Five must-read stories from the past week include the first in a series of the sharpest views of Pluto; a Turing test in the form of an online game; a new, untraceable text-messaging system; the world’s first mathematical theory of humor; and an 18-year-old student who won $400,000 for his video explaining Einstein’s Special Theory…
McAfee Personal Safety丨Family Locator
This is a snapshot listing the system requirements and a few of the highlighted features for the McAfee Personal Safety丨Family Locator App mentioned in “Smart Personal Safety and Security.” It also complements “The Gift of Fear,” which discusses how to recognize potentially dangerous situations. From McAfee Innovations in Santa Clara, CA, is a free personal…
Watch Over Me
This is a snapshot listing the system requirements and a few of the highlighted features for the Watch Over Me App mentioned in “Smart Personal Safety and Security.” It also complements “The Gift of Fear,” which discusses how to recognize potentially dangerous situations. From WATCH OVER ME is another free security app available for both…
bSafe Personal Safety App
This is a snapshot listing the system requirements and a few of the highlighted features for the Safe Personal Safety App mentioned in “Smart Personal Safety and Security.” It also complements “The Gift of Fear,” which discusses how to recognize potentially dangerous situations. A product of Bipper, located in Palo Alto, CA, this app currently…
Untraceable Text-messaging System Comes with Statistical Guarantees
Anonymity networks, which sit on top of the public Internet, are designed to conceal people’s Web-browsing habits from prying eyes. The most popular of these, Tor, has been around for more than a decade and is used by millions of people every day. Recent research, however, has shown that adversaries can infer a great deal…
Hybrid Data Management Approach Automates Primary Storage and Data Protection to, from and in the Cloud
HOPKINTON, MA — EMC has announced the immediate availability of a broad range of products and solutions designed to seamlessly connect primary storage and data protection systems to private and public clouds. As a result, organizations will be better equipped to take advantage of both the agility and unlimited scalability of public cloud services and…
Experiment Records Extreme Quantum Weirdness
Researchers from the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) at the National University of Singapore and the University of Seville in Spain have reported the most extreme ‘entanglement’ between pairs of photons ever seen in the lab. The result was published October 30, 2015, in Physical Review Letters. The achievement is evidence for the validity of…
In our Wi-Fi World, the Internet Still Depends on Undersea Cables
Recently, a New York Times article on Russian submarine activity near undersea communications cables dredged up Cold War politics and generated widespread recognition of the submerged systems we all depend upon. Not many people realize that undersea cables transport nearly 100 percent of transoceanic data traffic. These lines are laid on the very bottom of…
Two Degrees, Flies Planes, Author, Works at NASA. His Age? 17
BOSTON (AP) — Moshe Kai Cavalin has two university degrees, but he’s too young to vote. He flies airplanes, but he’s too young to drive a car alone. Life is filled with contrasts for Cavalin, a 17-year-old from San Gabriel, CA, who has dashed by major milestones as his age seems to lag behind. He…
Researchers find Potential Security Hole in Genomic Data-sharing Network
Sharing genomic information among researchers is critical to the advance of biomedical research. Yet genomic data contains identifiable information and, in the wrong hands, poses a risk to individual privacy. If someone had access to your genome sequence — either directly from your saliva or other tissues, or from a popular genomic information service —…
Cybersecurity: Senate takes Initial Step to Bill’s Passage
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate is set to pass a bill aimed at improving cybersecurity by encouraging the sharing of threat information among companies and the U.S. government. A procedural vote of 83-14 on October 22, 2015, represented a healthy endorsement of a bill opposed by companies such as Apple and Dropbox, who said it…
NICE Conference & Expo 2015: The National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education
November 3-4, 2015 Paradise Point Resort & Spa San Diego, CA https://www.fbcinc.com/e/nice/ Cybersecurity has emerged as one of the leading creators of jobs and opportunity for all economic sectors. The demand for cybersecurity positions in both the public and private sector is large and growing, but the talent pool of cybersecurity workers is not yet…
Protecting the Frontiers of Cyberspace
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has long supported cybersecurity research to protect the frontiers of cyberspace. NSF investments in basic research have resulted in innovative ways to secure information and ensure privacy on the Internet and have led to algorithms that form the basis for electronic commerce, software security bug detection, spam filtering and much…
Differential Privacy: Safely Sharing and Studying Sensitive Data
The promise of big data lies in researchers’ ability to mine massive datasets for insights that can save lives, improve services and inform our understanding of the world. These data may be generated by surfing the Web, interacting with medical devices or passing sensors. Some data may be trivial, but in many cases, data are…
Performance Cloning Techniques boost Computer Chip Memory Systems Design
Researchers have developed software using two new techniques to help computer chip designers improve memory systems. The techniques rely on “performance cloning,” which can assess the behavior of software without compromising privileged data or proprietary computer code. Computer chip manufacturers try to design their chips to provide the best possible performance. But to find the…
Science DMZ Infrastructure Architecture Accelerates Data Flows
From individual universities around the country to a consortium of research institutions stretching the length of the west coast, networking teams are deploying an infrastructure architecture known as the Science DMZ to help researchers make productive use of ever-increasing data flows. The Science DMZ traces its name to an element of network security architecture. In…
Automated Voice Imitation fools Humans and Machines
Researchers have found that automated and human verification for voice-based user authentication systems are vulnerable to voice impersonation attacks. Using an off-the-shelf voice-morphing tool, the researchers developed a voice impersonation attack to attempt to penetrate automated and human verification systems. This new research was presented at the European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, or ESORICS,…
Scientists Stop and Search Malware hidden in Super Bowl Tweets
Cyber criminals are taking advantage of real-world events with high volumes of traffic on Twitter in order to post links to Web sites that contain malware. To combat the threat, computer scientists have created an intelligent system to identify malicious links disguised in shortened URLs on Twitter. In the recent study, the Cardiff University team…
Millions More Government Fingerprints Deemed Stolen
WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of people applying for or receiving security clearances whose fingerprint images were stolen in one of the worst government data breaches is now believed to be 5.6 million, not 1.1 million as first thought, the Office of Personnel Management announced September 23, 2015. The agency was the victim of what…
Pursuing Effective Security Tools for Software Developers
For software programmers, security tools are analytic software that can scan or run their code to expose vulnerabilities long before the software goes to market. But these tools can have shortcomings, and programmers don’t always use them. New research from National Science Foundation-funded computer science researcher Emerson Murphy-Hill and his colleagues tackles three different aspects…
Quantum-proof: Cryptographers Develop New Protocol to Secure Data from Tomorrow’s Supercomputers
For the powerful quantum computers that will be developed in the future, cracking online bank account details and credit card numbers will be a cinch. But a team of cryptographers is already working at future-proofing the privacy of today’s Internet communications from tomorrow’s powerful computers. Queensland University of Technology’s Dr. Douglas Stebila, along with researchers…
JSM 2015 Roundup: 10 Stories You Don’t Want to Miss
JSM, the Joint Statistical Meetings, the largest gathering of statisticians held in North America, took place this year from August 8 to 13, 2015, in Seattle WA. Attended by more than 6,000 people, it was held jointly with the American Statistical Association, International Biometric Society (ENAR and WNAR), Institute of Mathematical Statistics, Statistical Society of…
New Analysis Method Finds 11 Security Flaws in Popular Internet Browsers
WASHINGTON, DC — Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing developed a new cyber security analysis method that discovered 11 previously unknown Internet browser security flaws, and were honored with the Internet Defense Prize, an award offered by Facebook in partnership with USENIX at the 24th USENIX Security Symposium. Ph.D. students Byoungyoung…
Powerful New Security Tool Detects Malware Uploading to Cloud Servers
A powerful new computer security tool called XDet that can detect malicious files being uploaded to a cloud computing service is reported this month in the International Journal of Space-Based and Situated Computing by researchers from Manchester Metropolitan University and Nottingham Trent University, UK. Rob Hegarty (MMU) and John Haggerty (NTU) explain how cloud computing…
U.S. seeks Extradition of Man Charged with Hacking into U.S. Government Networks
NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — A British man accused of hacking into U.S. government computer networks and stealing sensitive and confidential information was arrested in England, and U.S. prosecutors said they will attempt to have him transferred to New Jersey. Lauri Love, of Stradishall, England, has been charged with hacking into agencies including the U.S. Army,…