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Understanding Rowhammer

As I learned in my early days in electronics, every wire is an antenna. This means that a signal in any wire, given enough power, can be transmitted, and that same signal, in an adjacent wire, can be received (and potentially decoded) through electromagnetic induction (Rule 3 may apply). This is a major problem in the carrying of signals through a wire, a phenomenon known as cross talk. How do communications engineers overcome this? By observing that a signal carried along parallel wires at opposite polarities will cancel each other out electromagnetically. The figure below might help out, if you’re not familiar with this.

induction

This canceling effect of two waveforms traveling a pair of wires 180deg out of phase is why the twisted is in twisted pair, and why it’s so crucial not to unbundle too much wire when punching down a jack or connector. The more untwisted the wire there is, the less effective the canceling effect is around the punch down, and the more likely you are to have near end or far end crosstalk.

If you consider one row of memory in a chip one wire, and a second, adjacent row of memory in the Continue reading

FREE COURSE: Learn basic Cisco networking

In partnership with Pluralsight, Network World presents a free course on CCNA routing and VLANs. In this course, the student will learn the fundamental concepts of networking, and then immediately apply this knowledge to the configuration of a router and switch.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Friday, July 31

Facebook’s new Internet-access drone set to fly by year endAn unmanned aircraft called Aquila was the star of the show as Facebook on Thursday showed how it plans to provide Internet access to hundreds of millions of people in remote parts of the world. The plane should get a test flight later this year; its entire surface is covered with solar panels to enable it to stay up in the air for three months at a time, at an altitude between 60,000 and 90,000 feet. From there, it will use laser-based technology to receive an Internet connection and share it with users in a 50-kilometer radius.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Lawmakers headed to Silicon Valley to push tech companies on diversity

Three U.S. lawmakers are traveling to Silicon Valley to push tech companies to offer opportunities for African-Americans, an area in which most of these companies have poor track records.Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) Chairman G. K. Butterfield and Representatives Barbara Lee and Hakeem Jeffries, all members of the CBC Diversity Task Force, will travel to Silicon Valley on Sunday to meet with executives at companies and organizations there, including Apple, Bloomberg, Google, Intel, Kapor, Pandora and SAP.“Our goal for this trip is to encourage and partner with these organizations to implement a diversity plan that will place more African-Americans in the tech pipeline,” Butterfield said in a statement Thursday. “This will potentially lead to a wide range of opportunities, from student internships to positions on the boards of tech companies.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco’s pay package for CEO Robbins is a sweet deal

Cisco will pay incoming CEO Chuck Robbins a higher salary than outgoing chief John Chambers made in fiscal 2014.Robbins will make US$1.15 million in salary in fiscal 2016, which began this week, and he could earn another $2.59 million based on performance under Cisco’s Executive Incentive Plan. Add in as much as $13 million in stock grants, and Robbins could bring in more than $16.7 million for his first year at the helm.By contrast, Chambers got $1.1 million in salary and a smaller basic percentage bonus under the Executive Incentive Plan in fiscal 2014, according to the company’s proxy statement issued last September. Chambers was a 20-year veteran at the helm of the company and was also chairman of the board. He’s now stepped back to become executive chairman.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco’s pay package for CEO Robbins is a sweet deal

Cisco will pay incoming CEO Chuck Robbins a higher salary than outgoing chief John Chambers made in fiscal 2014.Robbins will make US$1.15 million in salary in fiscal 2016, which began this week, and he could earn another $2.59 million based on performance under Cisco’s Executive Incentive Plan. Add in as much as $13 million in stock grants, and Robbins could bring in more than $16.7 million for his first year at the helm.By contrast, Chambers got $1.1 million in salary and a smaller basic percentage bonus under the Executive Incentive Plan in fiscal 2014, according to the company’s proxy statement issued last September. Chambers was a 20-year veteran at the helm of the company and was also chairman of the board. He’s now stepped back to become executive chairman.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hacker shows he can locate, unlock and remote start GM vehicles

A security researcher has posted a video on YouTube demonstrating how a device he made can intercept wireless communications to locate, unlock and remotely start GM vehicles that use the OnStar RemoteLink mobile app. Samy Kamkar, who refers to himself as a hacker and whistleblower, posted the video today showing him using a device he calls OwnStar. The device, he said, intercepts communications between GM's OnStar RemoteLink mobile app and the OnStar cloud service. Samy Kamkar Hacker Samy Kamkar shows how after hacking the OnStar mobile app, he's able to use it to control a Chevy Volt.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Researchers improve de-anonymization attacks for websites hiding on Tor

Researchers have developed a new technique that could allow attackers to determine with a high degree of accuracy which Tor websites users are accessing and where those websites are hosted.The new attack, which improves upon previous traffic fingerprinting techniques, was devised by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), who found ways to differentiate between different types of connections in a user’s encrypted Tor traffic.The Tor anonymity network was built to hide from network snoopers which websites or other Internet resources that user is accessing. It does this by wrapping the user’s requests in several layers of encryption and routing them through multiple computers that run the Tor software.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Scalability Is A Matter Of Context

Scale is a relative term. While every technology needs to scale to some point to be useful to IT practitioners, not every technology needs to scale infinitely. Every technology has a context in which it is viable — where it proves to be the best choice. But in another context, the opposite technology might rise to the surface as more appropriate. Don't be religious about such a decision. Know your business need well, research the technology thoroughly, plan for the future, and choose wisely. Don't pick a tool that solves someone else's problem.

Facebook aims to launch unmanned drone by year-end

At 140 feet, it has the wingspan of a Boeing 737, but carries no passengers—and it’s much lighter too, weighing in at no more than 1,000 pounds. And within the next couple months, Facebook hopes to get its drone off the ground on an inaugural test flight.Named Aquila, the aircraft is the product of more than a year’s work at the social networking giant. Its function is not to drop retail items from the clouds like Amazon’s drones, but to provide Internet access to the hundreds of millions of people who don’t have it in under-served parts of the world. Facebook aims to partner with carriers and other companies to provide connectivity, potentially at a lower cost than typical infrastructure like cell phone towers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google rejects French request to expand right to be forgotten

Google won’t comply with an order from France’s privacy watchdog group to apply the right to be forgotten to all its search results around the world.In June, CNIL, France’s data protection authority, ordered Google to remove search results meeting “right to be forgotten” criteria from any regional version of Google’s search engine. However, granting CNIL’s request could have a “serious chilling effect on the web,” Google said Thursday in a blog post.The request stems from May 2014 decision issued by the European Court of Justice that allows Europeans to ask search engines in the region to scrub results that contain information about them that’s found to be inadequate, irrelevant or not in the public interest. This has been dubbed the right to be forgotten.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google rejects French request to expand right to be forgotten

Google won’t comply with an order from France’s privacy watchdog group to apply the right to be forgotten to all its search results around the world.In June, CNIL, France’s data protection authority, ordered Google to remove search results meeting “right to be forgotten” criteria from any regional version of Google’s search engine. However, granting CNIL’s request could have a “serious chilling effect on the web,” Google said Thursday in a blog post.The request stems from May 2014 decision issued by the European Court of Justice that allows Europeans to ask search engines in the region to scrub results that contain information about them that’s found to be inadequate, irrelevant or not in the public interest. This has been dubbed the right to be forgotten.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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