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AnonTechie writes:

A major cyber attack will happen between now and 2025 and it will be large enough to cause “significant loss of life or property losses/damage/theft at the levels of tens of billions of dollars,” according to more than 60 percent of technology experts interviewed by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

But other experts interviewed for the project “Digital Life in 2015,” ( http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/29/cyber-attacks-likely-to-increase/ ) released Wednesday, said the current preoccupation with cyber conflict is product of software merchants looking to hype public anxiety against an eternally unconquerable threat.

It’s the old phantom of the “cyber Pearl Harbor,” a concept commonly credited to former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta but that is actually as old as the world wide web. It dates back to security expert Winn Schwartau’s testimony to Congress in 1991 ( http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=pst.000018472172;view=1up;seq=14 ), when he warned of an “electronic Pearl Harbor” and said it was “waiting to occur.” More than two decades later, we’re still waiting. The Pew report offers, if nothing else, an opportunity to look at how the cyber landscape has changed and how it will continue to evolve between now and 2025.

http://www.defenseone.com/threats/2014/10/cyber-attack-will-cause-significant-loss-life-2025-experts-predict/97688/

AnonTechie writes with an article from PC World:

The mission of Google’s DeepMind Technologies startup is to “solve intelligence.” Now, researchers there have developed an artificial intelligence system that can mimic some of the brain’s memory skills and even program like a human.

The researchers developed a kind of neural network that can use external memory, allowing it to learn and perform tasks based on stored data. The so-called Neural Turing Machine (NTM) that DeepMind researchers have been working on combines a neural network controller with a memory bank, giving it the ability to learn to store and retrieve information.

The system’s name refers to computer pioneer Alan Turing’s formulation of computers as machines having working memory for storage and retrieval of data.

The researchers put the NTM through a series of tests including tasks such as copying and sorting blocks of data. Compared to a conventional neural net, the NTM was able to learn faster and copy longer data sequences with fewer errors. They found that its approach to the problem was comparable to that of a human programmer working in a low-level programming language.

Additional Coverage: http://phys.org/news/2014-10-google-deepmind-acquisition-neural-turing.html

Related: Neural Turing Machines http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.5401 and Learning to Execute http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.4615.

SrLnclt writes:

Tim Cook has recently chosen to disclose his sexual orientation.

At some point society may no longer be surprised when an athlete, celebrity, politician, or other public figure publicly acknowledges his/her sexual orientation. However, we may not be at that point yet.

Will Tim Cook's announcement have any impact on how people view Apple as a company or the likelihood that people will buy their products?

azrael writes:

TorrentFreak is reporting that Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm has been found guilty of hacking crimes by a Danish court.

After being arrested in his Cambodian apartment in September 2012 it took two years before Gottfrid Svartholm went on trial in Denmark.

The Swede and his 21-year-old co-defendant stood accused of hacking computer mainframes operated by US IT giant CSC. It developed into the largest case of its kind ever seen in the Scandinavian country.

The prosecution insisted that Gottfrid and his Danish accomplice, both experts in computer security, had launched hacker attacks against CSC back in April 2012 and maintained access to those systems until August that same year.

The defense claimed it was a case of mistaken identity and that others had carried out the crimes, remotely accessing Gottfrid’s computer after comprising its security.

All three judges and four of six jurors returned guilty verdicts. Two jurors voted to acquit after concluding that the remote access defense could not be ruled out.

Following his extradition from Sweden, Gottfrid has spent 11 months behind bars in Denmark. His Danish accomplice, who refused to give evidence to the police and maintained silence right up until his trial in September, has spent 17 months in jail.

Hugh Pickens writes:

The NYT reports that Naomi Oreskes, an historian of science at Harvard University, is attracting wide notice these days for a work of science fiction called “The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future,” that takes the point of view of an historian in 2393 explaining how “the Great Collapse of 2093” occurred. “Without spoiling the story,” Oreskes said in an interview, “I can tell you that a lot of what happens — floods, droughts, mass migrations, the end of humanity in Africa and Australia — is the result of inaction to very clear warnings” about climate change caused by humans." Dramatizing the science in ways traditional nonfiction cannot, the book reasserts the importance of scientists and the work they do and reveals the self-serving interests of the so called “carbon combustion complex” that have turned the practice of science into political fodder.

Oreskes argues that scientists failed us, and in a very particular way: They failed us by being too conservative. Scientists today know full well that the "95 percent confidence limit" is merely a convention, not a law of the universe. Nonetheless, this convention, the historian suggests, leads scientists to be far too cautious, far too easily disrupted by the doubt-mongering of denialists, and far too unwilling to shout from the rooftops what they all knew was happening. "Western scientists built an intellectual culture based on the premise that it was worse to fool oneself into believing in something that did not exist than not to believe in something that did."

Why target scientists in particular in this book? Simply because a distant future historian would target scientists too, says Oreskes. "If you think about historians who write about the collapse of the Roman Empire, or the collapse of the Mayans or the Incans, it's always about trying to understand all of the factors that contributed," Oreskes says. "So we felt that we had to say something about scientists."

azrael writes:

There isn't much information yet, but the BBC is reporting that an aeroplane has hit a building at a Kansas airport within the US.

Photographs from the area show grey smoke billowing from the Mid-Continent airport in Wichita, Kansas.

Emergency crews were responding to the FlightSafety International building, local media reported.

Update: KSN has confirmed from the FAA that a twin engine Beechcraft lost an engine on takeoff from Wichita’s Mid-Continent airport and crashed into the FlightSafety building at the airport. The east side of the roof on that building has collapsed. One person is in critical condition. KSN has confirmed 10 people are unaccounted for.

Live streaming video is available from the KSN link.

As more information comes in, please add it in comments to this story. We'll update the main story when we know more.

AnonTechie writes:

The control of modern infrastructure such as intelligent power grids needs lots of computing capacity. Scientists of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) at the University of Luxembourg have developed an algorithm that might revolutionise these processes. With their new software the SnT researchers are able to forego the use of considerable amounts of computing capacity, enabling what they call micro mining. Their achievements, which the team headed by Prof. Yves Le Traon published in the International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, earned the scientists a Best Paper Award during this event.

Modern infrastructure – from the telephone network and alarm systems to power supply systems – is controlled by computer programmes. This intelligent software continuously monitors the state of the equipment, adjusts system parameters if they deviate, or generates error messages. To monitor the equipment, the software compares its current state with its past state by continuously measuring the status quo, accumulating this data, and analysing it. That uses a considerable portion of available computing capacity. Thanks to their new algorithm, the SnT researchers' software no longer has to continuously analyse the state of the system to be monitored the way established techniques do. In carrying out the analysis of the system, it instead seamlessly moves between state values that were measured at different points in time.

http://phys.org/news/2014-10-lots-capacity-algorithm.html

[Source]: http://wwwen.uni.lu/university/news/latest_news/saving_lots_of_computing_capacity_with_a_new_algorithm

frojack writes:

Newsweek is reporting that a scrap of aluminum found on Nikumaroro, an atoll in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati is looking more and more like an artifact from Ameleia Earhart's Lockheed Electra.

The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) recovered in 1991 what has been identified as a Patch, to replace a non-standard window in Earhart's plane

The window was installed for unknown reasons prior to the attempted around the world flight. But for equally unexplained reasons, the window was removed and the patch installed just before departing Miami, FL.

The TIGHAR group has released their detailed analysis of the patch, using a sister-ship of Earhart's plane. Their report is published on line yesterday (October 28, 2014), showing that the rivet holes in this aluminum fragment match uniquely the structure of the Electra.

Not just ANY Electra. Because Earhart's Electra had a non-standard sized window installed which required structural modification, and this patch replaced that unique airframe part, the researchers are very confident that this patch came from Earhart's plane, and wouldn't fit any other plane.

There is a related article at the Miami Herald which contains a picture of the plane with the patch in place.

AnonTechie writes:

Security researchers at Ben-Gurion University in Israel have found a way to lift data from closed networks using little more than a standard computer monitor and FM radio waves. It's a pretty clever trick: researchers have created a keylogging app called AirHopper that can transmit radio frequencies by exploiting the PC's display. A companion app on an FM-equipped smartphone can decode those transmissions and record the host machine's keystrokes in real-time.

It's not the first time FM radio waves have been used to smuggle data out of an air gap network, but this method can be done without PC connected speakers and without either device being connected to an outside network. Like previous methods, it has a fairly short range (about 7 meters) and can't transmit more than a few bytes a second, but that's more than enough to nab passwords or other sensitive text data. The group has already released a short video of the exploit in action, and intends to publish a more detailed paper on the subject at Malcon 2014 later this week.

http://cyber.bgu.ac.il/content/how-leak-sensitive-data-isolated-computer-air-gap-near-mobile-phone-airhopper

http://www.engadget.com/2014/10/29/fm-data-leaking/

kaszz writes:

The Google X research lab has unveiled a new project: developing a pill capable of detecting cancer, imminent heart attacks, and other diseases. According to the article, "the company is fashioning nanoparticles—particles about one billionth of a meter in width—that combine a magnetic material with antibodies or proteins that can attach to and detect other molecules inside the body." When a person ingests the pill, these particles interact with the particular markers for a given disease. Since they're magnetic, they can then be guided back to a particular spot where they can be scanned to determine if any interactions took place. Google X's head of life sciences, Andrew Conrad, said, "What we are trying to do is change medicine from reactive and transactional to proactive and preventative. Nanoparticles... give you the ability to explore the body at a molecular and cellular level."

gewg_ writes:

The Center for American Progress reports:

At Authentic Jobs, a job search website, employees aren't just given vacation days. They're now required to take a certain number each year.

When founder Cameron Moll first started the company, he decided to institute an unlimited vacation policy much like the one in place at larger companies like Virgin Atlantic and Netflix. "Running Authentic Jobs, I see a lot of perks come through," Moll told ThinkProgress. "One that crops up is often vacation." Moll, resistant to typical corporate culture, was looking to do things differently. An attractive vacation policy can draw talent. "It does make for a good sell with potential candidates," he said. "It just sounds awesome."

But he found he didn't like the policy. [...] no one was taking enough.

[...]This trend had negative ramifications at Authentic Jobs. "Our overall health wasn't as good as it could be," he said. He also didn't have a way to track how much time people were taking and when, so he had no way to urge people to take more.

So he decided to try something different. "What if we got rid of this policy we had in place and flipped the traditional vacation policy on its head?" he thought to himself. "Instead of focus on maximum, focus on minimums." The new policy requires employees to take off 12 holidays and 15 vacation days a year, and then they can take unlimited time above that. "We're saying you need to take off at least 27 days per year and then beyond that if you need additional time, feel free to do it," he explained.

"Right now it's only a concept, only a theory for us, we just implemented it recently," he said. "I'm really curious to see how it plays out."

Dr Ippy writes:

You've already invested in the tin-foil hat, but now you can protect some other important bodily assets. The New York Post has an article about RadiaShield boxer briefs, which promise "to protect men's reproductive organs and maintain fertility health."

These underpants, supplied by the Belly Armor company, have a silvered layer of fabric in the crotch. They're supposed to stop electromagnetic radiation, such as that from cell phones, that could have deleterious effects on the production of sperm. The attenuation is claimed as 40 to 60 dB over a wide spectrum.

Female readers shouldn't feel left out: as the company's name suggests, it also produces a range of (non-ionising) radiation-proof belly armor for expectant mothers.

The RadiaShield fabric is "a highly conductive silver textile with the same shielding properties as a 1/4-inch thick sheet of aluminum", but without the weight, inconvenience and clanking noises of actual armor. (Enterprising Soylentils may prefer a do-it-yourself approach, utilizing aluminum cooking foil.)

frojack writes:

Pacific Standard is running a story that raises the issue of medical costs compared to the diseases they cure.

In the article they point out that a cure for Hepatitis C (HepC) with a new battery of drugs can be had in as little as 12 weeks for a lifetime cure.

mendax writes:

NPR is starting off a series titled "50 Great Teachers" and is starting with Socrates:

We're starting this celebration of teaching with Socrates, the superstar teacher of the ancient world. He was sentenced to death more than 2,400 years ago for "impiety" and "corrupting" the minds of the youth of Athens.

But Socrates' ideas helped form the foundation of Western philosophy and the scientific method of inquiry. And his question-and-dialogue-based teaching style lives on in many classrooms as the Socratic method.

Most of us have been influenced by our teachers, and some of them may have even been great ones even if, unlike Socrates, they toiled in anonymity. So, I ask this question: Who were (or are) your greatest teachers, why, and what did you learn from them that made them so great?

robpow writes:

Techcrunch.com are reporting that MCX (Merchant Customer Exchange), the coalition of retailers including Walmart, Best Buy, Gap and others, who are backing a mobile payments solution CurrentC has been hacked. The data breach involves the theft of email addresses.

CurrentC are working hard to bring their own mobile payment solution to the market and recently made a number of retail chains turn off their contactless (NFC) card readers to prevent people paying with the competing Google Wallet and Apple Pay.

Are proprietary solutions becoming the new norm? Previously, all TVs could display all channels being broadcast and either cash or standard, mainstream credit cards were universally accepted but the new direction seems to be a plethora of incompatible technologies for the benefit of the vendor instead of the customer.