cryptogon.com

Standing beneath a 52-foot-long tethered balloon on Thursday in Penitas, the Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley sector Chief Rosendo Hinojosa said the blimp-shaped aerostat would help intercept smuggling along the busiest section of the Southwest border.

“This is going to give us a capability we don’t have here,” Hinojosa said.

During a similar demonstration last year, an aerostat tethered 2,500 feet above the ground easily made out the make, model and color of vehicles a couple of miles away. Their infrared cameras are controlled by operators inside computer-filled shipping containers near where the balloons are anchored. Many of the devices were previously used in Iraq and Afghanistan to provide security around bases.

John Milne, U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s site director for the project, said the six-month trial will allow the agency to evaluate how the technology can be applied at the border.

More than 50 senior scientists from 14 countries, including three Nobel laureates and several fellows of the Royal Society, have written to the European Commission denouncing claims that the ferret experiments are necessary for the development of new flu vaccines and anti-viral drugs.

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Professor Palu said that Dr Fouchier’s “gain of function” experiments are designed to see what kind of mutations are necessary to enable the bird-flu virus to be transmissible between mammals in order to make better vaccines and drugs, and that these mutations have already been seen in nature.

“It has to be mentioned that, in this specific case, the ‘gain of function’ was used to reproduce what nature already selected (as demonstrated by sequencing of field mutants) with the variation that the aim of the study was to predict/anticipate biological evolution and to provide us with critical information to specify preventive and therapeutic measures,” Professor Palu wrote.

However, the letter from the 56 scientists, including Lord May of Oxford, a former government chief scientist, states that this assertion is wrong and gives a false impression about the medical need to undertake such dangerous research.

“The sole purpose of the experiments in question was to generate H5N1 viruses that could be transmitted between mammals as readily as seasonable flu via respiratory droplets ie coughing and sneezing,” the letter says.

“Despite intensive field surveillance conducted by national health authorities, government agencies, local and regional disease surveillance networks in Southeast Asia and elsewhere over a period of 16 years, there is no evidence that efficiently mammalian transmissible H5N1 viruses have ever emerged naturally in the wild,” it says.

“In summary, the statement that ‘gain of function’ was used to reproduce ‘what nature already selected (as demonstrated by sequencing of field mutants)’ is simply untrue,” it adds.

The signatories of the letter, who include eminent virologists, microbiologists and vaccine experts, as well as Nobel laureates Sir Richard Roberts, Harald zur Hausen and Richard Ernst, warned that there is a serious risk of an accidental release of a pandemic H5N1 virus from laboratories undertaking such research.

“The potential for accidental release of a hazardous pathogen is real, not hypothetical, as demonstrated by an alarming increase in the number of potential and actual release events in laboratories working with high-threat pathogens,” they say.

“We are in a situation where the probabilities of a laboratory accident that leads to global spread of an escaped mutated virus are small but finite, while the impact of global spread could be catastrophic,” they add.

The reason, based an analysis published in the journal Current Biology, is almost boring – old email addresses and obsolete storage devices are making off with hard-earned research, according to Tim Vines, a visiting scholar at the University of British Columbia, and his colleagues.

In all, Vines and his team estimated that some 80 percent of data are lost within 20 years of the publication of their accompanying study.

“Publicly funded science generates an extraordinary amount of data each year,” Vines said. “Much of these data are unique to a time and place, and is thus irreplaceable, and many other datasets are expensive to regenerate.”

Today’s system of leaving data with authors is simply not working, the researcher said, noting that nearly all of the information is going missing. This is problematic if anyone down the line hopes to validate the work done with it or use it for other purposes.

Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show that the NSA created and promulgated a flawed formula for generating random numbers to create a “back door” in encryption products, the New York Times reported in September. Reuters later reported that RSA became the most important distributor of that formula by rolling it into a software tool called Bsafe that is used to enhance security in personal computers and many other products.

Undisclosed until now was that RSA received $10 million in a deal that set the NSA formula as the preferred, or default, method for number generation in the BSafe software, according to two sources familiar with the contract. Although that sum might seem paltry, it represented more than a third of the revenue that the relevant division at RSA had taken in during the entire previous year, securities filings show.

The earlier disclosures of RSA’s entanglement with the NSA already had shocked some in the close-knit world of computer security experts. The company had a long history of championing privacy and security, and it played a leading role in blocking a 1990s effort by the NSA to require a special chip to enable spying on a wide range of computer and communications products.

The research by engineers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory was reported recently in the journal Algal Research. A biofuels company, Utah-based Genifuel Corp., has licensed the technology and is working with an industrial partner to build a pilot plant using the technology.

In the PNNL process, a slurry of wet algae is pumped into the front end of a chemical reactor. Once the system is up and running, out comes crude oil in less than an hour, along with water and a byproduct stream of material containing phosphorus that can be recycled to grow more algae.

With additional conventional refining, the crude algae oil is converted into aviation fuel, gasoline or diesel fuel. And the waste water is processed further, yielding burnable gas and substances like potassium and nitrogen, which, along with the cleansed water, can also be recycled to grow more algae.

While algae has long been considered a potential source of biofuel, and several companies have produced algae-based fuels on a research scale, the fuel is projected to be expensive. The PNNL technology harnesses algae’s energy potential efficiently and incorporates a number of methods to reduce the cost of producing algae fuel.

The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in El Paso said the unnamed 54-year-old U.S. citizen was “brutally” searched by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents in December 2012 after being selected for additional random screening at the Cordova Bridge in El Paso when a drug sniffing dog jumped on her. The woman was returning from a visit to a recently deported family friend in Cuidad Juarez, Mexico, the lawsuit said.

Agents quickly stripped searched her and did cavity searches but found no evidence of drugs, court documents said. But the woman was transported in handcuffs to the University Medical Center of El Paso, the lawsuit said, where doctors subjected her to an observed bowel movement, a CT scan and other exams without a warrant.

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The American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico and Texas said no drugs were found on the woman despite the intrusive searches.

“After enduring approximately six hours of demeaning and highly invasive searches, (the woman) was released without any charge,” the lawsuit said.

However, her attorney said she was charged $5,000 by the hospital.

This acoustic cryptanalysis, carried out by Daniel Genkin, Adi Shamir (who co-invented RSA), and Eran Tromer, uses what’s known as a side channel attack. A side channel is an attack vector that is non-direct and unconventional, and thus hasn’t been properly secured. For example, your pass code prevents me from directly attacking your phone — but if I could work out your pass code by looking at the greasy smudges on your screen, that would be a side channel attack. In this case, the security researchers listen to the high-pitched (10 to 150 KHz) sounds produced by your computer as it decrypts data.

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