New Top on the TOP500 – 415 PF!

Breaking News Edition

We have a new #1 on the TOP500 list of most powerful supercomputers! Big gets bigger by a factor of 2.8x as Fujitsu’s “Supercomputer Fugaku” tops the list at 415 PFlops.  There are also an additional three new entries in the top ten. We break down the top of the list in this fascinating episode of RadioFreeHPC.

Listen to us now! It will help you to amaze your friends and dismay your enemies with your newfound knowledge of the list. We have it here and first! Or at least not much later than others!

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@HPC_Guru Speaketh! Kind of.

Our Guest Today is...

In this extraordinary episode of Radio Free HPC, the crew interviews the industry icon that is @HPC_Guru. This is the first time that anyone has been granted an interview with him and we’re proud to have been chosen for this honor.

We posed an even dozen questions and received very thoughtful responses, which we rendered out in a machine voice in order to fit our podcast format. In the interview, HPC_Guru tells us his top five cool things in HPC today, why he remains anonymous, where he thinks HPC hardware will be in 10 years and who he thinks will be the first to reach exascale. And that’s just four of our 12 questions!

We don’t have to tell you that @HPC_Guru is a legend in the industry, as is his Twitter account. He has more than 15,000 followers and has tweeted over 38,000 times. Just to put that in context, if his average tweet is 150 characters, then he’s tweeted 5.7 million characters. Or if you look at it as words, HPC Guru has beaten the hell out of Leon Tolstoy’s War & Peace. Tolstoy came up with a piddling 587,287 words in his novel while HPC Guru has written roughly 712,500 words – and HPC Guru has written about more difficult content. Supercomputing is much more complex than Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. While this is impressive, it’s not quite as many words/characters as Timothy Prickett Morgan writes in a typical year.

If you printed up HPC Guru’s tweets, the tome would come in at more than four pounds, and that’s single spaced. That’s as much as a high-end laptop, including the storage and maybe even the power brick. Looking for another metric? If @HPC_Guru printed out each of his tweets, two per sheet of 8.5 by 11 inch paper, and laid them end to end, it would stretch a little over 3.3 MILES.

Give this groundbreaking episode a listen, in fact, listen to it twice to get the full impact.

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Climbing El Capitan? Details Detailed!

 Supercomputer Leaps to New Peaks

At the top of the show we discuss whether Indiana (where Jessi is located at Purdue) is in the heartland or not. We all agree that it is and, yes, Jessi sees Larry Bird all the time.

Getting into the heart of the episode, Dan talks about the briefing he received on the new Lawrence Livermore El Capitan system to be built by HPE/Cray. This new $600 million system will be fueled by the AMD Genoa processor coupled with AMD’s Instinct GPUs. Performance should come in at TWO 64-bit exaflops peak, which is very, very sporty. The new box (more like a room) will be 10x faster than today’s fastest supercomputer and faster than the top 200 supercomputers in the world – combined.

As the show continues, we talk about the specifics of the system and components. Henry make the unfortunate mistake of bringing up IEEE floating point and sending Dan into a mini-rant. Back to the show, the system should require somewhere close to 30MW worth of electricity, which is much lower than the nearly 60MW predicted just a year or so ago. Not surprisingly, the system will be liquid cooled, but not, as we speculate, cooled by Slushy machines. We have a tremendous tech talk around the varying aspects of the machine and AMD’s great progress in clawing their way back into the market. Well worth a listen.

Why No One Should Ever Be Online. Ever.

In this edition, Henry talks about how an ultrasonic hack can make your phone vulnerable to pownership. Just sending the exact right frequency of sound to a phone sitting on a solid object might be enough to unlock it and let a miscreant get at all of your goodies. Yikes!

Catch of the Week

Jessi:  Astronaut applications have opened up again! If you ever wanted to go to space, this might be your chance. You’ll want to have a strong science and computing background – plus hero or heroine good looks wouldn’t hurt either.

Shahin:  Discusses AMD vs. NVIDIA GPU comparative shipment figures from 4Q2019.

Henry:  Net is empty, ouch.

Dan:  Bees can count to six, which is hugely disquieting. If bees can do math, we might be doomed. Maybe this is why beehives are hexagonal?

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Slingshotting to Exascale, It's Hot!

At the top of this episode, Henry notes that the temperature in his city will be touching -15F, which is plenty cold. However, it’s very good overclocking weather as Dan and Shahin point out. Not quite quantum weather, unfortunately.

Cray Slingshot Interconnect

We quickly get to the main topic of the day, an examination of HPE/Cray’s Slingshot interconnect. It’s Ethernet on HPC steroids and will be the interconnect of choice for their upcoming slate of Exascale systems. Slingshot includes a bunch of HPC enhancements while maintaining compatibility with existing Ethernet devices and protocols. Cray has designed a new Ethernet superset of features that includes smaller headers, support for smaller message sizes, plus other features aimed at cutting Ethernet latency and improving performance on HPC-oriented interconnect tasks. At the heart of this new interconnect is their innovative 64 port switch that provides a maximum of 200 Gb/s per port and can support Cray’s enhanced Ethernet along with standard Ethernet message passing. It also has advanced congestion control and quality of service modes that ensure that each job gets their right amount of bandwidth.
The architecture can scale to an astounding 279,040 endpoints, which is, as we note, “a lot of endpoints.” We also kick around the possibility that HPE/Cray might sell the interconnect as a standalone for use with competitive gear.



As mentioned on the call, the chips on this switch run so hot that they need liquid cooling – a first for interconnect processors. We also discuss the rising heat load coming from new CPUs and particularly ASICs and how network design can greatly impact costs. Listen to the show to learn about more, it’s a good and meaty discussion.

Why Nobody Should Ever be Online. Ever.

Henry’s latest reason why we need to abandon the internet cracks us all up. What’s so funny? It’s that the Phillips smart lightbulbs need a firmware upgrade in order to prevent miscreants from pwoning your entire network. No kidding, it’s true. And hilarious. Here’s the link. This has Henry thinking about how to protect his new home from war flying drones. He’s looking into drone killing home-based air defense systems or perhaps a whole-home Faraday cage.

Catch of the Week

Henry:  Another security related story, this time about low level exploits in the Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) that can expose tens of millions of devices to internet troublemakers. This is highly disturbing since there is so much Cisco gear out there and the fix relies on users updating their firmware to plug the holes. Ouch.

Jessi:  Brings athletics into the podcast, which is the cause of some banter about how totally un-athletic the rest of us are (with the exception of Jessi, of course). Nike is using big time computation to 3D print their new uppers to give athletes the ultimate advantage in shoe performance.

Shahin:  Alerts us to a comprehensive review of AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper 3990X, the first CPU in the world to sport 64 cores. This CPU is currently the top of AMD’s line and is just another signpost signaling AMD’s resurgence. Welcome back, AMD.

Dan:  As we covered in a prior episode, Microsoft had the fantastic idea of forcing their corporate Office 365 users to have Microsoft’s Bing installed as their default search engine, using an update to accomplish this task. Well, the users have spoken and their voice was heard loud and clear in Redmond. The company is retreating from their forced ‘upgrade’ to Bing and back pedaling with all due speed. Hee. Hee.

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RISC-V CEO Sees Bright Global Future for Open Source CPUs

RISC-V, Historic Passwords Revealed, End of the World

We’re missing Henry S. Newman this week, who is down in Los Cruces inspecting and overseeing the construction of his new crib. Dan and Shahin discuss just how little they’d want to be the general contractor working to build Henry’s house. Henry would be deploying a set of lasers to make sure that the foundation was true to the nearest 1/64^th of an inch and all the while pointing to the contract which contains his exacting requirements. Dan wants to be there in a lawn chair, live blogging the entire process.

Open Sourcing the CPU? What Does it Mean and How Does it Work?

We have a very special guest today:  Calista Redmond, CEO of upstart RISC-V, the designers of a new open source processor instruction set which is looking to disrupt the entire industry. RISC-V can be used for light weight tasks such as embedded processing but, on the other hand, is also going to be utilized as the system accelerator for the European Exascale initiative boxes. That’s some serious flexibility. In our discussion, we briefly cover the origins of RISC-V, which started at Berkeley several years ago. It’s important to keep in mind that RISC-V is an instruction set, not a processor. Anyone can use the RISC-V instruction set, modify it for their unique needs, and then fab their own chips. Today, the instruction set is being used in everything from the smallest embedded device to large scale-out systems. The business model for RISC-V is different than most any other company. They make the ISA freely available to all comers. The RISC-V Foundation drives the design and development of IP, software, and tools for the instruction set. Foundation members pay dues and in return receive access to Foundation technology and programs, plus visibility and input into the RISC-V roadmap. Our interview with Calista covers a broad range of topics including how the foundation works to alleviate the risks of ISA fragmentation, where the strongest interest in RISC-V is geographically and workload-wise, and a comparison of RISC-V’s open source nature vs. the proprietary nature of existing ISA’s. Give it a listen, it’s a great introduction to RISC-V and the paradigm of open source ISA’s. We include an excerpt of a recent article on RISC-V in The Economist:

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.

Catch of the Week

Since we don’t have Henry, we don’t get a new episode of “Henry Newman’s Why No One Should be Online. Ever”, but we’ll somehow survive. As usual, we do have our Catch of the Week feature: Shahin:   Historic UNIX passwords cracked and recovered. Both the passwords and hashing algorithms were pretty weak back in the day and we now know just how weak. Listen to the podcast to hear some of the most important passwords of the era, including Eric Schmidt, Dennis Richie, Brian Keringhan, and Ken Thompson – who probably has the best password from a technical standpoint. We also discuss how much time and hardware it took to crack these passwords.

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).

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.

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.

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Coral is Cray for All

Cray Pulls an Exascale Hat Trick

Guess who's having a great year? Think Aurora, Frontier, and El Capitan. Cray has put some nice numbers on the accounts receivable ledger, and these are not ordinary numbers. The Exascale era is being defined substantially by the DOE Coral program and the commercial markets are watching as their computing needs start looking like those of the national labs. In that context, Cray's clean sweep makes its leadership in this area very important.
All of this is happening as Cray gears up to become what we hope to be an important part of HPE. The last time Cray sold anything like this to anyone was Cray BSD going to Sun, and that ended up being a multibillion dollar juggernaut. Exascale is a bigger deal, especially as supercomputing goes mainstream because of AI and data science. Exciting times. And kudos to HPE for snapping up Cray at the right time.

The impact of AI on Science

Speaking of AI, there is a series of town halls is being held around the nation by Argonne National Labs "aimed at collecting community input on the opportunities and challenges facing the scientific community in the era of convergence of High Performance Computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and the expected integration of large-scale simulation, advanced data analysis, data driven predictive modeling, theory, and high-throughput experiments. The term we are using to represent the next generation of methods and scientific opportunity is 'AI for Science'."
Co-chairing the town halls are Rick Stevens of Argonne, Kathy Yelick from Berkeley Labs, and Oak Ridge Labs' Jeff Nichols. Dan references a very good interview with Rick Stevens.

Henry Newman's Feel-Good Security Corner

Henry delights us all once again by describing how your camera can be an "Enter Here" sign for malware:

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.

Catch of the Week

It was a pretty full episode and so we skip Catch-of-the-Week segment this week.

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ExaScale is a 4-way Competition

In this post-ISC show, the RadioFree team discusses

• Magical cooling technology from Europe. Dan goes over magic beads that draw heat away and can carry-on doing it pretty much forever in a technology from the venerable Fraunhofer Institute and showcased by Lenovo.
• How pursuit of ExaScale computing is turning into heated competition with the US, China, Japan, and Europe. The European effort is targeting 2 pre-exa installation in the coming months, and 2 actual ExaScale installations in the 2022-2023 timeframe at least one of which will be based on European technology. This presumably refers to the European Process Initiative.
  The software ecosystem is an important consideration and how they all evolve and whether or not they converge will be a big issue.
• Another heated competition at the ISC Student Cluster Competition with the team from South Africa claiming the top spot. Dan has developed an efficiency metric that he will unveil in a future episode. This could separate the prowess of the team from that of the system!

Catch of the Week

Henry:

Henry point out the challenge for customers when the company that breached their data goes out of business.

Collections Firm Behind LabCorp, Quest Breaches Files for Bankruptcy

A medical billing firm responsible for a recent eight-month data breach that exposed the personal information on nearly 20 million Americans has filed for bankruptcy, citing “enormous expenses” from notifying affected consumers and the loss of its four largest customers.

Shahin:

Shahin highlights a paper on the beginnings of the programming language APL. A cool historical account.

The Socio-Technical Beginnings of APL, by Eugene McDonnell

This paper gives some of the history of implementations of APL, and concentrates on the system aspects of these implementations, paying special attention to the evolution of the workspace concept, the time-sharing scheduling strategy, and the handling of the terminal. It contrasts the development of APL with the development of other time-sharing systems which were being built at the same time.

Dan:

Dan relays the sad story of the multi-year demise of a the honor bar at the hotel near ISC.
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Quantum Computing and HPC

Quantum Computing and HPC

Another scintillating and insightful episode of RFHPC is about Quantum Computing and HPC and how the two spaces are evolving and cooperating.

We welcome a a distinguished guest with a most suitable background to talk to us about HPC and Quantum Computing. Mike Booth,  who’s been in supercomputing since 1979 including stints at Cray through 2000 where he ran the Software and Applications division and was later a GM at StorageTek heading the network storage division. He got into Quantum Computing when he joined D-Wave. He had just accepted to be the CTO of Quantum Computing, Inc. when we recorded this show.

We discuss and touch on how Quantum Computing and HPC interface, analog vs digital, qubits, magnets, resistors, connectors, cryogenics, algorithms, languages, the huge search spaces, NP-complete problems, quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (Qubo), Tabu search, etc. and how they are two different games right now but touching two sides of the big problems that represent grand challenges. Because QC is an accelerator, it fits nicely with how a lot of HPC is being done today.

We’re going to have to bring Mike back and we look forward to that.

ExaScale at Oakridge

Mike happens to be in Tennessee, and the episode was recorded when the new ExaScale system at Oakridge was announced so the team. That was quite a significant day for US science, and a second big win for Cray, this time with AMD. It's one of the few large systems that is not based on Intel or Nvidia technologies, and was described as:

• 100 Cray Shasta cabinets
• 40 MW power
• More than 1 million lbs weight
• 7,300 square feet
• 90 miles of cabling
• 5,900 gallons of water per minute for cooling

We don't remember who exactly had a hard stop, but no time for Catch of the Week this week, which some of you would be pleased to hear!

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TOP500 Jun2019, Facebook Coin

The new TOP500 list of most powerful supercomputers is out and we do our usual quick analysis. Not much changed in the TOP10 but a lot is changing further down the list. Here is a quick take:

• There are 65 new entries in 2019.
• US science is receiving support via DOE sites and academic sites like TACC.
• 26 countries are represented. China continues to widen its lead, now with 219 entries, followed by the US with 116, Japan with 29, France with 19, the UK with 18, Germany with 14, Ireland and the Netherlands with 13 each, and Singapore with 10.
• Vendors substantially reflect the country standings. Lenovo has 175 entries, Inspur 71, and Sugon 63, all in China. Cray with 42 and HPE with 40 (which will combine when their deal closes), followed by Dell at 17 and IBM at 16.  Bull has 21 entries.
• There are a lot of "accidental supercomputers" on the list. These are systems that probably are not be doing much science or AI work but they could, and the vendors counted them and it seems to be within the rules to list them. It's controversial but not a new practice.
• There are several systems listed as "Internet" companies. Hard to tell what that means but it points to the existence of very large clusters in the cloud for whatever purpose. Last year, there was one system listed as Amazon EC2, which remains on the list. This time, there is also one at Facebook. Usually the big social/cloud players don't care to participate, though they obviously could summon the resources to run the benchmarks.
• Just over half of systems use Ethernet as a fabric. A quarter us InfiniBand, nearly 50 use Intel's OmniPath, and the rest, 55, use custom interconnects like the ones Cray provides. The team talks about Cray+HPE entering the interconnect business for real and if so, they will be formidable.
• The majority of entries, 367, do not have any accelerators. 125 use Nvidia GPUs.
• The overwhelming majority of the systems, 478 of them, are based on Intel CPUs. 13 are IBM, and there is 1 system based on Arm provided by Cavium, now part of Marvell.
• So the when it comes to chips, it's an Intel game with a respectable showing by Nvidia when GPUs are used. Alternatives are bound to appear as the tens and tens of AI chips in the works become available and Arm, AMD, and IBM build on. The recently announced system at Oakridge will be all AMD, and that will point to an alternative as well.
• Notably, Intel is listed as the vendor for 2 entries and Nvidia is listed for 4. While Intel has stayed largely away from looking like a system vendor, Nvidia is going for it with its usual alacrity. That, and the pending acquisition of Mellanox by Nvidia should serve as a warning to all system vendors who might feel stuck between treating Nvidia as an important supplier and an up and coming competitor.

CryptoSuper500

Shahin mentions the 2nd edition of the CryptoSuper500 list (really 50 for now), a list developed by his colleague Dr. Stephen Perrenod, which was launched last November, and is being released at the same time as the TOP500. The TOP500 has spawned variations that look at different workloads and attributes, for example, the Green500, Graph500, and IO500 lists. CryptoSuper500 was inspired by those lists. The material for the inaugural edition of the CryptoSuper500 list here.
Cryptocurrency mining operations are often pooled and are very much supercomputing class, typically using accelerator technologies such as custom ASICs, FPGAs, or GPUs. Bitcoin is the most notable of such currencies. Scroll down for the top-10 list and see the slides for the full list and the methodology.

Catch of the Week

Henry:

Henry talks about check-out lanes at Target all being down for unknown reasons, though he hesitates to call that a cybersecurity breach. It turned out he's right and the company blamed an "internal technology issue".

Target down (then back up) as cash registers fail and leave long lines

Target's payment systems appeared to be missing the mark the day before Father's Day, as terminals went AWOL for a couple of hours in a number of the company's US retail outlets. The outage caused long lines but prompted an encouraging show of sympathy for Target employees from people on Twitter. And there were some jokes too, of course.

Shahin:

Facebook is expected to release a new cryptocurrency that is already impacting the crypto market.

Here’s what we know so far about the secretive Facebook coin

Facebook is likely to release information about its secretive cryptocurrency project, codenamed Libra, as soon as June 18, TechCrunch reports.

As is traditional with new cryptocurrencies, the social networking giant is expected to release a so-called “white paper” outlining how the currency works and the company’s plans for it.

Dan:

Dan reminds us all of the inimitable Erich Anton Paul von Däniken and his ancient astronauts hypotheses!

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Enterprises going HPC, Chips go Open Source, China goes for the top spot

We continue to want to make these introductions pretty brief here but not this time, apparently! Here's this week's synopsis.

Nvidia GTC 2019 announcements

We discussed the recent GTC conference. Dan has been attending since well before it became the big and important conference that it is today. We get a quick update on what was covered: the long keynote, automotive and robotics, the Mellanox acquisition, how a growing fraction of enterprise applications will be AI. In agreement with the message from GTC, Shahin re-iterates his long-held belief that the future of enterprise applications will be HPC and once again asserts that AI as we know it today is a subset of HPC. Not everyone agrees. Henry brings up varying precisions in AI and a discussion ensues about what is HPC. There seems to be agreement that regardless of what label you put on it, it is the same (HPC) industry and community that is driving this new trend. And that led to a discussion of selling into the enterprise and the need for new models and vocabulary and such. Speaking of varying precision, there is also Nvidia's new automatic mixed precision capability for Tensorflow and there is a bit of discussion on that.

China plans multibillion dollar investment in supercomputing

On the heels of the Aurora announcement, there was news in the South China Morning Post that the top spot in supercomputing is something the country is investing in. No surprise, but interesting to see, and consistent with the general view that supercomputing drives competitive strength.

Catch of the Week

Henry:

Facebook Stored Hundreds of Millions of User Passwords in Plain Text for Years

Hundreds of millions of Facebook users had their account passwords stored in plain text and searchable by thousands of Facebook employees — in some cases going back to 2012, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Facebook says an ongoing investigation has so far found no indication that employees have abused access to this data.

Shahin:

MIPS R6 Architecture Now Available for Open Use

MIPS 32-bit and 64-bit architecture – the most recent version, release 6 – will become available Thursday (March 28) for anyone to download at MIPS Open web page. Under the MIPS Open program, participants have full access to the MIPS R6 architecture free of charge – with no licensing or royalty fees.

Dan:

Vengeful sacked IT bod destroyed ex-employer's AWS cloud accounts. Now he'll spent rest of 2019 in the clink

An irate sacked techie who rampaged through his former employer's AWS accounts with a purloined login, nuking 23 servers and triggering a wave of redundancies, has been jailed.  

Dead LAN's hand: IT staff 'locked out' of data center's core switch after the only bloke who could log into it dies

'We can replace it but we have no idea what the config is on the device'

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Arm for Exascale is Coming

The show starts with a brief reference to Henry’s "Gator" nickname, a shout out to listeners 13, 14, and 15, plus a bad Arm processor pun. (Puns are the lowest form of humor other than limericks, Dan wits.)

This is an Arm heavy show, with our opening discussion concerning the Arm system at Sandia and a talk given by Sandia’s Michael Aguilar at the recent HPC Advisory Council’s Stanford Conference. The new system, dubbed Astra, was built by HPE and is the biggest Arm-based super on the Top500 list at 2.3 PFlop/s.

The guys discuss how quickly the system was brought up and how Sandia didn’t run into any major problems along the way – which is unusual for a system utilizing a new processor. We take a tangent into a discussion of new chip architectures and how this is leading to more options for customers.

Keeping with the Arm theme, the conversation moves to the new Arm Neoverse 128 core server processor. The guys are a bit agog over the 7nm size of the processor, wondering who is fabbing the chip, guessing TSMC. The new chip is 2.5x faster than previous Arm server processors and, according to Arm, also uses 30% less power.

The conversation moves to RISC V and whether it will be used as an accelerator or a CPU – eventually agreeing that it can be both.  We discuss how the chip can be used in various ways and how it can potentially replace a lot of things, including ASICs, which is pretty mind blowing.

Catch of the Week

Henry’s Catch of the Week concerns a new hardware hack that allows miscreants to capture payment info from a phone at the gas station. The bad guy uses a Bluetooth based skimmer to send payment info from contactless payment cards (or phones assumedly) via SMS message to the miscreant. You can read the frightening details at the link above, which goes to Krebs on Security – a great site if you want to scare yourself senseless.

Shahin chimes in with something even scarier – the Evil USB Cable:  a USB patch cable that has an embedded wifi transmitter that can send all of the data flowing through that cable to a bad guy. Yikes!

Dan attempts to put minds at ease by exposing the truth behind a hacking myth:  can a hacker easily get control of your laptop’s webcam? The answer? Nope, they can’t. A Wall Street Journal writer worked with a highly qualified white hat hacker to see just what it would take for a hacker to gain control of a Windows or Mac embedded camera.

It turns out that penetrating a laptop camera is pretty difficult and not really possible unless the user cooperates to make it work. On the Windows side, the writer had to disable Microsoft’s anti-virus and real time virus checking in order to get the hacker payload into her system. The file was also flagged as dangerous by Microsoft Word, so she had to dismiss that warning as well.

The Mac OS was even more difficult for the hacker to penetrate. First, the user had to install LibreOffice, meaning she had to disable Mac security settings that prevent unverified software from installing on her system. She also had to disable the security inside LibreOffice.

Take a look at the article and see if you agree with Dan, who believes that laptop cameras can’t be hacked by outsiders unless you essentially invite them in by disabling your OS and application security.

Subscribe on iTunes or Download this week’s edition of Radio Free HPC for a chance of winning out eternal gratitude and respect!

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