A Virus That Kills Cancer
September 4th, 2012Via: Telegraph:
Sitting in a refrigerator in a Swedish laboratory is what promises to be a cheap and effective cancer treatment. So why are the trials to bring it to market not going ahead?
…
‘Lack of how much money? Give me a figure,’ I pressed. ‘What sort of price are we talking about to get this virus out of your freezer and give these people a chance of life?’
Magnus has light brown hair that, like his voice, refuses to cooperate. No matter how much he ruffles it, it looks politely combed. He wriggled his fingers through it now, raised his eyes and squinted in calculation, then looked back into his laptop camera. ‘About a million pounds?’
…
That Magnus’s virus could be held up by a minuscule £1 million dumbfounded me.
‘That’s a banker’s bonus,’ I said. ‘Less than a rock star’s gold toilet seat. It’s the best bargain going. If I found someone to give you this money, would you start the clinical trials?’
‘Of course,’ replied Magnus. ‘Shall I ask the Swedish Cancer Board how soon we can begin?’
…
‘The trouble with Magnus’s virus is Magnus is Swedish,’ he says, wincing and clutching the air with frustration.
‘It is so,’ Magnus agrees sorrowfully. Swedishly uninterested in profiteering, devoted only to the purity of science, Magnus and his co-workers on this virus have already published the details of their experiments in leading journals around the world, which means that the modified virus as it stands can no longer be patented. And without a patent to make the virus commercial, no one will invest. Even if I could raise the £2 million (I want only the best version) to get the therapy to the end of phase II trials, no organisation is going to step forward to run the phase III trial that is necessary to make the therapy public.
Related: Run from the Cure: Concentrated, Full THC Hemp Oil Reportedly Cures Cancer and Other Diseases
Anonymous Claims FBI Hack Yielded 12 Million iPhone and iPad IDs
September 4th, 2012Update: Florida Firm Is Source of Apple Data in Breach
Via: AP:
A Florida company said Monday that the database of Apple device information that hackers stole and posted on the Internet last week came from a file the firm had in its computer system.
The disclosure comes nearly a week after a hacker group, which calls itself AntiSec, claimed that the data was stolen from an FBI laptop. The FBI flatly rejected the claim, saying it never possessed the information. The data included about 1 million unique identification numbers for Apple devices and some personal information, such as the names people assign to their iPads, iPhones and iPods.
Orlando-based BlueToad is a digital publishing company that converts files so that they can be more easily read online and by mobile devices.
In a statement, company president Paul DeHart said the Apple data was stolen in a cyberattack against BlueToad.
—
Via: ZDnet:
Hackers associated with Anonymous have published a million unique device identifiers from Apple devices, claiming they were taken from an FBI computer. The alleged hack was intended to publicise the existence of some kind of secret FBI tracking project.
…
AntiSec said the hack, which apparently exploited a Java vulnerability, yielded a CSV file containing “a list of 12,367,232 Apple iOS devices including Unique Device Identifiers (UDID), user names, name of device, type of device, Apple Push Notification Service [APNS] tokens, zipcodes, cellphone numbers, addresses, etc”.
Update: FBI Denies It Came from Them
More: SPECIAL #FFF EDITION – ANONYMOUS
Research Credit: almaverdad2
Neuroscientists Successfully Control the Dreams of Rats
September 4th, 2012Via: io9:
Researchers working at MIT have successfully manipulated the content of a rat’s dream by replaying an audio cue that was associated with the previous day’s events, namely running through a maze (what else). The breakthrough furthers our understanding of how memory gets consolidated during sleep — but it also holds potential for the prospect of “dream engineering.”
Working at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, neuroscientist Matt Wilson was able to accomplish this feat by exploiting the way the brain’s hippocampus encodes self-experienced events into memory. Scientists know that our hippocampus is busy at work replaying a number of the day’s events while we sleep — a process that’s crucial for memory consolidation. But what they did not know was whether or not these “replays” could be influenced by environmental cues.
More: Biasing the Content of Hippocampal Replay During Sleep
EU Funding Orwellian Artificial Intelligence Plan to Monitor Public for ‘Abnormal Behavior’
September 4th, 2012Via: Telegraph:
A five-year research programme, called Project Indect, aims to develop computer programmes which act as “agents” to monitor and process information from web sites, discussion forums, file servers, peer-to-peer networks and even individual computers.
Its main objectives include the “automatic detection of threats and abnormal behaviour or violence”.
Project Indect, which received nearly £10 million in funding from the European Union, involves the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and computer scientists at York University, in addition to colleagues in nine other European countries.
Shami Chakrabarti, the director of human rights group Liberty, described the introduction of such mass surveillance techniques as a “sinister step” for any country, adding that it was “positively chilling” on a European scale.
U.S. Flew Spy Drone Missions from Australia
September 3rd, 2012Via: ABC:
The United States flew highly classified Global Hawk spy drone missions from the Royal Australian Air Force base at Edinburgh in South Australia from late 2001 until at least 2006.
…
Global Hawk’s American manufacturer, Northrop Grumman, provided civilian ground crews to service the drones at the RAAF base.
Windows 8 Mess: Microsoft Will Allow Downgrades to Windows 7
September 3rd, 2012It’s just like what happened with Vista.
Via: PC World:
Microsoft will allow users of Windows 8 Pro to downgrade their new PCs to Windows 7 or even Vista, according to the operating system’s licensing agreement.
Not surprisingly, users may not downgrade to the still-used-but-slated-for-retirement Windows XP.
Downgrade rights — which let customers replace a newer version of Windows with an older edition without paying for two copies — are available only in Windows 8 Pro. That fits with previous practice: Only Windows 7 Professional, for instance, was allocated downgrade rights.
“Instead of using the Windows 8 Pro software, you may use one of the following earlier versions: Windows 7 Professional or Windows Vista Business,” states the software license agreement for the version of Windows 8 Pro that will be installed by computer makers (OEMs) on new PCs.
Windows XP Professional, which was one of the allowed downgrades for Windows 7 Professional, was not named. Windows XP will fall off Microsoft’s support list in April 2014.
FinFisher Spyware for Smartphones
September 3rd, 2012Via: Bloomberg:
FinFisher spyware made by U.K.-based Gamma Group can take control of a range of mobile devices, including Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s iPhone and Research in Motion Ltd. (RIM)’s BlackBerry, an analysis of presumed samples of the software shows.
The program can secretly turn on a device’s microphone, track its location and monitor e-mails, text messages and voice calls, according to the findings, being published today by the University of Toronto Munk School of Global Affairs’ Citizen Lab. Researchers used newly discovered malicious software samples to further pull back the curtain on the elusive cyber weapon.
The hunt for clues to the software’s deployment has gained speed since July, when research based on e-mails obtained by Bloomberg News identified what looked like a FinFisher product that infects personal computers. In that case, the malware targeted activists from the Persian Gulf kingdom of Bahrain.
The latest analysis, led by security researcher Morgan Marquis-Boire, may demonstrate how such spyware can reach a broader range of devices to follow their owners’ every move.
“People are walking around with tools for surveillance in their pockets,” says John Scott-Railton, a doctoral student at the University of California Los Angeles’ Luskin School of Public Affairs who assisted with the research. “These are the tools that can be used to turn on your microphone and turn your phone into a tracking device.”
Related: The SmartPhone Who Loved Me: FinFisher Goes Mobile?
Simplicity Parenting
September 3rd, 2012
Italian Government Debt Might Wreck World’s Oldest Bank
September 2nd, 2012Via: Washington Post:
Tucked away in this Tuscan city, the oldest bank in the world has survived the Borgias, pestilence and too many wars to count. Now, a mundane foe has proved far more dangerous: Italian government debt.
The 540-year-old Monte dei Paschi Bank, Italy’s third-largest, is on the ropes as it struggles to deal with holdings of Italian bonds, once considered a prudent place to tuck cash.
The euro crisis upset that calculation. Across Europe, banks are confronting the same problem as seemingly safe bets that governments would repay their debts turned out to have been major gambles.
At the heart of the crisis, the tangled relationship between governments and the financial sector amplifies the financial problems on both sides. And in Siena, bountiful profits that once poured from Monte dei Paschi’s treasure-filled Gothic palazzo have dried up. Last week, the bank announced that it had lost $2 billion in the first half of 2012.
Research Credit: almaverdad2
William Binney Talks About NSA Creating Dossiers on All Americans
September 2nd, 2012Via: New York Times / YouTube:
The filmmaker Laura Poitras profiles William Binney, a 32-year veteran of the National Security Agency who helped design a top-secret program he says is broadly collecting Americans’ personal data.
Related: The Program
Research Credit: alvinroasting
