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Amazon’s hiring effort includes an invitation-only recruiting event for systems support engineers at its Herndon, Va., facility on Sept. 24 and 25.

Brain scientists have discovered that swerving around cars while simultaneously picking out road signs in a video game can improve the short-term memory and long-term focus of older adults. Some people as old as 80, the researchers say, begin to show neurological patterns of people in their 20s.

Cognitive scientists say the findings, to be published Thursday in the scientific journal Nature, are a significant development in understanding how to strengthen older brains. That is because the improvements in brain performance did not come just within the game but were shown outside the game in other cognitive tasks.

Further supporting the findings, the researchers were able to measure and show changes in brain wave activity, suggesting that this research could help understand what neurological mechanisms should and could be tinkered with to improve memory and attention.

For the extraordinary speed envisioned in some future electronics applications, these innovative diodes solve problems that would not be possible with silicon-based materials as a limiting factor.

The new diodes consist of a “sandwich” of two metals, with two insulators in between, to form “MIIM” devices. This allows an electron not so much to move through materials as to tunnel through insulators and appear almost instantaneously on the other side. It’s a fundamentally different approach to electronics.

The newest findings, published in Applied Physics Letters, have shown that the addition of a second insulator can enable “step tunneling,” a situation in which an electron may tunnel through only one of the insulators instead of both. This in turn allows precise control of diode asymmetry, non-linearity, and rectification at lower voltages.

“This approach enables us to enhance device operation by creating an additional asymmetry in the tunnel barrier,” said John F. Conley, Jr., a professor in the OSU School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “It gives us another way to engineer quantum mechanical tunneling and moves us closer to the real applications that should be possible with this technology.”

OSU scientists and engineers, who only three years ago announced the creation of the first successful, high-performance MIM diode, are international leaders in this developing field. Conventional electronics based on silicon materials are fast and inexpensive, but are reaching the top speeds possible using those materials. Alternatives are being sought.

The court order, imposed by the district court for the northern district of Texas at the request of the US government, prohibits the defendant and his defence team, as well as prosecutors, from making “any statement to members of any television, radio, newspaper, magazine, internet (including, but not limited to, bloggers), or other media organization about this case, other than matters of public interest.”

It goes on to warn Brown and his lawyers that “no person covered by this order shall circumvent its effect by actions that indirectly, but deliberately, bring about a violation of this order”.

According to Dell Cameron of Vice magazine, who attended the hearing, the government argued that the gag order was needed in order to protect Brown from prejudicing his right to a fair trial by making comments to reporters.

But media observers seen the hearing in the opposite light: as the latest in a succession of prosecutorial moves under the Obama administration to crack-down on investigative journalism, official leaking, hacking and online activism.

Brown’s lead defence attorney, Ahmed Ghappour, has countered in court filings, the most recent of which was lodged with the court Wednesday, that the government’s request for a gag order is unfounded as it is based on false accusations and misrepresentations.

By 10-7, the Committee on Foreign Relations moved the measure to a full Senate vote, expected next week.

The proposal allows the use of force in Syria for 60 days with the possibility to extend it for 30 days. It prevents the use of US troops on the ground.

President Barack Obama is battling to build support at home and abroad for military action.

But what if the real problem is school itself? The unfortunate fact is that one of our most cherished institutions is, by its very nature, failing our children and our society.

School is a place where children are compelled to be, and where their freedom is greatly restricted — far more restricted than most adults would tolerate in their workplaces. In recent decades, we have been compelling our children to spend ever more time in this kind of setting, and there is strong evidence (summarized in my recent book) that this is causing serious psychological damage to many of them. Moreover, the more scientists have learned about how children naturally learn, the more we have come to realize that children learn most deeply and fully, and with greatest enthusiasm, in conditions that are almost opposite to those of school.

Compulsory schooling has been a fixture of our culture now for several generations. It’s hard today for most people to even imagine how children would learn what they must for success in our culture without it. President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan are so enamored with schooling that they want even longer school days and school years. Most people assume that the basic design of schools, as we know them today, emerged from scientific evidence about how children learn best. But, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

Schools as we know them today are a product of history, not of research into how children learn. The blueprint still used for today’s schools was developed during the Protestant Reformation, when schools were created to teach children to read the Bible, to believe scripture without questioning it, and to obey authority figures without questioning them. The early founders of schools were quite clear about this in their writings. The idea that schools might be places for nurturing critical thought, creativity, self-initiative or ability to learn on one’s own — the kinds of skills most needed for success in today’s economy — was the furthest thing from their minds. To them, willfulness was sinfulness, to be drilled or beaten out of children, not encouraged.

The traffic correlation problem in Tor has seen much attention in the literature. Prior Tor security analyses often consider entropy or similar statistical measures as metrics of the security provided by the system at a static point in time. In addition, while prior metrics of security may provide useful information about overall usage, they typically do not tell users how secure a type of behavior is. Further, similar previous work has thus far only considered adversaries that control either a subset of the members of the Tor network, a single autonomous system (AS), or a single Internet exchange point (IXP). These analyses have missed important characteristics of the network, such as that a single organization often controls several geographically diverse ASes or IXPs. That organization may have malicious intent or undergo coercion, threatening users of all network components under its control.

Given the severity of the traffic correlation problem and its security implications, we develop an analysis framework for evaluating the security of various user behaviors on the live Tor network and show how to concretely apply this framework by performing a comprehensive evaluation of the security of the Tor network [41] against the threat of complete deanonymization. To enable such an analysis, we develop a detailed model of a network adversary that includes (i) the largest and most accurate system for AS path inference yet applied to Tor and (ii) a thorough analysis of the threat of Internet exchange points and IXP coalitions. We also develop realistic metrics that inform this analysis, considering the network topology as it evolves over time, for example, as new relays are
introduced and others go offline.

“No one updates their routers,” he says. “If you think people are bad about patching Windows and Linux (which they are) then they are … horrible about updating their networking gear because it is too critical, and usually they don’t have redundancy to be able to do it properly.”

He also notes that routers don’t have security software that can help detect a breach.

“The challenge [with desktop systems] is that while antivirus don’t work well on your desktop, they at least do something [to detect attacks],” he says. “But you don’t even have an integrity check for the most part on routers and other such devices like IP cameras.”

Hijacking routers and switches could allow the NSA to do more than just eavesdrop on all the communications crossing that equipment. It would also let them bring down networks or prevent certain communication, such as military orders, from getting through, though the Post story doesn’t report any such activities. With control of routers, the NSA could re-route traffic to a different location, or even alter it for disinformation campaigns, such as planting information that would have a detrimental political effect or altering orders to re-route troops or supplies in a military operation.

According to the budget document, the CIA’s Tailored Access Programs and NSA’s software engineers possess “templates” for breaking into common brands and models of routers, switches and firewalls.

The article doesn’t say it, but this would likely involve pre-written scripts or backdoor tools and root kits for attacking known but unpatched vulnerabilities in these systems, as well as for attacking zero-day vulnerabilities that are yet unknown to the vendor and customers.

…

In 2005, security researcher Mike Lynn found a serious vulnerability in Cisco IOS, the operating system running on millions of Cisco routers around the world.

Lynn discovered the vulnerability after his employer, Internet Security Systems, asked him to reverse-engineer the Cisco operating system to see if he could find security problems with it. Cisco makes the majority of the routers that operate the backbone of the internet as well as many company networks and critical infrastructure systems. The Cisco IOS is as ubiquitous in the backbone as the Windows operating system is on desktops.

The vulnerability Lynn found, in a new version of the operation system that Cisco planned to release at the time, would have allowed someone to create a router worm that would shut down every Cisco router through which it passed, bringing down a nation’s critical infrastructure. It also would have allowed an attacker to gain complete control of the router to sniff all traffic passing through a network in order to read, record or alter it, or simply prevent traffic from reaching its recipient.

Once Lynn found the vulnerability, it took him six months to develop a working exploit to attack it.

Lynn had planned to discuss the vulnerability at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, until Cisco intervened and forced him to pull the talk under threat of a lawsuit.

But if Lynn knew about the vulnerability, there were likely others who did as well — including intelligence agencies and criminal hackers.