UPDATE: Today (Tuesday) the FCC voted to pass the net neutrality regulations mentioned toward the bottom of this post. The rules include the provisions that wireless and traditional Internet be treated separately, and generally made everyone unhappy. However, expect a fight in Congress to either overturn the rules or strip the FCC of its authority in this sphere.
Behind closed doors, wireless providers are talking about a future that’s a net neutrality advocate’s worst nightmare.
Last week the tech companies Allot Communications and Openet, which provide products for large carriers like AT&T and Verizon, demonstrated new products in a web seminar, some details of which have leaked out. The PowerPoint slides detail a plan to monitor your online behavior and charge you for your use of certain applications. For example:
In the seventh slide of the … PowerPoint, a Vodafone user would be charged two cents per MB for using Facebook, three euros a month to use Skype and $0.50 monthly for a speed-limited version of YouTube. But traffic to Vodafone’s services would be free, allowing the mobile carrier to create video services that could undercut NetFlix on price. [Wired]
Today WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, wanted in connection with sex-related charges in Sweden, turned himself in to the police in London. And while Assange’s personal troubles escalate, so does the online war over WikiLeaks.
Last week came the cyber attack against WikiLeaks.org, which hacker “Jester” claimed to have organized.
On his blog, Jester describes himself as a”hacktivist for good” and someone who is “obstructing the lines of communication for terrorists, sympathizers, fixers, facilitators, oppressive regimes and other general bad guys.” [Los Angeles Times]
That disrupted the site’s operation and left WikiLeaks scrambling. But this week the tide of hacking has turned: Hackers operating under the names Operation Payback or Anonymous are targeting sites that have withdrawn support from WikiLeaks during the current controversy.
Noa Bar Yossef, senior security strategist for Imperva, commented via e-mail to say, “Operation Payback’s goal is not hacking for profit. In the classical external hacker case we see hackers grab information from wherever they can and monetize on it. In this case though, the hackers’ goal is to cripple a service, disrupt services, protest their cause and cause humiliation. In fact, what we see here is a very focused attack – knocking the servers offline due to so-called ‘hacker injustice’.” [PC World]
It was late September when the world got wind of Stuxnet, the complex piece of malware that appeared to specifically target Iranian nuclear sites. Now, analysis of Stuxnet suggests it was almost perfectly designed to corrupt nuclear centrifuges, according to David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security.
On Wednesday, Mr. Albright and a colleague, Andrea Stricker, released a report saying that when the worm ramped up the frequency of the electrical current supplying the centrifuges, they would spin faster and faster. The worm eventually makes the current hit 1,410 Hertz, or cycles per second — just enough, they reported, to send the centrifuges flying apart. In a spooky flourish, Mr. Albright said in the interview, the worm ends the attack with a command to restore the current to the perfect operating frequency for the centrifuges — which, by that time, would presumably be destroyed. [The New York Times]
Computer experts don’t know Stuxnet’s origin for sure, though the Times’ story drops a few cryptic hints of Israeli involvement. And further study of the attack shows that although Stuxnet appears calibrated to disrupt centrifuges, it could be easily adapted to seize the reins of other systems.
The widespread interconnection of corporate networks and use of SCADA systems [supervisory control and data acquisition] means that industrial infrastructure is increasingly vulnerable to software attack. Such control systems are used in virtually every industry—food production, vehicle assembly, chemical manufacturing—and are commonly exposed to insecure networks. This leaves them vulnerable to tampering, such as with Stuxnet, as well as intellectual property theft. [Ars Technica]
This week China unveiled a new supercomputer that’s pretty darn quick.
The Tianhe-1A machine housed at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin reportedly works at the rate of 2.5 petaflops (a petaflop being about a thousand trillion operations per second), and reportedly will take the top spot in the rankings of world supercomputers when the people who attend to this list release the new version next month. That will bump the top U.S. machine down to number 2.
Personally, I’m not going to panic until China leapfrogs the United States on the Princeton Review list of top party countries or People Magazine’s sexiest countries in the world. But the announcement brought talk of American unease about being bested by China, and American alarm over China’s growing technological expertise. So is the vague, festering worry about the Chinese supercomputer justified? Let’s look at both sides of the argument.
Yes
Putting aside the issue of our wounded national pride, some experts say the real concern is whether the United States has the organization to match what China has done. CNET interviewed Jack Dongarra of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, keeper of the former fastest supercomputer, who called China’s achievement a “wake-up call.”
Spotting mistakes is a crucial part of typing (and indeed, life) and according to Gordon Logan and Matthew Crump, it’s a more complicated business than it might first appear. Using some clever digital trickery, the duo from Vanderbilt University found that the brain has two different ways of detecting typos. One is based on the characters that appear on the screen, and the other depends on the strokes of our fingers, as they tap away at the keys.
Logan and Crump asked 22 good typists to type 600 words presented on a screen, one at a time. Their efforts appeared below the target word, but all was not as it seemed. Throughout the experiment, Logan and Crump occasionally took control to the display. Sometimes, they put up the correct word, regardless of what the recruits actually typed so that their mistakes never appeared. On other trials, they deliberately introduced mistakes, which the typists hadn’t actually made.
To see whether the typists realized they were being toyed with, check out the full post at DISCOVER blog Not Exactly Rocket Science.
The Social Network arrives in theaters around America today. Written by Aaron Sorkin (creator of the TV shows The West Wing and Sports Night), the film purports to tell the tale of Mark Zuckerberg’s creation of Facebook at Harvard, and drips with backstabbing high drama. The early reviews are in, and the forming consensus is: It’s a fabulous film, but don’t go to the cinema expecting the truth.
The Facebook company itself has called the film a fiction. But that’s partly because Zuckerberg has shown no inclination to discuss his history—at least not with the creators of this film.
What makes The Social Network more intriguing than a standard biopic is that it was made without the co-operation of its principal subject — whose own mission in life seems to be to let us all make unauthorised biographies of each other. Personality and motivation inferred from a smattering of potentially misleading facts: isn’t that precisely the kind of thing that worries people about Facebook? [New Scientist]
Data centers are energy hogs. They run around the clock, sucking down power. So to save some public face (and save on their electric bills), some IT giants are experimenting with how to make their data centers much more efficient (pdf).
Enter Yahoo’s new building out in Lockport, New York, near Niagara Falls. It’s high-tech inspired by low-tech.
Those server buildings have been nicknamed the “Yahoo Chicken Coop” because they resemble their long, narrow design. This helps encourage natural air flow, however, which Yahoo said means that less than 1 percent of the building’s total energy consumption will be for cooling purposes. [PC World]
The software tool called Haystack was supposed to protect dissidents in Iran who wanted to use the Internet free of the government’s censorship. If third-party software testers are correct, though, flaws in the system meant to help those dissidents could have led authorities right to them. The Censorship Research Center, the San Francisco-based organization that created Haystack, has now pulled it back and asked users to destroy the existing copies.
“We have halted ongoing testing of Haystack in Iran pending a security review,” HaystackNetwork.com said in a brief statement. “If you have a copy of the test program, please refrain from using it.” [AFP]
Jacob Appelbaum, a security expert who volunteers with WikiLeaks, sounded the alarm.
This week computer manufacturer HP announced it is teaming up with chip-maker Hynix to bring the first memristors, or memory resistors, to market within three years. Able to store information even without a source of power, memristors have been hailed as a way to keep up with Moore’s Law.
Moore’s Law is that old adage, first uttered by Intel’s Gordon Moore in the 1960s, that the number of transistors one could fit on an integrated circuit should double every couple years or so.
But industry consensus had shifted in recent years to a widespread belief that the end of physical progress in shrinking the size modern semiconductors was imminent. Chip makers are now confronted by such severe physical and financial challenges that they are spending $4 billion or more for each new advanced chip-making factory. [The New York Times]
Scientists have cranked through the numbers and determined that no matter how you mangle a Rubik’s Cube, if you’re doing it right you can theoretically solve the puzzle in 20 moves or fewer. By doing it right, we mean doing it like a supercomputer: Researchers tapped Google’s spare computing power to burn through the Cube’s 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 starting positions.
Even given Google’s processing power, the team–which included a mathematician, a Google engineer, a math teacher, and a programmer–could not solve the problem using brute force alone. They had to take all the starting positions and divide them into more manageable chunks, 2.2 billion smaller groups called “corsets,” which Google’s computers could solve simultaneously.
“The primary breakthrough was figuring out a way to solve so many positions, all at once, at such a fast rate,” says Tomas Rokicki, a programmer from Palo Alto, California, who has spent 15 years searching for the minimum number of moves guaranteed to solve any configuration of the Rubik’s cube. [New Scientist]
P is not equal to NP. Seems simple enough. But if it’s true, it could be the answer to a problem computer scientists have wrestled for decades.
Vinay Deolalikar, who is with Hewlett-Packard Labs, has sent to peers copies of a proof he did stating that P is not equal to NP. Mathematicians are reviewing his work now—a task that could go on for a long time. If he’s correct, Deolalikar will have figured out one of the Clay Mathematics Institute’s seven Millennium Prize Problems, for which they give $1 million prizes. (Grigory Perelman won one of the seven for solving the Poincaré conjecture, but turned down the money last month.)
What’s all the hubbub? First, an explainer:
The P versus NP question concerns the speed at which a computer can accomplish a task such as factorising a number. Some tasks can be completed reasonably quickly – in technical terms, the running time is proportional to a polynomial function of the input size – and these tasks are in class P. If the answer to a task can be checked quickly then it is in class NP [New Scientist].
That definition is pretty abstract, so here’s a more concrete example:
Yesterday, Google and Verizon posted their joint policy proposal for internet regulation. The proposal suggests a legislative framework for Congress regarding our current “open internet.” An open internet means all bits are treated the same: internet service providers process every internetcontent provider’s information at the same speed–YouTube or Hulu, Wikipedia or Britannica. Though the Google Verizon plan is titled “a joint policy proposal for an open Internet,” it leaves some internet neutrality champions concerned; the plan does not address wireless service regulation and allows exceptions to the open internet standard for special broadband services.
We’ll break down the possible implications of this move, but first, a briefing on the basics.
What is an example of an alternative to our open internet? Internet content providers could pay more to get their information to you more quickly–like paying for a plane ticket instead of taking the bus. Since October of 2009, Verizon and Google have issued a shared statement of principles, submitted a joint filing to the FCC, and published a joint op-ed on net neutrality. But after talks between the two companies, a New York Times article and others asked if Google–a self-proclaimed proponent of net neutrality–might pay Verizon to get information to users more quickly, thus ending our net neutral system.
In April, a federal appeals court ruled that the FCC–which can regulate interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable–cannot regulate the way internet service providers conduct business. So instead the FCC, which has said it’s in favor of the current open internet, invited major internet players to a series of meetings to devise an agreement. But after weeks of private meetings, talks seem to be breaking down:
The F.C.C. in recent weeks has been trying to negotiate its own agreement in a series of private meetings with a group of big Internet service and content companies, including Google and Verizon, to ensure net neutrality. But the agency canceled a session scheduled for Thursday after the reports of the Google-Verizon talks. [An FCC spokesman] said in a statement that the effort “has been productive on several fronts, but has not generated a robust framework to preserve the openness and freedom of the Internet, one that drives innovation, investment, free speech and consumer choice.” [New York Times]
Yesterday, Google announced on their official blog that they’re pulling the plug on Google Wave–an emailing, instant messaging, and picture-sharing progeny, that allowed users to communicate real-time to share documents, videos, and what they had for lunch. If you haven’t heard of Google Wave, first announced last May, you’re not alone. That’s one reason Urs Hölzle, Google Senior Vice President for Operations, cites for the Wave’s demise:
Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. [Google]
But why didn’t more folks ride the Wave? We’ve gathered some opinions.
Kamil crater, at only about 150 feet wide and 50 feet deep, may not break any size records–but what the Egyptian crater lacks in range it makes up for with cleanliness. In an paper published yesterday in Science, researchers say that its “pristine” impact, spotted in 2009 during a Google Earth survey, makes the crater an ideal model to understand similar impacts.
The best place to see a clean crater? Rocky or icy planets without an atmosphere. Earth’s weather quickly erodes a crater’s structures, making it difficult to determine how exactly a meteorite struck. The Kamil crater, study leader Luigi Folco says, has avoided this fate:
“This crater is really a kind of beauty because it’s so well-preserved that it will tell us a lot about small-scale meteorite impacts on the Earth’s crust…. It’s so nice. It’s so neat. There is something extraordinary about it.” [Space.com]
Though the wing-flapping contraptions of early human flight haven’t quite caught on, researchers think birds may still have something to teach us about navigating the air: how to land. MIT researchers have made a system that can bring a modified glider to an elegant bird-like stop, causing it to set down on its tail.
Russ Tedrake of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and his student Rick Cory developed the computer model to bring a basic foam glider to a unique landing. The principle behind the plane’s stop is the same one used by stunt planes–stall. When its wings tilt back, the plane loses lift and falls from the sky. Traditional planes don’t use this method to land because the airflow is chaotic (see smoke visualization above) making it hard to predict how the plane will behave.
Birds come to a stop by tilting their wings back at sharp angles. This creates turbulence and large, unpredictable whirlwinds behind the wings. If an airplane pointed its wings up in this way, it would lose lift and fall out of the sky. But MIT researchers wanted to take advantage of stall–specifically, post-stall drag–to help a plane come to a controlled landing. [Popular Science]
80beats is DISCOVER's news aggregator, weaving together the choicest tidbits from the best articles on the day's most compelling topics.
80beats is written by Veronique Greenwood and Valerie Ross. This team darts through each day's science news faster than the ruby-throated hummingbird that beats its wings 80 times per second. Send ideas, tips, suggestions, and complaints to [azeeberg at discovermagazine dot com].
UPDATE: Today (Tuesday) the FCC voted to pass the net neutrality regulations mentioned toward the bottom of this post. The rules include the provisions that wireless and traditional Internet be treated separately, and generally made everyone unhappy. However, expect a fight in Congress to either overturn the rules or strip the FCC of its authority in this sphere.
Today WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, wanted in connection with sex-related charges in Sweden, 
It was late September when 
This week China unveiled a new supercomputer that’s pretty darn quick.
Data centers are energy hogs. They run around the clock, sucking down power. So to save some public face (and save on their electric bills), some 
The software tool called Haystack was supposed to protect dissidents in 
This week computer manufacturer 
P is not equal to NP. Seems simple enough. But if it’s true, it could be the answer to a problem computer scientists have wrestled for decades.
Kamil crater, at only about 150 feet wide and 50 feet deep, may not break any size records–but what the Egyptian crater lacks in range it makes up for with cleanliness. In an 
