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AnonTechie writes:

Cisco is working to build the confidence of prospective customers in its products, two years after disclosures of spying by the U.S. National Security Agency seeded doubt, particularly in China.

It is increasingly putting more stringent security requirements on its suppliers and has launched a beta program that allows customers to analyze its products in a highly secure environment before buying. The efforts are intended to introduce more transparency to allay growing concerns over how supply chains could be opportunistically used by spies and cyber criminals.

The company has developed a master security specification for those suppliers with 184 requirements covering areas such as manufacturing, governance and asset management, Conway said. Other requirements revolve around personnel security, such as how people are trained or procedures used when peoples' jobs change or they're terminated, she said. Cisco is also taking a cue from other companies, including competitor Huawei and Microsoft, to allow customers to test and inspect source code in a secure environment.

A Cisco router might have 30 million lines of code, which would be impossible to completely vet. Proving a product hasn't been tampered with by spy agencies is like trying "to prove the non-existence of god," Skorupa said (a networking and communications analyst with Gartner).

http://www.infoworld.com/article/3006213/security/how-cisco-is-trying-to-keep-nsa-spies-out-of-its-gear.html

[Also Covered By]: Computerworld

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

tl;dr: this is a series of posts about embedded firmware hacking and reverse engineering of a IoT device, a TomTom Runner GPS Smartwatch. Slidedecks of this work will be available here when I complete this series.
...
I will show you how I hacked a TomTom Runner GPS Smartwatch, by:

        --Finding a memory corruption vulnerability exploitable via USB and possibly bluetooth (if paired);
        --Taking advantage of said vulnerability to gain access to its encrypted firmware;
        --Doing all this without ever laying a screwdriver near the device (no physical tampering).

After reading about the epic hacking of the Chrysler Jeep by Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek, and getting to watch their talk at Defcon this year (seriously, go watch it if you haven't already), I felt really jealous because I wanted to be able to do that, so I got to work.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Besides your genes from parents, you are a mosaic of viruses, bacteria – and potentially, other humans. Indeed, if you are a twin, you are particularly likely to be carrying bits of your sibling within your body and brain. Stranger still, they may be influencing how you act.

"Humans are not unitary individuals but superorganisms," says Peter Kramer at the University of Padua. "A very large number of different human and non-human individuals are all incessantly struggling inside us for control." Together with Paola Bressan, he recently wrote a paper in the journal Perspectives in Psychological Science, calling for psychologists and psychiatrists to appreciate the ways this may influence our behaviour.

That may sound alarming, but it has long been known that our bodies are really a mishmash of many different organisms. Microbes in your gut can produce neurotransmitters that alter your mood; some scientists have even proposed that the microbes may sway your appetite, so that you crave their favourite food. An infection of a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii, meanwhile, might just lead you to your death. In nature, the microbe warps rats' brains so that they are attracted to cats, which will then offer a cosy home for it to reproduce. But humans can be infected and subjected to the same kind of mind control too: the microbe seems to make someone risky, and increases the chance they will suffer from schizophrenia or suicidal depression. Currently, around a third of British meat carries this parasite, for instance – despite the fact an infection could contribute to these mental illnesses. "We should stop this," says Kramer.

The microbes made me do it.

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

AP reports that the American Medical Association has called for a ban on direct-to-consumer ads for prescription drugs and implantable medical devices, saying they contribute to rising costs and patients' demands for inappropriate treatment. According to data cited in an AMA news release, ad dollars spent by drugmakers have risen to $4.5 billion in the last two years, a 30 percent increase. Physicians cited concerns that a growing proliferation of ads is driving demand for expensive treatments despite the clinical effectiveness of less costly alternatives. "Today's vote in support of an advertising ban reflects concerns among physicians about the negative impact of commercially-driven promotions, and the role that marketing costs play in fueling escalating drug prices," said AMA Board Chair-elect Patrice A. Harris, M.D., M.A. "Direct-to-consumer advertising also inflates demand for new and more expensive drugs, even when these drugs may not be appropriate."

The AMA also calls for convening a physician task force and launching an advocacy campaign to promote prescription drug affordability by demanding choice and competition in the pharmaceutical industry, and greater transparency in prescription drug prices and costs. Last month, the Kaiser Family Foundation released a report saying that a high cost of prescription drugs remains the public's top health care priority. In the past few years, prices on generic and brand-name prescription drugs have steadily risen and experienced a 4.7 percent spike in 2015, according to the Altarum Institute Center for Sustainable Health Spending.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

On Monday at the Center for Strategic & International Studies' Global Security Forum, John Brennan, Director of the US' Central Intelligence Agency, spoke about the recent bombings in Paris. In what many commentators took as a reference to Edward Snowden, but could instead refer to the Church Committee, Brennan predicted that finding the attackers will be more difficult than it would have been, had intelligence services been left unchecked:

In the past several years, because of a number of unauthorized disclosures and a lot of hand-wringing over the government's role in the effort to try to uncover these terrorists, there have been some policy and legal and other actions that are taken that make our ability collectively, internationally to find these terrorists much more challenging.

I do hope that this is going to be a wake-up call particularly in areas of Europe where I think there has been a misrepresentation of what the intelligence security services are doing by some quarters that are designed to undercut those capabilities.

[...]

There are a lot of technological capabilities that are available right now that make it exceptionally difficult both technically as well as legally for intelligence security services to have insight that they need to uncover it.

Brennan's complete remarks are available in video via C-SPAN.

[Additional coverage after the break]

Phoenix666 writes:

Netflix, the streaming video company, has released a tool called Spinnaker that it says "is an open source multi-cloud Continuous Delivery platform for releasing software changes with high velocity and confidence."

Netflix partnered with Google, Microsoft, and EMC's Pivotal to build Spinnaker over the past year or so, and have released the platform code on GitHub.

Spinnaker supports deployment to AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Pivotal Cloud Foundry today, with support for Microsoft Azure "actively underway". There are also plans to add support for containers "in coming months".

Original Submission

bradley13 writes:

Ah, it has finally happened: the first publication that has declared that Scrum is dead. Apparently, the over-paid consultants have relieved the under-clued bosses of all the money they can, so it's time for the next fad.

Scrum works, of course. Just about any software development methodology works, as long as you have good people working in a disciplined team. If you have a lousy team, adopting the latest fad isn't going to help you.

Iterative development is an old technique. I knew of it as far back as the 1980's, but writing this submission, I see that it has roots much farther back. In software, all the way back to the 1950s. In product development generally, it goes back at least to the 1930's, when Walter Shewhard proposed short "plan, do, study, act" cycles for product improvement.

So: let's take bets. What will the next fad be? TFA says it will be the "open development method". What do Soylentils think the consultants will be selling our bosses in five years?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Since the first laser was invented in 1960, they've always given off heat -- either as a useful tool, a byproduct or a fictional way to vanquish intergalactic enemies.

But those concentrated beams of light have never been able to cool liquids. University of Washington researchers are the first to solve a decades-old puzzle -- figuring out how to make a laser refrigerate water and other liquids under real-world conditions.

In a study to be published the week of Nov. 16 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team used an infrared laser to cool water by about 36 degrees Fahrenheit -- a major breakthrough in the field.

"Typically, when you go to the movies and see Star Wars laser blasters, they heat things up. This is the first example of a laser beam that will refrigerate liquids like water under everyday conditions," said senior author Peter Pauzauskie, UW assistant professor of materials science and engineering. "It was really an open question as to whether this could be done because normally water warms when illuminated."

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A mimic function changes a file A so it assumes the statistical properties of another file B. That is, if p(t,A) is the probability of some substring t occuring in A, then a mimic function f, recodes A so that p(t,f(A)) approximates p(t,B) for all strings t of length less than some n. This paper describes the algorithm for computing mimic functions and compares the algorithm with its functional inverse, Huffman coding. It also provides a description of more robust mimic functions which can be defined using context-free grammars.

In his short story, "The Purloined Letter", Edgar Allan Poe describes a search by the police for an incriminating letter. The police ransack the house and pry open anything that might be hiding it, but they cannot find it. They look for hidden compartments, poke in mattresses and search for secret hiding spaces with no success. The detective, C. Auguste Dupin, goes to the house and finds the letter hidden in a different envelope in plain sight. He says, "But the more I reflected upon the daring, dashing and discriminating ingenuity, ... the more satisfied I became that, to conceal this letter, the Minister had resorted to the comprehensive and sagacious expedient of not attempting to conceal it at all."

In many ways, the practical cryptographer faces the same problem. Messages need to get from one place to another without being read. A traditional cryptographer tries to guarantee the letter's security by sealing the message in a mathematical safe and shipping the safe. There is no attempt made to hide the fact that it is a letter at all. The cryptanalyst attacking the message may or may not be able to break the code, but he has little problem finding and identifying the carrier.

Many of the histories written about the cryptography community, however contain stories of how the analysis of the message traffic alone lead to intelligence coups. Mimic functions hide the identity of a text by recoding a file so its statistical profile approximates the statistical profile of another file. They can convert any file to be statistically identical to, for instance, the contents of the USENET newsgroups like rec.humor or the classified section of the Sunday New York Times. Their contribution to security is largely founded upon the assumption that the explosion of information traffic makes it impossible for humans to read everything. Anyone watching must use computers outfitted with statistical profiles to weed the interesting data from the mundane.

Original Submission

mcgrew writes:

I'm actually looking for two things: good magazines I haven't found, and good magazines to submit science fiction stories to. I also want to know where I can find your favorite magazines; I've been getting them at the Barnes&Noble in town, but they sell out quickly. Once all they had was three copies of F&SF, and I found it to be excellent. Another time I found five titles, but I haven't seen Asimov's there, and I always liked that one.

Analog was excellent as well, as they've always been. The British Interzone was very well designed, with excellent layout and large amounts of excellent artwork, but I didn't like any of the writing. It just didn't suit my taste.

I have yet to find any decent online mags, I'm sure you guys can supply me with that.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

When most wild animals first encounter humans, they respond as they would to any predator—by running, swimming or flying away.

Over time, some species become more tolerant of humans' presence, but the extent to which they do is largely driven by the type of environment in which the animals live and by the animal's body size, according to a comprehensive new analysis.

Researchers led by Daniel Blumstein, a professor and chair of ecology and evolutionary biology in the UCLA College, analyzed 75 studies conducted over the past half-century of 212 animal species—mostly birds, but also mammals and lizards. The scientists estimated species' tolerance to human disturbance by comparing how far away from humans an animal would have to be before it fled—a statistic called "flight initiation distance."

The paper was published today in Nature Communications.

Among the findings:

• Birds in more heavily populated urban areas are much more tolerant of humans than birds in rural areas.
• Larger birds are more tolerant of humans than smaller birds.

Why Are Some Wild Animals More Tolerant to Human Interaction Than Others? No.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Given the proliferation of microtransit services trying to match drivers and passengers, you might think they had ride-sharing and carpooling all figured out. But the recent demise of Leap Transit in San Francisco—to say nothing of the other transportation start-ups that have failed without a media whimper—reminds us that even in a big city it’s not easy to fill empty vehicle seats. And in the suburbs, it’s downright mathematically impossible.

Or just about, anyway, according to a provocative new thought-experiment by Steve Raney, principal at a smart mobility consultancy called Cities21. In a working paper, the former Silicon Valley tech product manager crunched the numbers on ride-sharing in the Palo Alto area and found the odds of matching drivers with passengers long, to say the least. Raney calls it the “Suburban Ridematch Needle in the Haystack Problem.”

“I wanted to gently inject some reality into this,” he tells CityLab.

Original Submission

MichaelDavidCrawford writes:

The Washington Post reports:

Hollande is expected to put forward a bill this week to extend a state of emergency for three months, enhancing police power to restrict freedom of movement and gatherings at public places.

At Versailles, he also proposed constitutional changes that would allow authorities to withdraw French citizenship from people with dual nationality, even if they were born in France, and to prevent French terrorism suspects from returning to France.

(Emphasis added.)

I feel this would be unproductive; among the problems Europe has long faced is that the children and even grandchildren of immigrants feel unwelcome in the nations of their birth: I understand there are some European countries in which birth does not convey citizenship. President Hollande's proposal would dramatically exacerbate the problem and so give rise to further terrorism.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Intel's Knights-branded Xeon Phi chips remain the most familiar "many-core" accelerators or coprocessors. However, another name has emerged recently: PEZY, whose 1,024-core chips were used in the top 3 most efficient supercomputers. Tom's Hardware reports that PEZY's next generation of chips will boost the core count to 4,096 and integrate Imagination's 64-bit MIPS Warrior CPU onto a system-on-a-chip:

PEZY Computing, a Japanese firm that makes the top three most efficient supercomputers in the world, according to the Green500 list, announced that it will integrate Imagination's highly efficient 64-bit I6400 CPUs into its many-core architecture.

The PEZY SC-2 will be PEZY's next-generation system, which will increase the 1024 core count of the first generation PEZY SC to 4096 cores, or four times more. PEZY's many-core accelerator has been combined with Intel CPUs from top supercomputers to significantly increase their efficiency for computing tasks. For instance, the Shoubo supercomputer, which uses Haswell XEON CPUs and PEZY SC many-core accelerators, was able to break the world record with 7 GFLOPS/W performance.

In the November edition of Green500, the top 23 supercomputers used a heterogeneous architecture with many-core accelerators. In the updated June edition of this year, that number increased by 40 percent, and now the top 32 supercomputers are using many-core accelerators. These supercomputers all use accelerators from AMD, Intel, Nvidia and PEZY. The current top 3 supercomputers are manufactured by PEZY Computing and Exascaler Inc, and include Haswell or Ivy Bridge Xeons as well as PEZY many-core accelerators.

Presumably the integration of the MIPS CPU could allow relatively power-hungry Intel Xeons to be ditched entirely.

Previously: MIPS Strikes Back: 64-bit Warrior I6400 Arrives

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

It's big. It's cold. And it's melting into the world's oceans.

It's Zachariae Isstrom, the latest in a string of Greenland glaciers to undergo rapid change in our warming world. A new NASA-funded study published today in the journal Science finds that Zachariae Isstrom broke loose from a glaciologically stable position in 2012 and entered a phase of accelerated retreat. The consequences will be felt for decades to come.

The reason? Zachariae Isstrom is big. It drains ice from an area of 35,440 square miles (91,780 square kilometers). That's about 5 percent of the Greenland Ice Sheet. All by itself, it holds enough water to raise global sea level by more than 18 inches (46 centimeters) if it were to melt completely. And now it's on a crash diet, losing 5 billion tons of mass every year. All that ice is crumbling into the North Atlantic Ocean.

"North Greenland glaciers are changing rapidly," said lead author Jeremie Mouginot, an assistant researcher in the Department of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine. "The shape and dynamics of Zachariae Isstrom have changed dramatically over the last few years. The glacier is now breaking up and calving high volumes of icebergs into the ocean, which will result in rising sea levels for decades to come."

Original Submission