MIT event to promote U.S.-China cooperation on machine learning, autonomous vehicles & more

MIT-CHIEF, a not-for-profit student group that promotes cooperation between the United States and China in technology and innovation, is readying its annual conference with a focus on machine learning, new materials and more.The MIT-China Innovation and Entrepreneurship Forum (CHIEF) Annual Conference, to be held Nov. 12-13 at MIT, will feature 6 panels and 6 keynote speeches that in addition to the topics cited above, will hit on energy, advanced manufacturing, healthcare and autonomous driving. Speakers will include those from academia and industry, including venture capital firms, and represent outfits such as Microsoft, Stanford University and AutoX.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Encrypted communications could have an undetectable backdoor

Researchers warn that many 1024-bit keys used to secure communications on the internet today might be based on prime numbers that have been intentionally backdoored in an undetectable way.Many public-key cryptography algorithms that are used to secure web, email, VPN, SSH and other types of connections on the internet derive their strength from the mathematical complexity of discrete logarithms -- computing discrete logarithms for groups of large prime numbers cannot be efficiently done using classical methods. This is what makes cracking strong encryption computationally impractical.Most key-generation algorithms rely on prime parameters whose generation is supposed to be verifiably random. However, many parameters have been standardized and are being used in popular crypto algorithms like Diffie-Hellman and DSA without the seeds that were used to generate them ever being published. That makes it impossible to tell whether, for example, the primes were intentionally "backdoored" -- selected to simplify the computation that would normally be required to crack the encryption.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Encrypted communications could have an undetectable backdoor

Researchers warn that many 1024-bit keys used to secure communications on the internet today might be based on prime numbers that have been intentionally backdoored in an undetectable way.Many public-key cryptography algorithms that are used to secure web, email, VPN, SSH and other types of connections on the internet derive their strength from the mathematical complexity of discrete logarithms -- computing discrete logarithms for groups of large prime numbers cannot be efficiently done using classical methods. This is what makes cracking strong encryption computationally impractical.Most key-generation algorithms rely on prime parameters whose generation is supposed to be verifiably random. However, many parameters have been standardized and are being used in popular crypto algorithms like Diffie-Hellman and DSA without the seeds that were used to generate them ever being published. That makes it impossible to tell whether, for example, the primes were intentionally "backdoored" -- selected to simplify the computation that would normally be required to crack the encryption.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Datadog on an automation roll, makes support ticket creation seamless

Last week Datadog was in the news trying to attack the market share of monitoring vendor New Relic. While that may seem like industry shenanigans, it marked a very interesting point in time when two vendors, who had previously been happy to compete in a friendly manner, announced all-out warfare and a race for each other’s customer base.New Relic moved strongly into the infrastructure monitoring space, one that it didn’t previously cover, while Datadog made a corresponding move into application monitoring.+ Also on Network World: Infrastructure monitoring products: Users pinpoint the best and worst features +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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President Obama, NASA desire Mars habitation too

Hot on the heels of Elon Musk and his SpaceX company’s grand plan to inhabit Mars, President Obama and NASA reminded the scientific world it too has a designs to inhabit the red planet – though at perhaps a far more deliberate pace than Musk wants.“We have set a clear goal vital to the next chapter of America's story in space: sending humans to Mars by the 2030s and returning them safely to Earth, with the ultimate ambition to one day remain there for an extended time. Getting to Mars will require continued cooperation between government and private innovators, and we're already well on our way. Within the next two years, private companies will for the first time send astronauts to the International Space Station,” Obama wrote in an editorial for CNN this week. “The next step is to reach beyond the bounds of Earth's orbit. I'm excited to announce that we are working with our commercial partners to build new habitats that can sustain and transport astronauts on long-duration missions in deep space. These missions will teach us how humans can live far from Earth -- something we'll need for the long journey to Mars.”To read Continue reading

President Obama, NASA desire Mars habitation too

Hot on the heels of Elon Musk and his SpaceX company’s grand plan to inhabit Mars, President Obama and NASA reminded the scientific world it too has a designs to inhabit the red planet – though at perhaps a far more deliberate pace than Musk wants.“We have set a clear goal vital to the next chapter of America's story in space: sending humans to Mars by the 2030s and returning them safely to Earth, with the ultimate ambition to one day remain there for an extended time. Getting to Mars will require continued cooperation between government and private innovators, and we're already well on our way. Within the next two years, private companies will for the first time send astronauts to the International Space Station,” Obama wrote in an editorial for CNN this week. “The next step is to reach beyond the bounds of Earth's orbit. I'm excited to announce that we are working with our commercial partners to build new habitats that can sustain and transport astronauts on long-duration missions in deep space. These missions will teach us how humans can live far from Earth -- something we'll need for the long journey to Mars.”To read Continue reading

Pradeep’s Principle: Give up on Moore’s Law and embrace automation

It’s arguable that Juniper Networks has been the most successful competitor to Cisco over the past 20 years, and co-founder and CTO Pradeep Sindhu’s vision is the main reason why. Included in that vision is Pradeep’s Principle, which is based on the thesis that we are seeing the end of Moore’s Law. If you’re not familiar with that law, in 1965 Intel co-founder Gordon Moore surmised that the number of transistors per square inch on an integrated circuit would double every year, effectively giving us twice the processing capacity in the same time frame. Sindhu isn’t the only person to say Moore’s Law is coming to an end. Earlier this year, a post on ARS Technica UK made a similar observation. Sindhu extended this thesis to storage and packet switching and stated that the rate of growth for all of these elements has slowed down.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook at Work (finally) launches as ‘Workplace’

Facebook at Work, the company's social network for business, has a new name, but it features many of the same tools that 1.71 billion people use every month — without all the ads. Now called simply "Workplace," the service is now publicly available to any organization. Facebook is a dominant force among consumers and marketers, and now it is setting its sights on the enterprise market.  Workplace is free for the first three months, and then Facebook will charge a range of monthly prices, per active user: $3 each for up to 1,000 users, $2 for up to 10,000 users and $1 each for enterprises with more than 10,000 users. Nonprofit organizations and academic institutions will get Workplace at no cost, according to Facebook. In comparison, the popular collaboration service Slack, now a Workplace rival, offers a free app with limited features, and it currently charges $15 per month per active user for its premium offering. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Netgear goes even more flexible with Arlo Pro video security cameras

Netgear is updating its Arlo wireless and wire-free home security camera systems with a professional version that takes the ‘wire-free’ and flexibility angle even further. Coming to retail shelves on October 23, the Arlo Pro system (small cameras that connect via a low-power, proprietary Wi-Fi to a router-connected base station) will now include two-way audio, a 100+ decibel siren, rechargeable batteries that can last up to six months, and improved motion detection software functionality. The new system will work with older cameras in the Arlo line, and newer cameras can work with older base station (if so desired).In addition, NETGEAR is announcing a set of accessories to make the cameras more flexible for placement and charging. For example, users who don’t want to utilize the rechargeable batteries can recharge the unit through a micro-USB charger. The Arlo Pro Charging Station ($59.99) will let you charge up to two batteries simultaneously so you can swap out one quickly if the initial battery (extra batteries sold at $49.99 each) goes low.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Netgear goes even more flexible with Arlo Pro video security cameras

Netgear is updating its Arlo wireless and wire-free home security camera systems with a professional version that takes the ‘wire-free’ and flexibility angle even further. Coming to retail shelves on October 23, the Arlo Pro system (small cameras that connect via a low-power, proprietary Wi-Fi to a router-connected base station) will now include two-way audio, a 100+ decibel siren, rechargeable batteries that can last up to six months, and improved motion detection software functionality. The new system will work with older cameras in the Arlo line, and newer cameras can work with older base station (if so desired).In addition, NETGEAR is announcing a set of accessories to make the cameras more flexible for placement and charging. For example, users who don’t want to utilize the rechargeable batteries can recharge the unit through a micro-USB charger. The Arlo Pro Charging Station ($59.99) will let you charge up to two batteries simultaneously so you can swap out one quickly if the initial battery (extra batteries sold at $49.99 each) goes low.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Stop Trying to Change Users

The problem isn’t the users: it’s that we’ve designed our computer systems’ security so badly that we demand the user do all of these counterintuitive things. Why can’t users choose easy-to-remember passwords? Why can’t they click on links in emails with wild abandon? Why can’t they plug a USB stick into a computer without facing a myriad of viruses? Why are we trying to fix the user instead of solving the underlying security problem? Traditionally, we’ve thought about security and usability as a trade-off: a more secure system is less functional and more annoying, and a more capable, flexible, and powerful system is less secure. This “either/or” thinking results in systems that are neither usable nor secure. —Schneier on Security

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Microsoft increases European cloud data center capacity

Microsoft has spent the past few years engaged in massive expansions of its data centers in the U.S., adding the capacity needed as its Azure business grows. Now it's moving on to Europe, as is Amazon, in what looks to be the next big cloud battleground. At a company event in Dublin, Ireland, CEO Satya Nadella told an audience that the company is building out its data centers as "a global hyperscale cloud." Microsoft has over 30 regions across all parts of the globe, making sure customers worldwide have access to the cloud. Its next big push will be to open multiple cloud data centers in France, beginning next year. Amazon Web Services (AWS) last week said it plans to do the same. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft increases European cloud data center capacity

Microsoft has spent the past few years engaged in massive expansions of its data centers in the U.S., adding the capacity needed as its Azure business grows. Now it's moving on to Europe, as is Amazon, in what looks to be the next big cloud battleground. At a company event in Dublin, Ireland, CEO Satya Nadella told an audience that the company is building out its data centers as "a global hyperscale cloud." Microsoft has over 30 regions across all parts of the globe, making sure customers worldwide have access to the cloud. Its next big push will be to open multiple cloud data centers in France, beginning next year. Amazon Web Services (AWS) last week said it plans to do the same. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to prepare for the Windows 7/8.1 ‘patchocalypse’

October marks a watershed in Microsoft patching practices for Windows 7 and 8.1, and confusion reigns supreme. With the majority of organizations still holding off upgrading their fleets to Window 10, this “patchocalpyse” may have significant impact if you’re not prepared for the sticky details.The upshot: Windows 7 and 8.1 will no longer receive individual patches. These will give way to two separate kinds of monthly updates: a security-only strain and a full collection of updates. The security strain isn’t cumulative; the full bundle is. Each has its own deployment method. KBs have been KO’d. Sounds simple, right?[ The essentials for Windows 10 installation: Download the Windows 10 Installation Superguide today. | Stay up on key Microsoft technologies with the Windows Report newsletter. ] The devil, however, is in the details, and for many organizations, it may be quite a devil indeed. Here we break down what you need to know about Win7/8.1 updates going forward, in hopes of helping you avoid your own “patchocalypse.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

17 tools to protect your online security

Last month's news about the massive data breach at Yahoo, which affected at least 500 million user records, making it the largest data breach on record, might finally be what it takes to get the average internet user to take online security into their own hands — if only they knew how.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

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