Martyn Williams
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Martyn Williams
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Free speech for computers, and nine other DARPA ideas
If free speech for humans is worth fighting for, is free speech for computers worth fighting against?That's the type of question you might expect from someone who holds a doctor of philosophy degree in computer science and psychology and it's exactly what the audience at DARPA's Wait, What? conference in St. Louis heard on Thursday.Posing the question was Paul Cohen, who joined the Department of Defense-run research organization from the University of Arizona in 2013."Are you attracted or appalled by the idea of machines that have ideas and know how to express them?," he continued. "What if you were lonely? What if they were bigots? What if you could each change the other’s mind?"To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Xerox PARC’s new chip will self destruct in 10 seconds
Engineers at Xerox PARC have developed a chip that will self-destruct upon command, providing a potentially revolutionary tool for high-security applications.The chip, developed as part of DARPA’s vanishing programmable resources project, could be used to store data such as encryption keys and, on command, shatter into thousands of pieces so small, reconstruction is impossible.It was demonstrated at DARPA’s Wait, What? event in St. Louis on Thursday.“The applications we are interested in are data security and things like that,” said Gregory Whiting, a senior scientist at PARC in Palo Alto, California. “We really wanted to come up with a system that was very rapid and compatible with commercial electronics.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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US defense secretary mulls rapid grants for tech companies
The U.S. Department of Defense is considering offering rapid seed funding to private companies as a way to encourage more work on technology projects with the commercial sector, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter said Wednesday.The push for greater cooperation with tech companies has been a big theme for the DOD in the last year as it faces a growing and unprecedented threat from private and state actors on the Internet and beyond.That was demonstrated late last year when Sony Pictures suffered a devastating hack of its corporate email system that the U.S. government attributed to North Korea. Hackers based overseas have also been blamed for high-profile attacks on the Department of State and the Office of Personnel Management, the latter of which resulted in personal data on millions of government employees being lost.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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US defense secretary mulls rapid grants for tech companies
The U.S. Department of Defense is considering offering rapid seed funding to private companies as a way to encourage more work on technology projects with the commercial sector, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter said Wednesday. The push for greater cooperation with tech companies has been a big theme for the DOD in the last year as it faces a growing and unprecedented threat from private and state actors on the Internet and beyond. That was demonstrated late last year when Sony Pictures suffered a devastating hack of its corporate email system that the U.S. government attributed to North Korea. Hackers based overseas have also been blamed for high-profile attacks on the Department of State and the Office of Personnel Management, the latter of which resulted in personal data on millions of government employees being lost.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Carly Fiorina calls on Apple, Google to provide greater access for FBI
Republican presidential candidate and former tech-executive Carly Fiorina has called on Apple and Google to provide greater access to information about their users to the FBI and law enforcement in order to aid investigations.Speaking Thursday in a televised debate in Cleveland organized by Fox News Channel, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard said restrictions that prevent private companies and law enforcement from working together need to be changed.“I certainly support that we need to tear down cyber walls, not on a mass basis but on a targeted basis,” she said in response to a question from a moderator.“I do not believe that we need to wholesale destroy every American citizen’s privacy in order to go after those that we know are suspect or already a problem, but yes, there is more collaboration required between private sector companies and the public sector and specifically we know that we could have detected and repelled some of these cyber attacks if that collaboration had been permitted,” she said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Mt. Gox CEO Karpeles arrested by Japanese police
The CEO of failed Bitcoin exchange Mt.Gox was arrested in Japan early Saturday by police, according to several media reports.Mark Karpeles faces charges related to the loss of 650,000 bitcoins worth hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars when the Tokyo-based trading exchange collapsed in February 2014.Karpeles, a French citizen, is suspected of accessing the company’s computer systems and falsifying financial data, according Japan’s Kyodo News.Japanese broadcaster NHK showed video of a man that appeared to be Karpeles being led to a car by police in a residential district of Tokyo. The TV station said the footage was recorded around 6:40am Saturday, or Friday afternoon U.S. time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Samsung plots Galaxy S6 price cut, new phones to help business
Lackluster demand for its flagship Galaxy S6 smartphone and higher marketing costs led Samsung Electronics to another quarter of falling sales and profits in the April to June period.Net profit at the company was 5.75 trillion won (US$49 billion), down 8 percent on the same period a year earlier, while sales fell 7 percent to 48.5 trillion won, it said Wednesday. Both figures are in line with expectations published by Samsung earlier this month.In the key smartphone market, an area led by Samsung until recently, the popularity of Apple’s iPhone 6 and 6 Plus handsets and the rise of lower-cost phones from Chinese vendors squeezed Samsung at both the high and low end of the market.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Car and pedestrian collision? There’ll soon be an app for that
A safety system that ties cars and smartphones together to stop those heart-stopping near misses between cars and pedestrians could be standardized by the end of this year.The technology involves smartphones broadcasting data over a short-range radio channel to nearby cars, so the cars can determine if a collision is likely. Unlike today’s radar-based systems, this has the ability to warn around blind corners and can alert both the driver and pedestrian.It’s being developed by engineers at Honda and was demonstrated last week at the company’s new research and development center in Mountain View, in the heart of Silicon Valley.In the demonstration that took place in a parking lot, a car was slowly cruising a row looking for a space. Ahead, and unseen to the driver, a pedestrian was walking between a car and SUV while listening to music, and about to step into the path of the oncoming vehicle.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Car and pedestrian collision? There’ll soon be an app for that
A safety system that ties cars and smartphones together to stop those heart-stopping near misses between cars and pedestrians could be standardized by the end of this year. The technology involves smartphones broadcasting data over a short-range radio channel to nearby cars, so the cars can determine if a collision is likely. Unlike today’s radar-based systems, this has the ability to warn around blind corners and can alert both the driver and pedestrian. It’s being developed by engineers at Honda and was demonstrated last week at the company’s new research and development center in Mountain View, in the heart of Silicon Valley. In the demonstration that took place in a parking lot, a car was slowly cruising a row looking for a space. Ahead, and unseen to the driver, a pedestrian was walking between a car and SUV while listening to music, and about to step into the path of the oncoming vehicle.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Apple Pay rival CurrentC to start rolling out next month
CurrentC, an electronic payment system backed by many of the biggest retailers in the U.S., will begin a limited public roll-out in August, Bloomberg News reported on Friday.The smartphone-based technology is intended to rival payment services from Apple, Google and Samsung, and an August launch would be in line with the “mid-2015” schedule the company told IDG News Service in April.CurrentC will offer the same type of convenience as its rivals, enabling consumers to pay at participating retail outlets by phone. But rather than rely on the phone’s wireless NFC (near-field communications) chip, the first-generation CurrentC involves the customer scanning a barcode on a retail terminal to initiate payment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Honda’s trippy Dream Drive is an awesome use of virtual reality
As I climbed into the Honda Pilot SUV, I didn’t have high hopes.I was trying out Honda’s Dream Drive, a prototype technology that pairs an Oculus Rift headset with data about the car’s movements to produce a virtual reality simulation.The car was going to drive around the parking lot at Honda’s new R&D center here in Mountain View, California, and the headset would let me gaze into another world as we drove along.“I bet it will be a race track with cars whizzing by,” I thought as I put on the headset. Perhaps I’m jaded, but I’ve tried many VR demonstrations and while fun they often feel a bit lacking and uninspired.And sure enough, there was the race track. I could see spectators to the left, the pits to the right, and sponsorship banners (Honda’s, of course) on a gantry above the first straight.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Hillary Clinton sent classified information via personal email
A government investigation has concluded that Hillary Clinton sent classified information through a personal email account while she served as Secretary of State, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.The internal review of Clinton’s use of a personal account by the Inspector General for the intelligence community examined just 40 emails of the thousands sent through the account and found four of them contained information that should have been classified as “secret,” the newspaper said. None of the emails were marked as such.At the time they were sent, that was the second highest level of classification in the U.S. government.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Chrysler recalls 1.4M cars that were vulnerable to remote hacking
Chrysler has launched a recall of 1.4 million recent model cars that were vulnerable to being remotely accessed and controlled by hackers.The recall comes days after Wired reported a demonstration by hackers in which they were able to access and control a Chrysler Jeep as it was being driven.The hack detailed in the Wired article took place under somewhat controlled conditions—the driver, a Wired writer knew that it was about to happen—but it occurred on the busy Interstate 64 near St. Louis. It culminated in the vehicle slowing down and causing something of a traffic obstacle for cars behind.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Chrysler recalls 1.4M cars that were vulnerable to remote hacking
Chrysler has launched a recall of 1.4 million recent model cars that were vulnerable to being remotely accessed and controlled by hackers.The recall comes days after Wired reported a demonstration by hackers in which they were able to access and control a Chrysler Jeep as it was being driven.The hack detailed in the Wired article took place under somewhat controlled conditions—the driver, a Wired writer knew that it was about to happen—but it occurred on the busy Interstate 64 near St. Louis. It culminated in the vehicle slowing down and causing something of a traffic obstacle for cars behind.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Senate bill proposes cyber security standard for cars
Cars will have to be much better protected against hacking and new privacy standards will govern data collected from vehicles under proposed legislation introduced in the U.S. Senate on Tuesday.The Security and Privacy in Your Car Act of 2015 seeks to get a step ahead of what is seen by some as one of the next fronts in hacking: connected vehicles, which are always on the Internet and rely on sophisticated computer control systems.Proposed by Senators Edward J. Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, and Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, the act would mandate that critical software systems in cars be isolated and the entire vehicle be safeguarded against hacking by using “reasonable measures.” The proposed bill doesn’t define those measures.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Spy’s suicide adds to Hacking Team scandal in South Korea
A South Korean intelligence officer who used a controversial surveillance system from Italy’s Hacking Team was found dead over the weekend in an apparent suicide as controversy swirls in the country over use of the software.The officer, identified by local media only as Lim, was a 20-year cyber-security veteran of the country’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) and ran the department that used the software, according to reports.He was found dead on Saturday in a car south east of Seoul. Burnt coal was found in the car and an autopsy conducted a day after his death on Saturday found he died of asphyxiation, according to reports. Burning charcoal in a confined space is a relatively common method of committing suicide in South Korea and Japan.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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China retains supercomputing crown in latest Top 500 ranking
A supercomputer developed by China’s National Defense University remains the fastest publically known computer in the world while the U.S. is close to an historic low in the latest edition of the closely followed Top 500 supercomputer ranking, which was published on Monday.The Tianhe-2 computer, based at the National Super Computer Center in Guangzhou, has been on the top of the list for more than two years and its maximum achieved performance of 33,863 teraflops per second is almost double that of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Cray Titan supercomputer, which is at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.The IBM Sequoia computer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is the third fastest machine, and fourth on the list is the Fujitsu K computer at Japan’s Advanced Institute for Computational Science. The only new machine to enter the top 10 is the Shaheen II computer of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, which is ranked seventh.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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OPM director resigns after unprecedented data breach
The director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management resigned on Friday, a day after her agency announced hackers had stolen information on 21.5 million current, former and prospective government employees and their families.Katherine Archuleta said she had informed President Barack Obama of her plans to step down, and he had accepted her resignation.“I conveyed to the President that I believe it is best for me to step aside and allow new leadership to step in, enabling the agency to move beyond the current challenges and allowing the employees at OPM to continue their important work,” she said in an email to employees.Archuleta had been at the agency for less than two years, joining in November 2013 at about the time the agency began an upgrade of its cyberdefenses. It was as part of that upgrade that it discovered two separate ongoing breaches that, investigators concluded, were unprecedented in their size and seriousness.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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OPM director resigns after unprecedented data breach
The director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management resigned on Friday, a day after her agency announced hackers had stolen information on 21.5 million current, former and prospective government employees and their families.Katherine Archuleta said she had informed President Barack Obama of her plans to step down, and he had accepted her resignation.“I conveyed to the President that I believe it is best for me to step aside and allow new leadership to step in, enabling the agency to move beyond the current challenges and allowing the employees at OPM to continue their important work,” she said in an email to employees.Archuleta had been at the agency for less than two years, joining in November 2013 at about the time the agency began an upgrade of its cyberdefenses. It was as part of that upgrade that it discovered two separate ongoing breaches that, investigators concluded, were unprecedented in their size and seriousness.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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OPM hackers stole data on 21.5m people, including 1.1m fingerprints
Investigators have tallied up the number of records stolen in an attack on the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and it’s bigger than anyone thought.The agency has concluded “with high confidence” that hackers got away with sensitive information including Social Security numbers on 21.5 million people—almost everyone who underwent a background security investigation for a government job through OPM since 2000.The majority of records, some 19.7 million, were for background investigation applicants while an additional 1.8 million were from nonapplicants—friends and family of applicants who would also be investigated as part of the process.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here