An interesting titbit from the ABC:
The Federal Government has enacted powers to allow for mandatory detention of people in Australia suspected of having swine flu, if the situation was to worsen.
Whilst these are scary powers I suspect it will be necessary in the case of the current outbreak becoming a lethal pandemic, given many peoples inability to to complete a course of drugs for an illness, and thus vastly increasing its risk of becoming resistant. It’s just evolution in action..
Bruce Schneier has posted a link to a story about the German Police having an interesting time with DNA analysis of a series of murders due to a consistent false positive result; Bruce writes:
The German police spent years and millions of dollars tracking a mysterious killer whose DNA had been found at the scenes of six murders. Finally they realized they were tracking a worker at the factory that assembled the prepackaged swabs used for DNA testing.
I hope this gives pause for thought to those who think that programs like CSI reflect reality and that DNA profiling is always right..
Shishir Nagaraja of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Ross Anderson of Cambridge University have published a very interesting paper called “The snooping dragon: social-malware surveillance of the Tibetan movement” (abstract, full report) on how agents of the Chinese government managed to infiltrate the computer network of the Dalai Lama’s organisation through ingenious social engineering and gain access to intelligence information that could lead to peoples arrest and possible execution.
It’s a very interesting report and points out that the techniques used are within the reach of motivated individuals as well as government intelligence agencies and ponders how much less well known organisations can cope with such attacks; it also lends weight to the sage advice offered in Ross Andersons “Security Engineering” book. Both are well worth a read, even for those of us whose network security is not a literal matter of life or death.
From the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science is some fairly grim news, CO2e emissions are increasing faster than the worst case scenarios in the 2007 report and sea levels are now rising at twice the rate it was before 1993 and that (unlike previously) 80% of that increase is due to meltwater from ice on land. 🙁
An interesting set of simulations at Sandia of multi-core systems have been reported:
A team of researchers simulated key algorithms for deriving knowledge from large data sets. The simulations show a significant increase in speed going from two to four multicores, but an insignificant increase from four to eight multicores. Exceeding eight multicores causes a decrease in speed. Sixteen multicores perform barely as well as two, and after that, a steep decline is registered as more cores are added.
The reason for this is fairly well known, but it’s nice to see numbers put to the effect..
The problem is the lack of memory bandwidth as well as contention between processors over the memory bus available to each processor.
The original Sandia press release has more information.
Via Bruce Schneier, a redacted version of the NSA’s “American Cryptology during the Cold War, (1945-1989)“ has been released thank to a request from the George Washington Universities National Security Archive project.
It includes a rather interesting section (book 1, pages 18 and 19) on how, in 1947, the UK foreign intelligence agency, SIS, decrypted some KGB messages from Canberra that turned out to include classified UK intelligence military estimates. This caused the US to break off crypto intelligence sharing with Australia putting the British in an awkward situation; as Clement Attlee put it:
The intermingling of American and British knowledge in all these fields is so great that to be certain of of denying American classified information to the Australians, we should have to deny them the greater part of our own reports. We should thus be placed in a disagreeable dilemma of having to choose between cutting of relations with the United States in defence questions or cutting off relations with Australia.
It took 5 years, the establishment of ASIO and a change in government from Chifley to Menzies before the US would reestablish full resumption of cryptologic exchanges with Australia and the author of the history concludes that this has a very bad effect on early American intelligence efforts against China.
The cause of the original leak to the KGB ? Two “leftists” in the Australian diplomatic service…
Now this is, umm, interesting..
We have identified a vulnerability in the Internet Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) used to issue digital certificates for secure websites. As a proof of concept we executed a practical attack scenario and successfully created a rogue Certification Authority (CA) certificate trusted by all common web browsers. This certificate allows us to impersonate any website on the Internet, including banking and e-commerce sites secured using the HTTPS protocol.
Trust no one..
(Via)
Courtesy of my kernel log:
Jan 1 10:59:59 quad kernel: [303561.577455] Clock: inserting leap second 23:59:60 UTC
🙂
(Thanks to Jason White for pointing out that it was logged on the luv-main list)
Call for Papers
3rd International Workshop on Virtualization Technologies in
Distributed Computing (VTDC-09)
http://grid-appliance.org/vtdc09
In conjunction with ICAC 2009
Barcelona, Spain, June 15 2009
This is pretty neat, Breathing Earth is a flash based simulation of the real time statistics of births, deaths and CO2 emissions across the planet. You can mouse over countries to see how many people have died and been born whilst you’ve been watching, how much CO2 has been emitted and the rates.
It also has the per-capita emission numbers which are quite illuminating (especially if you listen to all this noise about getting India and China on board). So, for example, here are a few examples of the annual per capita CO2 emissions (in tonnes) of some countries:
USA : 19.66
Australia : 18.17
Japan : 10.1
UK : 9.23
France : 6.72
China : 3.7
India : 1.17
“We have ‘survival’ emissions, you have lifestyle emissions.” – Shyam Saran, India’s envoy to the UN climate conference in Poznan, Poland