There's a lot that happens before the exhibit floor on Monday night. Our old pal Rich Brueckner from insideHPC joins us to give us the full rundown.
Chemists bitten by Python scripts: How different OSes produced different results during test number-crunching
Chemistry boffins at the University of Hawaii have found, rather disturbingly, that different computer operating systems running a particular set of Python scripts used for their research can produce different results when running the same code.
Stalking suspect allegedly studied pop idol's pupil images online to find her location
The man allegedly studied reflections of the woman's pupils in photos on social media and using Google Street View to find where she lived and what train stations she used.
Artificial intelligence isn’t very intelligent and won’t be any time soon
For all of the recent advances in artificial intelligence, machines still struggle with common sense
Open-source computing: A new blueprint for microprocessors challenges the industry’s giants
RISC-V is an alternative to proprietary designs Most microprocessors —the chips that do the grunt work in computers—are built around designs, known as instruction-set architectures (ISAs), which are owned either by Intel, an American giant, or by Arm, a Japanese one.
Dan: Speaking of time, we might not have so much left. According to the European Space Agency, there is an asteroid approaching Earth that has a “non zero” chance of impacting our beloved planet. The asteroid, dubbed 2019 SU3, is expected to come within 73,000 miles (or maybe zero miles) from Earth, which is extremely close. Expected arrival time is September 16, 2084. Is this the time to panic? Yes, says Dan. We’ll be giving updates on this asteroid every five years or so, to keep you on top of the action.Computer historians crack passwords of Unix's early pioneers
... Leah Neukirchen recovered an BSD version 3 source tree and posted about it on the Unix Heritage Society mailing list, revealing that she was able to crack many of the weak passwords used by the equally weak hashing algorithm from those bygone days. Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie's was "dmac", Bourne's was "bourne", Schmidt's was "wendy!!!" (his wife's name), Feldman's was "axlotl", and Kernighan's was "/.,/.,". Four more passwords were cracked by Arthur Krewat: Özalp Babaoğlu's was "12ucdort", Howard Katseff's was "graduat;", Tom London's was "..pnn521", Bob Fabry's was "561cml.." and Ken Thompson's was "p/q2-q4!" (chess notation for a common opening move).
Asteroid may collide with Earth, ESA warns: 'Non-zero... probability'
Asteroids known as near-Earth objects are among the most dangerous space items, with space agencies around the world keeping a close eye on them. The European Space Agency is paying particular attention to asteroid 2019 SU3, which may collide with Earth as soon as 70 years from now. The space rock was recently added to the ESA's Risk List due to the potential for it to collide with Earth on Sept. 16, 2084.
Universal Memcomputing
We introduce the notion of universal memcomputing machines (UMMs): a class of brain-inspired general-purpose computing machines based on systems with memory, whereby processing and storing of information occur on the same physical location. We analytically prove that the memory properties of UMMs endow them with universal computing power—they are Turing-complete—, intrinsic parallelism, functional polymorphism, and information overhead, namely their collective states can support exponential data compression directly in memory.
United States Attorney Mike Stuart Issues Statement on Election Security
CHARLESTON, W.VA. – United States Attorney Mike Stuart issued the following statement about the important issues of elections, election security and voter legitimacy: “During the 2018 election cycle, Secretary of State Warner referred to my office what he perceived to be an attempted intrusion by an outside party into the West Virginia military mobile voting system. I note that there was no intrusion and the integrity of votes and the election system was not compromised. My office instituted an investigation to determine the facts and whether any federal laws were violated. The FBI has led that investigation. That investigation is currently ongoing and no legal conclusions whatsoever have been made regarding the conduct of the activity or whether any federal laws were violated.
Henry points out eight new storage-related patents granted to Intel, 2 of which look quite important for emerging storage systems. Here are the two patents here and here, and a link to the article:DOE Sets Sights on Accelerating AI (and other) Technology Transfer
For the past two days DOE leaders along with ~350 members from academia and industry gathered in Chicago to discuss AI development and the ways in which industry and DOE could collaborate to foster AI commercialization. The occasion was DOE’s fourth InnovationXLab Summit – the earlier three summits were on advanced manufacturing; grid modernization; and energy storage. Two more are planned: bio-manufacturing in January and quantum science in the late spring.
Dan is concerned that bots are overstepping their boundaries and talks about research at Microsoft that can generate fake comments for online articles.Intel Assigned Eight Patents
Erase block granularity eviction in host based caching, persistently caching storage data in page cache, drive-based storage scrubbing, processors, methods, systems, and instructions to load multiple data elements to destination storage locations other than packed data registers, secure memory, techniques for command validation for access to storage device, authenticating system to enable access to diagnostic interface in storage device, techniques for moving data between network i/ot device and storage device
This won't end well. Microsoft's AI boffins unleash a bot that can generate fake comments for news articles
Please no, we don't need a machine-learning troll farm As if the internet isn’t already a complicated cesspool full of trolls, AI engineers have gone one step further to build a machine learning model that can generate fake comments for news articles.
Quantum supremacy using a programmable superconducting processor
Google AI Quantum and collaborators The tantalizing promise of quantum computers is that certain computational tasks might be executed exponentially faster on a quantum processor than on a classical processor. A fundamental challenge is to build a high-fidelity processor capable of running quantum algorithms in an exponentially large computational space. Here, we report using a processor with programmable superconducting qubits to create quantum states on 53 qubits, occupying a state space 253∼1016. Measurements from repeated experiments sample the corresponding probability distribution, which we verify using classical simulations. While our processor takes about 200 seconds to sample one instance of the quantum circuit 1 million times, a state-of-the-art supercomputer would require approximately 10,000 years to perform the equivalent task. This dramatic speedup relative to all known classical algorithms provides an experimental realization of quantum supremacy on a computational task and heralds the advent of a much-anticipated computing paradigm.
Top-10 Crypto/Blockchain Topics
Why? What’s the big deal? Blockchain or Crypto? ICOs Political Support Libra Apps Security Other Coins Digital Assets Smart Contracts
Man Who Hired Deadly Swatting Gets 15 Months
An Ohio teen who recruited a convicted serial “swatter” to fake a distress call that ended in the police shooting an innocent Kansas man in 2017 has been sentenced to 15 months in prison. “Swatting” is a dangerous hoax that involves making false claims to emergency responders about phony hostage situations or bomb threats, with the intention of prompting a heavily-armed police response to the location of the claimed incident.
Henry doesnt know whether to laugh or cry as he describes some of the "ignoble" prize winners and wonders how they ever got funded.Germany's Scholz: We cannot accept parallel currencies such as Facebook's Libra
German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz said on Tuesday policymakers could not accept the emergence of parallel currencies such as Facebook’s planned Libra, adding that Berlin would reject any such plans. Facebook’s planned Libra is the most well-known of the stablecoins, a certain form of cryptocurrency backed by assets such as traditional money deposits, short-term government securities or gold.
Dan talks about the call-center scammer whose plea deal backfires:Magnetic cockroaches, dirty money, wombat poo and posties' balls: It's the Ig Nobels 2019
This year's theme was 'habits' and they were baaaaad The Annals of Improbable Research held its annual award-giving ceremony – the Ig Nobel Prize – on Thursday night at Harvard's Sanders Theatre, and the entries were as worthy as ever.
Call-center scammer loses $9m appeal in stunning moment of poetic justice
But I only expected to pay $250,000, wails scumbag to wall of blank faces. A call-center scammer has lost his appeal to overturn a $9m fine – after a court pointed out the crook had specifically waived the right to appeal when he pleaded guilty.
Google To Fix Malicious Invites Issue For 1 Billion Calendar Users
Way back in 2017, two researchers at Black Hills Information Security disclosed how a vulnerability in the Google Calendar app was leaving more than a billion users open to a credential-stealing exploit. Google apparently didn't fix this at the time as it would have caused "major functionality drawbacks" for Calendar users, despite those researchers demonstrating how they had weaponized the vulnerability at the Wild West Hackin' Fest.
How Wi-Fi Almost Didn’t Happen
We all love Wi-Fi, except when we can’t connect. We take for granted being able to have wireless access at home and the office, on airplanes, in cafés around the globe, and if we'd be so lucky, floating on the International Space Station. But what if Wi-Fi hadn’t happened? It almost didn’t, at least not in the way we recognize it today.
Ransomware attacker demanded $5.3 million from city of New Bedford, mayor says
In the video below (also linked in the heading), the mayor of New Bedford explains what happened and how the averted disaster!
Deepfakes are coming and they're coming fast. Shahin talks about the Chinese phone app, Zao, that went viral before getting banned for reportedly data privacy issues. It takes a headshot and works it into a video clip. It does a very convincing job according to the samples that people have put on social media. Now, imagine what the real bad guys or so-inclined organizations can do with more resources. He also references an NPR article that discussed the impending impact of Deep Fakes on elections with pretty much no solution in sight. Serious problem.MIT engineers build advanced microprocessor out of carbon nanotubes
After years of tackling numerous design and manufacturing challenges, MIT researchers have built a modern microprocessor from carbon nanotube transistors, which are widely seen as a faster, greener alternative to their traditional silicon counterparts. The microprocessor, described today in the journal Nature, can be built using traditional silicon-chip fabrication processes, representing a major step toward making carbon nanotube microprocessors more practical.
A face-swapping app takes off in China, making AI-powered deepfakes for everyone
It’s as easy as using a photo filter on Instagram or Snapchat, but it also demonstrates the remarkable power of advances in artificial intelligence to make fake videos.
Dan talks about the new experience he had during a 12 hour layover at the Perth airport in Australia. He decided to use the shower facilities. Generally a good experience but he has some pointers for you.What You Need To Know About Fake Video, Audio And The 2020 Election
Security experts have warned about the prospect of a new era of high quality faked video or audio, which some commentators worry could have deeply corrosive effects on U.S. democracy. Here's what you need to know.
"The IO-500 has been developed together with the community and its development is still ongoing. The benchmark is essentially a benchmark suite bundled with execution rules. It harnesses existing and trusted open source benchmarks. The goal for the benchmark is to capture user-experienced performance.
Ransomware Bites Dental Data Backup Firm
PerCSoft, a Wisconsin-based company that manages a remote data backup service relied upon by hundreds of dental offices across the country, is struggling to restore access to client systems after falling victim to a ransomware attack.
Henry describes a few ISPs who ended up stealing communication spectrum from, guess where, the airport, obviously. And here's the thing about at least some of these incidents: the whole thing is so complex now that it can be hard to tell incompetence from malice.Employees connect nuclear plant to the internet so they can mine cryptocurrency
Ukrainian authorities are investigating a potential security breach at a local nuclear power plant after employees connected parts of its internal network to the internet so they could mine cryptocurrency.
American ISPs fined $75,000 for fuzzing airport's weather radar by stealing spectrum
Three ISPs will be fined $25,000 apiece by America's broadband watchdog, the FCC, for interfering with weather signals in Puerto Rico. Boom Solutions, Integra Wireless, and WinPR were all found to be using devices for their point-to-point broadband that were “misconfigured,” according to the regulator this week. This caused interference with a doppler weather radar station at San Juan international airport.
KNOB Attack Weakens Bluetooth Encryption
It turns out Bluetooth might have more in common with doors than we thought. Researchers disclosed a new attack they called Key Negotiation of Bluetooth (KNOB) that affects every device released before 2018 (and potentially some released after) because of an issue with the Bluetooth protocol itself. This attack can be used to make it easier to brute-force the encryption keys used by the devices.
Bluetooth is not enough! Henry asks us to cancel our credit card too if we have shopped at Hy-Vee:This Linux computer plus router is the size of a ring box
If there's one thing that stayed consistent through the last decade or so of tech industry turmoil, it's the love affair between techies and Linux. There's just a ton you can do with the OS, and its open-source format means you can customize your rig from the ground up.
Breach at Hy-Vee Supermarket Chain Tied to Sale of 5M+ Stolen Credit, Debit Cards
On Tuesday of this week, one of the more popular underground stores peddling credit and debit card data stolen from hacked merchants announced a blockbuster new sale: More than 5.3 million new accounts belonging to cardholders from 35 U.S. states. Multiple sources now tell KrebsOnSecurity that the card data came from compromised gas pumps, coffee shops and restaurants operated by Hy-Vee, an Iowa-based company that operates a chain of more than 245 supermarkets throughout the Midwestern United States.
Listen in to hear the full conversation.Sharing insights about the challenges and successes in Enterprise IoT
We will discuss all aspects of building and scaling commercial IoT products. Topics include building a business case, assessing end-user benefits, selecting connectivity hardware, software development for embedded-mobile-cloud including multi-product mobile apps, security, privacy, cloud back-end, analytics and AI, remote control, commerce, governance, the relevance of cryptocurrencies, etc.
Anyone with a serious interest in IoT or engaged in planning or launching IoT projects should consider attending.
Canon DSLR Camera Infected with Ransomware Over the Air
Vulnerabilities in the image transfer protocol used in digital cameras enabled a security researcher to infect with ransomware a Canon EOS 80D DSLR over a rogue WiFi connection.
A host of six flaws discovered in the implementation of the Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) in Canon cameras, some of them offering exploit options for a variety of attacks.
AT&T workers took $1 million in bribes to unlock 2 million phones, DOJ says
An indictment alleges that "Fahd recruited and paid AT&T insiders to use their computer credentials and access to disable AT&T's proprietary locking software that prevented ineligible phones from being removed from AT&T's network," a DOJ announcement yesterday said.
Future Computing Community of Interest Meeting, August 5-6, 2019, NITRD NCO
Goal: The Future Computing (FC) Community of Interest Meeting will explore the computing landscape for the coming decade and beyond, along with emerging and future application drivers, to inform agencies and to identify potential opportunities as well as gaps. It will also examine new software concepts needed for the effective use of advances that come with the future computing systems to ensure that the federal government is poised to respond to unanticipated challenges and opportunities.
Another rewrite for 737 Max software as cosmic bit-flipping tests glitch out systems – reportTesting focused on flipping five bits, said to control some of the most crucial parameters: positioning of flight controls and activation state of flight control systems, such as the infamous MCAS anti-stall system.
Microsoft to invest $1 billion in OpenAI, will jointly develop new supercomputer technologiesMicrosoft and OpenAI also plan to work together on new AI supercomputing technologies to solve the world’s hardest problems. “The companies will focus on building a computational platform in Azure of unprecedented scale, which will train and run increasingly advanced AI models, include hardware technologies that build on Microsoft’s supercomputing technology, and adhere to the two companies’ shared principles on ethics and trust..."
