Science & TechnologyS


Network

Wikipedia: You Still Can't Trust It

Lance Ulanoff
PC Mag
Fri, 14 Jan 2011 03:57 UTC
wikipediaprivacy
© PC Mag
Wikipedia, the world's largest user-generated online encyclopedia is 10. Sometimes it's hard to believe anything on the web could be 10 years old. In human years, 10 is but a pup: a small, gangly thing with too large hands and feet. Old enough to sense the onset of teenage-dom, but still too young to see the world as it really is. Knowing the difference between fact and fiction, for instance, can be particularly difficult at this age--and in this one way, Wikipedia is still a lot like that prepubescent child.

Six years ago, I pondered whether Wikipedia was in fact dangerous. So much information, so many people using it as a source, and so much potential for misuse. When I wrote the story, the site was being roiled by a fresh controversy. One man had, as a joke, written a fake biography of journalist John Seigenthaler. The entry included nonsense about him and the John F Kennedy assassination. The post author lost his job and Wikipedia ended up with a black eye. Up until then, it seems as if no one realized how easy it was for anyone to enter virtually anything in the information Wiki.
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Network

Age of surveillance: the fish is rotting from its head


Non-Linear Response
Fri, 14 Jan 2011 03:49 UTC
On 19th of December, 2010 elections were held in Belarus, my dear home country. The apparent popularity of opposition candidates was met with a crackdown. Seven out of nine presidential candidates were thrown to jail, some of them maimed in the process. A peaceful street protest of tens of thousands was brutally dispersed, with many hundreds beaten and arrested. All NGOs and political parties shut down, with human rights activists dragged to courts.

While none of it really was new for this long abused nation, some things surfaced for the first time. The Great Belarussian Firewall debuted, shutting down SSL connections, blocking major social media websites and replacing opposition news outlets with fake dummies. Traditional wiretapping of phone networks was combined with GSM location services: thousands of people are now getting subpoenas and are dragged to police stations for being on streets in the vicinity of protests.
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Bug

Lame Stuxnet worm 'full of errors', says security consultant

John Leyden
The Register
Wed, 19 Jan 2011 03:42 UTC
Far from being cyber-spy geniuses with ninja-like black-hat coding skills, the developers of Stuxnet made a number of mistakes that exposed their malware to earlier detection and meant the worm spread more widely than intended.

Stuxnet, the infamous worm that infected SCADA-based computer control systems, is sometimes described as the world's first cyber-security weapon. It managed to infect facilities tied to Iran's controversial nuclear programme before re-programming control systems to spin up high-speed centrifuges and slow them down, inducing more failures than normal as a result. The malware used rootkit-style functionality to hide its presence on infected systems. In addition, Stuxnet made use of four zero-day Windows exploits as well as stolen digital certificates.

All this failed to impress security consultant Tom Parker, who told the Black Hat DC conference on Tuesday that the developers of Stuxnet had made several mistakes. For one thing, the command-and-control mechanisms used by the worm were inelegant, not least because they sent commands in the clear. The worm spread widely across the net, something Parker argued was ill-suited for the presumed purpose of the worm as a mechanism for targeted computer sabotage. Lastly, the code-obfuscation techniques were lame.
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Display

Facebook suspends personal data-sharing feature

John Leyden
The Register
Tue, 18 Jan 2011 03:38 UTC
Developers kicked back out of your undie drawer

Facebook has "temporarily disabled" a controversial feature that allowed developers to access the home address and mobile numbers of users.

The social network suspended the feature, introduced on Friday, after only three days. The decision follows feedback from users that the sharing of data process wasn't clearly explained and criticism from security firms that the feature was ripe for abuse.

Individual users had to grant permission before developers could hook into the API on Facebook's platform. However, because many users often click through permission dialogue boxes without paying attention, concerns were raised by net security firms such as Sophos that the feature might make life easier for the developers of rogue applications.
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Display

Creepy as hell: Facebook developers get to know you better

Bill Ray and John Leyden
The Register
Mon, 17 Jan 2011 03:30 UTC
Home addresses and mobile numbers up for grabs

Facebook has added APIs for developers to access the home address and mobile numbers of users, so FarmVille can see where, as well as who, you are.

Permission to access such data must be given through the usual notification system, but with the vast majority of users simply agreeing with everything they're asked, the new facility is attracting privacy concerns beyond those incurred by sharing one's details with the developers of Bejeweled Blitz or similar.

fbprviacy
© The Register
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Bug

Carbon trading registry suspends ops following hack attack

John Leyden
The Register
Wed, 19 Jan 2011 03:26 UTC
Smokey and the bandits

A carbon emissions trading registry in Austria has suspended operations until at least 21 January following a hacking attack earlier this month.

The registry has been disconnected from the EU and UN carbon trading registries in response to the 10 January attack, details on which are unclear. A statement on the trading registry website (extract below) explains that the disconnection from other registries and suspension of operations is a security precaution taken to safeguard the operation of wider EU systems while problems on the Austrian site are identified and resolved.
Umweltbundesamt GmbH as registry and ECRA GmbH as registry service provider inform that for security reasons all access to the Austrian emissions trading registry has been locked because of a hacker attack on 10 January 2011. The Austrian registry can therefore not be reached until further notice.

Since the registry also had to be disconnected from the CITL and the ITL to ensure security, it is currently not foreseeable when trading in the Austrian emissions trading registry may continue.
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Magnify

$1b effort yields no bioterror defenses

Bryan Bender
Boston
Mon, 17 Jan 2011 03:21 UTC
Mass. labs in line to join scaled-back Pentagon program

The Pentagon is scaling back one of its largest efforts to develop treatments for troops and civilians infected in a germ warfare attack after a $1 billion, five-year program fell short of its primary goal.

Even the heavy infusion of research cash and a unified effort by university labs and biotech companies from Boston to California were insufficient to break through limitations of genetic science, according to government officials and specialists in biological terrorism.

Instead, the Pentagon's next $1 billion for the Transformational Medical Technologies program will focus on better ways to identify mutant versions of Ebola, Marburg, and other deadly viruses. Those are among the genetically modified agents that officials fear could be used by terrorists or rogue states against urban or military targets.
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Sun

Plasma Rain on The Sun


SpaceWeather
Wed, 19 Jan 2011 16:24 UTC
A sheet of plasma more than 350,000 km wide is rising and falling along the sun's southwestern limb today. It's so big, it makes an easy target for backyard observatories. Amateur astronomer Michael Buxton sends this time lapse movie from Ocean Beach, California:


"I made the movie at 1 minute intervals from 1753-1934 UT on Jan. 18th," he explains. "It was a real jaw dropper. Even in my small telescope (a 4-inch Takahashi refractor with a H-alpha solar filter) you could clearly see blobs of plasma falling to the stellar surface."
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Bug

Dutch Scientist Has Solution To Global Food Crisis - Bugs


BBC News
Wed, 19 Jan 2011 00:00 UTC
Image
Dutch scientist Arnold van Huis has advocated bugs as a healthy, green, alternative food, saying it is time to break old eating habits.

Insect dishes could be the answer to the global food crisis, shrinking land and water resources, he argued.

"Children don't have a problem with eating insects," he told Reuters.

Prof van Huis gives lectures, tastings and cookery classes with a master chef who prepares Dutch-farmed bugs.

The problem for adults is psychological, he said, and "only tasting and experience can make them change their minds".

Insects are a long-established food in some parts of the world such as Mexico and Thailand.
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Beaker

The genetic basis of brain diseases

Don Powell
Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
Sun, 19 Dec 2010 22:06 UTC
A set of brain proteins is found to play a role in over 100 brain diseases and provides a new insight into evolution of behavior

In recent research scientists studied human brain samples to isolate a set of proteins that accounts for over 130 brain diseases. The paper also shows an intriguing link between diseases and the evolution of the human brain.
protiens brain diseases
© UnknownBrain tissue samples were removed from patients undergoing brain surgery (left image). As shown in the middle image, two nerve cells are shown with their long branches which contact one another at synapses and one of them is boxed (for illustration purposes). From the synapses, the proteins were identified and as shown in the right image, each protein can be represented as a point, and the lines show the connections between proteins. This shows how the many proteins in the PSD are connected in a network or roadmap. Many of these proteins are involved in human diseases and these are shown as 'stars' in the protein network map.

Brain diseases are the leading cause of medical disability in the developed world according to the World Health Organisation and the economic costs in the USA exceeds $300 billion.

The brain is the most complex organ in the body with millions of nerve cells connected by billions of synapses. Within each synapse is a set of proteins, which, like the components of an engine, bind together to build a molecular machine called the postsynaptic density - also known as the PSD. Although studies of animal synapses have indicated that the PSD could be important in human diseases and behaviour, surprisingly little was known about it in humans.
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