a 1,000-server deployment.
Another Deloitte study confirmed that cloud deployments delivered greater investment returns with a shorter payback period when compared to the traditional on-premise delivery option.
In considering cloud computing for the Intelligence Community, security is an obvious concern. Given the legal and operational concerns, classified information should always be processed in properly protected and certified IC private or community clouds. If a secure cloud model can be designed, economic savings can certainly be realized.
When used to process unclassified information, sharing cloud computing resources can nominally provide the operational advantages of a private cloud with a cost closer to that of a public cloud due to the expected economies of scale from combined user communities.
The federal government is currently deploying a federal community cloud. Officially referred to as the General Services Administration Infrastructure as a Service Blanket Purchase Agreement (GSA IaaS BPA; item #4 in the White House CIO’s “25 Point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal Information Technology Management”), this Government Wide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) vehicle is designed to implement a community cloud economic model to support the federal government.
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) expects this community to provide approximately $20 billion in cloud computing services to a community made up of more than 25 agencies.
Using the BAH study as a guide, and assuming that community cloud economies mimic those expected from a hybrid cloud, transitioning IT services from an agency-owned IT infrastructure to the GSA IaaS platform should deliver benefit cost ratios of approximately 7:1.
Cloud computing provides some strong benefits and economic incentives. Selecting a public, private, hybrid or community cloud implementation will depend on a customer’s specific application, performance, security and compliance requirements. Proper deployment can provide significant savings, better IT services and a higher level of reliability.
- Lower Costs
- Cap-Ex Free Computing
- Deploy Projects Faster, Foster Innovation
- Scale as Needed
- Lower Maintenance Costs
- Resiliency and Redundancy
(The following is the Executive Summary of a recent NJVC Executive Whitepaper. The full version is available at NJVC.com )
Cross-posted from Cloud Musings | <urn:uuid:d49d94b8-98dd-4872-9b56-7a72b78c739c> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.infosecisland.com/blogview/17130-The-Economic-Benefit-of-Cloud-Computing.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501170914.10/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104610-00106-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.905954 | 874 | 2.90625 | 3 |
Four U.S. senators have proposed a bill that would call on the Federal Communications Commission to study the need for more spectrum to connect Internet of Things devices.
The bill, proposed by a bipartisan group of senators, would require the FCC to look at whether there is enough spectrum to support the continued growth of IoT. The agency also would have to study regulatory barriers to providing more licensed and unlicensed spectrum for IoT. The FCC would have to report back to Congress with recommendations within a year.
IoT might benefit from a U.S. government push to make agencies give up little-used frequencies for commercial use or at least share them with other users. The Citizens Broadband Radio Service in the 3.5GHz band, created last year, will allow for unlicensed and lightly licensed use of spectrum that had been fully devoted to military use.
The bill, called the Developing Innovation and Growing the Internet of Things (DIGIT) Act, also calls for a federal IoT working group to consider issues like spectrum needs, consumer protection and security. The group would meet with enterprises, IoT vendors and consumer groups and come back to Congress with recommendations within a year.
Congress has signaled before that it thinks there’s too much at stake in IoT to leave it entirely up to industry. The Senate passed a resolution last March that said the U.S. should have a national policy on IoT, and Congress has already held a hearing on IoT issues such as privacy, security and spectrum.
Industry representatives told Congress last July that heavy-handed regulation could stifle IoT innovation. But because it could bring many new devices into consumers’ lives and affect how industries operate, IoT touches on several areas the government regulates. And to grow as much as industry proponents like Cisco and Ericsson predict, the new technology may need more wireless spectrum from bands it can’t yet use.
The new bill, sponsored by a bipartisan group of senators, would have the U.S. Secretary of Commerce convene the new working group. It could include representatives from the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Transportation and other agencies.
The DIGIT Act is sponsored by Republican Senators Deb Fischer of Nebraska and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, along with Democrats Cory Booker of New Jersey and Brian Schatz of Hawaii. | <urn:uuid:a8ec2325-ced6-415a-8148-e3a0bf91c1cb> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.itnews.com/article/3039567/iot-users-could-win-with-a-new-bill-in-the-us-senate.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171608.86/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00458-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96653 | 474 | 2.578125 | 3 |
Variations in space weather have the potential to disrupt the electric power grid, telecommunications and Global Positioning Systems -- virtually all public infrastructure. To predict such disruptions, a comprehensive space weather forecasting system could cost between $1 billion and $2 billion during the next decade, space scientists told members of the House Space, Science and Technology Committee on Wednesday.
Costs would include replacing the Advanced Composition Explorer satellite, which provides data for geomagnetic storm warnings issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center, which has operated 13 years beyond its two-year design life, Laura Furgione, acting director of the National Weather Service, told the committee’s panel on space and aeronautics.
Furgione said the ACE satellite represents the “single point of failure” for critical geomagnetic storm measurements and NOAA planned to replace it with the Deep Space Climate Observatory satellite that NASA developed and placed in storage in November 2001. NOAA plans to launch DSCOVR in 2014, but Furgione told the hearing that it too has a two-year design life.
NOAA will have to consider a variety of options to replace these two key spacecraft, including hosting payloads on commercial satellites, using space weather information provided by other countries and commercial space weather data, Furgione said.
Charles Gay, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, testified that research missions the agency’s multisatellite Heliophysics Explorer program conducted can be adapted to provide solar, solar wind and near-Earth observations essential for NOAA’s space weather forecasting mission. He added NASA has agreed to work with the European Space Agency on a Solar Orbiter Collaboration project that will use a new satellite slated for launch in 2017 to help where solar winds, plasma and magnetic fields originate in the sun’s corona.
Subcommittee chairman Steven M. Palazzo, R-Miss., said in his opening statement that “as we enter into the next solar maximum -- an 11-year solar cycle marked by increased solar activity -- the availability of solar wind measurements in particular are essential for maintaining our way of life.” But, he added, the need for improved space weather forecasting has to be balanced against budgetary realities, which means a “prudent and careful examination of the core capabilities and essential services” is needed.
Daniel Baker, director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the expert who estimated the space weather program’s costs, said costs could be cut by multiagency cooperation among NOAA, NASA, the Defense Department and the National Science Foundation.
The potential impacts of space weather on the country’s infrastructure and economy demand high-level oversight, Baker said. He recommended a national space weather program be chartered under the auspices of the National Science and Technology Council and include the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Office of Management and Budget.
Do you want to know more about the outlook for federal IT in 2013? Attend Nextgov Prime on Monday, Dec. 3, where key lawmakers will outline their plans for reforming the way agencies buy technology. Our expert panels will discuss the future of cloud computing, cybersecurity, data analytics and more. | <urn:uuid:38587453-af62-4239-b19d-ccc2567a9b53> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.nextgov.com/defense/2012/11/space-weather-forecast-system-could-cost-2-billion/59801/?oref=ng-HPriver | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171781.5/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00634-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.922508 | 670 | 2.6875 | 3 |
A team of researchers at Georgia Tech Research Institute is investigating whether passwords are now worthless, given the supercomputer-like performance now available to hackers using standard desktop graphics cards.
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"We've been using a commonly available graphics processor to test the integrity of typical passwords of the kind in use here at Georgia Tech and many other places," said Richard Boyd, a senior research scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI).
"Right now we can confidently say that a seven-character password is hopelessly inadequate - and as GPU power continues to go up every year, the threat will increase."
The researchers have warned that software development kits simplify coding graphics cards to run general purpose applications rather than just graphics, which makes it easy to harness their power for hacking, according to Boyd.
This new capability puts power into many hands, he says, and it could threaten the world's ubiquitous password-protection model because it enables a low-cost password-breaking technique that engineers call "brute-forcing."
In brute-forcing, attackers can use a fast GPU (or even a group of linked GPUs) combined with the right software program to break down passwords that are excluding them from a computer or a network.
The intruders' high-speed technique basically involves trying every possible password until they find the right one.
Christian Brindley, Regional Technical Manager EMEA at VeriSign Authentication, said, "Lots of people think that they have a solid password - over 12 characters long, including a combination of letters, numbers and cases to increase their strength.
"However, in today's world passwords are simply not enough to protect sensitive information on their own. In fact, VeriSign research of UK online adults showed that 39% of us disagree that 'user name plus password' is a strong enough security measure.
"A password is only one layer of security, which criminals have proven they are able to bypass - either through brute force as the Georgia Tech researchers have demonstrated, or, often, simply by guessing. | <urn:uuid:e0f7c829-5aee-4dee-9f1d-7e1543ce5590> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.computerweekly.com/news/1280093554/Graphics-card-supercomputers-render-passwords-pointless | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501170380.12/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104610-00102-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942033 | 439 | 3.265625 | 3 |
Security “leaks” and breaches on popular services are becoming so common it’s almost comical. Except that if your account gets hacked, it could have dire consequences for your privacy and even financial security. Whether it’s a simple social network like Twitter (where 250,000 users’ details have been leaked) or your email account that gets hacked, here’s what you need to do to get control back and protect yourself going forward.
1. Find out if your account has been hacked. Sometimes it’s obvious when your account has been compromised. On Twitter, the hacker might post in your name. For your email account, all of the sudden family and friends are telling you you’ve been spamming them like some Nigerian scammer. Even worse, you might find fraudulent charges on your credit card if one of your online shopping accounts gets compromised.
If you’re not sure or you want to keep tabs on any possible leaks associated with your email address, sites like Pwned List and Should I Change My Password will check your email address against publicized databases of compromised accounts. Both will alert you, if you create an account, in the event your email winds up on any new compromises.
2. Try to regain control of your account immediately. First, scan your computer for malware to make sure your PC is clean. Then try to change the password on the account; you might get lucky. If you’re able to get in, also change the account security question. Because security questions are very basic and also easily guessable, however, it’s best to fib a bit on those answers. E.g., if asked your favorite sports team, answer with your favorite quote.
Change your password to one that’s as long as possible, with mixed case letters, numbers, and symbols. A passphrase is easier to remember than random alphanumeric characters, but the most important factor is length and that you don’t use the same password everywhere (more on that it a bit).
If you can’t get back into your account, contact the security team for the service right away. If your email has been hacked, set up a new email address that you can use for secure communications only (and a separate new email address for stuff like newsletters).
3. Change your password for every site you’ve used the same password. Using the same password for multiple accounts is convenient but it leaves you vulnerable. If you’ve used the same password as the compromised account anywhere else, change it to a unique one right away.
A password manager like KeePass and LastPass makes it easier to create truly unique passwords for each site and service. Alternatively, you could create a master passphrase and tweak it slightly for each service; so, for example, you can use ThisIsMyPassword-forWebMail and ThisIsMyPasword-forGoofingOffonFacebook.
4. Notify friends and family of possible security issues. Often hackers will use your account to attach malware or send phishing emails to your contacts (e.g., “Dear Mom and Dad, I’m stranded in a foreign country and got robbed. Please send money.”) If your email has been hacked, warn your contacts not to click on any links from that account.
5. Set up credit monitoring. If the hacked account has any financial information (credit card or bank account, for example) tied to it, keep a close eye on your statements. Often, companies whose user databases have been hacked will offer customers free credit monitoring. If not, sites like Credit Karma and Credit Sesame can monitor your credit profile, so you’ll know if someone tries to open a new account in your name.
6. Revoke access to third-party applications. A hacker could possibly link your account to malicious third-party apps without your knowledge, so even if you regain control over your account, the hacker could still continue stealing your information. Take the time to review your permissions for these connected apps and remove any unknown or suspicious ones. MyPermissions is a useful landing page for seeing what apps have permissions on a variety of services, including Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Dropbox.
7. Protect your account. If two-factor authentication is an option, make sure you set that up on your account as soon as possible. Two-factor authentication is the best protection we have right now; it requires additional verification when anyone tries to log into your account from a new device. You should also sign up for alerts in Google, your bank accounts, and wherever possible for any suspicious activity in your account.
Photo by IntelFreePress Read more of Melanie Pinola’s Tech IT Out blog and follow the latest IT news at ITworld. Follow Melanie on Twitter at @melaniepinola. For the latest IT news, analysis and how-tos, follow ITworld on Twitter and Facebook. | <urn:uuid:62fd6213-b3f9-46c1-94ce-a6b01eedaef1> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.itworld.com/article/2712055/consumerization/what-to-do-when-you-ve-been-hacked.html?page=3 | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171834.68/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00330-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.911984 | 1,026 | 2.546875 | 3 |
SNMP - Anything But Simple
The recent vulnerabilities discovered in the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) have had those involved in network management asking two questions. Why has the problem not been detected in the past 12 years, and why are we using a product that is 12 years old in any case? The answer to both questions, if you'll excuse the pun, is anything but simple.
SNMPv1 was introduced in 1989 to provide a mechanism that allowed devices on the network to communicate information about their state to a central system. The central system is referred to as an SNMP manager or more commonly as a Network Management System (NMS). The devices that can communicate with the manager are referred to as SNMP agents. It's a common misconception that SNMP is a network management system, which it is not. SNMP is a protocol, part of the TCP/IP protocol suite, that enables the communication of network management information between devices.
SNMP operates on a fairly simple structure. A small number of commands can be issued by the manager, to the agent, which responds with the information requested. In certain cases, the SNMP manager is able to reconfigure the device it is communicating with by issuing a special command, called a 'set'.
The information that can be retrieved from the agent or set by the manager is defined by a Management Information Base, or MIB. The MIB defines a set of values that can be read or changed by the SNMP manager. To make sure that SNMP remains protocol dependant rather than platform dependant, the International Standards Organization (ISO) controls the creation of MIBs. The ISO issues MIB identifiers (which look something like '220.127.116.11.4.1.311') to organizations that want to create their own MIBs. As long as they stay under the MIB ID they are assigned, they can do anything they like with it.
As well as the process of the manager interrogating or configuring the devices that are running an SNMP agent, the devices themselves are also able to communicate with the manager through the use of 'trap' messages. Traps are generated when either a threshold is exceeded on the device, or when a certain condition is met. Examples of events that might generate a trap message include an interface going down on a router or the threshold that dictates the amount of free disk space on a server being surpassed. It should be noted that SNMP agents are very simple pieces of software, which makes it possible to install SNMP agent functionality on just about anything from a server to a router to an air conditioning system to a vending machine. Now that's a practical application for technology if ever I have heard of one.
As adept as SNMPv1 is at allowing the management of devices on the network, it does so at the expense of one major factor -- security. Although there are additional mechanisms that can be used to increase the security of SNMP, the basic measures boil down to something called community strings. When configuring an SNMP agent, the community string (which is a name or combination of characters) is input as part of the configuration information. When a management system wants to communicate with the device, it authenticates using the community string. There are typically two community strings accommodated by a device, one for reading values and one for writing (setting) values. It's a sound strategy, except for one fact. The community strings are transmitted between manager and agent in plain text, which means that anyone with a packet sniffer and the inclination to do so can discover the community strings. Amusingly, this facet of SNMP causes some in the industry to rename it 'Security is Not My Problem.' Hey, who said this industry wasn't fun!
To move SNMP forward a version was needed that offered all of the good points of v1, but that took care of the bad - in other words the security concerns. The next version of SNMP called, not surprisingly, SNMPv2 set out to accomplish this goal in 1995. Although security was the major drive behind SNMPv2, it was not the only enhancement. New SNMP commands such as 'GetBulk', were added along with an enhanced MIB language which added a degree of flexibility missing from SNMPv1.
The only problem was that it quickly became apparent that opinions differed as to how to make SNMP more secure. As the wrangling continued, two separate versions, SNMPv2* and SNMPv2u emerged, each touting its advantages over the other. In attempt to move forward with SNMP as a whole, another version SNMPv2c was introduced that took the advantages of management over SNMPv1, but reverted back to the old community string authentication methods of the original version. The result of all these shenanigans is that SNMPv2 of any variety never managed to get a foothold.
Which brings us up to version 3, which is where we are today. SNMPv3 was introduced in 1999, and gets around the security concerns by making it possible to encrypt all SNMP related traffic. It also accommodates authentication via a digital signature for remote systems. In other words, the router in Helsinki is able to verify, in a secure manner, that the request to reset Interface 0 originated from the SNMP management system in Orlando. It is also possible to operate SNMPv3 without the authentication or encryption if so desired, though the number of environments that would consciously disable security in this day and age is few.
It should be noted however, that SNMPv3 does not just offer security enhancements. Other features of the new version include auditing, an enhanced time synchronization protocol and an increased set of management tools. It also incorporates the non-security related enhancements that were included in SNMPv2. To put it simply, SNMPv3 takes the best of version 2, perfects these features, adds a few of its own and then makes it secure. Another major plus for SNMPv3 is that it has been designed in a modular manner that, some say, will make in unnecessary for a new version (v4 per chance) to be introduced in the near future. When the need for new functionality is realized, it can be incorporated into SNMPv3 without the need for wholesale changes.
With all the advantages SNMPv3 offers you might think that everyone who's anyone would be using it, but that's not the case, and it's certainly not for lack of vendor support. All major network hardware vendors including Cisco, Nortel and Intel provide SNMPv3 support. SNMPv3 support in network management software applications is also widespread and has been for some time.
To go back to the original question posed at the beginning of this article, you may now be asking yourself why everyone is not using SNMPv3. For many, it is a case of "If it's not broken don't fix it." The problem with this strategy is that now, with the security problems identified with SNMPv1, even if your SNMP structure is not broken, someone else is likely to try and break it for you.
Drew Bird is a freelance writer, trainer, consultant and technical author with over 13 years of industry experience. He is the author of a number of technical books including the Server+ Study Guide for Coriolis and the Linux+ Study Guide from Osborne McGraw Hill.
Related Article: What To Do About SNMP Vulnerabilities | <urn:uuid:7917a15a-ac08-4bd7-85a2-c89b7f7b9a9a> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/print/netsp/article.php/979991/SNMP--Anything-But-Simple.htm | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501170992.17/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104610-00150-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954291 | 1,536 | 3.234375 | 3 |
The opportunity for the Internet of Things is often connected business potential represented by all the new and interesting devices, sensors and things that are riding the IoT wave. This opportunity especially manifests itself when you consider the benefit from all the connections these devices will make, as they gather and pass data back to users, other devices, Enterprise applications and big data analytics solutions. These connections promise to improve workflows, solve business problems and yield new business insights.
Yet one of the concerns that comes with introducing these new devices and connections is how you secure these devices. Adding more devices, sensors and things to your network also represents the potential to increase your attack surface. In short, all devices, including IoT devices, need to be secure. So organizations need to be diligent, and purchase enterprise-class IoT devices that can be configured and updated in line with security policy – just like anything else that is connected to your network. Many consumer devices don’t meet the security bar, and never will.
But there’s a deeper underlying problem: lack of security standards for IoT devices.
One of the genuine technical challenges is encryption in the smallest IoT devices, such as sensors. These devices have to operate for extended periods on battery power, so they often use microcontrollers with extremely limited amounts of RAM and ROM. Some of these microcontrollers have merely 64 bytes of RAM or less. Yes, bytes – not kilobytes or megabytes. This means that entirely new algorithms have to be devised to fit. This is called lightweight cryptography (LWC), and NIST, in the U.S., has now started a standardization initiative for LWC.
It’s time: the need is pressing, and the research community has already been studying and experimenting with LWC for more than a decade. Devices using LWC will always involve specialist design, but the aim is to standardize these security building blocks for IoT.
Another technical challenge is that IoT devices use different protocols for communication. Some of these protocols, such as MQTT, can run on top of existing secure session protocols such as Transport Layer Security (TLS) – the standardized replacement for SSL. This is an excellent fit for gateways that already support TLS. Less powerful devices may use protocols such as COAP. Because COAP uses UDP rather than TCP, it can run on top of the DTLS variant of TLS. This again is a great fit for those gateways, as DTLS is so closely similar to TLS. The smallest IoT devices using LWC with message-based security protocols – because they aren’t powerful enough to support TLS/DTLS – will be more challenging, as we just saw. Gateways are vital to IoT security, as they allow the traffic to be inspected and validated in a scalable way.
A third security challenge applies to a different class of IoT: updating multi-function devices. The smallest IoT devices, like sensors, won’t be updatable. More powerful single-function devices can just be updated by their vendor. But multi-function devices may involve software from different vendors, so there needs to be a trustworthy way to update their software without them interfering. Smartphones have already successfully tackled this challenge, and their approach is now being repurposed as the Open Trust Protocol (OTrP) within the IETF.
More broadly, great work is going on within the Online Trust Alliance (OTA) and Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), and the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) to provide detailed security guidance and checklists for developers of IoT devices. Much of the guidance will be familiar to enterprise software developers; developers of IoT devices need to follow it, too. After all, it’s not the size of the device that counts: it’s the size of the risk that it can pose.
You can find out how Octoblu helps secure IoT devices here: https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2015/12/10/citrix-octoblu-is-securing-the-internet-of-things/ . And with the emergence of these standards, let’s hope that IoT security becomes a routine operations matter, rather than something exotic.
Architect’s Guide: IoT Security:
Secure Design and Development of IoT Products – [CSA “coming soon”]
Online Trust Alliance: Internet of Things: | <urn:uuid:f83dec03-c221-4df7-8398-65f0d9a69827> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2016/12/01/iot-security-light-relief-for-the-industry/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501170992.17/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104610-00150-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931541 | 899 | 2.9375 | 3 |
In 11.70.xC3, we added some new time series capabilities. Why would you care?
Time series are found everywhere. It is simply data that is collected over time. It could be changes in stock price and transaction volumes. It could also be reading of your house electric meter. Readings could be done every 15 minutes for example to provide a much more accurate picture of how electricity is being used. Other time series examples include weather information, network traffic, thermal readings in a large data center, and so on.
One key characteristic of time series is that the processing always include a time component. For example, you want to get all the meter readings for one month for a specific customer. With this data, you can calculate daily consumption, running averages, etc. To do this type of processing, you need quick access to the specific range of data you want to analyze and you also need to get it in time order.
Informix provides a data type that is used specifically to optimize time series data. It also comes with a extensive set of functions used to manipulate these time series. The Informix TimeSeries provide three major benefits:
- Space savings
In a standard relational database, each time series element must have an identifier and a time stamp because the time series element are stored in a separate table from the object it refers to (such as an electric meter). You then need an index on the identifier and the time stamp so you can joint it with the table that allows you to select what identifier and time range you want to operate on.
In contrast, Informix TimeSeries stores the time series in the same table and row that represents the object. You don't need the additional index on the identifier to join tables. Also, the data is kept in time order in the time series. In the case of regular intervals, you don't even need to keep the time stam since the position gives you the time
In customer tests we have regularly seen that Informix TimeSeries takes one third of the disk space.
- Performance benefits
Just by having less data on disk gives the Informix TimeSeries a significant performance benefit but it does not stop there.
The data is ordered. This means it is much faster to get to the exact subset of data that you want to process. By being ordered, This means you will likely find the next record that you are looking for on the same page as the last one. In a relational system, all this data could be scattered over a large number of pages without specific ordering. This would cause a lot more I/O operations to be executed than in the case of Informix TimeSeries. You also don't need to go through an additional sorting step before you process your data.
In customer tests we have seen as much as 60X performance improvements over standard relational in some queries.
- Simpler development
Informix TimeSeries comes with a set of functions that allow you to manipulate the time series. For example, if you need to group ou r reading to go from a 15 minute interval to a hourly interval, it can be done in a simple statement. Similarly, if you want to calculate a running average: simple statement. This means you don't need to write specialized code to provide this processing. It is built into the Informix TimeSeries capabilities.
The end result can be simpler code, less maintenance, and faster time to market
Informix TimeSeries also provides the ability to create relational views on top of your time series data. This opens the door to the use of standard off the shelf products to do things like reporting.
With this very brief introduction, we are now ready to talk about the improvements made in 11.70.xC3. This will have to wait until next time | <urn:uuid:3c998fdf-30fb-4c37-8a11-ee699d976d06> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/jacquesroy/date/201107?lang=en | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171932.64/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00026-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941406 | 771 | 2.796875 | 3 |
The anti-phishing feature, currently available in the test version of Google's Chrome, would unlikely provide the boost the browser needs to catch up with Microsoft's Internet Explorer, an expert says.
Chrome trails IE in its ability to protect users landing on malicious websites through phishing attacks. The experimental feature in Chrome Canary Version 36.0.1975.0 would try to narrow the gap by displaying the root domain of a website to theoretically make it easier for a person to distinguish between a legitimate and bogus site.
If the domain is supposed to be "amazon.com," but what's shown is "amazon_scam.com," then the Chrome user would know they've landed on a fake site.
However, such a feature is unlikely to be of much help.
"I believe it is far too soon to assess success or failure," Randy Abrams, research director for NSS Labs, said. "That said, allowing users to see the true top level domain (TLD) name will be of limited effectiveness.
"Many users do not know what a TLD is or even have the knowledge to distinguish a good one from a bad one."
In addition, such tactics do not help when cybercriminals compromise a web server and load malicious pages on the site, Abrams said. In those cases, the URL would look fine, so the only tip-off would be if the page seeks personal information unrelated to the site.
"There will be users who do not put two and two together to figure out that 'kinder_peope_love_you.com' is probably not a safe place to share their banking credentials," Abrams said.
A recent comparison of browser malware detection found Chrome trailing IE with a block rate of 70.7 percent versus 99.9 percent, according to NSS Labs.
The malware threat typically starts when criminals send email crafted to trick the recipient into clicking on a link that leads to a malicious webpage. Chrome and IE use a combination of URL filtering and application reputation technology to detect bogus URLs and malware.
Besides questionable effectiveness, Google's anti-phishing feature is also flawed, according to PhishMe, which provides security training to companies.
PhishMe reported this week that the feature failed to display long URLs. How long would depend on the size of the browser window, but URLs over 98 characters were certain to disappear.
Chrome Canary is intended for developers and early adopters of the browser. Because it is meant for testing, Google warns that the browser could "sometimes break down completely." | <urn:uuid:0c633dd8-00a9-4496-aa62-72e019c3aacd> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.csoonline.com/article/2153281/browser-security/anti-phishing-in-google-chrome-a-shaky-work-in-progress.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501170434.7/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104610-00146-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940923 | 521 | 2.71875 | 3 |
Can a tool or technology be applied to the brain and accurately predict out of a given group of people who will be the smartest?
The research arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is looking for exactly those kinds of tools.
“IARPA is looking to get a handle on the state of the art in brain-based predictors of future cognitive performance. In particular, IARPA is interested in non-invasive analyses of brain structure and/or function that can be used to predict who will best learn complex skills and accomplish tasks within real-world environments, and with outcome measures, that are relevant to national security.
+More on Network World: 7 high-tech programs that want to pick your brain+
While conventional measures such as academic achievement, pencil-and-paper exams, and previous experience can be informative for predicting future performance, some recent research suggests that it may be possible to supplement (or supplant) traditional evaluation tools with direct measurements of the brain to confer additional predictive power. However, the extent to which neural tools can improve prediction of performance and expertise over and above more conventional tests remains in question, and the extent to which neural tools and measures have been tested using meaningful real-world outcome measures is also unclear, IARPA stated.
IARPA said with the program dubbed Neural Tools to Augment Prediction of Performance, Expertise, and Domain-knowledge (UNTAPPED), it is looking for insight into what it calls “credible next-generation tools, methods, and/or analyses that may overcome current technical and/or practical hurdles in predicting future cognitive performance, or that have been developed for other applications (such as predicting or assessing mental illness or psychological disorders) but have not yet been tested for this application.”
The researchers say that many organizations - from universities and companies to competitive sports teams and the military - are interested in accurately predicting an individual’s future cognitive performance and potential for different domain-knowledge and expertise.
“Such a predictive capability would allow organizations to determine in advance who is most likely to be able to learn and master complex skills and accomplish tasks in real-world environments that are important for the organization’s mission and success, thereby increasing return on investment for training activities and optimizing matching of personnel to tasks/environments. Such a capability would be particularly valuable in professions where job demands and required skills change rapidly due to new environments, new competitors, and/or advances in tools and methods. Indeed, given the accelerating rate of technical and social change impacting many organizations, as well as increasing costs for training and sustaining human resources, the ability to improve accuracy in predicting future cognitive performance for even a small percentage of current or future personnel could be significant.”
To get an idea of what IARPA is looking for, its UNTAPPED Request For Information includes the kinds of questions it is looking to answer with this new research, including:
a. What characteristics of brain structure and/or function are (or could be) used to predict future cognitive performance or potential expertise in different domains?
Which technologies are used to collect this information?
What are the experimental protocol(s) employed?
Have the measures been used in conjunction with a specific intervention (e.g.collected prior to or in parallel with task-related training to predict training outcome)?
e. What are the key technical or logistical challenges in collecting these data (e.g. multiple samples are needed per person and/or overall; extensive time is required to collect the data; imaging requires dye injection; analysis requires supercomputer; etc.)?
Which of these challenges (if any) are likely to be resolved with advances in primary or enabling technologies?
a. What types of cognitive performance have been (or could be) predicted with these measures? If this performance isn’t demonstrated in terms of real-world outcomes, is there evidence in the literature that these predictions could affect real-world outcomes?
b. For which types of cognitive tasks are neural measures likely to offer the most predictive power relative to more easily assessable behavioral predictors (e.g., pen and paper tests)?
c. How far in advance have these measures been shown to be predictive (i.e. do they predict performance one hour/day/week/year from when they are collected)?
d. What data support the finding that the measures can be used to predict performance in the future vice simply correlating with previous or current performance?
e. In what kind and size of populations have these results been demonstrated? How much variance is exhibited in the accuracy of prediction? How much additional variance could be expected by increasing the diversity of the subject population in terms of sex, age, IQ, occupation, nationality, culture, etc.?
f. What support, if any, have these measures received in peer-reviewed
literature? Have there been any reports (anecdotal or published) of negative findings using the same types of measures?
a. Have these brain-based predictors been compared to or combined with conventional (non-neural) measures? If so, what are the relative costs/benefits? If not, against which conventional measures should the proposed approach be tested?
a. Given that performance on a complex cognitive task or expertise in a specific domain may be mediated by a host of intermediate factors, what are likely to be fundamental limitations (theoretical and/or practical) to the development, testing, or use of neural tools and measure(s)?
This brain research is just one of many ongoing projects IARPA has going. In July the group talked about a project it says could revolutionize machine intelligence by constructing algorithms that utilize the same data representations, transformations, and learning rules as those employed and implemented by the brain.
The specific goal of that program, known as Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) is to create what IARPA calls “a new generation of machine learning algorithms derived from high-fidelity representations of the brain’s cortical microcircuits to achieve human-like performance on complex information processing tasks.
+More on Network World: Security Holy Grail anyone?; US sets $1.4M to get unique metaphor-recognizing software system humming+
In March, IARPA announced the Investigating Novel Statistical Techniques to Identify Neurophysiological Correlates of Trustworthiness (INSTINCT) Challenge where it asked members of the public to develop algorithms that improve predictions of trustworthiness, using neural, physiological, and behavioral data recorded during experiments in which volunteers made high-stakes promises and chose whether or not to keep them.
Check out these other hot stories: | <urn:uuid:8dd4e6c0-506c-4346-bc62-1553776bcce3> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.networkworld.com/article/2461383/it-skills-training/intelligence-agency-wants-brain-tools-to-tell-who-s-the-smartest-of-them-all.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501170434.7/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104610-00146-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93913 | 1,381 | 2.953125 | 3 |
Talk about an ambitious project. The scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said today they want to develop a massive system of sensors and unmanned systems that can monitor and track the remote environment of the Arctic.
DARPA acknowledged the immensity of the Assured Artic Awareness project saying the Arctic is physically vast, with transpolar distances of over two thousand nautical miles, and typical travel distances from the US of over one thousand miles. However with retreating Arctic ice in the coming decades, shipping is expected to increase during the summer months as will effort to exploit natural resources along the resource rich continental shelf. This growth in activity will increase the strategic significance of the region and will drive a need to ensure stability through effective regional monitoring, the agency stated.
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From DARPA: "Remote distributed sensing is a way to provide stand-off situation awareness in the Arctic, and is an emphasis for the Assured Artic program. Distributed and unmanned systems offer the advantage of extensive footprints as well as proximity, without the potential system costs of large manned platforms and bases. As with the development of any remote distributed system, developers will need to overcome the technical challenges of persistence, survivability, energy management, sensing, mobility, delivery, and communications.
Such endeavors are further challenged by the extreme meteorological and environmental conditions of the Arctic. For example: polar ice isolates underwater activities from overhead assets; extensive darkness and cloud cover limit electro-optical imaging; instability in the ionosphere disrupts radiofrequency propagation; geosynchronous satellites access can fail at latitudes above 70 degrees N; and temperatures can fall below -65 degrees C affecting hardware designs."
The agency depicted two central areas of technology it wants to develop:
Under-ice awareness: "Proposed solutions in this area should leverage unique Arctic properties (like under-ice acoustic propagation, noise, and non-acoustic properties) to enable distributed unmanned autonomous systems to find and hold targets underwater. Primary interest lies in anti-submarine warfare, however innovative approaches for the detection of structures, bathymetry [study of underwater depths], and other measurements where compelling cases are made for their strategic value will be considered."
Surface awareness: "Proposed technologies in this area will leverage unique Arctic properties (such as electromagnetic and optical phenomena, ice distributions within a coverage area, the narrow passageways for shipping traffic, and other unique attributes) to let distributed unmanned autonomous systems find and hold surface contacts in the marginal ice zone and summer ice-free waters. Primary interest lies in surface ship and ice tracking, however, this technical area will include innovative approaches for enabling technologies such as networking, data exfiltration, the detection of other activity and conditions of concern where compelling cases are made for their strategic value."
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DARPA said that the program seeks to develop alternative technology that "creatively turns the perceived environmental challenges of the Arctic into exploitable opportunities."
DARPA said the program will initially offer multiple contracts worth a total of up to $4 million.
Layer 8 Extra
Check out these other hot stories: | <urn:uuid:4159be0e-6a6c-419c-a2ce-65f0b4942d60> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.networkworld.com/article/2221952/lan-wan/darpa-wants-the-ultimate-technology--sensor-network-to-monitor-the-vast-arctic.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501170993.54/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104610-00498-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.918384 | 651 | 3.21875 | 3 |
Lesson 2By Dennis Mendyk | Posted 2003-09-10 Email Print
The telecom company's cables were crushed and submerged in water after 7 World Trade Center crashed.: Redundancy Matters">
Lesson 2: Redundancy Matters
Muscle power was aided immeasurably by one feature Verizon built into its network before Sept. 11.
Verizon had installed redundant connections between its central offices so a cable failure on one route wouldn't disrupt communications. Although the redundancy did not allow Verizon to immediately restore service, technicians ran aboveground cables to an undamaged portion of a redundant line that connected 140 West to a central office on Canal Street, several blocks north of Ground Zero.
Without the redundancy, Verizon would have taken weeks to dig up streets and connect 140 West to the Canal Street facilityassuming equipment was available to dig the trenches.
After Sept. 11, Verizon put 18 optical communications rings into place in Lower Manhattan. With these rings, which use Synchronous Optical Network (SONET) technology, a failure between two points can be overcome simply by reversing the direction of traffic.
Even with the SONET rings, Verizon's data network in Lower Manhattan is not fail-safe. A knockout of 140 West will still cause the network to fail. But now Verizon's network will operate if damage or disaster disables part of a ring. | <urn:uuid:678f01a3-8c04-497d-836e-bcc85bea280c> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/Projects-Integration/Verizon-Reconnecting/2 | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501172649.58/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104612-00550-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942837 | 278 | 2.75 | 3 |
It's a given that criminals such as arsonists and serial murderers often return to the scene of the crime -- sometimes to relive the crime. But not only criminals do so.
Detectives, prosecutors and juries must also revisit the crime scene. Detectives may need to re-examine the evidence, prosecutors may return for case preparation and jury members may need to review the crime scene to make a decision.
To do their re-evaluations, investigators typically rely on photographic evidence and two-dimensional drawings. Since we live in a three-dimensional world, however, it can be difficult to visualize the positional relationships of evidence with two-dimensional tools.
What if agents could measure with extreme accuracy thousands of data points per second in a crime scene? What if an agent could capture that information, recall it and create his or her own virtual representation for use during a trial?
Through a combination of laser and computer technology, high-definition surveying (HDS) creates a virtual crime scene that allows investigators to maneuver every piece of evidence.
HDS reflects a laser light off of objects in the crime scene and back to a digital sensor, creating three-dimensional spatial coordinates that are calculated and stored using algebraic equations, said Tony Grissim, homeland security and law enforcement liaison for Leica Geosystems HDS, based in San Ramon, Calif.
"An HDS device projects light in the form of a laser in a 360 degree horizontal circumference," he said "The HDS is measuring millions of points, creating a 'point cloud.'"
Think of letting off an insect bomb in your apartment -- millions of particles create a fog, and the resulting cloud settles on all objects in your apartment. With HDS, instead of millions of data particles settling on the objects, those data points are bounced back to the receiver, collected, converted and used to create a virtual image of any location.
An average desktop personal computer can now take the data file and project that site onto your screen. Not only has the scene been preserved exactly, but the perspective can also be manipulated. For instance, if the crime scene were the front room of an apartment, the three-dimensional image allows the investigator to move around and examine different points of view.
Or perhaps the victim was found seated. An investigator could see and show a jury what the victim might have seen. If witnesses outside said they looked in a living room window, an investigator could zoom around and view what the witnesses could or could not have seen through that window.
Cloud of Information
"Understanding evidence documented on a 2-D drawing of a staircase is difficult," said Derry Long of Plowman Craven & Associates (PCA), a land surveying company based in the United Kingdom. "If you create a 3-D staircase and cut-away, the relevance of evidence is often clear."
Long spent 12 years as a civilian employee of Scotland Yard, where he designed police stations and developed computer modeling. At PCA, he uses HDS to re-create crime scenes down to the submillimeter level. Although PCA's focus is working with builders and developers, Long created the first HDS call-out team in Europe for criminal investigations.
His team, on-call 365 days a year, responds to about 150 incidents each year.
Many times, Long responds to a scene weeks after crime-scene investigations are concluded. His job, then, is to scan the scene, and then use the photographic documentation and crime-scene notes to re-create the scene.
Long recalled a recent homicide where the murder was thought to have occurred in the kitchen, but no one could determine how the body ended up in a hallway. By re-creating and studying the crime scene, investigators examined different points of view and the positional relationships of the evidence.
"Now it made sense, the investigators were able to see what had happened," said Long, adding that because the case is still ongoing he can't provide further details.
Keeping the Scene Clean
A basic concept taught to first responders is securing a crime scene, so contamination of evidence is minimized.
Crime-scene contamination can take many forms -- someone may touch an object leaving their fingerprints, or inadvertently move or take evidence from the scene, perhaps by picking up fibers on their shoes.
Analyzing a scene's evidence helps explain what happened, and if an item of evidence is moved or disturbed from its resting place, the analysis could be faulty.
The time after a crime has been committed, during which there is a maximum potential for the recovery of forensic evidence, is referred to as "the golden hour" by Mark Harrison, MBE, special adviser to the UK's National Crime & Operations Faculty (NCOF).
Harrison, an 18-year veteran of British policing, is on loan from the Bedfordshire Police to the NCOF, a national organization in the UK that provides special services during complex investigations.
He commonly uses HDS technology as a "stand off" device, allowing him to approach the scene in stages by scanning from the outer perimeter and moving into the heart of the scene.
"The laser doesn't care if its day or night," Harrison said. "It captures the information and allows me to interrogate the crime scene with my laptop before it has been disturbed."
In the past, the method of preserving information about the evidence was photographic documentation and two-dimensional drawings. Later, not only could someone testify to the recovery of the evidence, they might also provide expert interpretation. Drawings and photographs assist investigators in the investigation, and ultimately assist prosecutors in telling the story to a jury.
In many cases, Harrison said, the value of evidence is in its positional relationship.
"It could be blood splatters, a firearm, shell casings or any other pieces of physical evidence," he said.
Investigators often go to elaborate means to reconstruct scenes. Unfortunately no matter how good your photographer, there is always something else an investigator wants to know. Photographs and drawings are helpful, but they are two-dimensional, and are the technician's interpretation of the scene.
Long and Harrison agree that observer bias always creeps into photography and crime-scene drawing. If an HDS device is used at the scene, detectives, prosecutors and juries can return to a crime scene in its preserved state.
Matter of Perspective
The investigative and prosecutorial value of virtual crime scenes is evident. Showing a jury exactly what a witness could or could not have seen can be very valuable.
Recently Craig Fries, president and founder of Precision Simulation, said his company was asked to re-create an officer-involved shooting in the San Francisco area that occurred one year earlier.
There were more than 40 witnesses to the incident, he said, and the scene itself was approximately 400 feet by 2,000 feet -- an entire city block with businesses and apartments. Using HDS technology, Fries scanned the scene, the involved vehicles (at the impound yard) and used photographic evidence to reconstruct a virtual model of the incident that could be examined from almost any point of view.
"Once the plaintiff knew what we were able to provide, they dropped the lawsuit," Fries said, adding that HDS technology is beginning to be a tool used by both the defendant and plaintiff. "If done well, it's very compelling to the jury."
HDS works equally well in a large rural area. Harrison recalled a political execution in Ireland where the crime scene was a large pasture. HDS technology allowed investigators to document the entire scene in a relatively short period of time and was extraordinarily useful in their investigation.
Long and Harrison also said UK agencies have scanned vehicles, train crashes, river crossings, buildings and planes. From the point-cloud data, investigators in the UK can develop two-dimensional line drawings, three-dimensional models, animations and interactive multimedia packages.
The system also has training applications. Currently there are driving, pursuit and use-of-force simulators. Using HDS, police officers could be taken into a virtual world to practice their skills, or taken back to actual events and debriefed on their own or other police officers' actions.
HDS technology could be used for tabletop exercise, and in addition to training, the technology has a real-time application in tactical situations. Harrison explained that if there were a hostage situation on an aircraft, a similar aircraft could be used to create a virtual representation of the problem.
"Within about two minutes, you could scan the interior of the second aircraft, upload the data and hand virtual goggles to the tactical team," he said. With that data, combined with other real-time intelligence, the team could explore the interior of the aircraft before taking action.
In the UK, government agencies are beginning to use HDS to document critical infrastructure as a means of furthering emergency planning. It would be valuable for fire, and emergency medical or tactical teams to have access to virtual information about buildings.
Imagine a tactical team virtually touring the inside of a school where children are being held hostage. As with the aircraft scenario, the HDS could produce a virtual school, and combined with real-time information, could give tactical teams an edge over the hostage-takers.
For this to be effective, though, the HDS scanning of critical structures must take place before the incident. As we go forward in the 21st century, we will likely see this technology take an important role in criminal investigations, civil liability, training and emergency preparedness. | <urn:uuid:6b34cbc2-ba3a-40f2-bfa9-bf320ee143af> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.govtech.com/public-safety/Crime-Scene-Investigation.html?page=1 | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501172649.58/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104612-00550-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962723 | 1,945 | 2.78125 | 3 |
Traditions and Customs - Quiz Questions & Answers
- Why do Christian brides traditionally wear the wedding ring on the fourth finger?
- What did handshaking originally symbolize?
- Which people traditionally smoke a pipe of peace?
- What primitive religion is still practiced in the West Indies, notably in Haiti?
- What kind of dance do native women perform for tourists in Hawaii?
- (a) According to a superstition, which bird’s feathers should never be in a house as decoration?
(b) Why should you never give a knife to a friend, according to custom?
- (a) Why did early sailors and pirates wear ear-rings?
(b) Why is it considered unlucky to open umbrellas indoors?
- (a) Why is number 13 considered unlucky?
(b) How many years bad luck follow breaking a mirror?
- What was the most important symbol of Kingship in the Lake States of Africa?
- What two flowers were supposed to have been the colors for Holi in India?
- What was the name of the Island in ancient Greece where no births or deaths were allowed to take place?
- Match these toasts with their lands:
(a) Skal - Japan
(b) Viva - England
(c) Prosit - Brazil
(d) Cheers - Spain
(e) Salud - Scandinavia
(f) Banzai - Germany
- What does “Namak Haram” mean?
- Why is it customary to wear blue beads among the nomadic tribes of the Middle East?
- What did the ‘Pigtail’ symbolize in China?
- Name the Polynesian people of New Zealand who are found of tattooing themselves.
- Why was lipstick used in ancient Egypt?
- What is called “The Japanese custom of committing suicide to save face”?
- (a) In which country is it a tradition to drink tea made of salt and yak butter?
(b) Over which shoulder should you throw spilled salt?
- Which people use the following modes of greeting?
(a) rubbing noses
(b) folding hands together
(c) pressing one’s thumb to that of another person
(d) kissing on both cheeks
(e) shaking one’s own hand
- It was believed that the fourth finger has a vein that is linked directly to the heart.
- A Legal act symbolic of the parties joining in compact, peace or friendship.
- The Red Indians
- The Hula
- (a) The Peacock’s
(b) because it will cut your friendship
- (a) They believed that ear-rings would keep them from drowning.
(b) Umbrellas were associated with the Sun God and it was sacrilege to open them in the shade.
- (a) According to superstition, there were 13 people at the Last Supper – Christ and his 12 disciples. So it was ominous.
(b) 7 Years
- Royal tribal drums. Through the rhythm of the drums, a king communicated with his ancestors and the larger the drums of the king, the more powerful it was supposed to make him.
- The Tesu and the Mohua
- (a) Skal - Scandinavia
(b) Viva – Brazil
(c) Prosit – Germany
(d) cheers – England
(e) Salud – Spain
(f) Banzai - Japan
- Indian believes that spilt between 2 friends brings enmity. To renew a broken friendship, they must seal their reunion by eating salt together. Eating a man’s salt is to partake of his hospitality. A “Namak Haram” is one who is not true to his salt as he breaks the covenant.
- To ward off the evil eye
- The pigtail was a symbol of abject humiliation.
- The Maoris
- It was believed that a red circle painted around the mouth kept the soul inside the body and the devil outside.
- (a) Tibet
(b) The left
- (a) Eskimoes
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We're glad you have chosen to leave a comment. Please keep in mind that all comments are moderated according to our comment policy, and all links are nofollow. Do not use keywords in the name field. Let's have a personal and meaningful conversation.comments powered by Disqus | <urn:uuid:4ba3f293-8f41-4217-80cd-177376db13d5> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.knowledgepublisher.com/article-726.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501169769.33/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104609-00015-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958722 | 972 | 2.640625 | 3 |
Manufacturing Breakthrough Blog
Thursday July 2, 2015
What Are the Thinking Processes?
In a nutshell, the Thinking Processes comprise a suite of five logic diagrams as well as a set of logic rules. As I’ve written about in previous posts, there are three basic questions we should always ask when trying to improve our organization.
- What to change?
- What to change to?
- How to cause the change to happen?
The TOC Thinking Processes are designed to answer these three questions in a very systematic and logical way by exploring and communicating information and assumptions about the current reality and the future reality and how to get there. Each Thinking Process diagram includes the use of a particular type of logic when they are used. Some use necessity based logic and some use sufficiency based logic. So before we delve into each of these tools, let’s first explain the difference between these two different types of logic.
Necessity-Based versus Sufficiency-Based Logic
Necessity-based logic diagrams are those that identify conditions that are necessary for a particular effect to exist. A sufficiency-based logic diagram is one that identifies all of the conditions that are necessary and sufficient to cause a particular effect.
While both sufficiency- and necessity-based logic rely on cause/effect relationships, there is a difference between the two.
When testing for sufficiency we ask: “If A occurs, then is this sufficient to cause B?” That is, are the entities within the logic tree complete and valid?
On the other hand, necessity-based logic is looking for those things that must be done to overcome potential obstacles to achieving a particular outcome. These injections (actions or ideas) then become minimum mandatory requirements for the predicted outcome to happen.
Necessity based logic is triggered by asking: “In order to have A we must have B because C”
For example, In order to minimize downtime at the system constraint, we must plan 100% all equipment services (e.g. scheduled maintenance) and repairs (e.g. unscheduled maintenance) because planning reduces wait time and therefore minimizes the mean time to repair.
Examples of Necessity and Sufficiency Based Logic
To say that A is sufficient to cause B means that if A exists, then it guarantees the presence of B. Using maintenance as an example, if we were to say that “correctly trained maintenance employees” are required to have a “highly reliable manufacturing plant,” then by saying this suggests that correctly trained maintenance employees (A) will guarantee that we have a highly reliable plant (B). This implies that correctly trained maintenance employees would be a sufficient condition for a highly reliable plant.
To test whether this sufficiency statement is actually true, we need to ask this question: “Is there a situation where A is present but B is not?” We naturally know that in reality there are organizations that do have correctly trained maintenance employees but still have low plant reliability due to many other factors like old equipment, incorrect maintenance strategies, replacement parts not available, etc. Because of this, our original statement doesn’t pass the sufficiency-based logic test. There are many other conditions that must exist like correctly trained operators or enough maintenance personnel that are also required to have a highly reliable plant. Therefore the statement ”properly trained maintenance employees are needed for a highly reliable plant” is not sufficient by itself to guarantee a highly reliable plant.
The logic of necessity is to identify the minimum mandatory requirements to achieve the intended objective. Necessary conditions seek to remove ambiguity and be unequivocal. The primary test for necessity asks “‘is it true that the stated requirement must exist in order for the subsequent outcome to occur?” For example, in order to have a fire, we must have fuel matches and air. If one of these is removed then a fire cannot happen, so it is a necessity that all three exist.
The Thinking Process Diagrams
Dr. Eli Goldratt is the man responsible for the creation of the first five logic trees listed below and we will discuss the basics of each one in future posts. The Goal Tree was developed by H. William Dettmer and, for me, it was a clear breakthrough in logical decision making. I will spend more time on this logic diagram because it’s the easiest to learn and, in my opinion, will help you the most.
- Current Reality Tree
- Evaporating Cloud (EC)
- Future Reality Tree (FRT)
- Prerequisite Tree (PRT)
- Transition Tree
- Goal Tree
A Question to Ponder
Let's say we want to improve the quality of the product we manufacture. We want to achieve this effect: "The defect rate of our manufacturing operation is less than five percent." Right now the defect rate is nine percent, and our control-chart shows that our manufacturing system is in a state of statistical control. If you were to devise an improvement plan, which type of logic would you use to develop the plan?
In my next post we’ll begin discussing the Thinking Process tools and the correct sequence in which to use them. As always, if you have any questions or comments about any of my posts, leave a message and I will respond.
Until next time. | <urn:uuid:609ac5f4-e473-452d-a54c-69bef85e81b6> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://manufacturing.ecisolutions.com/blog/posts/2015/july/the-thinking-processes-part-1.aspx | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171053.19/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00543-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939329 | 1,108 | 2.859375 | 3 |
Piranha: Decoding the genomic tree in millions of documents
- By Rutrell Yasin
- Nov 30, 2012
The Piranha text analytics software developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which can scale from working on a single PC to a supercomputer, speeds up the search for relevant information by grouping and comparing documents.
Piranha essentially represents documents as mathematical vectors, which lets users of the software perform similarity comparisons, explained Thomas Potok, senior scientist and leader of the Computational Data Analytics Group at the Energy Department’s lab. Users can compare the two vectors and determine how closely they resemble each other.
“What we are able to do in a highly parallel fashion is to create and compare these vectors, so in essence we are comparing every word in every document to every word in every other document,” Potok said. From that point, researchers can say how similar the documents are.
The Piranha clustering algorithm is similar to how animals are grouped in a genomic tree, where horses and cows are close to each other but much different from a squid or an amoeba, Potok explained. “It kind of gives you a sense of how you look at similarities in documents, what things are similar or how things are dissimilar.”
Piranha’s software agents work differently than more traditional software agents, Potok said. It is not a piece of software running around a network but can be assigned to a specific computer or group of computers. For example, if an agency used the software with 10 computers, the software agents would move around the 10 computers to process information faster. A law enforcement officer might install Piranha on his computer, but not on any other. For an agency that has a huge volume of data, users might put Piranha on a cluster of computers, a very large cluster of computers or even on a supercomputer if they needed that level of computing power.
ORNL’s Computational Data Analytics Group is working to extend Piranha’s capabilities. “We are looking to analyze a trillion documents,” Potok said, noting that the team is using the lab’s supercomputer to try to solve this task. But challenges still exist with how text analysis tools tag items, he said. An analyst might want to pull out and highlight a name in a document, for instance. But if he sees the name “Washington,” he doesn’t know if that refers to a person, city or street. So information tagging still needs to be addressed, he added.
ORNL’s computational data analytics team is also focused on how to look at text information in a time view. For instance, with Twitter, people tweet things at certain times but also from certain locations. Law enforcement or intelligence analysts might have information before an event that could be significant, and after an event has occurred wished they had seen the information. So the team is working on “how do you deal with time and location,” Potok said.
Finally, “perhaps one of the biggest challenges is: How do I deal with the volume of data and the ugliness of data?” Potok said. “You have all of these documents and raw information. Well, what is the value, what is useful and what is noise of no value at all?”
ORNL is offering a prototype version of Piranha that can be downloaded from the ORNL site. | <urn:uuid:a48c46c7-d9b4-42bc-a6d9-f0464829e92f> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://gcn.com/articles/2012/11/30/piranha-organizing-tree-millions-documents.aspx | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171670.52/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00243-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941369 | 722 | 2.703125 | 3 |
You may not be aware of this, but merely erasing your data the regular way does not make it disappear for good. Some of it can still be retrieved with the use of recovery tools. This means that your personal information is not at risk only if your computer is stolen or broken into, but also if you simply sell it before getting a new one. If your hard drive was not wiped clean you’ve potentially given another person access to a variety of personal information.
To illustrate the magnitude of this threat, in 2003 Simson Garfinkel and Abhi Shelat published an article in “IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine” reporting on an experiment in which he purchased 158 used hard drives on the secondary market (most of them from different sellers on eBay) and checked to see whether they still contained readable data. To their astonishment, around one third of the drives appeared to have information that was highly confidential and should have definitely been erased prior to the drive’s resale.
They acquired a total of 75 Gbytes of data, consisting of 71 Gbytes of uncompressed disk images and 3.7 Gbytes of compressed tar files. One of these drives was most likely used in an ATM machine in Illinois, and that no effort was made to remove any of the drive’s financial information. The log contained account numbers, dates of access, and account balances. In addition, the hard drive had all of the ATM machine software. Another drive contained 3,722 credit card numbers (some of them repeated) in a different type of log format.
In order to make sure that your data is erased properly I’d recommend using one of the programs listed below, each is for a different operating system: Windows, Linux or Mac OS X.
Eraser (Windows) – Free
Eraser is an advanced security tool for Windows, which allows you to completely remove sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns.
ShredIt X (Mac OS X) – Shareware
ShredIt is the file shredder / hard drive cleaner that offers all the features you need to clean a hard drive, wipe a file and more – as well as the ease of use and safety features you really want from data file shredder software.
dcfldd (Linux) – Free
dcfldd is an enhanced version of GNU dd with features useful for forensics and security. Based on the dd program found in the GNU Coreutils package, dcfldd has the following additional features:
- Hashing on-the-fly – dcfldd can hash the input data as it is being transferred, helping to ensure data integrity.
- Status output – dcfldd can update the user of its progress in terms of the amount of data transferred and how much longer operation will take.
- Flexible disk wipes – dcfldd can be used to wipe disks quickly and with a known pattern if desired.
- Image/wipe Verify – dcfldd can verify that a target drive is a bit-for-bit match of the specified input file or pattern.
- Multiple outputs – dcfldd can output to multiple files or disks at the same time.
- Split output – dcfldd can split output to multiple files with more configurability than the split command.
- Piped output and logs – dcfldd can send all its log data and output to commands as well as files natively. | <urn:uuid:6e5332dc-4d01-498b-b51d-57258a367f74> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2007/11/27/privacy-erase-your-hard-drive/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501172831.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104612-00595-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949332 | 722 | 2.59375 | 3 |
by Mark Gavin
I’ve been developing an application to generate Fresnel Zone Plates; and, ran into an interesting problem. A Zone Plate is similar to a lens in its ability to focus light. It differs from a lens by using diffraction instead of refraction.
The problem I encountered is that Acrobat creates many significant drawing artifacts when it renders this PDF drawing to the screen. In the above screen capture; only the rings centered on the center of the graphic are real. All other rings, centered off of the center, are drawing artifacts.
A zone plate consists of a single set of concentric rings progressively getting thinner and closer together as they move out from the center. The application directly draws the rings of the zone plate to a PDF file as vector artwork. All of the other PDF viewing applications also introduce artifacts; but, they render these artifacts differently then Acrobat 8.
Following are links to a couple of PDF Zone Plate files to test in your favorite PDF viewer:
The appearance of the artifacts displayed will change as you alter the document magnification on the screen.
The intent of the application is to print the drawing to a wide format printer; then, photo-reduce the drawing onto a film negative in order to produce a zone plate. | <urn:uuid:43d5ee15-e5e1-4a0f-be6c-93c0c0771be9> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://labs.appligent.com/pdfblog/the_limits_of_resolution/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501174215.11/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104614-00119-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930128 | 258 | 2.875 | 3 |
At work, if you use your ID badge or a USB token to log onto your PC or network, you are most likely using smart card technology. Smart cards have small but sophisticated computers inside them. They deliver the highest levels of computer security to protect your identity and your employer’s information systems. Your smart ID badge helps prove it really is you, and not someone who stole your password and is pretending to be you. Normally you have to enter a PIN code to prove it is you, and your company’s servers use the computer in the smart card ID as a second level check to make sure it really is you. Companies are giving employees these personal security devices now because of the high risk that someone might steal your password and use it to break into their information systems. Another way to increase network security some companies use is to give employees a small device that displays a different code they have to enter every time they log in. This is called a one-time password (OTP). This serves the same purpose, because if someone steals your password but cannot enter the unique one-time code too, they cannot log onto the network. See also, Why is it safer to have a personal security device to access online services? | <urn:uuid:7e481971-f9b7-4df1-b7ae-03e5d89caa2e> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://www.justaskgemalto.com/us/work-i-use-my-id-badge-or-usb-token-log-my-pc-smart-card/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501174215.11/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104614-00119-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963058 | 249 | 2.984375 | 3 |
Aging networking protocols still employed by nearly every Internet-connected device are being abused by hackers to conduct distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
Security vendor Prolexic found that attackers are increasingly using the protocols for what it terms "distributed reflection denial-of-service attacks" (DrDos), where a device is tricked into sending a high volume of traffic to a victim's network.
"DrDos protocol reflection attacks are possible due to the inherent design of the original architecture," Prolexic wrote in a white paper. "When these protocols were developed, functionality was the main focus, not security."
Government organizations, banks and companies are targeted by DDoS attacks for a variety of reasons. Hackers sometimes use DDoS attacks to draw attention away from other mischief or want to disrupt an organization for political or philosophical reasons.
One of the targeted protocols, known as Network Time Protocol (NTP), is used in all major operating systems, network infrastructure and embedded devices, Prolexic wrote. It is used to synchronize clocks among computers and servers.
A hacker can launch at attack against NTP by sending many requests for updates. By spoofing the origin of the requests, the NTP responses can be directed at a victim host.
It appears the attackers are abusing a monitoring function in the protocol called NTP mode 7 (monlist). The gaming industry has been targeted by this style of attack, Prolexic said.
Other network devices, such as printers, routers, IP video cameras and a variety of other Internet-connected equipment use an application layer protocol called Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP).
SNMP communicates data about device components, Prolexic wrote, such as measurements or sensor readings. SNMP devices return three times as much data as when they're pinged, making them an effective way to attack. Again, an attacker will send a spoofed IP request to an SNMP host, directing the response to a victim.
Prolexic wrote there are numerous ways to mitigate an attack. The best advice is to disable SNMP if it is not needed.
The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team warned administrators in 1996 of a potential attack scenario involving another protocol, Character Generator Protocol, or CHARGEN.
It is used as a debugging tool since it sends data back regardless of the input. But Prolexic wrote that it "may allow attackers to craft malicious network payloads and reflect them by spoofing the transmission source to effectively direct it to a target. This can result in traffic loops and service degradation with large amounts of network traffic."
CERT recommended at that time to disable any UDP (User Datagram Protocol) service such as CHARGEN if it isn't needed.
Send news tips and comments to firstname.lastname@example.org. Follow me on Twitter: @jeremy_kirk | <urn:uuid:16082801-4f06-4a4c-bb92-ea767b3c6cd0> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.networkworld.com/article/2165835/security/aging-networking-protocols-abused-in-ddos-attacks.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501170600.29/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104610-00539-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945517 | 591 | 2.6875 | 3 |
Entity Extraction Enables “Discovery”
If you were looking for information on red cars, for example, even the technology that powers Ask.com would only return answers from sources explicitly including the word red. It would not return answers about burgundy or maroon unless those sources included the word red as well. That might pose a problem for, say, a car designer looking for the most popular color combinations mentioned in a year’s worth of customer emails.
Adding the word color to the search string as a workaround might improve results, but again, not all red-related content would include the word color either. Another issue arises in the fact that the word red has meanings outside the context of design, especially as a metaphor for danger, as in red zone. A designer might want to exclude those.
Bush is an even richer example of a word whose meaning is different depending on context.
A search on that word might return articles about President Bush as well as articles about landscaping. A journalist looking for documents about President Bush would want to specify the person attribute in the search.
What is missing in these scenarios is the ability to refine searches to target the desired meaning (semantics) of a term. The computer cannot automatically discover all the “entities,” i.e., concepts, expressed as words or phrases that have those attributes. With first generation search, you must already know all the right keywords to type into the search box. You must also have taken into account all the semantic misinterpretations (as in other kinds of bushes). And you would also need the skill to express terms so as to exclude those misinterpretations.
This ability to automatically discover semantic matches and exclude semantic non-matches is what entity extraction is all about.
Download The Whitepaper | <urn:uuid:45333389-dda6-45a4-820a-b5e3b5a4269e> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.basistech.com/whitepapers/entity-extraction-enables-discovery/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171070.80/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00239-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950337 | 367 | 2.71875 | 3 |
The world's first solar highway has been opened in France, in the not-very-sunny village of Tourouvre au Perche in Normandy. The roadway is just one kilometre (0.6mi) long, but that still works out at 2,800 square metres of photovoltaic cells—enough, hopefully, to power the village's street lights.
The road was built by Colas, a large Anglo-French construction company. Colas has apparently been working on its own solar road tech, called Wattway, for at least five years. Wattway has been tested in car parks, but this is the first time it has been used on an active road. There will now be a two-year test period, to see if Wattway can withstand the rigour of being pounded by thousands of cars and trucks per day, and whether it can actually provide a useful amount of electricity.
Usefulness aside, the main problem with constructing solar roads is their crippling cost. One of the main selling points of Wattway, according to Colas, is that each panel is just a few millimetres thick, and can thus be installed on top of an existing road, which in turn massively reduces construction costs. Having said that, the 1km road in Normandy cost €5 million (£4.3m) to build. And that's for a single lane of a two-lane highway!
Expanding that out to €10m per kilometre for a two-lane solar road, you're looking at a total cost measured in billions or even trillions of pounds to cover a sizeable portion of a country's roads with solar panels. France has over a million kilometres of roads; the US has over 6 million. And that's not counting the larger highways with more than two lanes...
Fortunately, Ségolène Royal, France's ecology minister, has a much more reasonable goal in mind: she would like to see solar roadways replace one kilometre of every 1000 in France. Again, assuming she means two-lane solar roads at around €10 million per kilometre, the total cost would be €10 billion—not bad, assuming the panels (and the accompany electrical system) don't need regular maintenance, and that they produce enough electricity to be worth the much higher initial outlay.
Indeed, their questionable efficiency is one of the main reasons that more solar roads aren't currently being built. Colas says that Wattway's photovoltaic efficiency is 15 percent, which is pretty good (commercial panels that you might put on your roof are at about 20 percent). But that doesn't take into account the fact that the solar panels are flat on the ground, rather than angled towards the sun's trajectory, significantly reducing efficiency at higher latitudes. Heavy traffic could also block sunlight; as could snow, mud, and perhaps standing water after rain.
Back in 2014, a 70-metre solar bicycle path was built in the suburbs of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, at the utterly insane cost of €3 million. In its first year it produced about 3,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity—enough to power an average home. At the current wholesale price in the UK (about £40 per megawatt-hour), that same €3 million would've bought you about 65,000,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity, enough to power about 21,000 homes for a year.
Obviously the maths are a bit better on the €5 million road in Normandy, but that's still an awful lot of money to spend on powering the village's (population ~3,300) street lights. The Wattway brochure suggests that 2,800 square metres of solar roadway ought to be able to power about 140 homes—about 420MWh per year. Though clearly, if they are just looking to power the village's street lights, they're not expecting anywhere near 420MWh in reality—perhaps due to the low amount of direct sunlight in Normandy.
Finally, because it's Christmas and there's no one in the office to stop me being mean, let's talk about Solar Roadways, an Indiegogo project that raised a ridiculous sum of money ($2.2 million) back in 2014. That money, according to Solar Roadways, is being spent "on engineers to help us make a few needed tweaks in our product and streamline our process so that we could go from prototype to production.” Two years later, the first public installation of Solar Roadways is finally being constructed at a Route 66 welcome centre in Missouri.
According to the Missouri department of transport (MoDOT), the small 12ft-by-20ft patch of solar road will cost $100,000 to install. That works out at $416 per square foot—about $4,500 per square metre, or $11.6 billion per square mile. Scott Brusaw, founder of Solar Roadways, says there's about 29,000 square miles of paved roads in the lower 48 US states, and he'd like to turn most of them into solar roads. He'll need one hell of a Kickstarter to raise $330 trillion—16 times the US national debt—though.
Personally, I think Brusaw's efforts would be better focused on just building a Dyson sphere and solving all of humanity's energy issues in one fell swoop.
This post originated on Ars Technica UK
Listing image by Charly Triballeau/AFP/Getty Images | <urn:uuid:a0b9844b-7535-4e82-b0f1-9f1ef86c2e25> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/12/worlds-first-solar-road-opens-in-france/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171416.74/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00415-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966532 | 1,123 | 2.9375 | 3 |
This course is an overview of modern cryptography algorithms and will describe asymmetric algorithms such as DES, 3DES, AES, and Blowfish as well as asymmetric algorithms such as RSA, Diffie-Hellman, and Elliptic Curve.
Chuck Easttom is the author of 11 computer science books including 2 computer security textbooks used at universities around the globe and translated into several languages. He also holds a host of IT certifications including MCP, MCSA, MCSE, MCAD, MCTS (Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Visual Studio 2010), MCITP (Windows 7 and SQL Server 2008), MCDBA, MCT, A+, Network+, Linux+,iNet+, Server+, CEH, CHFI, ECSA, CEI, and CISSP. He currently has 7 provisional patents, all related to computer science and 4 related to computer security. One of those patents regards a new method of steganography, another regards a new approach to detecting spyware, and yet another involves the invention of a new, more stable file system.
He is also the inventor of a method for quantifying network security that is being taught at several universities, and most recently has developed a new approach to creating ghost drives. He has taught various security related courses for several years and has over 10 years of teaching experience. He is also a frequent consultant on various computer related court cases including both criminal and patent cases. While Mr. Easttom has a broad range of security expertise, his passion has always been cryptography | <urn:uuid:ca139f8c-46fb-405a-b9f5-78a283230ecb> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/288/27837 | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501173405.40/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104613-00291-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959936 | 314 | 3.078125 | 3 |
A new "biochip" under development to accurately identify disease strains may reduce costs for medical testing and also reduce wait time for results.
The Hydra-1K -- which is a silicon chip -- can be used at doctor's offices or points of care, where a disease can be instantly analyzed to determine treatment, said Arjang Hassibi, founder and CEO of startup InSilixa, during a presentation at the Hot Chips conference in Cupertino, California.
The chip -- which Hassibi also called a reader -- heats up a culture or sample, and can identify unique molecular structures like DNA sequences, to help identify possible strains of a disease, which can help determine medication, or whether a patient needs to be isolated.
Right now the chip can test cultures or samples only for specific diseases and mutations.
The tool has sensors, I/O ports and a fluidic cap through which the sample is sent on the chip. The chip is then heated up, and sensors then assess the sample to identify specific DNA sequences. The chip is then disposed after one use.
Hydra-1K can't identify diseases from scratch. The chip instead is "hypothesis-driven," and an assumption needs to be made that a patient has a particular disease, after which a sample is tested for specific genomic strains.
Hassibi provided the example of E-Coli. The chip can check specific DNA sequences for random mutations to determine whether the bug is resistant or sensitive to antibiotics. Each disease has unique DNA sequence identifiers ranging from around 10 for urinary tract infections to around 1,000 for tuberculosis.
The chip can detect up to 1,000 sequences and analyze samples to high accuracy rates, said Hassibi, who previously was a professor and biosensor researcher in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Texas, Austin.
It'll also save patients lots of money, Hassibi said.
For example, if a urinary tract infection or respiratory disease isn't diagnosed via conventional techniques, samples need to be sent to labs for meaningful results. It could cost hundreds to thousands of dollars to conduct tests for specific diseases, and results could take a while to come back, Hassibi said.
The price per test with the Hydra-1K biochip could be between $7 and $15, Hassibi said. Other tests to detect patterns can be costly, with the most expensive being DNA sequencing, which could cost up to $700,000, he said.
The Hydra-1K will ship by the middle of next year to healthcare professionals. It will be used for one or two high-volume "applications," or for specific diseases, Hassibi said in an interview on the sidelines of the show.
InSilixa first has to prove that the chip and its detection techniques work, and then it will hopefully attract more users, Hassibi said. The reader will not be available to end customers.
The chip has successfully gone through tests with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on detecting specific sequences for tuberculosis. But Hydra-1K has not yet been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Hassibi said FDA approval is not necessary for it to be used in clinics as it's a diagnostic tool, and not surgical equipment.
The biochip is pretty exciting technology, said David Kanter, an analyst at The Linley Group, who was attending Hot Chips.
"My dad's a physician. I'm used to the cycle time for lab tests being really high. The idea of being able to do it while I'm at the doctor's office, that's pretty exciting and cool in terms of making health care way more efficient," Kanter said.
It'll be cheaper, and also save people the trouble of going through drugs that may not work, Kanter said.
"Going through antibiotics is not hot. If we can save people from that grief, and save some money, that's great," he added.
The chip itself is cheap to make as it's made using old manufacturing technology. It's also limited in capacity.
"You can tune it for whatever target as long as it fits within the capacity of the chip," Kanter said. | <urn:uuid:86991d7d-1409-46f1-a387-279833eb5e1d> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.computerworld.com/article/2491077/healthcare-it/-biochip--aims-to-quicken-disease-diagnosis--cut-medical-test-costs.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501174276.22/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104614-00467-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960794 | 862 | 2.96875 | 3 |
The science behind Qualcomm's 'mirasol' color e-book displays
It sounds like a cleaning product and looks like butterfly wings. It's "mirasol" (yes, lowercase m, isn't that cute?) and it uses a reflective technology, called interferometric modulation (IMOD). The technology uses microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technology to imitate the way butterfly wings shimmer -- a process called biomimetics, or imitating things found in nature.
That's a mouthful. The question is, is it an eyeful?
Mirasol is a technology under development by Qualcomm's MEMS Technologies division (so that's what the "MEMS" part means). The technology is being demonstrated at CES this week in e-book readers, and was demonstrated by Qualcomm CEO Dr. Paul Jacobs during his Friday afternoon keynote. It is supposed to be better over existing technologies in a couple of ways. First, it reportedly uses less power, because it only uses power if the display changes. Second, it's supposed to be faster than current technologies, which users have complained take up to two seconds to change a page.
According to Qualcomm, the technology has two conductive plates: one a thin film stack on a glass substrate, the other a reflective membrane suspended over the substrate. Normally it's clear. When a voltage is applied, the plates are pulled together by electrostatic attraction and the element turns black. And because the two plates are so close together, this can happen very fast.
Once it's changed…well, let's let Qualcomm explain it: "The bistability of mirasol displays comes from the inherent hysteresis derived from the technology's electro-mechanical properties -- the inherent imbalance between the linear restorative forces of the mechanical membrane and the non-linear forces of the applied electric field."
Intuitively obvious to the casual observer, so let's move on.
Mirasol low-power MEMS display for e-readers, in a proof-of-concept built by Qualcomm. [Courtesy Qualcomm MEMS Technologies, Inc.]
The display is full color with elements that reflect in red, green, and blue wavelengths, based on the difference in phase caused by reflection between the two plates. Ever blow into a plastic straw, then cut down the straw to change the note (check out this video to see what I'm talking about)? Mirasol does the same thing, except with light. "Black" is actually ultraviolet, which is not visible to most human eyes.
At least, that's the theory of how it works. But we know that in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is -- so how does it work? Most people who saw it reported that it was pretty good, but one person said it seemed dim and not particularly colorful.
Some questions, too, for a technology that relies so heavily on vibration and electrostatics: How well is it going to work as a replacement for a book, which people cram into back pockets and take to the beach? Because it works with reflected light, reportedly it works better in a brightly lit environment than the competition, but will it work if you're wearing polarized sunglasses at the time? How well does it work in a dusty environment? A static-charged environment? A moist environment, such as people who like to read in the tub? How resilient is it to being dropped? How does it work for the colorblind? People who can see in the ultraviolet range?
And while they're at it addressing all these pressing issues, how soon could they change the name? | <urn:uuid:4ec830a6-03f6-4251-86f3-858be9639fcb> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://betanews.com/2010/01/09/the-science-behind-qualcomm-s-mirasol-color-e-book-displays/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501170249.75/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104610-00059-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955486 | 746 | 3.21875 | 3 |
Mozilla is developing a protocol that aims to let security tools and Web browsers work better together.
Configuring a web browser to work with a security tool involves writing platform and browser-specific extensions, a non-trivial process that discourages people with less experience, wrote Simon Bennetts, a security automation engineer with Mozilla, on Thursday.
The proposed standard, called "Plug-n-Hack," will define how security extensions can work with a browser in a more usable way, Bennetts wrote. PnH will allow the security tool to "declare the functionality that they support which is suitable for invoking directly from the browser."
Under the current arrangement, if a user wants to, for example, intercept HTTPS traffic, a user must configure proxy connections through the tool and browser correctly and import the tool's SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate, Bennetts wrote.
"If any of these steps are carried out incorrectly then the browser will typically fail to connect to any website -- debugging such problems can be frustrating and time-consuming," Bennetts wrote.
Users may also have to switch often between the tool and their browser to intercept an HTTPS request.
"PnH allows security tools to declare the functionality that they support which is suitable for invoking directly from the browser," Bennets wrote. "A browser that supports PnH can then allow the user to invoke such functionality without having to switch to and from the tool."
The PnH protocol is being designed to be browser and tool independent. The implementation for Firefox has been released under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 and can be incorporated into commercial products for free, Bennetts wrote.
The next phase of the project is being planned, but it is expected it will allow browsers to "advertise their capabilities to security tools," he wrote.
"This will allow the tools to obtain information directly from the browser, and even use the browser as an extension of the tool," Bennetts wrote.
Send news tips and comments to firstname.lastname@example.org. Follow me on Twitter: @jeremy_kirk | <urn:uuid:d00bfb17-e378-4192-99db-f14be83dbdd2> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.cio.com/article/2383065/enterprise-browsers/mozilla--plug-n-hack--project-aims-for-tighter-security-tool-integration.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171463.89/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00111-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938315 | 433 | 2.609375 | 3 |
Laying more fiber optic cables is an acceptable solution to meet the increasing needs for higher bandwidth. However, in some situations, this solution is not economical and flexible for many service providers and enterprise who are limited by costs and time. Thus, WDM technologies, allowing more bandwidth over a single fiber optic cable, are widely used in today’s network.
CWDM network as a cost-effective and easy-to-deploy solution, has attracted the attentions of many service providers and corporations. Although, CWDM network is not as perfect as DWDM network in data capacity, it can still satisfy a variety of applications in fiber optic networks by increasing the channel spacing between wavelengths on the fiber. In addition, CWDM allows any protocol to be transported over the link, as long as it is at the specific wavelength.
The capacity of a CWDM network is largely relayed on a passive component—CWDM Mux/Demux. Theoretically, the more channels a CWDM Mux/Demux provides, the larger capacity of a CWDM network could have. The channel numbers of most CWDM Mux/Demuxs provided in the market are ranging from 2 to 16 according to different requirements. The most commonly used CWDM Mux/Demuxs use standard rack design, LGX box design or pigtailed ABS module design.
|LGX CWDM Mux/Demux||Rack CWDM Mux/Demux||Pigtail CWDM Mux/Demux|
Driven by the increasing needs for higher network capacity and future proofing of network infrastructure, a CWDM Mux/Demux with 18 channels has been introduced. A 18-channel CWDM Mux/Demux utilizing all of the 18 CWDM wavelengths defined by standards, which can combine up to 18 different wavelength signals from different optical fibers into a single optical fiber, or separates up to 18 different wavelength signals coming from a single optical fiber to separate optical fibers. The 18-CH CWDM Mux/Demux provided by FS.COM is equipped with a monitor port, for better CWDM network management. The following picture shows a 18-channel CWDM Mux/Demux in standard 1 U rack.
To build a 10G CWDM network with Mux/Demux is relatively lower cost and higher efficiency compare with other methods, especially for optical transmission in long distances. The steps to build a 10G CWDM network is very simple and the components are affordable for most companies. For 10G CWDM network, the basic required components are 10G switches, CWDM Mux/Demux, 10G CWDM SFP+ transceivers (or 10G CWDM XFP, if the switch is with XFP interfaces) and fiber patch cables. To guarantee correct and error free system setup, the most important and complex step in 10G CWDM network cabling is plugging in the patch cables from the correct wavelength SFP+ (or XFP) to the correct port on each end of the link.
The following picture shows the basic infrastructure of a CWDM network that uses 18-CH CWDM Mux/Demux for long distance transmission. A 18-CH CWDM Mux/Demux is deployed on each end of the existing fiber optic cable to separate or multiplex the 18 wavelengths of signals. Signals transmitting over a specific wavelength are transmitted to the switch via a length of fiber patch cable which is connected to the CWDM Mux/Demux on one end and a same wavelength SFP+ transceiver on the other end. The SFP+ transceiver is firstly installed in the switch SFP+ port for transition between optical signal and electrical signal.
Note: Click to Enlarge the Picture
Selecting the right products for 10G CWDM network, cannot only enjoy the best network performance, but also cut the cost effectively. Here offers a full series of product solutions for 18-CH CWDM Mux/Demux 10G cabling.
Enjoy High Performance Network With Right Patch Cords
The quality and performance of the fiber patch cables for 10G CWDM network are essential. Except standard fiber patch cables, there are different fiber patch cables that can meet a variety of cabling applications. Customers can choose what they need accordingly.
|Bend Insensitive Patch Cords for Lower Signal Loss||Uniboot Patch Cords for Higher Duplex Cabling Density||Push-Pull Patch Cords for Easier Finger Access|
Cut Cost Effectively With Reliable and Affordable CWDM SFP+ Transceivers
During the selection of the 10G CWDM SFP+ transceivers, the compatibility should be considered. For example, if you are using a Cisco switch, the CWDM SFP+ should be compatible with this Cisco switch. However, an original brand CWDM SFP+ fiber optic transceiver is usually very expensive to many companies. For instance, an original brand Cisco CWDM SFP+ transceiver that supports 80km transmission distance is priced around 10000 USD. Luckily, there is another choice—Cisco compatible CWDM SFP+ transceivers which are much cheaper than the original branded ones.
The price of Cisco compatible CWDM SFP+ provided by FS.COM has been cut more than half compared with the original one. In addition, their performances are ensured by a series of tests for its compatibility and quality. Here listed the generic CWDM SFP+ transceivers for 18-CH CWDM Mux/Demux.
|Wavelength||20km CWDM SFP+||40km CWDM SFP+||60km CWDM SFP+|
Kindly contact firstname.lastname@example.org or Visit FS.COM for more details about 18-CH CWDM Mux/Demux and its cabling solutions | <urn:uuid:f5962ed7-fe49-467e-90b7-b67cf32e595b> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.fs.com/blog/affordable-10g-network-over-cwdm-up-to-18-channels.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171463.89/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00111-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.893512 | 1,239 | 2.59375 | 3 |
Christopher Mims has written a two-part blog at MIT’s Technology Review concerning the historic announcement that China with its 2.5 petaflop machine, Tianhe-1A, had pulled ahead of the US in the worldwide supercomputing race.
In the first part, Mims makes the case for why China’s new supercomputer is only technically the world’s fastest. It probably comes as no surprise that this has to do with the way the machine’s peformance is measured, à la Linpack benchmark, the test used to officially determine the speed of the world’s fastest supercomputers. It measures a computer’s ability to perform calculations in short bursts, but in the real world of scientific computing, sustained performance is a more meaningful designation.
“In other words,” says Mims, “the Tianhe 1A comes on strong, but American supercomputers can last all night or sometimes many days, depending on the scale of the problem they’re tackling.”
A distinction in peak processing power is not a predictor of sustained performance, and, according to Mims, the NVIDIA GPUs in the Tianhe-1A are not so great at the latter. With GPU-based systems, there’s a memory bottleneck that leaves the GPUs sitting idle much of the time.
Thom Dunning, director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, is straightforward in expressing the conundrum of the Linpack benchmark:
“The Linpack benchmark is one of those interesting phenomena — almost anyone who knows about it will deride its utility. They understand its limitations but it has mindshare because it’s the one number we’ve all bought into over the years.”
Mims questions whether engineers working on Tianhe-1A will be able to create scientific software that can take advantage of the machine’s peak performance by rarely accessing memory. And parellelizing the code to work with GPUs is perhaps an even greater challenge, one that has stymied programmers in the West.
Says Mims: “It’s not clear that the Linpack benchmark which pegs the machine as the world’s fastest is a useful indicator of its performance in real-world applications.”
The second part of Mim’s one-two punch is that the US is already developing a system that is on track to becoming the world’s fastest supercomputer in 2012. Mims explains that because so much time goes into the development process of the highest-end supers, with long planning, design and implementation stages, generally the experts in the field can predict with some degree of certainty which systems will be game changers and to some extent how they will measure up to one another. This is why Mims says that “it’s possible to predict with some confidence the world’s fastest supercomputers — even, perhaps, the single fastest supercomputer — in the year 2012.” According to Jack Dongarra, the keeper of the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest systems, there are five such systems in line to topple Tianhe-1A’s standing.
One of these potential upstarts is Blue Waters. What sets this machine apart is that it will be powered by the latest IBM Power chip, the Power 7, and will sport a superfast interconnect with greater bandwidth and lower latency than previous incarnations.
According to Dunning, Blue Waters will be installed at NCSA sometime in the first half of 2011 with production ramping up in the Fall of 2011. In 2012, the Blue Waters will be up and running a full range of scientific applications. | <urn:uuid:122546eb-4399-4575-9a44-bea79e8e2dd7> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://www.hpcwire.com/2010/11/11/us_in_line_to_win_back_supercomputing_title_in_2012/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171775.73/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00287-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933982 | 772 | 2.65625 | 3 |
Thanks to Hollywood, the media, and even American politics, the lone hacker trope is alive and well. The truth is, there are a multitude of personas that represent hackers, with an equally diverse set of agendas.
Social engineering is a tool as old as war. And a growing number of cybercriminals are using it to manipulate users into giving them what they want.
Today, we wanted to let you know about a new computer security initiative called “100 Cities in 100 Days”. The Identify Theft Council created this project to persuade cities to commit to doing at least one thing to aid community awareness about identify theft and online safety. Malwarebytes Labs will be publishing an article a day for five days that describe different aspects of computer security. We are trying to share knowledge with everyone we possibly can to make the most out of this project. | <urn:uuid:cb0343ba-73f9-4e6a-9508-298e4b3284a1> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://blog.malwarebytes.com/tag/cybercrime/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501170914.10/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104610-00107-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946643 | 174 | 2.671875 | 3 |
The Institute for Local Self-Reliance recently compiled this map of all the communities in the country that control their own access to the Internet. At best count, there are about 340 of them with publicly owned fiber-optic or cable networks, serving either all or parts of town. In these places, those residents and businesses served don’t have to spar with telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast. They get their Internet instead – like many communities do their electric utility – straight from the city.
The red states on the map have passed laws restricting the ability of local communities to build their own networks (primarily with the pressure of telecom lobbyists). And, at first blush, it’s striking that a state like Texas has almost no municipal broadband. But this picture also reveals another curious contrast.
"The interesting thing about the map is how few big cities are on it," says Christopher Mitchell, who directs the Telecommunications as Commons Initiative at the institute. In fact, the largest city on this map is Chattanooga, where a two-year-old citywide fiber network serves about 170,000 households. The next biggest city is Lafayette, Louisiana, home to about 120,000 people. From there, this movement drills down into intimate communities of just tens of thousands of residents, or less. | <urn:uuid:4ab60d97-98f5-4b00-bdc2-76a13a9bdcaf> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.nextgov.com/cloud-computing/2013/03/why-are-there-no-big-cities-municipal-broadband-networks/61646/?oref=ng-dropdown | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171163.39/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00283-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958371 | 264 | 2.578125 | 3 |
Ameen Pishdadi is the CTO at GigeNET. In this interview he discusses the various types of DDoS attacks, tells us who is at risk, tackles information gathering during attacks, lays out the lessons that he’s learned when he mitigated large DDoS attacks, and more.
While most have heard of DDoS attacks, not everyone knows that there are several types of such attacks. Can you provide an overview of the different kinds and illustrate their severity? What kind of damage can a DDoS attack do?
Well the easiest way to define DDoS is to discuss what it stands for. It really originated from DoS which was short for Denial of Service. The 2nd D stands for “Distributed.” In the late 90’s to early 00’s, the first true Distributed DoS attacked occurred. If I remember correctly, one of the first publicized tools for executing a DDoS was called “trinoo.” It was the first of its kind, where infected machines were able to receive commands from a central location which is called a botnet C&C (command-and-control). Botnet makers got smarter and instead of hosting the C&C from a single host, they started to use IRC (Internet Relay Chat). The compromised machine would connect to a hostname and port that were hardcoded in the botnet code and connect to a channel where a single chat entry need only entered once, but then be seen by tens of thousands of compromised machines and then execute their attack.
The first widely publicized attack was early 2000’s when internet giants such as Yahoo! were taken down. The amount of bandwidth that was required for this would have to have been enormous in those days. This is when the botnet / DDoS scene began to take off.
The goal of a DDoS is to cause a ‘denial of service’ to the user or end users of whatever is being attacked. This can be done in a few different ways. The three most common are as follows:
1. Saturate the connections that the target has to the internet, thus preventing real users from being able to connect. This is usually done with a UDP flood, and lately a UDP reflection flood.
2. Saturate the CPU of the router or host machine by sending more packets per second then it can handle. When this occurs, pretty much anything trying to connect does not get processed by the CPU of the device nor forwarded to the destination. This is usually done with a synflood.
3. Overload the application with requests that look like real users. An example would be having a thousand servers making a request to your website’s page all at the same time. These days, since websites are primarily database driven, this effect is even greater. The webserver and database servers become overloaded quickly.
We’ve seen a significant rise in DDoS attacks in the past year. What are the reasons behind this trend? What type of organization is most at risk?
The significant increase is a direct result of the misuse of information for marketing purposes. While the method that was used to take down Spamhaus was fairly well known and had been around for awhile, media attention was purposefully exploited by CloudFlare for its own gain. This exposed this type of attack to a much wider audience. It basically laid out the blueprints and also broadcast how massive the DDoS could be if done right and with the proper resources.
Most of the time, people who DDoS have no idea how large a reaction they are generating. They are merely trying to achieve their goal of taking down the target. Well, CloudFlare publicized the size of this attack on a daily basis and it enlightened a lot of new crowd to the method. Although it is believed that the CloudFlare final number of 300Gb/s was quite padded and that the real number was more believably around 100Gb/s, this was still a massive amount of bandwidth. As a result, tools popped up all over the place for scanning host machines to add to your database along with tools to execute the attack. This made the process so simple that a 10 year old with Windows had the ability to point and click and in seconds, generate a few Gb/s of UDP traffic.
The unfortunate truth is that EVERYONE is at risk. Sometimes people get attacked and they have no idea why! The source is often someone who doesn’t like one’s business, perhaps a competitor or someone trying to extort money.
How important is intelligence gathering when it comes to mitigating the effects of a massive DDoS attack? What type of information are you looking for?
It is extremely important for the entire online community. Mitigating the attack only stops the attack from hurting one specific target, but if you can find the information that will lead to the C&C, this can be reported to several “white hat” groups who volunteer their time into dismantling these botnets so they cannot attack anyone else. It is also important to figure out who the attacker is, in the event that criminal prosecution can be pursued.
What are some of the lessons that you’ve learned when you mitigated large DDoS attacks impacting your clients?
I learned quickly that no attack is the same. There is no “one size fits all” device out there that will stop every attack. To be responsible, a person needs to have many different tools in his or her arsenal, sometimes used together along with some manual work, to stop some of the more intelligent attacks.
Never assume that you have seen an attack as big as it would ever get. But also, it is worth noting that size isn’t everything. It can actually be the smaller attacks, the ones which look quite similar to normal traffic, which are the hardest to stop.
What advice would you give to organizations interested in getting DDoS protection? How can they make sure that they make the right choice when evaluating providers?
When evaluating any potential provider, look at their history. See how long they have been around and ask for some proof. Check there website for original content. There is smaller company out there who is decently known, but their entire site is plagiarized from different companies who sell DDoS mitigation devices. If they cannot write original text on their own site, then I really would not have too much faith in them protecting my interests as a client.
What are the advantages of using GigeNET DDoS protection? What makes you stand out from the competition?
Without a doubt, our best asset is our experience. We are tried and true. I began defending DoS attacks in 1998 when we used to run a shell server and attackers would DoS other people off of IRC chats.
Paul, our network engineer, started the first fully dedicated DDoS protection company in the late 90’s and pioneered many of the methods of protection. We joined forces in 2005 and have been at the forefront of the industry ever since. | <urn:uuid:d49280a9-fe73-4ace-a66d-1170a4902326> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2013/06/24/ddos-attacks-what-they-are-and-how-to-protect-yourself/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501171781.5/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104611-00635-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9749 | 1,452 | 2.953125 | 3 |
Energy Department highlights access to research
The Department of Energy is rolling out new measures it hopes will increase public access to DOE data, scholarly publications and other department-funded research.
The agency on Aug. 4 launched a web-based portal it dubbed Public Access Gateway for Energy and Science (PAGES), to provide free access to accepted peer-reviewed manuscripts and published scientific journal articles within 12 months of their publication.
The PAGES site will include access to DOE-funded authors' research manuscripts produced by the Energy Department’s National Labs and grantee institutions, as well as public access offerings of publishers. For publisher-hosted content, DOE said it is collaborating with the publisher consortium CHORUS -- the Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States.
PAGES will initially contain a basic collection of accepted manuscripts, but will add more metadata and links, anticipating growth of 20,000 to 30,000 articles and manuscripts annually.
DOE said its Office of Science has issued new requirements for researchers, requiring all proposals for research funding to include a data management plan describing whether and how the data generated in the course of the proposed research will be shared and preserved.
NASA opens next round of CubeSat initiative for space hopefuls
More than 20 states and U.S. territories are getting the chance to participate in the next round of NASA’s CubeSat Launch initiative, giving teachers and students a hands-on opportunity to design, build and operate small research nanosatellites.
CubeSat, part of the White House Maker initiative, aims to engage space enthusiasts to help NASA reach its exploration goals. CubeSats are small research space rafts, measuring about 4 cubic inches.
In addition to giving students and teachers the chance to work with flight hardware and participate in the creative process, “it also provides a low-cost pathway to space for research in the areas of science, exploration, technology development, education or operations consistent with NASA's Strategic Plan,” according to a blog post on the NASA website.
The ultimate goal of the initiative is to launch a small satellite from at least one participant in each state over the next five years. NASA has already selected 114 CubeSats from 29 states, 17 of which have been launched, with nine more scheduled in the next year.
Selected experiments from this round of the initiative are “slated to be flown as auxiliary payloads on agency rocket launches or be deployed from the International Space Station beginning in 2015 and running through 2018,” according to the post.
Proposals for this round must be submitted to NASA by Nov. 25.
Army uses 3D printing to study brain injuries
Defense Systems reports that Army Research Laboratory scientists are using 3D printing technologies to study the dangerous effects of shockwaves on the human brain, as part of an effort to find the best materials to prevent damage.
To better study the effects of shockwaves and to develop new techniques and materials to mitigate their effects, ARL researchers are creating synthetic cranial bones that will be used in experiments that would simulate combat blasts.
Surveilling the NSA
Privacy rights groups have released video of their blimp flyby of the National Security Agency's massive data center facility in the Utah desert.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Greenpeace and the Tenth Amendment Center made the video of the June 27 flight of a 135-foot-long blimp emblazoned with an "Illegal Spying Below" banner. The groups have been bitter opponents of the NSA's data surveillance programs.
The group said it released what it called a "short documentary" on Aug. 5 to rein in those programs, "just as the U.S. Senate has introduced a new version of the USA Freedom Act."
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) introduced that legislation on July 29. The bill aims to narrow the scope of government data surveillance, barring collection of information relating to a particular service provider or to a broad geographic region, such as a city, zip code or area code.
The groups have also started StandAgainstSpying.org, a website showing how members of Congress voted on mass surveillance legislation. | <urn:uuid:78000a9f-078b-49dd-b87a-b715f8b6b781> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://fcw.com/articles/2014/08/05/news-in-brief-august-5.aspx | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501170925.44/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104610-00455-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.926629 | 854 | 2.53125 | 3 |
A groundbreaking theoretical linguistic framework
The meaning-text theory (MTT) is a unique AI method that uses lexical functions to compute semantics. We’ve implemented software based on the way meaning-text theory conceives natural language from lexicon to semantics, which has led our linguistic team to create detailed and specific descriptions of the lexical units in a number of different languages.
The two men behind the MTT model
First put forward in Moscow by Aleksandr Žolkovskij and Igor Mel’čuk, MTT is a theoretical linguistic framework for the construction of models of natural language. A theory that provides a large and elaborate basis for linguistic description and, due to its formal character, lends itself particularly well to computer AI applications.
The power of lexical function
One important discovery of meaning–text linguistics was the recognition that the elements in the lexicon (lexical units) of a language can be related to one another in an abstract semantic sense. These relations are represented in MTT as lexical functions (LF). Thus, the description of the lexicon in a crucial aspect of our software.
Lexical functions are a tool designed to formally represent the relations between lexical units. This allows us to formalize and describe — in a relatively simple manner — the complex network of lexical relationships within languages and assign a corresponding semantic weight to each element in a sentence. Most importantly, they allow us to relate analogous meanings, no matter which form they’re presented in.
The meaning in MTT
Natural languages are more restrictive than they may seem at first glance. In the majority of cases, we encounter frozen expressions sooner or later. And although these have varying degrees of rigidity, ultimately they are fixed, and must be described according to some characteristic, for example:
Obtain a result
Do a favor
Ask / pose a question
Raise a building
All of these examples show us that it’s the lexicon that imposes selection restrictions since we would hardly find “do a question” or “raise a favor” in a text. Indeed the most important factor when analyzing these phrases is that, from a meaning point of view, the elements don’t have the same semantic value. As illustrated in the examples above, the first element provides little information, with all of the meaning or semantic weight provided by the second element.
The crucial matter here is that the semantic relationship between the first and second element is exactly the same in every example. Roughly, what we’re saying is “make X” (a result, a joke, a favor, a question, a building). This type of relation can be represented by the “Oper” lexical function.
Complexity is easy for our linguists
MTT collects around 60 different types of lexical functions. This allows, among other things, the description of relations such as synonymy (buying and purchasing are identical actions), hypernymy and hyponymy (a dog is a type of animal) and other relations among lexical units at the sentence level. This includes the Oper that we mentioned before, or ones expressing the concept “a lot”, i.e., if you smoke a lot you are a heavy smoker, but if you sleep a lot, you are not a “heavy sleeper”. All we can say is that you sleep like a log.Our linguists adapt the principles of the meaning-text theory while describing the languages supported. User questions may be completely different on the surface but the questions underlying meaning is the same, and thus correctly understood by our semantic-based searches. The upshot is that users get fast, accurate results from their queries.
Another example of MTT in action
Let’s take these user questions:
- Purchasing a ticket for an overweight person
- I want to buy a ticket for someone who is obese
Even though the words are different, the meaning conveyed is the same way in both cases. So both will get the same answer from a virtual assistant. At Inbenta, our semantic search engine is built within a rich and complex network of lexical relations so that it understands what users mean with their queries, regardless of the exact words they use to pose their questions. | <urn:uuid:bc6c99c5-49f5-4c8a-b8fb-f549e9213d6c> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | https://www.inbenta.com/en/technology/the-meaning-text-theory/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501170925.44/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104610-00455-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933051 | 887 | 3.1875 | 3 |
Nearly all living creatures have some kind of natural defense, whether it's speed, agility, power, a shell, quills or claws. It's hard out there in the ecosystem, so you have be prepared to fight or flee for your life.
But on a pound-for-pound basis, few can match the defensive weaponry that evolution has bestowed upon the bombardier beetle. As National Geographic contributor Ed Yong explains:
These insects deliberately engineer explosive chemical reactions inside their own bodies, so they can spray burning, caustic liquid from their backsides. The liquid can reach up to 22 miles per hour, at temperatures of around 100 degrees Celsius. It’s painful to humans ... and potentially lethal to smaller predators like ants.
And, probably, Ant-Man.
If you want to get all sciency about it, Yong's article will tell you about hydroquinones and p-benzoquinones and stuff. We'd rather focus on the notion of the beetle spraying liquid out of its butt! Ha ha ha!
This story, "See why the bombardier beetle is the most badass insect in the world. Literally." was originally published by Fritterati. | <urn:uuid:7d08c93d-49c5-4b27-b83d-4cd4dd340113> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.itnews.com/article/2922510/see-why-the-bombardier-beetle-is-the-most-badass-insect-in-the-world-literally.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501172156.69/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104612-00507-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93752 | 242 | 2.734375 | 3 |
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