TechnoJunkyard

Wild Weather Day 3 of 3

Demoman — Mon, 20 May 2013 14:59:41 +0000

Ok so I’ve not gotten a chance to post anything for the last several days as we have been dodging tornado’s and stuff. I’ve added a few more things to the weather section. Some chaser videos and double checked some of the IP Specific weather. Be safe and if you see something that should be added, please fill out the contact form.

Wild Weather Day 3 of 3 originally appeared on TechnoJunkyard on May 20, 2013.

Google and NASA Snap up D-Wave Quantum Computer

Demoman — Thu, 16 May 2013 12:55:39 +0000

D-Wave, the small company that sells the world’s only commercial quantum computer, has just bagged an impressive new customer: a collaboration between Google, NASA and the non-profit Universities Space Research Association. The three organizations have joined forces to install a D-Wave Two, the computer company’s latest model, in a facility launched by the collaboration — the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. The lab will explore areas such as machine learning — making computers sort and analyse data on the basis of previous experience. This is useful for functions such as language translation, image searches and voice-command recognition. “We actually think quantum machine learning may provide the most creative problem-solving process under the known laws of physics,” says a blog post from Google describing the deal.

The Google-led collaboration is only the second customer to buy computer from D-Wave, which is based in Burnaby, Canada. Aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, was the first. Lockheed purchased a D-Wave quantum computer in 2011 and installed it in a new Quantum Computation Center at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles. D-Wave declines to disclose the price of their computers.

Both quantum-computing centres — the one at USC and the one at Ames — have reserved 20% of their computer time for access by outside researchers. “Judging by the third-party requests we’ve had, I’d say there should be plenty of demand — probably more than can be accommodated,” says Daniel Lidar, director of the USC centre. So far, people have mostly used these machines to explore possible applications of quantum computing and to investigate how the computer behaves, rather than to solve previously unanswered problems.

The D-Wave computer is unusual because it uses quantum bits (qubits) — bits that can exist in two states, on and off, simultaneously — to speed up calculations, and because it does not operate on the normal ‘gate’ model of computing, whereby logic gates are used to manipulate those bits. Instead, it is an ‘adiabatic’ computer, which reads out the ground state of its qubits to find a solution. The academic community has favoured the gate model, which has a better-developed theory behind it. But the adiabatic model has proven much easier to build, allowing D-Wave to double its processor size every year. The D-Wave Two has 512 qubits.

Adiabatic computers are particularly well suited to solving ‘optimization problems’, in which a number of criteria all fight to be met at the same time. One example is trying to find the lowest-energy fold for a protein, the various amino acids of which attract or repel each other differently. The D-Wave computer is not a ‘universal’ computer that can be programmed to tackle any kind of problem. But scientists have found they can usefully frame questions in machine-learning research as optimisation problems¹.

D-Wave has battled to prove that its computer really operates on a quantum level, and that it is better or faster than a conventional computer². Before striking the latest deal, the prospective customers set a series of tests for the quantum computer. D-Wave hired an outside expert in algorithm-racing, who concluded that the speed of the D-Wave Two was above average overall, and that it was 3,600 times faster than a leading conventional computer when working on the specific type of problem that the quantum computer was built to solve.

Whether D-Wave will make for faster-running or better artificial-intelligence systems is yet to be seen. Lidar says that he has seen faster solvers. “Every problem we have tested can still be solved faster on classical computers,” he says.
Source: Nature

Google and NASA Snap up D-Wave Quantum Computer originally appeared on TechnoJunkyard on May 16, 2013.

Microsoft’s BLUE will be free upgrade

Demoman — Wed, 15 May 2013 12:46:45 +0000

Microsoft has announced that its coming Windows Blue, or Windows 8.1, will be delivered as a free update through the operating system’s app store. Redmond’s chief marketing officer, Tami Reller, told JP Morgan’s Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in Boston that Windows 8.1 will be delivered free to Windows 8 and Windows RT users.

She said that the update will be “easy to get from the Windows start screen through the app store,” so that punters who have Windows 8 or plan to buy a device in the near future can get the Windows 8.1 fairly easily.

Of course she did not say when Windows 8.1 would become available but hinted that Vole was “very sensitive to the timing of the holidays”.

The hint means that Microsoft will provide devices with Windows 8.1 pre-loaded in time for the holiday 2013 season, but those who purchase a Windows 8 device later this year will be able to easily upgrade to 8.1.

Microsoft will release a public preview of Windows 8.1 at the Build conference. After 26 June, the preview will be available for anyone to download, Reller said.

It looks like Microsoft will be expanding the allowable size of tiles that one can place on Windows 8′s Start Screen, and adding customization options, among other things. Microsoft will bring back the start button.

Microsoft has been rolling out small updates via Windows Update since the October launch of Windows 8, but hinted that Windows 8.1 will be “more substantial” than anything Redmond could deliver via daily or weekly updates, Reller said.

Windows 8 users will be told when Windows 8.1 is live, she added.

Source: TGDaily

Microsoft’s BLUE will be free upgrade originally appeared on TechnoJunkyard on May 15, 2013.

A Hack-Proof Internet Exists, Thanks to Quantum Physics

Demoman — Mon, 13 May 2013 14:03:30 +0000

Leave it to the quantum physicists at Los Alamos National Labs to have run for the past two years something that sounded like science fiction: a quantum Internet that promises perfectly secure online communications. While hackers have gotten much better in the past decade at intercepting alphanumeric keys used to transmit most electronic message or unlocking passwords with brute-force attacks, the Los Alamos system uses cryptography based on the intrinsic randomness of quantum physics. Its digital keys, generated by a truly random set of numbers, theoretically leave hackers with no way to figure out the key’s internal coding.

A second layer of security lies in the passage of the key to its recipient. The key is effectively transported by photons of light along a dedicated fiber optic line. Per Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle, hack attempts would have clear effects on those particles. As MIT Technology Review puts it, “any attempt to eavesdrop on a quantum message cannot fail to leave telltale signs of snooping that the receiver can detect.”

So while the rest of us are still prey to the spying eyes of the Chinese army, larcenous Eastern European fraudsters, or the FBI, a select research team in New Mexico can engage in snoop-proof online communication—a massive breakthrough for the security of our personal data, as well as for nationwide endeavors such as online banking and voting.

Some forms of quantum communications also exist outside the New Mexico research lab. In Switzerland, the canton of Geneva has been using quantum cryptography since 2007 to prevent tampering with online voting in federal and regional elections. In the canton, the actual vote tally is encrypted at a central vote counting station and the results are transferred along a dedicated optical fiber line to a data storage facility. The vote results are secured via a quantum cryptopgraphy system pioneered by Swiss network security company ID Quantique. “In Geneva, we protect the part that is most vulnerable, the passage of the vote tally from the counting station to the government data center,” says Kelly Richdale, the company’s vice president of network encryption.

ID Quantique also has several big banking and government clients, which it cannot name for security purposes, who pay as much as tens of thousands of euros annually to secure data in a hack-proof environment, using quantum cryptography.

There are some drawbacks to quantum computing, beyond the price. At the moment, messages travel only from point A to point B; today’s routers cannot forward the messages to a third party. (The Los Alamos team is trying to develop a multipoint quantum network). Researchers are still working out the kinks of getting encrypted quantum keys in the possession of multiple parties to set up, say, secure three-way online videoconferencing.

A further drawback: The farther a quantum network’s photons have to travel, the more they degrade, meaning that distances may lose vital bits of the key and render the message unrecoverable. So far, ID Quantique says, lab results suggest quantum messages can be sent as far as you can send a quantum message: as far as 200 kilometers, roughly 124 miles.

The Los Alamos news suggests we are on the breakthrough of a radical new networked-computing architecture that should make our details more secure online. It doesn’t yet come with skeleton keys.
Source: Bloomberg

A Hack-Proof Internet Exists, Thanks to Quantum Physics originally appeared on TechnoJunkyard on May 13, 2013.

IE8 Exploit Had US Nuke Workers in Its Sights

Demoman — Wed, 08 May 2013 15:17:43 +0000

Security researchers revealed that series of “Watering Hole” has been conducted exploiting a IE8 zero-day vulnerability to target U.S. Government experts working on nuclear weapons research.

The news is not surprising but it is very concerning, the principal targets of the attacks are various groups of research such as the components of U.S. Department of Labor and the U.S. Department of Energy, the news has been confirmed by principal security firms and by Microsoft corporate.

The flaw has been used in a series of “watering hole” attacks, let’s remind that “Watering Hole” is a technique of attack realized compromising legitimate websites using a “drive-by” exploit. The attackers restrict their audience to a individuals interested to specific content proposed by targeted website, in this way when the victim visits the page a backdoor Trojan is installed on his computer.

The website compromised to exploit the IE8 zero-day is the Dept. of Energy’s Site Exposure Matrices (SEM) website, the site provides information on “nuclear-related illnesses” linked to Dept. of Energy facilities of employees who are experiencing health problems as a result of their professional activities.

Security community supposes that behind the exploits of IE8 zero-day flaw there is a group of Chinese hackers known as “DeepPanda” that hijacked visitors to a compromised website to deploy Poison Ivy Trojan through the execution of a “drive-by download exploit”.

Security firm FireEye revealed that the new IE8 zero-day exploit is able to work against Internet Explorer 8 for all versions of Windows XP and above, including Windows Server 2003, 2008 and R2.

“This particular exploit checks for OS version, and only runs on Windows XP. We are able to reproduce the code execution and confirm it’s a working zero-day exploit against IE8. During our research we also found the exploit constructs a ROP chain on non-ASLRed msvcrt.dll, and we verified it could also work against IE8 on Windows 7. So we believe there should be some other exploits targeting IE8 on Windows 7.” FireEye post states.

At the moment there isn’t information on the information stolen but it is clear that the campaign discovered is related to a cyber espionage activity due the numerous classified documents managed by targeted departments.

Microsoft issued a security advisory on Friday announcing its investigation on the event and confirming it as a “remote code execution vulnerability.“, Microsoft confirmed on Friday that the IE8 zero-day vulnerability exists in Internet Explorer 8 for all versions of Windows XP and above are affected, including Windows Server 2003, 2008 and R2.

Microsoft noted that IE6 users on Windows XP, IE7, IE9, and IE10 users on Windows 8 and Surface tablets, are not affected by the security flaw.

Other precious suggestions provided by the advisory are:

Mitigating Factors:

By default, Internet Explorer on Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Server 2008 R2 runs in a restricted mode that is known as Enhanced Security Configuration. This mode mitigates this vulnerability.
By default, all supported versions of Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Outlook Express, and Windows Mail open HTML email messages in the Restricted sites zone. The Restricted sites zone, which disables script and ActiveX controls, helps reduce the risk of an attacker being able to use this vulnerability to execute malicious code. If a user clicks a link in an email message, the user could still be vulnerable to exploitation of this vulnerability through the web-based attack scenario.
An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the current user. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.
In a web-based attack scenario, an attacker could host a website that contains a webpage that is used to exploit this vulnerability. In addition, compromised websites and websites that accept or host user-provided content or advertisements could contain specially crafted content that could exploit this vulnerability. In all cases, however, an attacker would have no way to force users to visit these websites. Instead, an attacker would have to convince users to visit the website, typically by getting them to click a link in an email message or Instant Messenger message that takes users to the attacker’s website.

Source: thehackernews, technewsworld

IE8 Exploit Had US Nuke Workers in Its Sights originally appeared on TechnoJunkyard on May 8, 2013.

Locating Snipers with a Smartphone app.

Demoman — Wed, 08 May 2013 14:33:40 +0000

A team of researchers at Vanderbilt University has developed two hardware modules along with corresponding software that uses an Android smartphone to spot the location of a nearby shooter.
The U.S. military has worked with the scientific community to develop systems to identify sniper locations for more than a decade. Pentagon leaders have already used at least two systems to track sniper fire — the Boomerang and Pilar acoustic sensor system.

These systems use the sound created by the muzzle blast and/or the shockwave created by the bullet traveling at supersonic velocities to triangulate the location of a shooter. In order to best locate a shooter, the systems depend on networks of sensors. A processor collects the readings from the different sensors in the area and determines the location.

Vanderbilt’s team has developed two modules of microphone sensors that can be connected to a smartphone. One is roughly the size of a pack of playing cards. It collects readings from both the muzzle blast and the shockwave to triangulate a location. For it to work, this version must have six nodes to get an accurate location, according to Akos Ledeczi, a member of Vanderbilt’s team.

The second module is slightly larger, but it only requires two people to have the module and collect data in order to gain a reading. The second version only collects data on the shockwave, and it can detect the direction of the shot as well as a general estimate of its range, Ledeczi said.

This isn’t the first time Ledeczi has worked on determining sniper locations. He led a team at Vanderbilt in 2007 that developed helmet mounted sensors that units could distribute and use to find snipers.

He said it made sense to develop a system for the smartphone because of their computing power and how prevalent they’ve become. Army leaders have said they eventually want to outfit all soldiers with smartphones in garrison and deployed. The 10th Mountain Division is set to deploy to Afghanistan with smartphone-like devices as part of Capability Set 13 and the Army Network.

However, Ledeczi said the project at Vanderbilt has run out of funding. The team is looking for a grant or Pentagon funding to continue their work. He said he could see uses for both military and police units.

Source: Military.com

Locating Snipers with a Smartphone app. originally appeared on TechnoJunkyard on May 8, 2013.

Syria drops off the Internet

Demoman — Wed, 08 May 2013 14:29:13 +0000

It looks like internet access into and out of Syria has been deliberately shut down. Just take a look at this traffic graph from Akamai, showing a dramatic and abrupt change at about 18:45 UTC.

Umbrella Security Labs report that Syria’s two TLD servers – ns1.tld.sy and ns2.tld.sy – are unreachable.

Sure enough, if you try to reach Syrian websites right now – you’ll probably find it impossible.

It’s not clear what has caused the problem, but there will no doubt be speculation as to whether the country’s rulers chose to unplug themselves from the net for reasons best known to themselves.

It’s bad news, of course, for those wanting to see what is happening in the country – and for those inside Syria who wish to communicate with the outside world.

To be flippant for a second, this outage might at least shed some light as to whether the Syrian Electronic Army (who have been causing quite a nuisance by hacking media organisations lately) are *really* based in Syria, or not as some tend to suspect…

Source: Sophos

Syria drops off the Internet originally appeared on TechnoJunkyard on May 8, 2013.

Hotmail is extinct, and evolves into Outlook.com

Demoman — Wed, 08 May 2013 14:13:42 +0000

Microsoft has completed the move from Hotmail to the new Outlook.com, which now boasts more than 400 million accounts. The new Outlook email client has several different features from Hotmail, such as two-factor authentication, an updated calendar and app and integration with cloud service Skydrive and Skype.

Most Hotmail users will not notice much difference. They can continue to use those accounts as long as they choose and can claim an Outlook email address whenever they like.

Writing in the company blog , Dick Craddock said that Hotmail had more than 300 million active accounts.

Upgrading had meant communicating with hundreds of millions of people, upgrading all their mailboxes and making sure that every person’s mail, calendar, contacts, folders, and personal preferences were preserved in the upgrade. All this was done live and in only six weeks.

Hotmail was one of the first web-based email services. Founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith it was launched on July 4 1996 as “HoTMaiL”. Microsoft bought the web email service in 1997 for an estimated $400 million, and it was rebranded as “MSN Hotmail”.

Outlook.com was launched in February 2013. It’s based around Microsoft’s Metro design language, and closely mimics the interface of Microsoft Outlook.

Source: TGDaily

Hotmail is extinct, and evolves into Outlook.com originally appeared on TechnoJunkyard on May 8, 2013.

The Upcoming Intel Media Box Could Be the Gateway to 4K

Demoman — Wed, 08 May 2013 14:07:28 +0000

Intel’s media box is coming and it may be the 4K device we’ve been waiting for. Intel announced Wednesday that its fourth-generation Haswell processors would support 4K resolution. That’s great news for computers, but even better news if that technology finds its way into Intel’s upcoming set-top box. With the Iris graphics news and Intel’s desire to break into the TV market with an all-in-one set-top box, the company could deliver the first real 4K content device. And that would be great, because the 4K transition needs a device that actually pushes content to those expensive TVs.

With 3D pretty much dead in the water, TV manufacturers are pushing 4K (or Ultra HD) as the next great television technology. At this very moment, you can buy a 4K TV from Sony for $5,000, but there’s no content to speak or devices capable of pushing it. Yes, yes, we know about the $700 4K Media Player from Sony. But it only works with Sony TVs, and after watching The Amazing Spider-Man for the 34th time, you’ll want more out of your expensive television.

Intel has been tight-lipped about its upcoming media box and over-the-internet subscription TV service. It has promised to deliver smarter bundles than you’re currently getting from cable and satellite providers. Intel’s VP of Media Erik Huggers told the crowd at Dive Into Media the box also will have a superior UI and it will support streaming apps like Netflix and Amazon.

Add in 4K capability and you’ve got all the TV you want in to a device ready for the future of video. It’ll do all of this using one HDMI port and the broadband connection you already pay for.

Intel declined to comment, but its plan to shove TV through your ISP’s tubes will give a whole lot of people a viable alternative to the cable TV provider monopolizing their local market. Plus, thanks to the newly ratified HEVC (h.265) codec, those tubes can handle 60fps 4K transmissions. The new codec brings the size of a 4K transmission down from 45-50Mbps to 10Mbps. According to the networking gurus at Western Digital, you should be able to sustain that speed with a 20Mbps account.

Although it might be awhile before networks start broadcasting and streaming 4K content, sources familiar with the situation say they are testing 4K broadcasts. Netflix is watching how 4K evolves according to a Stuff interview with Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos on May 1. Chief product officer Neil Hunt told the Verge that streaming will be the best way to get 4K video and it should appear with in a year or two. What’s more, it hopes to have House of Cards encoded in 4K later this year.

The dirty little secret in all of this, of course, is the fact you need an absolutely ginormous TV for any of this to matter. Unless you’re starting at a screen bigger than 60 inches, you’re just not going to notice the improved resolution. That said, if you absolutely, positively must have the very best resolution and you’ve got the screen (and budget) to make it worthwhile, a box that supports 4K should be on your wish list.

Whether you need it or not, 4K content is coming. Intel is in the position to lead the transition. It has the technology, it just needs to bring it together.

Source: Wired

The Upcoming Intel Media Box Could Be the Gateway to 4K originally appeared on TechnoJunkyard on May 8, 2013.

Antigravity gets first test at Cern’s Alpha experiment

Demoman — Wed, 01 May 2013 21:40:50 +0000

Researchers at Cern in Switzerland have tested a novel way to find out if antimatter is the source of a force termed “antigravity”. Antimatter particles are the “mirror image” of normal matter, but with opposite electric charge.

How antimatter responds to gravity remains a mystery, however; it may “fall up” rather than down.

Now researchers reporting in Nature Communications have made strides toward finally resolving that notion.

Antimatter presents one of the biggest mysteries in physics, in that equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created at the Universe’s beginning.

Yet when the two meet, they destroy each other in what is called annihilation, turning into pure light.

Why the Universe we see today is made overwhelmingly of matter, with only tiny amounts of antimatter, has prompted a number of studies to try to find some difference between the two.

Tests at Cern’s LHCb experiment and elsewhere, for example, have been looking for evidence that exotic particles decay more often into matter than antimatter.

Last week, the LHCb team reported a slight difference in the decay of particles called Bs mesons – but still not nearly enough to explain the matter mystery.

One significant difference between the two may be the way they interact with gravity – antimatter may be repelled by matter, rather than attracted to it.

But it is a difference that no one has been able to test – until the advent of Cern’s Alpha experiment.

Getting annihilated

Alpha is an acronym for Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus – an experiment designed to build and trap antimatter “atoms”.

Just as hydrogen is made of a proton and an electron, antihydrogen is an atom made of their antimatter counterparts antiprotons and positrons.

The trick is not just in making it, but in making it hang around long enough to study it – before it bumps into any matter and annihilates.

In 2010 the Alpha team did just that, and in 2011 they showed they could keep antihydrogen atoms trapped for 1,000 seconds.

The team has now gone back to their existing data on 434 antihydrogen atoms, with the antigravity question in mind.

“In the course of all the experiments, we release (the antihydrogen atoms) and look for their annihilation,” said Jeffrey Hangst, spokesperson for the experiment.

“We’ve gone through those data to see if we can see any influence of gravity on the positions at which they annihilate – looking for atoms to fall for the short amount of time they exist before they hit the wall,” he told BBC News.

The team has made a statistical study of which antihydrogen atoms went where – up or down – and they are able to put a first set of constraints on how the anti-atoms respond to gravity.

The best limits they can suggest is that they are less than 110 times more susceptible to gravity than normal atoms, and less than 65 times that strength, but in the opposite direction: antigravity. In short, the question remains unanswered – so far.

“It’s not a very interesting band yet but it’s the first time that anyone has even been able to talk about doing this,” said Prof Hangst.

“We actually have a machine that can address this question, that’s what’s exciting for us here, and we know how to get from here to the interesting regime.”

The Alpha experiment’s main task is to study the energy levels within antihydrogen, to spot any differences between it and the hydrogen that physicists know to extraordinary precision.

Prof Hangst said the antigravity measurement was just an “interesting sideshow” for the experiment.

“We have a lot of options for studying antimatter and this is a new one that has a future.”

Source: BBC

Antigravity gets first test at Cern’s Alpha experiment originally appeared on TechnoJunkyard on May 1, 2013.