Thee Computer Station

The world’s increasing reliance on information technology, combined with the growing sophistication of cybercriminals and cyberattacks, is leading to a sort of cyber-cold war, according to a new report from computer security research firm McAfee.

For example, Estonian government and commercial Web sites were hit by a series of denial of service attacks over a period of weeks back in 2007. Technical analysis showed the attacks came from sources in Russia, but the Russian government denied any responsibility and refused to help find or prosecute the suspects, the report states.

In August, tensions between Georgia and Russia overflowed onto the Web when Russians apparently attacked the Web site and blog of an Estonian writing about the problems between the two countries. The attacks denied millions of people around the world access to their Twitter and Facebook pages.

“Those people were collateral damage in the attack on the Georgian blogger,” Dmitri Alperovitch, vice president of threat research at McAfee, told TechNewsWorld.

Getting Ready for Cyberbattle

Governments around the world are preparing for future cyberattacks, the McAfee report says. NATO has set up a “Center of Excellence” for cyberdefense in Estonia to study cyberattacks and determine under what circumstances such an attack should trigger NATO’s common defense principle. That principle holds that an attack on one member is an attack on all.

In June, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced the formation of the U.S. Cyber Command. This is an organization under the U.S. Strategic Command led by a four-star general that will defend vital U.S. military networks, according to McAfee’s report.

The UK government has recently announced plans to create a central Office of Cyber Security to deal with the rising level of online attacks. The office can mount a cyberattack in response to intrusions in extreme cases, the McAfee report states.

Other countries are contemplating similar measures.

The Dogs of War

So far, the hostilities have been confined to cybercrime and cyberespionage and do not amount to war, James Lewis, director and senior fellow of the technology and public policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told TechNewsWorld.

However, countries have probably planned systematic attacks to use in a crisis, Lewis said. The major players are the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, Israel and China, according to Lewis. Turkey, India and Taiwan may also be players, he added.

Other countries are engaged in cyberhostilities also. “I was in a meeting in Malaysia where I was told that there are a number of attacks coming from Indonesia,” Randy Abrams, director of technical education at ESET, told TechNewsWorld. “But Malaysia and Indonesia are not at war, so I wouldn’t call it ‘warfare.’”

Defining when intrusions should be considered acts of war is critical, and McAfee’s report lays out four criteria.

The first is the source. Cybersleuths have to ask whether the attack was carried out or supported by a nation-state. Second is consequence — did the attack cause any harm? Third is motivation — was the attack politically motivated? Fourth is sophistication — did the attack require customized methods and/or complex planning?

Determining just who launched a given attack is seldom easy. “One of the problems we have is attribution,” McAfee’s Alperovitch pointed out. “Also, the weapons themselves are used both by nation-states and by cybercriminals, and separating the two is very difficult.”

“It’s difficult to attribute activities to a specific country due to the use of proxies and the nature of the public network,” said Rick Caccia, vice president of product marketing at ArcSight.

Cybercriminals could have a major role to play in the event of a cyberwar. “Foreign governments use cybercriminals as irregular forces,” CSIS’s Lewis pointed out. “Left to their own devices, cybercriminals are only going to attack places where they can make some money; when they attack a government, it’s usually someone else’s idea.”

Reworking the Web

The very nature of the Internet lays countries open to cyberespionage and cyberwar. “Networks are more open and porous than before, and that makes attacks easier,” ArcSight’s Caccia said. “More information is online in those networks and is more valuable, so they are more vulnerable to attack.”

That means the Internet may need some amount of restructuring, according to McAfee. “We need to rework the infrastructure of the entire Internet,” McAfee’s Alperovitch said. “It’s not going to be done overnight; it’s going to be done piece by piece.”

That will be a very expensive proposition, but the cost could be shared among governments, private companies and individuals, Alperovitch said. “The cost of security now is enormous, with people losing billions of dollars, and governments having national security compromised because of this.”

Rumor has it that Intel is prepped to launch its new SSDs in the next two weeks. According to sources speaking to the The Inquirer, the new solid state disks will feature that smaller 34nm NAND Flash developed by Intel and Micron. As usual, the smaller manufacturing processes should allow for higher density SSDs (as high as 320GB) at a reduced cost to manufacture. In fact, INQ says, “there will be drives big enough to replace the HDDs in most, if not all laptops.” With Intel already cutting SSD prices we remain optimistic that this rumor is true.

Pete Worden is the Director of the NASA Ames Research Center and an Advisor to the Space and Physical Sciences Track of Singularity University. We caught up with Pete on the NASA Ames campus, where we talked about what we’ve just learned about Mars and how self replicating robots will be used to colonize space, among other things.

h+: What have we learned recently about Mars and the possibility of life there?
PETE WORDEN: Well, from what we’ve seen and the missions we’ve had, Mars is obviously an environment that can support large-scale human activity. It has substantial quantities of water and other “volatiles” — carbon compounds and so forth — so it clearly can support life. In fact, it may already be supporting life, and that’s one of the main things we need to find out before we do anything, because there may be microbial life below the surface of the planet.

We announced recently — and this is actually from Earth-based observations — that there is evidence of variable methane on the planet. This could mean that there is some sort of geologic activity going on underground, with its own source of heat that would melt water and allow flows underground. This would be exciting in its own right, for we have long thought that Mars was a geologically inactive, “cold” planet, like the Moon. However, since life can also cause methane to be produced, our first objective is to find out if there is already life there.

h+: And that’s where the robot missions come in?
PW: Yes. The possibility that life exists currently on mars suggests that we’re going to have to do extensive robotic exploration here on Earth. Mars is obviously an environment that can support large-scale human activity. I don’t want to take the chance that we’re on the losing side, until we find out what it is, and if it’s compatible with Earth life, or not. There’s also a possibility that Earth life is Mars life. The first life forms here may have come from Mars. We don’t know. It may be more compatible than one would think. But, at any rate, it’s a very interesting scientific question.

h+: But you’re also trying to be careful not to introduce any harmful bacteria to anything that might already be living on Mars?
PW: Exactly. Until we understand the full biospheres of both planets, we’ll want to be careful. so, sterile robots can begin to help us do that. We’re pretty sure that there’s no life on the surface of Mars, or at least nowhere we’ve looked, but there may be life sub-surface. We already know from the Phoenix Lander that right below the surface is a permafrost. One of the things we’re doing here at NASA Ames is developing autonomous robots and drills that can drill down into that permafrost. We learned from Apollo that it’s hard to drill on other planets. The rock characteristics are different… and different in a way you can’t predict.

We have already done a lot of work on autonomous robots, which is the first step. Many of the Mars robots we’ve sent there have JPL on the outside and NASA Ames on the inside, since a lot of the software has been developed right here.

Next, we’ll want to build self-replicating robots, and that’s why nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and other technologies being worked on at Singularity University are so interesting. When you start looking at self-replicating robots, a biologist would tell you “well, we already know how to do that. Those are called living cells. Microbes.” in particular. So one of the obvious questions is: Can we begin to take existing microbes and engineer them to do things? And then, at some point, can you actually create synthetic life that can be engineered to extract the materials you need and construct environments?

We have a research group here at NASA Ames that is looking at “extremophiles,” life forms able to operate under highly extreme conditions, such as close to the boiling point of water, or in highly acidic conditions. These conditions may or may not represent exactly what you’d find on Mars, but we’ve been able to extract these self-replicating proteins and are beginning to figure out how you can replicate them to manipulate metals to construct substrates, and maybe even grow an electronic component.

h+: Are you talking about creating “synthetic life” that will duplicate what’s going on with biology?
PW: Yes. Eventually. But at first, we’re just using what we’ve already found in nature. In fact, there was an article the other day about using viruses to create batteries, and that you can modify the genome of a virus to construct battery leads (+, -), to create a kind of “nano batteries” using the viruses.

So rather than using the current manufacturing process, where somebody melts metal and pours it into molds and machines those parts together into an electrical component, in the future, we’ll use microbes and proteins to “grow” them. In a cell, a particular genetic coding manufactures a particular kind of protein that it links to build, say, a cell wall. Well, supposing we modify that so rather than building a cell wall, it builds a substrate for an electronic component. It might be a simple modification to say, “OK, build this in a flat area.” Then you have another one that comes in and says “OK, every few microns we have an electronic lead.”

The next step — and this is one that is speculative — is creating synthetic life. People like Craig Venter are beginning to do this. If we can actually understand the programming languages of DNA and RNA, which are basically natural computers that are able to replicate themselves, we can, potentially, write code to do things…. It would be like software. So, if nature hasn’t already developed something that can build a brick, we can instead program artificial life to build a brick. Now, that may be decades away, but, maybe not. I mean, there are a lot of people working on this.

The next order of business, if we truly are going to “settle” another world, is that we have to create some sort of environment that’s more hospitable than Mars’ current surface conditions. Mars has less that one percent of the Earth’s atmospheric pressure (that’s like being above 100,000 feet), and the temperatures and other extremes are pretty substantial. People obviously can’t live there.

h+: Enter “cyanobacteria”?
PW: Yes. Cyanobacteria is one of the earliest and most common life forms on Earth. Maybe the earliest, having existed for over 3 billion years. It’s what converted the Earth’s early atmosphere, which was a reducing carbon dioxide atmosphere, to its current oxygen atmosphere. Cyanobacteria are able to convert sunlight, in the presence of water and a few other materials and carbon, into life, and it also produces other carbon materials that can actually be used for fuel. In fact, they’ve already programmed cyanobacteria to produce ethanol from photosynthetic life.

The life that exists today on Earth, including us, is supported by these processes. So, one of the objectives is to determine if we can use what we find there, or modify it, or create synthetic forms of life that will enable us to operate on Mars, and convert its environment, at least on a small scale.

In the near-term, on the Moon, which we’re going to go to before we go to Mars, we can begin to understand more natural alternatives to using chemical reactors to clear the air, such as running air through canisters of cyanobacteria that consume the carbon dioxide and release oxygen. So, it’s a scrubber. In the longer term, we’ll want to see if we can modify it to operate in different temperature ranges and radiation conditions.

If we really want to settle Mars, and we don’t want to have to carry millions of tons of equipment with us to duplicate the way we live on Earth, these technologies will be key. Ideally, at some point, hundreds of years in the future or maybe sooner, people can go to Mars, and take some seeds with them to plant in the Martian soil that will produce a house and an environment they can live in. It’s obviously going to be more complicated than that, but that’s the vision.

written by Lisa Rein

NEW YORK — At the largest annual gathering of political technology geeks (and we mean that in the nicest possible way) the country’s first chief technology information officer is treated a bit like USB co-inventor Ajay Bhatt in the new Intel ad series: a different kind of rock star.

Vivek Kundra, King of Geek, got a thunderous and standing ovation after unveiling the most ambitious and pioneering effort yet to come out of his young federal office: an “IT dashboard” where you, the tax-paying citizen, can easily track how some 28 federal agencies are spending nearly $40 billion on federal technology projects, complete with descriptions, evaluation reports and contact information for managers in charge. The dashboard lives on USASpending.gov, a federal budget database.

As it happens, the federal government is the largest single buyer of technology in the world, Kundra said, and the goal of the dashboard is to give iPhone-carrying, Web-oriented Americans a way to keep Uncle Sam in check — in their own communities, on their own time. For example, if Citizen X in San Francisco sees a way for Project 3 in California to save more money on Item 3, there’s a way for Citizen X to communicate with the government. In Kundra’s view, this kind of data transparency holds agencies accountable.

“Now, for the first time, the entire country can look at how we’re spending money and give us feedback,” Kundra told the attendees of the Personal Democracy Forum (PdF) early this morning. “What this dashboard is going to allow us to do, for the first time, as we democratize data, as we make information available, we go to the golden source of that information.”

The aim is for the federal government to “tap into the ingenuity of the American people to show us a better way, to show us an innovative path,” he added.

The project underscores two realities. First, the open-source, here-comes-everybody ethos of the social Web has arrived in the White House, big time. If Kundra’s team can launch a Web 2.0 dashboard for federal IT spending, what’s next — a dashboard for federal education and military spending? Second, the fact that the announcement was made here at PdF — the brainchild of Andrew Rasiej, a New York entrepreneur-turned-tech-political-evangelist — has firmly cemented the confab and online think-tank at the center of the intersection of politics and technology. Together with Micah Sifry, a former journalist for The Nation and also a tech political evangelist, Rasiej has created the bipartisan TechPresident.com, which aggregates and analyzes how politicians use technology.

Six years ago, when PdF held its first conference, the focus was convincing politicos that the Internet, as Sifry said in an interview, “was not a fad.” This was in 2004, when inside-the-Beltway political operatives were quick to point to Howard Dean as a sign that the Internet can only take a campaign so far. In the past two years, and especially this year, the focus has been less on campaigning and more in governing. The title of this year’s confab, in fact, is We.gov.

“We still don’t know exactly how We.gov works,” Rasiej said in an interview, “but we know something is happening, something new is being born, and this is the place to figure it out.”

The two-day conference attracted some 1,000 attendees, which included many of the bold-faced names in the tech political circle. Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, sits on the board of the D.C.-based Sunlight Foundation, the non-partisan group that fights for more government transparency. Newmark introduced Kundra. Joe Rospars, who headed Barack Obama’s Internet team, headlined the confab’s first session, along with Mark McKinnon, the long-time Republican consultant. Panels have titles such as “Reinventing Government: What Would Google Do?,” which featured the author and new media guru Jeff Jarvis, and “From Participatory Politics to Participatory Medicine: The Coming Revolution in Health Care,” moderated by the Esther Dyson, the author and veteran tech maven whom the magazine Fast Company included on its list of the Most Influential Women in Technology.

Fittingly, the event is being held at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Jazz is all about experimentation, going with the beat, feeling your way through the music. The same goes with this emerging tech political sphere.

written by Jose Antonio Vargas

This is a story that truly rocks. The folks at Rock The Bike have teamed with JBL to create a human powered audio setup that can be used as an artists performs. You can pedal along and power up the stage while you rock out with your favorite artist, what a great concept!

Checkout the press release below for more details on the setup.

In a highly creative and environmentally forward-thinking application of JBL PRX portable loudspeakers, Rock the Bike, a designer and manufacturer of bicycles with an eye on raising the awareness of the “bike culture,” has employed PRX loudspeakers at several of its live music events, which are run on human power generated on bicycles.

For its live events, Rock the Bike designed a pedal-powered stage, which enables one or many individuals to ride stationary bicycles in place, which in turn power the audio system as the artists perform. “It’s been a steady progression to this—most of our performances used to be primarily in the streets and running off battery power,” said Paul Freedman of Rock The Bike. “Then we started hooking up with people interested in human power and over the past year, we’ve put a lot of energy into creating our own pedal-powered stage.”

Thanks to the efficiency of the JBL PRX Series, Rock the Bike employs PRX535 speakers for its main sound reinforcement system. “Because we’re an environmentally conscious group, the PRX speakers are a perfect fit, plus they’re lightweight so we can easily transport them on our cargo bicycles,” Freedman said. “I also really like the PRX speakers because the low/mid/high knobs on my mixer correspond directly with the low/mid/high drivers in the speaker, which make them very easy to use.”

Rock the Bike relies on volunteers from the audience to pedal the bikes, something that has never posed a challenge. “If there are a lot of people at an event, we have no problem getting volunteers from the crowd to keep a 2-bike pedal-powered system going,” Freedman said. “We position them close to the stage so they have a good view of the performers, and they’re literally supporting the music with their power.”

While the pedal-powered stage contributes to a sense of community at the live events, the system has taken an ironic (but intentional) back seat to the actual performances, as a result of its own efficiency. “The pedal-powered stage used to be the center of attention at our shows, but with the sound quality of the PRX speakers, along with our ability to make the pedal-power bikes quieter, the audience is getting absorbed into the music without even thinking about the pedal power,” Freedman added. “That’s our goal: to keep the music excellent and help spread the spirit of the bike.”

Since employing the pedal-powered stage, Rock the Bike has supported events ranging from rock star performances to a press conference at City Hall in San Francisco. “We recently powered a show by Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam,” Freedman said. “He was only supposed to play the first song of his set through pedal power, but he ended up playing the entire set with it because he got such a great response from the crowd.”

For more information on Rock The Bike, please visit www.rockthebike.com

Written by Richard M

The new owners of file-sharing website The Pirate Bay say users will be paid for sharing files.

Global Gaming Factory (GGF) paid 60m kronor (£4.7m) to take over the site.

In an exclusive interview with the BBC, GGF’s Hans Pandeya said that the only way to beat illegal file-sharing was to make something more attractive.

“We are going to set up a system where the file-sharer actually makes money,” he said.

According to Mr Pandeya, GGF’s chief executive, the business model for The Pirate Bay would be that it continued to be a file-sharing site. The only difference – at least in terms of content – would be that the files would be hosted legally, rather than stolen from copyright holders.

“We’re a listed company so everything we do has to be legal; content providers need to be paid and have their wishes and demands met,” he said.

Freebie beater

Mr Pandeya said that one of the biggest hurdles in overcoming illegal file-sharing was that there was zero cost to the users, while legitimate sites required users to pay for content. The only way to make something more attractive than free was to pay users to share files.

“More than half of all internet traffic is file sharing and P2P [peer-to-peer] traffic and buying Pirate Bay gives us one of the biggest sources of traffic.

“We can then use this massive network of file-sharers to help [internet service providers] reduce overload.

“Let’s say a popular song comes out. Rather than a million downloads from a site – which would cause a considerable strain on that ISP – we can take that song and put it out on P2P.

“The copyright holder still gets paid, the users still get their file, the ISP doesn’t have a million people all grabbing a file and – for the users who share that song – a payment for putting that file on the P2P network.”

Mr Pandeya said that while they would be paying content providers and file sharers, there was money to be made from helping ISPs cope with overload.

“We’ve been working with ISPs for over a year and we can cut their costs – when the system becomes overloaded – by 90%.

“All ISPs have this problem and it is one we can fix,” he said.

Computer grid

The company is also looking at harnessing the storage capacity and processing power of the file-sharing community, creating a powerful grid of P2P-linked computers.

“We’re talking about next-gen file sharing so you can create revenue from storage and internet traffic optimisation,” he said.

However, GGF said that the technology to drive this was still in its infancy.

“This technology is new. For now, we’re outlining our intentions and asking users to have faith,” said Mr Pandeya

By Daniel Emery

The admins of The Pirate Bay have stressed that in order for the Bay to stay alive, they need to adapt the site to a legitimate one, selling the site for $7.8 Million in the process. While some users showed their support for the infamous website, others are already jumping ship, demanding that their accounts be removed in the process. We were curious to know what alternatives there are out there these days and have come up with 5 alternative websites.

It seemed almost unfathomable right up to the announcement of the website being sold, but it has indeed happened. While sites like the once mighty SuprNova fell in it’s wake, The Pirate Bay stood proud long after other sites succumbed to pressure from copyright entities. The length the site lasted seemed like the site became very symbol of defiance toward the copyright industry as a whole. Really how many sites can be named that lasted as long as The Pirate Bay? To drive the point home, the admins even created a page of legal threats they received and included responses which became a sensation all in its own primarily for the audacity of the responses, but also for the humor in it all. The Pirate Bay was the biggest ’stick it to the man’ kind of sites. As a result, many other sites may have been emboldened by the efforts of The Pirate Bay – perhaps because the site lead the way in resilience, or maybe because the site took most of the flack from the copyright industry to name two possibilities.

For these and many other reasons, the loss of such a site in the eyes of many would lead to a huge hole left behind. While the fact that it was such a large site where users went to was, in and of itself, is a large reason for the hole left behind, many would agree that the spirit behind the site being removed can be felt by many file-sharers – how many users out there who never used the site or rarely used the site felt at least one bit emotional about the sale?

While the admins reassured their users that the site isn’t dying, just changing hands, many users have already expressed their doubts and are opting for the attitude that the site died the moment the announcement came that the site was sold – even though nothing has even changed yet.

I was  curious. If one were to jump ship, where would the users go? Under the idea that the site has to be somewhat public at the very least, we found 5 alternative websites through our own resources that may be of interest to public BitTorrent users:

1. Mininova

MiniNova is perhaps the most well known in the BitTorrent community. It was formed after the demise of SuprNova by ex-SuprNova staff members. It’s not hard to argue that this was the best site that replaced SuprNova. It indexes .torrent files from other sites, so some of the .torrents are from private sites that only allow members of those sites to download the given files. Still, the site is moderated and well-used by members and, with the release of their distribution network, content creators alike.

2. Demonoid

There’s been some debate in the past on whether or not this is a public or private site, though many would agree that this would be classified as semi-private given how often sign-ups are open. Whether or not you agree with this kind of torrent site, Demonoid has a huge following backing them and a number of it’s users would no doubt defend it’s viability as an alternative to The Pirate Bay.

3. ISOHunt

ISOHunt, like MinoNova, has had it’s share of legal trouble in the past and agreed to filtering content. Still, a number of users still use that site for finding what they want and it has stayed being one of the most populated sites online to this day.

4. 1337x

1337x.org is a lesser known BitTorrent site. Still, that hasn’t stopped their front page from saying “we don’t plan on selling anytime soon.”

MustangX continues, “We welcome all the users of TPB to use our trackers and site. It’s a free leech community with NO ratios to maintain, we have a web based chat , A 24/7 radio station with 8 different DJ’s.”

5. BTJunkie

BTJunkie is another site that is well-populated with users, but not as well known as sites like MiniNova and ISOHunt. Still, many users still find this place to be a torrent home or even a second torrent home when another of their preferred sites goes down or inaccessible on their end.

Afterthought

It should be noted that for many, no site will fully replace The Pirate Bay. That site is easily considered a home site for many and a site that is difficult to impossible to replace in the long run. Still, The Pirate Bay isn’t the only site around these days. It might be questionable if there would be many, if any, sites that could match the longevity and reach of The Pirate Bay, but that doesn’t make the only BitTorrent site around with, at least, a semi-open nature about it.

Written by Drew Wilson

It probably comes as no surprise, but it seems most people ignore routine computer maintenance and only think about it when disaster strikes. You know, like falling victim to more than 3,000 viruses. At once.

A survey done of Staples “EasyTechs,” indicated that more than 80 percent of the chain’s customers don’t bother with routine maintenance and most of the problems they call in the techs for could have been prevented.

The problems the techs found included the personal record number of viruses cited above as well as some much, much ickier ones:

• Enough dust inside to fill the tech’s hand-held vacuum
• A family of cockroaches living quite comfortably, thankyouverymuch
• A bee’s nest. Yes, a bee’s nest. You know, those flying things that go “bzzzz” and sting you? A nest of those.

The techs suggested some easy tips for users that could potentially result in the techs having less work to do, but possibly getting fewer bee stings:

• Keep your antivirus software up to date. Only a third of the 105 techs reported their customers had the current versions.
• If you have a Windows computer, use Windows Disk Cleanup to safely get rid of temporary files.
• Keep your computer in a well-ventilated area and clear out any dust or dirt that’s gotten into the case.
• Defragment your hard drive regularly; it organizes your hard drive to maximize your performance
• Check regularly for updates to your OS, whether it be Windows, Mac, Linux or other, and make sure you download any security patches.
• Back up stuff that’s hard or impossible to replace – photos, music, important files – on an external hard drive or flash drive. More than 85 percent of the techs said virtually none of their customers backed up data.

One word – vacuum. It could save your PC’s life…

In other words: Don’t be like most people and wait for your computer to crash and die an ignominious death before seeking help.

by Amy Vernon