SoylentNews

Phoenix666 writes:

This report examines the feasibility for non-state actors, including terrorist and insurgent groups, to increase their political and/or economic power by deploying a virtual currency (VC) for use in regular economic transactions. A VC, such as Bitcoin, is a digital representation of value that can be transferred, stored, or traded electronically and that is neither issued by a central bank or public authority, nor necessarily attached to a fiat currency (dollars, euros, etc.), but is accepted by people as a means of payment. We addressed the following research questions from both the technological and political-economic perspectives: (1) Why would a non-state actor deploy a VC? That is, what political and/or economic utility is there to gain? How might this non-state actor go about such a deployment? What challenges would it have to overcome? (2) How might a government or organization successfully technologically disrupt a VC deployment by a non-state actor, and what degree of cyber sophistication would be required? (3) What additional capabilities become possible when the technologies underlying the development and implementation of VCs are used for purposes broader than currency? This report should be of interest to policy makers interested in technology, counter-terrorism, and intelligence and law enforcement issues, as well as for VC and cyber-security researchers.

Key Findings:

Non-State Actors Can Use VCs to Disrupt Sovereignty and Increase Political and/or Economic Power, but Unlikely to Use Established VC; Many Challenges Posed by Creation of VCs

[...] VCs Are Vulnerable to Attacks, Especially by a Technologically Sophisticated Adversary

[...] Development and Implementation of VCs Could Add to Security-Related Technological Developments That Could Aid Non-State Actors

Only terrorists use Bitcoin?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Seagate has announced its first helium-filled hard disk drive, a 10-terabyte Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5-inch HDD. Competitor and Western Digital subsidiary HGST has had multiple generations of helium-filled HDDs ranging from 6-10 terabytes.

Seagate said last year that it had experimented with helium-filled hard disk drives for about 12 years. While the company is several generations behind HGST with its hermetically sealed commercial HDDs, the company's helium platform should be rather robust in terms of both reliability and performance.

At present, Alibaba and Huawei, who both said that the new hard drives help them to reduce their costs, [are evaluating] Seagate's Enterprise Capacity 10 TB HDDs. Some other companies have also received Seagate's new HDDs. HGST's 10 TB helium-filled hard disk drives are already deployed by companies like Netflix, which need [the] maximum [density] of storage.

Seagate itself predicted recently that in 2016 its 8 TB hard drives would be its most popular high-capacity models. The company did not announce [a] high-volume availability timeframe [for] its 10 TB HDDs, but it is unlikely that Seagate will ship a lot of such products this year. Pricing of Seagate's Enterprise Capacity 10 TB HDD is unknown.

The drive contains seven 1.43 TB platters. Some of Seagate's latest air-filled HDDs contain as many as six platters, including an 8 TB NAS drive announced yesterday. The company has not provided detailed specifications of the drive, but if it is anything like HGST's helium drives, it will have lower power consumption, vibrations, and operating temperature than air-filled drives.

Helium sealed drives are just one of the technologies Seagate and WD will be adopting in order to keep hard drives relevant over the next two decades. Two dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR) and shingled magnetic recording (SMR) will slightly extend the capacity of perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) platters. PMR drives may eventually reach 2 TB per platter using these technologies, according to a Showa Denko (SDK) forecast. Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), which has been delayed to at least 2018, will pick up from where PMR leaves off. Bit patterned magnetic recording drives could appear sometime in the 2020s and may also be combined with HAMR.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

In eastern Ukraine, government forces have to face an array of conventional threats. Snipers, artillery and machine gun fire to name a few. On top of that, Ukrainian troops also have to contend with electronic warfare. The separatists, well-supplied and trained by Russia, have the ability to jam drones and communications — seriously hindering battlefield operations for their opponent.

What is happening in Ukraine has major implications for the future of U.S. warfare. Russia and China, both seen as "near-peer" adversaries, have robust electronic warfare capabilities. And while the U.S. is trying to expand its electronic warfare suite, it has been slow going because of budget restrictions and a shrinking military.

Enter a new chip from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA] that would give the U.S. military a much needed boost when it comes to operating in a combat environment where communications and radar can be jammed by the enemy. This chip — an "exceptionally high-speed analog-to-digital converter," known as an ADC — would benefit U.S. equipment that operates on the electromagnetic spectrum (radios, radar, etc) by increasing the ability to process portions of the electromagnetic spectrum at a drastically higher rate than current jamming and anti-jamming equipment.

How fast is fast? The new ADC samples and digitizes spectrum signals at a rate of over 60 billion times per second (60 GigaSamples/sec). That's fast enough to directly detect and analyze any signal at 30 GHz or below—a range that encompasses the vast majority of operating frequencies of interest. Whereas scanning through these frequencies today requires costly application-specific hardware with long development cycles, the new ADC can provide a "one-stop shop" for processing radar, communications and electronic warfare signals.

According to DARPA, the only issue with the chip is the amount of power and processing speed required for it to operate. To rectify the issue, DARPA is working with the company GlobalFoundries to create a smaller processor that uses less power but is still able to compute the data required for the chip to work.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/01/12/this-new-darpa-chip-could-give-u-s-a-leg-up-in-electronic-warfare/

[Source]: New Chips Ease Operations In Electromagnetic Environs

[Also Covered By]: DARPA's New Chip Will Create Un-jammable Communication Devices

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

CES 2016 has a surprising amount of tech that was cutting-edge in the late 1970s: vinyl record players.

Sony announced the PS-HX500, a high-resolution turntable that can both play records and convert them to digital files. Panasonic announced the Technics SL-1200G, a direct-drive turntable based on a model that's been popular with DJs for years. (Neither Sony nor Panasonic announced prices for the turntables, which will be available in the spring and summer, respectively, but the previous iteration of the Technics SL-1200, discontinued in 2010, goes for hundreds of dollars on eBay.) Smaller companies such as Flexson are demoing turntables on the CES 2016 show floor, too.

Vinyl records were supposed to have been made obsolete with the introduction of the audio CD in 1982. CDs take up less space, can hold more music, and are more resistant to scratches and warping than records. Yet vinyl sales have grown for 10 straight years, hitting a new high of almost 12 million LPs sold in 2015, according to Nielsen Soundscan.

That may be because of nostalgia, or because vinyl fans praise the format for sounding warmer and more authentic than digital files.

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

Valentina Zarya writes at Fortune Magazine that the top 2016 prediction for David Marcus,Facebook's vice president of messaging products, is the disappearance of the phone number and its replacement by applications like Facebook's Messenger. " You can make video and voice calls while at the same time not needing to know someone's phone number," writes Marcus. "You don't need to have a Facebook account to use Messenger anymore, and it's also a cross platform experience – so you can pick up where you left off whether you're on a desktop computer, a tablet, or your phone."

Jonah Berger, Wharton professor and author of "Contagious: Why Things Catch On" agrees. "For most of us, I think it's really hard to actually remember what someone's phone number actually is. We use our phones so often or we click on a button that has it. But if there was a test where you had to say, do you remember your best friends number or could you type in your best friend's number I think most of us would fail."

But not everyone agrees that Murcus' predictions are objective and disinterested. "It's all very well the company wanting to be the de facto Internet -- especially in places like India. But drier minds and eyes might wonder whether the wish to eradicate phone numbers has something to do with not everyone having yet given Facebook their phone numbers," says Chris Matyszczyk. "It may well be that phone numbers will disappear. Some, though, might wonder how making their disappearance a company theme squares with what Marcus claims is the ultimate goal: 'It's all about delight.' This one's easy. It's all about delighting Facebook."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The Lego Group has announced that it will no longer ask customers who buy large amounts of Lego bricks what the bricks will be used for:

As of January 1st, the LEGO Group no longer asks for the thematic purpose when selling large quantities of LEGO bricks for projects. Instead, the customers will be asked to make it clear - if they intend to display their LEGO creations in public - that the LEGO Group does not support or endorse the specific projects.

NPR reports that the change in guidelines comes after Lego had previously refused to sell bricks to Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei:

In October, Ai said Lego had refused to sell him the bricks he needed for an exhibition on free speech at Australia's National Gallery of Victoria. He intended to use the bricks to create portraits of freedom advocates. A frequent critic of China who was imprisoned by the government, Ai accused the Danish company of censorship and said it was afraid to offend Beijing.

After the company's decision, supporters of Ai set up donation points around the world for people to donate used bricks. Ai also told NPR that he was flooded with messages of support on social media:

They're not necessarily museum-goers, but they understand what is the most important meaning of art, which is to really express yourself successfully and to really defend the essential values.

Ai said pressure from his supporters had pressured Lego to change its policy on bulk orders, and he told The Associated Press that it was a "good move":

Lego is a language which everybody can appreciate and should be able to use ... according to their will, and that's what all freedom of expression is about.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The Computer Vision Laboratory, ETH Zurich, is branching out into a hotness-judging application leveraging its technology strengths in computer-based interpretation of 2D and 3D image data sets from image sources—both conventional and nonconventional.

The lab has otherwise been more known in its research in fields such as medical image visualization, scene understanding and modeling. Nonetheless, the lab has stated that it is their strategy to let "difficult, real-world applications drive our research and development. We see collaboration with industry as an important plus for an engineering lab like ours."

Wow, how much more real-world can you get than a pairing up with the dating app BLINQ for a web site that invites people to get an attractiveness rating. The researchers harness "artificial intelligence" to rate the attractiveness and age of users on the site.

Can (leave alone, should) artificial intelligence be used to rate your (and potential mate) attractiveness?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The Commission on a Global Health Risk Framework for the Future has released a report that predicts worse pandemics in the future and criticizes the sluggish response to the Ebola outbreak in 2014. The Commission also recommends spending billions per year in order to soften the economic blow of future pandemics:

"Gentlemen, it is the microbes who will have the last word."

That comment from 19th century disease fighter Louis Pasteur is not what you'd expect to see at the start of a report from some of the world's top public health officials. But the report itself has a stinging message: We're not prepared for the next coming plague or pandemic — or HIV 2.0. That report, titled "The Neglected Dimension of Global Security," comes from a commission put together last year by the National Academy of Medicine.

The commission says future pandemics have the potential to kill millions and cause economic losses in the trillions of dollars. "Pandemics represent a real threat to human security," says Peter Sands, the chair of the Commission on a Global Health Risk Framework for the Future. "They will happen and we need to be able to contain them."

The report predicts that new diseases will emerge even faster in the 21st century than they did in the 19th. The commission of 17 public health officials from around the globe sums it up this way: "A range of factors, including increasing population, economic globalization, environmental degradation and ever increasing human interaction around the globe are changing the dynamics of infectious disease."

Sands says the Ebola outbreak of 2014-15 was a wake-up call. It showed that the world is not prepared to deal with a rapidly spreading disease. "The alerts were raised too slowly. Local health systems were quickly overwhelmed. The international response was slow and clumsy," he says. "We lacked many of the medical products we needed, either therapeutic or vaccination or indeed even effective diagnostics."

This report argues that the world needs to better position itself for the next pandemics. If the world were to invest roughly $4.5 billion a year, the authors estimate economic losses of $60 billion a year from future pandemics could be avoided. The bulk of the money would go to bolster health care systems in low- and middle-income countries. An additional $1 billion would be poured into medical research for potentially dangerous diseases.

The Neglected Dimension of Global Security: A Framework to Counter Infectious Disease Crises (PDF, DOI: 10.17226/21891)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Around 200 groups, companies, and individuals including the likes of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Amnesty International, the Free Software Foundation, CloudFlare, DuckDuckGo, Jacob Appelbaum, Thomas Drake, Mike Godwin, and Bruce Schneier have signed an open letter urging governments not to ban, weaken, undermine, or limit access to encryption.

Coverage at Tom's Hardware and The Register:

The Obama Administration also recently ruled out any possibility of legislation passing through Congress that would mandate government access. That has led to a curious formulation from politicians about the need for the "best minds" to come together and develop a system that works. Or, in other words, to create a backdoor of some kind that doesn't have to be called a backdoor. The wording of the letter is intended to cover all possible scenarios.

Tom's Hardware also reports on an amendment to a French "Digital Republic" bill that would effectively ban strong encryption:

[Continues...]

HughPickens.com writes:

The New York Times reports that the Pentagon has been developing the B61 Model 12, the nation's first precision-guided atom bomb. Adapted from an older weapon, the Model 12 was designed with problems like North Korea in mind: Its computer brain and four maneuverable fins let it zero in on deeply buried targets like testing tunnels and weapon sites and its yield can be dialed up or down depending on the target, to minimize collateral damage. The B61 Model 12 flight-tested last year in Nevada and is the first of five new warhead types planned as part of an atomic revitalization estimated to cost up to $1 trillion over three decades. As a family, the weapons and their delivery systems move toward the small, the stealthy and the precise.

And some say that's the problem. The Federation of American Scientists argues that the high accuracy and low destructive settings means military commanders might press to use the bomb in an attack, knowing the radioactive fallout and collateral damage would be limited. Increasing the accuracy also broadens the type of targets that the B61 can be used to attack. Some say that a new nuclear tipped cruise missile under development might sway a future president to contemplate "limited nuclear war."

Worse yet, because the missile comes in nuclear and non-nuclear varieties, a foe under attack might assume the worst and overreact, initiating nuclear war. In a recent interview, General James Cartwright, a retired four-star general who last served as the eighth Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says the overall modernization plan might change how military commanders looked at the risks of using nuclear weapons. "What if I bring real precision to these weapons?" says Cartwright. "Does it make them more usable? It could be."

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A team of archeologists working at a dig site in Cambridgeshire in Britain has found what they are describing as Britain's 'Pompeii'—evidence of everyday life in an ancient society, covered by mud—and the best preserved Bronze Age dwelling ever found in that country. The find consists of two circular wooden houses that once stood atop stilts over a river—when the houses caught fire, they collapsed into the river and were covered by silt, which preserved everyday items inside, such as tables and chairs and jewelry, and even food in bowls.

The site was first discovered back in 2006, but it was only recently that excavations began—a joint effort between the University of Cambridge and Historic England. Items from the houses which sit approximately two meters below ground level, have been dated to approximately 1000-800 BC, which puts them near the end of the Bronze Age—a time dominated by tools and weapons made by mixing copper and tin, from roughly 2500, to 1000 BC. In Britain, the Bronze Age has been extended to approximately 800 BC—it ended when visitors from overseas introduced implements made of iron. Because of the arrangement, the researchers believe the houses were abandoned very quickly, likely due to the fire, which allowed for the preservation of objects as they existed in the everyday lives of people during that time period.

Thus far, workers digging at the site have uncovered pots and pans of varying sizes, spears and daggers, exotic glass beads and even textiles that had been fashioned from tree bark. They have also uncovered the charred remains of the timbers that once served as stilts, allowing those living in the house to exist as if on their own tiny island. A human skull has also been found near one entrance, but it has not yet been studied in detail, thus it is not known if it might have belonged to one of the inhabitants of the house. The team has also identified footprints in the sediment.

How will future archeologists segment our society, "The Age of Bell-bottoms" vs. "The Age of Keds?"

BBC News.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Researchers studying a sponge-like creature say they've found evidence that one mutation more than 600 million years ago may have paved the way for multicellular life.

Mutations can lead to good or bad results, or even to a combination of the two, says Ken Prehoda, a professor in the chemistry and biochemistry department at the University of Oregon.

"Proteins are the workhorses of our cells, performing a wide variety of tasks such as metabolism," he says. "But how does a protein that performs one task evolve to perform another? And how do complex systems like those that allow cells to work together in an organized way, evolve the many different proteins they require?

"Our work suggests that new protein functions can evolve with a very small number of mutations. In this case, only one was required."

Prehoda's team began looking at choanoflagellates with the help of Nicole King's group at the University of California, Berkeley. Choanoflagellates are a group of free-living, single-celled organisms considered to be the closest living relative of animals.

These sponge-like, seawater-dwelling organisms have a short, outward-facing squiggly tail called a flagellum that allows them to move and gather food. Choanoflagellates exist both in a single-celled solitary form, but also as multi-cellular colonies.

Prehoda and colleagues then used ancestral protein reconstruction, a technique devised by co-author Joseph W. Thornton, a biologist at the University of Chicago. By using gene sequencing and computational methods to move backward in the evolutionary tree, researchers can see molecular changes and infer how proteins performed in the deep past.

Evolution of an ancient protein function involved in organized multicellularity in animals (DOI: 10.7554/eLife.10147)

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

We discussed this topic some in December 2015, so this is perhaps a continuation:

Many home NAS builders consider using ZFS for their file system. But there is a caveat with ZFS that people should be aware of.

Although ZFS is free software, implementing ZFS is not free. The key issue is that expanding capacity with ZFS is more expensive compared to legacy RAID solutions.

With ZFS, you either have to buy all storage you expect to need upfront, or you will be wasting a few hard drives on redundancy you don't need.

This fact is often overlooked, but it's very important when you are planning your build.

Other software RAID solutions like Linux MDADM lets you grow an existing RAID array with one disk at a time. This is also true for many hardware-based RAID solutions. This is ideal for home users because you can expand as you need.

ZFS does not allow this!

To understand why using ZFS may cost you extra money, we will dig a little bit into ZFS itself.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

When building a shelter on Mars, the best way is going to be using materials that can be found on location. This is because building materials would vastly increase the payload the rocket would need to carry and the cost of getting it to Mars.

For NASA's 3D-printed Mars habitat challenge, contestants came up with hypothetical solutions. But a team led by associate professor Gianluca Cusatis at Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering decided to come up with something a little more practical. They actually experimented and created a type of concrete made from Martian materials.

Like Earth concrete, the Martian version is made from a gravel aggregate and a binding agent. However, rather than the gravel, cement and water used on Earth, the team used Martian soil as simulated by NASA as an aggregate, and molten sulphur, which exists in abundance on Mars, as a binding agent.

[...] Sulphur concrete has some significant advantages. It only takes 2 to 3 hours to fully set, unlike Earth concrete, which takes 28 hours, which means it could work very well with construction-sized 3D printers. It's also highly corrosion-resistant, and the material developed by Cusastis' team was more than twice as strong as typical sulphur concretes, which the team attributed to the fine particles of the Martian soil. When adjusted for Martian gravity, it would be as strong as concrete used for Earth skyscrapers.

Original Submission

tt0102181 writes:

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the nonprofit body that maintains the Web's core standards, made a terrible mistake in 2013: they decided to add DRM—the digital locks that train your computer to say "I can't let you do that, Dave"; rather than "Yes, boss"—to the Web's standards.

So the EFF came back with a new proposal: the W3C could have its cake and eat it too. It could adopt a rule that requires members who help make DRM standards to promise not to sue people who report bugs in tools that conform to those standards, nor could they sue people just for making a standards-based tool that connected to theirs. They could make DRM, but only if they made sure that they took steps to stop that DRM from being used to attack the open Web.

The EFF asked the W3C to make this into their policy. The only W3C group presently engaged in DRM standardization is due to have its charter renewed in early 2016. The W3C called a poll over that charter during the Christmas month, ending on December 30th.

Despite the tight timeline and the number of members who were unavailable over the holidays, a global, diverse coalition of commercial firms, nonprofits and educational institutions came together to endorse this proposal. More than three quarters of those who weighed in on the proposal supported it.

This isn't the first collision between proprietary rights and the W3C. In 1999, the W3C had to decide what to do about software patents. These patents were and are hugely controversial, and the W3C was looking for a way to be neutral on the question of whether patents were good or bad, while still protecting the Web's openness to anyone who wanted to develop for it.

[Continues...]