Details are in the symbols...

How is WEP hacking not a national security issue?

Lifehacker today (and 1000's of others) posted how to break into my house???

While I appreciate them giving me job security in the IT front .... I do not know why posting these kinds of threats are not a national security issue?

Yes we should report it and discuss, but giving 'how to' editorials is a threat.

From Lifehacker How to Crack a Wi-Fi Network's WEP Password

You already know that if you want to lock down your Wi-Fi network, you should opt for WPA encryption because WEP is easy to crack. But did you know how easy? Take a look.

Today we're going to run down, step-by-step, how to crack a Wi-Fi network with WEP security turned on. But first, a word: Knowledge is power, but power doesn't mean you should be a jerk, or do anything illegal. Knowing how to pick a lock doesn't make you a thief. Consider this post educational, or a proof-of-concept intellectual exercise.

Dozens of tutorials on how to crack WEP are already all over the internet using this method. Seriously—Google it. This ain't what you'd call "news." But what is surprising is that someone like me, with minimal networking experience, can get this done with free software and a cheap Wi-Fi adapter. Here's how it goes.

Attacks always get better, they never get worse.

New cryptanalytic attack on AES that is better than brute force:

Abstract. In this paper we present two related-key attacks on the full AES. For AES-256 we show the first key recovery attack that works for all the keys and has complexity 2¹¹⁹, while the recent attack by Biryukov-Khovratovich-Nikolic works for a weak key class and has higher complexity. The second attack is the first cryptanalysis of the full AES-192. Both our attacks are boomerang attacks, which are based on the recent idea of finding local collisions in block ciphersboomerang switching techniques to gain free rounds in the middle. and enhanced with the

In an e-mail, the authors wrote: We also expect that a careful analysis may reduce the complexities. As a preliminary result, we think that the complexity of the attack on AES-256 can be lowered from 2¹¹⁹ to about 2^110.5 data and time.

We believe that these results may shed a new light on the design of the key-schedules of block ciphers, but they pose no immediate threat for the real world applications that use AES.

Agreed. While this attack is better than brute force -- and some cryptographers will describe the algorithm as "broken" because of it -- it is still far, far beyond our capabilities of computation. The attack is, and probably forever will be, theoretical. But remember: attacks always get better, they never get worse. Others will continue to improve on these numbers. While there's no reason to panic, no reason to stop using AES, no reason to insist that NIST choose another encryption standard, this will certainly be a problem for some of the AES-based SHA-3 candidate hash functions.

Read more from Bruce:

China Dominates NSA-Backed Computer Coding Contest

"With about 4,200 people participating in a US National Security Agency-supported international competition on everything from writing algorithms to designing components, 20 of the 70 finalists were from China, 10 from Russia, and 2 from the US. China's showing in the finals was helped by its large number of entrants, 894. India followed at 705, but none of its programmers was a finalist. Russia had 380 participants; the United States, 234; Poland, 214; Egypt, 145; and Ukraine, 128. Participants in the TopCoder Open was open to anyone, from student to professional; the contest proceeded through rounds of elimination that finished this month in Las Vegas. Rob Hughes, president and COO of TopCoder, says the strong finish by programmers from China, Russia, Eastern Europe and elsewhere is indicative of the importance those countries put on mathematics and science education. '

"We do the same thing with athletics here that they do with mathematics and science there..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot

95 percent of blogs being abandoned...

"Douglas Quenqua reports in the NY Times that according to a 2008 survey only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days meaning that "95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled." Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but it's probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views. "There's a joke within the blogging community that most blogs have an audience of one." Many people who think blogging is a fast path to financial independence also find themselves discouraged. "I did some Craigslist postings to advertise it, and I very quickly got an audience of about 50,000 viewers a month," says Matt Goodman, an advertising executive in Atlanta who had no trouble attracting an audience to his site, Things My Dog Ate, leading to some small advertising deals. "I think I made about $20 from readers clicking on the ads."

Read more at slashdot

Generation Y Explained....

Bruce Schneier - cloud computing is nothing new

IT is because Bruce 'knows' IT
...cloud computing is nothing new . It's the modern version of the timesharing model from the 1960s, which was eventually killed by the rise of the personal computer. It's what Hotmail and Gmail have been doing all these years, and it's social networking sites, remote backup companies, and remote email filtering companies such as MessageLabs. Any IT outsourcing -- network infrastructure, security monitoring, remote hosting -- is a form of cloud computing.

The old timesharing model arose because computers were expensive and hard to maintain. Modern computers and networks are drastically cheaper, but they're still hard to maintain. As networks have become faster, it is again easier to have someone else do the hard work. Computing has become more of a utility; users are more concerned with results than technical details, so the tech fades into the background.

You don't want your critical data to be on some cloud computer that abruptly disappears because its owner goes bankrupt . You don't want the company you're using to be sold to your direct competitor. You don't want the company to cut corners, without warning, because times are tight. Or raise its prices and then refuse to let you have your data back. These things can happen with software vendors, but the results aren't as drastic.

Trust is a concept as old as humanity, and the solutions are the same as they have always been. Be careful who you trust, be careful what you trust them with, and be careful how much you trust them. Outsourcing is the future of computing. Eventually we'll get this right, but you don't want to be a casualty along the way.

This essay originally appeared in The Guardian.

FBI - CAN YOU CRACK A CODE?

From www.fbi.gov
Try Your Hand at Cryptanalysis... to unravel a code and reveal its secret message, just like the “cryptanalysts” in our FBI Laboratory.

This time we've used a different set of characters entirely—ancient runes that are sometimes used by criminals to code their communications. Give it a try!



Good luck!

Note: sorry, but cracking this code doesn't guarantee you a job with the FBI! But do check out careers with us at FBIJobs.gov.

'crack cocaine of the gaming world'

"My name is Ian, and I am a recovering MMO addict."
The entire experience feels not too different from wasting away in front of a big screen TV for 16 hours a day with your shirt stained orange with cheetos as your body curses you for treating it so poorly.

It's no big secret that MMORPGs are intensely addictive. MMORPGs have been called the 'crack cocaine of the gaming world' by report in Sweden backed by the Swedish National Institute of Public Health after a 15-year old boy collapsed and went into convulsions after playing World of Warcraft, an MMORPG, for a 24-hour stretch of time.

With regards to MMORPGs, the organization added, "There is no known medical diagnosis of conditions brought on by excessive game-playing, but it is clear they have a very powerful addictive hold over many people who use them."

It was a terrible realization that besides the addictive gameplay mechanics, the one other thing that was keeping me from leaving was my guild, or the fellows with whom I enjoyed playing. It was simple: I had managed to become hooked by the game's subtle and sinister social mechanics.

Being not a slave to anything or anyone but myself, I took a step back and decided there and then to stop playing. It was an easy decision to make, but it was one which took me way longer than it should have to discover.

All in all, you'd be better off doing something else than playing an MMORPG.

Read full From The Human Cost of MMORPGs

A darker view of technology's future

Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future

"There are so many things you can't anticipate when you create a new technology," he says. "Who would have predicted that the Internet would be taking down shopping malls and wiping out newspapers?''

"Even then, people had a misplaced faith in the power of inventions to make life easier, Americans' faith in the power of technology to reshape the future is due in part to their history. Americans have never accepted a radical political transformation that would change their future. They prefer technology, not radical politics, to propel social change."

"At some point, you can't expect a miracle to come in the form of technology to save us, the miracle has to come from a change in attitude and a new outlook."

 

Read full via CNN 

 

Secrets in the TCP - code, messages and more...

Web, file transfer, email and peer-to-peer networks all use TCP, which ensures that data packets are received securely by making the sender wait until the receiver returns a 'got it' message. If no such acknowledgment arrives (on average 1 in 1000 packets gets lost or corrupted), the sender's computer sends the packet again in a system known as TCP's retransmission mechanism. The new steganographic system, dubbed retransmission steganography (RSTEG), relies on the sender and receiver using software that deliberately asks for retransmission even when email data packets are received successfully (PDF). 'The receiver intentionally signals that a loss has occurred,'  'The sender then retransmits the packet but with some secret data inserted in it.' Could a careful eavesdropper spot that RSTEG is being used because the first sent packet is different from the one containing the secret message?

As long as the system is not over-used, apparently not, because if a packet is corrupted, the original packet and the retransmitted one will differ from each other anyway, masking the use of RSTEG."  It's out there... now read more at slashdot

Stats on the MAlWar

The May edition of the MessageLabs Intelligence monthly provided this information regarding the ongoing fight against viruses, spam and other unwelcome content.

    Report Highlights:
        * Spam - 90.4% in May (an increase of 5.1% since April)
        * Viruses - One in 317.8 emails in May contained malware (a decrease of 0.01% since April)
        * Phishing - One in 404.7 emails comprised a phishing attack (an increase of 0.11% since April)
        * Malicious websites - 1,149 new sites blocked per day (a decrease of 67.7% since April)
        * Spammers continue to abuse reputable domains and web-based malware more likely to be found on older domains
        * Geographic location determines at what time of day you receive spam
        * “Russian” spam squarely rooted in Cutwail botnet

Read full paper from source: Symantec

Why we are technically discontent and disconnected...

Technology is 'The knack of so arranging a world that we need not
experience it' - Max Frisch

Sony CEO: "Nothing good from the Internet, period."

From the boingboing  visionary statement from one of our would-be masters of technology:

"I'm a guy who doesn't see anything good having come from the Internet," said Sony Pictures Entertainment chief executive officer Michael Lynton. "Period." , Lynton wasn't just trying for a laugh: He complained the Internet has "created this notion that anyone can have whatever they want at any given time. It's as if the stores on Madison Avenue were open 24 hours a day. They feel entitled. They say, 'Give it to me now,' and if you don't give it to them for free, they'll steal it." – Read more here

The rise of American Idiot...

What we have created with our advanced IT systems cold fusion, stopped hunger, cured cancer?

Nope we twitter away our day to expand the new idiots.

Charles Pierce -   The rise of Idiot America, though, is essentially a war on expertise.
It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of the intellectual elites that Richard Hofstader teased out of the national DNA, although both of these things are part of it. The rise of Idiot America today reflects — for profit, mainly, but also and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power — the breakdown of the consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people we should trust the least are the people who know the best what they're talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

   This is how Idiot America engages itself. It decides, en masse, with a million keystrokes and clicks of the remote control, that because there are two sides to every question, they both must be right, or at least not wrong. And the words of an obscure biologist carry no more weight on the subject of biology than do the thunderations of some turkeyneck preacher out of Christ's Own Parking Structure in DeLand, Florida. Less weight, in fact, because our scientist is an "expert" and therefore, an "elitist." Nobody buys his books. Nobody puts him on cable.    

He's brilliant, surely, but no different from the rest of us, poor fool...

Hidden valuable natural resource is being exploited...

From newscientist

 

Click image to see spectrum

Google is backing a political campaign to force the US government to release full details of how one of our most valuable natural resources is being exploited - radio communications spectrum.

 

A post on Google's policy blog lauds a bill being introduced to Congress that would require the Federal Communications Commission to "take a full inventory of our nation's spectrum resources between the 300 MHz and 3.5 GHz bands."

You can already see a representation of how the spectrum is divided in the graphic above, or in pdf form here. But the bill would make available full details of who is using which chunks of spectrum for what, and how efficiently. As the Google post puts it, "is a sizable portion of useful spectrum simply lying fallow?"

 

The internet giant was one of many that lobbied sucessfully to get spectrum freed up by the demise of analogue TV signals allocated to new kinds of mobile devices. That will supposedly allow the development of technology dubbed "Wi-Fi on steroids" by its proponents, and shape our technological future - allowing faster portable connections and high-speed broadband in remote areas, for example.

 

Similarly, making it publicly known how the rest of the radio spectrum is being used, and what is left, could change how we communicate for years to come.

 

The only secure PC, a book...

See more awesome illustrations of 'pop up book PC'

The SUM of my Substance...

Warrantless Tracking Is Legal, Says Wisconsin Court

Slashdot - A Wisconsin appeals court ruled Thursday that police can attach GPS trackers to cars to secretly track anybody's movements without obtaining search warrants. As the law currently stands, the court said police can mount GPS on cars to track people without violating their constitutional rights — even if the drivers aren't suspects. Officers do not need to get warrants beforehand because GPS tracking does not involve a search or a seizure, wrote Madison Judge Paul Lundsten."

Windows 7 ready?

When the internet went... to hell

Mathematical Illiteracy

This may be the stupidest example of risk assessment I've ever seen. It's a video clip from a recent Daily Show, about he dangers of the Large Hadron Collider. The segment starts off slow, but then there's an exchange with high school science teacher Walter L. Wagner, who insists the device has a 50-50 chance of destroying the world:

"If you have something that can happen, and something that won't necessarily happen, it's going to either happen or it's going to not happen, and so the best guess is 1 in 2."

"I'm not sure that's how probability works, Walter."

This is followed by clips of news shows taking the guy seriously.

Read full by schneier

IT... bored is part of innovation

Live beta - Google sorry were down but for a

Why I love google - They are NOT scared to beta test live... it is evolution we need.

If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning, you likely saw that the message "This site may harm your computer" accompanied each and every search result. This was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users.

What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message "This site may harm your computer" if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list.

We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning. 

IT is not as pretty as IT was

slashdot tell us that new research is suggesting as many as a quarter of all IT staff in small to medium businesses have suffered some sort of abuse and are looking for careers elsewhere [PDF]. "The study also found that over a third have suffered from sleepless nights or headaches as a result of IT problems at work, while 59 per cent spend between one and 10 hours a week working on IT systems outside normal hours. [...] The biggest cause of stress among IT staff is problems arising from operational day-to-day tasks, the survey found. Another major cause came from loss of critical data, according to Connect."

 

The End of Individual Genius?

An anonymous reader writes "A recent study suggests the downfall of individual researchers, who are being rapidly replaced by enormous research groups. Quoting: '... in recent decades — especially since the Soviet success in launching the Sputnik satellite in 1957 — the trend has been to create massive institutions that foster more collaboration and garner big chunks of funding. And it is harder now to achieve scientific greatness. A study of Nobel Prize winners in 2005 found that the accumulation of knowledge over time has forced great minds to toil longer before they can make breakthroughs. The age at which thinkers produce significant innovations increased about six years during the 20th century.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

 

Class of 76 'cleverer' than kids of today

Clever teenagers of today are not as bright as kids in the class of 1976, according to researchers.

The intellect of even the brainiest 14-year-olds has deteriorated dramatically over the decades despite an increase in the number of pupils achieving top grades in exams.

Their cognitive abilities are level with those of 12-year-olds in 1976, the study found.

The tests - designed to assess grasp of abstract scientific concepts such as volume, density, quantity and weight - found far fewer youngsters hit top scores than in 1976.

Professor Michael Shayer, who led the study, said the brainpower slump may be down to over-testing in schools.

He said: "The moment you introduce targets, people will find the most economical strategies to achieve them.

In previous research, Professor Shayer concluded that the cognitive abilities of 11-year-olds were up to three years behind where they were in 1975.

Your brain on the web... evolution?

Is technology changing our brains?

"Perhaps not since early man first discovered how to use a tool has the human brain been affected so quickly and so dramatically," he writes. "As the brain evolves and shifts its focus towards new technological skills, it drifts away from fundamental social skills."

 

The impact of technology on our circuitry should not come as a surprise.  Professional musicians have more gray matter in brain regions responsible for planning finger movements. And athletes' brains are bulkier in areas that control hand-eye coordination. That's because the more time you devote to a specific activity, the stronger the neural pathways responsible for executing that activity become. So it makes sense that people who process a constant stream of digital information would have more neurons dedicated to filtering that information. Still, that's not the same thing as evolution.

 

To see how the Internet might be rewiring us, Small and colleagues monitored the brains of 24 adults as they performed a simulated Web search, and again as they read a page of text. During the Web search, those who reported using the Internet regularly in their everyday lives showed twice as much signaling in brain regions responsible for decision-making and complex reasoning, compared with those who had limited Internet exposure. The findings, to be published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, suggest that Internet use enhances the brain's capacity to be stimulated, and that Internet reading activates more brain regions than printed words. The research adds to previous studies that have shown that the tech-savvy among us possess greater working memory (meaning they can store and retrieve more bits of information in the short term), are more adept at perceptual learning (that is, adjusting their perception of the world in response to changing information), and have better motor skills.

 

Small says these differences are likely to be even more profound across generations, because younger people are exposed to more technology from an earlier age than older people. He refers to this as the brain gap.

 

Read full at newsweek

Listen to Yourself

From xkcd.com

 

State Of The Blogosphere: Get To 100K Uniques, Make $75K/year

Technorati, the blog search engine, put out Part I of its sporadic (now-annual?) State of the Blogosphere report this week. This year, it conducted a random survey of 1,079 random bloggers (a statistically significant sample) to paint a more detailed picture of just who exactly is out there blogging. Technorati has indexed a total of 133 million blogs since 2002. In terms of how many are active, 7.5 million blogs have added a new post during the last four months, and 1.5 million have been updated during the last week.

And the average blog that runs ads, according to Technorati, is actually making money:

Among those with advertising, the mean annual investment in their blog is $1,800, but it’s paying off. The mean annual revenue is $6,000 with $75K+ in revenue for those with 100,000 or more unique visitors per month.

The $6,000 a year I can believe. The $75,000 figure is harder to swallow, especially with only 100,000 visitors a month. But directionally there is no doubt that blogs are bringing in more cash.

Who are these bloggers? Technorati breaks that down as well. The vast majority of all bloggers (79 percent) write about their personal interests. No surprise there.
But more than half of all bloggers also write about business. While only 12 percent identify themselves as official “corporate bloggers,” a full 46 percent consider themselves “professional bloggers” (meaning that they write about their industries, but not in an official capacity).

Blogs are also mostly a male affair: 57 percent in the U.S. are written by men, 42 percent went to graduate school, and 50 percent earn more than $75,000 a year, and 58 percent are over 35 years old. (Someone call the diversity police).

More than half have a separate full time job. More than half of survey respondents have been blogging for more than two years.Geographically, North America dominates, with 48 percent of respondents living here. San Francisco and the Bay Area has the most bloggers in the U.S., with New York City, Chicago, and LA also having a strong showing. Although, as the map below shows, the geographic distribution is actually pretty wide.

And blogs continue to be read: blogs in the aggregate now attract 77.7 million unique U.S. visitors per month according to Comscore, nearly double the number of people who visit Facebook.

This is just the first day of the report, so get ready for a lot of data over the next four days. Read full By Erick Schonfeld on Technorati

Stanford offers free CS, robotics courses

Stanford University has launched a series of 10 free, online computer science (CS) and electrical engineering courses. The courses span an introduction to computer science and an introduction to artificial intelligence and robotics, among other topics.

The free courses are being offered “to students and educators around the world” under the auspices of Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE). Each course comprises downloadable video lectures, handouts, assignments, exams, and transcripts.

The courses are nearly identical to what’s offered to enrolled Stanford students, according to the University. However, those taking courses through SEE are not eligible to receive Stanford credit for them.

Course participants do not register, and have no direct contact with Stanford instructors or professors. They do, however, have the ability to communicate online with other SEE students. A detailed SEE FAQ is available here.

The University says SEE’s initial courses include “one of Stanford’s most popular engineering sequences: the three-course Introduction to Computer Science taken by the majority of Stanford undergraduates, and seven more advanced courses in artificial intelligence and electrical engineering.”

Specifically, SEE’s first 10 courses are…

• Introduction to Computer Science:
  • Programming Methodology — CS106A
  • Programming Abstractions — CS106B
  • Programming Paradigms — CS107
• Artificial Intelligence:
  • Introduction to Robotics — CS223A
  • Natural Language Processing — CS224N
  • Machine Learning — CS229
• Linear Systems and Optimization:
  • The Fourier Transform and its Applications — EE261
  • Introduction to Linear Dynamical Systems — EE263
  • Convex Optimization I — EE364A
  • Convex Optimization II — EE364B

Source: deviceguru.com

Will Collider Startup Turn Earth Into a Black Hole?

Will particle physics research lead to humankind's destruction? "That question has been raised by the impending startup of the Large Hadron Collider. It starts smashing protons together this summer at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or Cern, outside Geneva, in hopes of grabbing a piece of the primordial fire, forces and particles that may have existed a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Critics have contended that the machine could produce a black hole that could eat the Earth or something equally catastrophic. To most physicists, this fear is more science fiction than science fact. At a recent open house weekend, 73,000 visitors, without pitchforks or torches, toured the collider without incident." Dennis Overbye's essay appears in the New York Times April 15, 2008.

 

GOD has given society the conscience to "create and destroy" all the things of this earth … what we do with that will be the determination of our judgment. 
 
It is always easier to destroy than create... 

When was your vote counted.

The Dumbing Down Of America

The Chronicle Of Higher Education has a commentary on the sorry state of ignorance that exists in American Universities, noting "Today's college students have tuned out the world, and it's partly our fault". One more example of what Hunter S Thompson called "The Dumbing Down Of America" - So Much for the Information Age. In recent years I have administered a dumbed-down quiz on current events and history early in each semester to get a sense of what my students know and don't know. Initially I worried that its simplicity would insult them, but my fears were unfounded. The results have been, well, horrifying.

Last fall only one in 21 students could name the U.S. secretary of defense. Given a list of four countries — China, Cuba, India, and Japan — not one of those same 21 students could identify India and Japan as democracies. Their grasp of history was little better. The question of when the Civil War was fought invited an array of responses — half a dozen were off by a decade or more. Some students thought that Islam was the principal religion of South America, that Roe v. Wade was about slavery, that 50 justices sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, that the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1975. You get the picture, and it isn't pretty. Read more here by By Big Gav peakenergy

Techno Crutches make you dumber than a POTHEAD

. . . A study carried out at the British Institute of Psychiatry . . found that excessive use of technology reduced workers' intelligence and that those distracted by incoming e-mail and phone calls saw a ten-point fall in their IQ, over twice the impact of smoking or marijuana use. . .

Programmers [for example ] know that task switches take a long time. It is easier to keep going once you're at full steam . . . than to stop work and finish later. That last hour might take three hours, since you have to retrieve all of the background info from long-term memory and bring it back to the front of your mind.

Studies report that the American worker wastes 2.1 hours per day due to multitasking. When distracted while performing a task, it takes a certain amount of time to begin the new task, complete the new task and get back on track with the original task. Microsoft employees had their computers log their work for a period and found that simply dealing with an e-mail message took an average of 15 minutes and often lead to subsequent distractions, which lead to the employee taking up to an hour to get back to their original task.

The bottom line is that multitasking has been proven to make us less effective, not more. Although our digital assistants can be time savers, they can also be time wasters, if we allow them to break our focus. So for all of you who trouble getting things done . . . turn off your chat, RSS feeds, Google Desktop, Outlook alerts and whatever else keeps distracting you, and see what it would it would be like to simply focus on [ the task at hand ].