Cryptanalist Discovers New MD5 Attack Variant in Flame
June 7th, 2012Via: CWI:
Using our forensic tool, we have indeed verified that a chosen-prefix collision attack against MD5 has been used for Flame. More interestingly, the results have shown that not our published chosen-prefix collision attack was used, but an entirely new and unknown variant. Therefore it is not unreasonable to assume that the particular chosen-prefix collision attack variant underlying Flame had already been in development before June 2009. This has led to our conclusion that the design of Flame is partly based on world-class cryptanalysis.
Research Credit: keti
‘Mass Transit Cameras Spot Bad Guys, No Human Judgment Required’
June 7th, 2012And while we’re at it, how about using Google searches to identify pre-crime?
Via: Fast Company:
A new breed of security cameras can supposedly detect terrorism and crime without a human judgment call–and mass transit agencies are shelling out big bucks for the product. San Francisco’s Municipal Transit Authority, which oversees the city’s MUNI trains, has signed a contract with security firm BRS Labs to deploy cameras to 12 subway stations that use algorithms and machine learning techniques to spot anomalous behavior.
BRS Labs is a security firm that provides behavior recognition software for video surveillance. The company’s clients include government, tourist attractions, military bases, and private industry; BRS’s software issues real-time text alerts when cameras detect strange behavior. Servers connected to security cameras observe locations for weeks at a time and then establish a baseline of “normal” behavior based on this timespan; anomalous activities afterwards (loitering, abandoned packages, abnormally high/low numbers of passengers) trigger an alert. No tripwires or programming of initial parameters are required.
According to a publicly available product bid, the San Francisco MUNI project will include up to 22 connected cameras at each train station; video monitoring will be conducted by train control, MUNI Metro East facility, and in-station personnel. The video systems will build memories of observed behavior patterns that mature with time; the systems, in the bid’s words, “[have] the capability to learn from what [they] observe.”
Research Credit: noncompliant
Google Fellow Wants to Offer Online Graduate Degrees for $100
June 7th, 2012In ten or twenty years, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the majority of paid work in companies, that is, work that isn’t done by machines, being done by these “certificate” holders. They’ll live in ever expanding slums, autonomously policed by RoboCops and drones. They’ll have fast Internet and there will be Superbowl commercials about how great all of it is.
—Top U.S. Colleges to Offer Free Classes Online
Here’s a small sample of recent related posts:
Foxconn: Students Told to Man Production Lines If They Want to Graduate
The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps
Robert Reich to New College Graduates: ‘You’re F*cked’
Canon: Fully Automated Digital Camera Manufacturing by 2015
Increasing Use of Robots in China’s Factories
All Hail the Robotic Farmers and Pilots of the Future
IBM’s Internal Plan to Grow Earnings-Per-Share to $20 by 2015: Fire Most U.S. Employees
Via: Forbes:
Thrun has found a fresh challenge that excites him even more: fixing higher education. Conventional university teaching is way too costly, inefficient and ineffective to survive for long, he contends. He wants to foment a teaching revolution in which the world’s best instructors conduct highly interactive online classes that let them reach 100,000 students simultaneously and globally.
Financiers at Charles River Ventures have already pumped $5 million into Thrun’s online-ed startup, Udacity. “I like to back people who have disruptive personalities,” explains CRV partner George Zachary. “They create disruptive solutions.”
Udacity’s earliest course offerings have been free, and although Thrun eventually plans to charge something, he wants his tuition schedule to be shockingly low. Getting a master’s degree might cost just $100. After teaching his own artificial intelligence class at Stanford last year—and attracting 160,000 online signups—Thrun believes online formats can be far more effective than traditional classroom lectures. “So many people can be helped right now,” Thrun declares. “I see this as a mission.”
High Blood Caffeine Levels in Older Adults Linked to Avoidance of Alzheimer’s Disease
June 7th, 2012Medicine.
Via: Alpha Galileo Foundation:
Those cups of coffee that you drink every day to keep alert appear to have an extra perk – especially if you’re an older adult. A recent study monitoring the memory and thinking processes of people older than 65 found that all those with higher blood caffeine levels avoided the onset of Alzheimer’s disease in the two-to-four years of study follow-up. Moreover, coffee appeared to be the major or only source of caffeine for these individuals.
Researchers from the University of South Florida (www.usf.edu) and the University of Miami (www.miami.edu) say the case control study provides the first direct evidence that caffeine/coffee intake is associated with a reduced risk of dementia or delayed onset. Their findings will appear in the online version of an article to be published June 5 in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, published by IOS Press (http://health.usf.edu/nocms/publicaffairs/now/pdfs/JAD111781.pdf). The collaborative study involved 124 people, ages 65 to 88, in Tampa and Miami.
“These intriguing results suggest that older adults with mild memory impairment who drink moderate levels of coffee — about 3 cups a day — will not convert to Alzheimer’s disease — or at least will experience a substantial delay before converting to Alzheimer’s,” said study lead author Dr. Chuanhai Cao, a neuroscientist at the USF College of Pharmacy and the USF Health Byrd Alzheimer’s Institute. “The results from this study, along with our earlier studies in Alzheimer’s mice, are very consistent in indicating that moderate daily caffeine/coffee intake throughout adulthood should appreciably protect against Alzheimer’s disease later in life.”
RAND Suggest Reality TV Style Control Room Layout to Deal with Military Drone Data Glut
June 6th, 2012In a weird case of life imitating art, the film, Sleep Dealer, depicts a grim future in which drone missions are broadcast on a reality TV show.
Via: Wired:
Turns out, reality TV control rooms and Air Force ground stations actually have more in common than you might surmise. The volume of footage exploited in a reality TV control room, the report states, “is comparable in scale” to what an Air Force ground station processes. Operations in both scenarios run 24/7, with operators required to “record and report events in near realtime.” And in both settings, footage can be mundane for hours on end — until unusual or important events occur unexpectedly.
Google Creating 3D Models of Metropolitan Areas
June 6th, 2012Via: Google:
An important next step in improving all of these areas—comprehensiveness, accuracy, and usability of our maps—is the ability to model the world in 3D. Since 2006, we’ve had textured 3D buildings in Google Earth, and today we are excited to announce that we will begin adding 3D models to entire metropolitan areas to Google Earth on mobile devices. This is possible thanks to a combination of our new imagery rendering techniques and computer vision that let us automatically create 3D cityscapes, complete with buildings, terrain and even landscaping, from 45-degree aerial imagery. By the end of the year we aim to have 3D coverage for metropolitan areas with a combined population of 300 million people.
Western Banks Reaping Billions from Colombian Cocaine Trade
June 6th, 2012Via: Guardian:
The vast profits made from drug production and trafficking are overwhelmingly reaped in rich “consuming” countries – principally across Europe and in the US – rather than war-torn “producing” nations such as Colombia and Mexico, new research has revealed. And its authors claim that financial regulators in the west are reluctant to go after western banks in pursuit of the massive amount of drug money being laundered through their systems.
The most far-reaching and detailed analysis to date of the drug economy in any country – in this case, Colombia – shows that 2.6% of the total street value of cocaine produced remains within the country, while a staggering 97.4% of profits are reaped by criminal syndicates, and laundered by banks, in first-world consuming countries.
“The story of who makes the money from Colombian cocaine is a metaphor for the disproportionate burden placed in every way on ‘producing’ nations like Colombia as a result of the prohibition of drugs,” said one of the authors of the study, Alejandro Gaviria, launching its English edition last week.
“Colombian society has suffered to almost no economic advantage from the drugs trade, while huge profits are made by criminal distribution networks in consuming countries, and recycled by banks which operate with nothing like the restrictions that Colombia’s own banking system is subject to.”
His co-author, Daniel Mejía, added: “The whole system operated by authorities in the consuming nations is based around going after the small guy, the weakest link in the chain, and never the big business or financial systems where the big money is.”
The work, by the two economists at University of the Andes in Bogotá, is part of an initiative by the Colombian government to overhaul global drugs policy and focus on money laundering by the big banks in America and Europe, as well as social prevention of drug taking and consideration of options for de-criminalising some or all drugs.
Research Credit: noncompliant
Meet The Oil Shale Eighty Times Bigger Than The Bakken
June 6th, 2012Via: Forbes:
But as great as the Bakken is, I learned last week about another oil shale play that dwarfs it. It’s called The Bazhenov. It’s in Western Siberia, in Russia. And while the Bakken is big, the Bazhenov — according to a report last week by Sanford Bernstein’s lead international oil analyst Oswald Clint — “covers 2.3 million square kilometers or 570 million acres, which is the size of Texas and the Gulf of Mexico combined.” This is 80 times bigger than the Bakken.
…
This Siberian bonanza might be news to most of us, but it’s old news to Big Oil. The conventional oil fields of Siberia have been producing millions of barrels a day for decades — oil that originated in the Bazhenov “source rock” then slowly oozed up over the millenia. From the looks of it, geologists have been looking at the Bazhenov for more than 20 years.
It’s only in the last five years that the technology and expertise has been developed that will enable drillers to harvest it. Lukoil‘s president Vagit Alekperov said a year ago that his company was also experimenting with the shale.
Research Credit: jakdmsy
Fear and Loathing and Windows 8
June 6th, 2012This piece is long, but it’s quite a knee-slapper.
I’d love to hear recordings of Microsoft tech support calls when Windows 8 starts showing up in front of “normal” users. My guess is that millions of clueless people are going to buy computers with Windows 8 installed and think that something broke when they see that Metro interface.
Helpdesk queues will be packed with people wondering:
Where’s the desktop?
Where’s the Start button?
Where’s the control panel?
And that’s just for openers. Click through to see what’s involved with turning off a machine running Windows 8, for example. *chortle*
Via: Mobile Opportunity:
My conclusion is that Windows 8 in its current form is very different; attractive in some ways, and disturbing in others. It combines an interesting new interface with baffling changes to Windows compatibility, and amateur mistakes in customer messaging. Add up all the changes, and I am very worried that Microsoft may be about to shoot itself in the foot spectacularly. Even the plain colorful graphics in Windows 8 that looked so cool when I first saw them are starting to look ominous to me, like the hotel decor in The Shining.
…
The most important message I want you to understand is this: Windows 8 is not Windows. Although Microsoft calls it Windows, and a lot of Windows code may still be present under the hood, Windows 8 is a completely new operating system in every way that matters to users. It looks different, it works differently, and it forces you to re-learn much of what you know today about computers. From a user perspective, Microsoft Windows is being killed this fall and replaced by an entirely new OS that has a Windows 7 emulator tacked onto it.
Related: You’ll Hate Windows 8
Chinese Developer Clones Austrian Village
June 6th, 2012I beg you to listen to, Joe Frank’s, An Enterprising Man, before reading this.
Via: Stuff:
A US$940 million (NZ$1.2 billion) Chinese clone of one of Austria’s most picturesque villages, the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Hallstatt, recently opened its doors to visitors in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong amidst some controversy.
In a nation known for its skill in manufacturing knock-offs ranging iPhones to Hermes Birkins, the replica village is perhaps the most ambitious attempt at Chinese reproduction yet.
The “Made in China” version of the lakeside European village known for tourism and salt includes an exact replica of its church clock tower, European style wooden houses and other properties that will be sold to investors.
The project, conceived by a Chinese mining tycoon, initially sparked outrage and surprise among some Hallstatt villagers, who weren’t at first aware of the attempt to copy their unique, centuries-old home.
Half an hour’s ride away from the gritty city of Huizhou, close to China’s “world factory” of the Pearl River Delta, China’s Hallstatt hopes to become a new tourist attraction.
Disney-themed photo spots are scattered around the village’s main plaza, which is modeled after Hallstatt’s marketplace.
