An anonymous reader writes “Pennsylvania’s chief information security officer Robert Maley has been fired for publicly talking about a security incident involving the Commonwealth’s online driving exam scheduling system. He apparently did not get the required approval for talking about the incident from appropriate authorities.”
President Obama recently announced several appointments to the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel, including data visualization expert Edward Tufte, author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. The purpose of the panel is to advise the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, whose aim is “To promote accountability by coordinating and conducting oversight of Recovery funds to prevent fraud, waste, and abuse and to foster transparency on Recovery spending by providing the public with accurate, user-friendly information.” Tufte said on his website, “I’m doing this because I like accountability and transparency, and I believe in public service. And it is the complete opposite of everything else I do. Maybe I’ll learn something. The practical consequence is that I will probably go to Washington several days each month, in addition to whatever homework and phone meetings are necessary.”
Source: Edward Tufte Appointed To Help Track and Explain Stimulus Funds
santosh maharshi passes along an article on Edge by David Gelernter, the man who (according to the introduction) predicted the Web and first described cloud computing; he’s also a Unabomber survivor. Gelernter makes 35 predictions and assertions, some brilliant, some dubious. “6. We know that the Internet creates ‘information overload,’ a problem with two parts: increasing number of information sources and increasing information flow per source. The first part is harder: it’s more difficult to understand five people speaking simultaneously than one person talking fast — especially if you can tell the one person to stop temporarily, or go back and repeat. Integrating multiple information sources is crucial to solving information overload. Blogs and other anthology-sites integrate information from many sources. But we won’t be able to solve the overload problem until each Internet user can choose for himself what sources to integrate, and can add to this mix the most important source of all: his own personal information — his email and other messages, reminders and documents of all sorts. To accomplish this, we merely need to turn the whole Cybersphere on its side, so that time instead of space is the main axis. … 14. The structure called a cyberstream or lifestream is better suited to the Internet than a conventional website because it shows information-in-motion, a rushing flow of fresh information instead of a stagnant pool.”
An anonymous reader notes a long piece up at BusinessInsider.com accusing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg of hacking into the email accounts of rivals and journalists. The CEO of the world’s most successful social networking website was accused of at least two breaches of privacy. In a two-year investigation detailing the founding of Facebook, Nicholas Carlson, a senior editor at Silicon Alley Insider, uncovered what he claimed was evidence of the hackings in 2004. “New information uncovered by Silicon Alley Insider suggests that some of the complaints [in a court case ongong since 2007] against Mark Zuckerberg are valid. It also suggests that, on at least one occasion in 2004, Mark used private login data taken from Facebook’s servers to break into Facebook members’ private email accounts and read their emails — at best, a gross misuse of private information. Lastly, it suggests that Mark hacked into the competing company’s systems and changed some user information with the aim of making the site less useful. … Over the past two years, we have interviewed more than a dozen sources familiar with aspects of this story — including people involved in the founding year of the company. We have also reviewed what we believe to be some relevant IMs and emails from the period. Much of this information has never before been made public. None of it has been confirmed or authenticated by Mark or the company.” The single-page view doesn’t have its own URL; click on “View as one page” near the bottom.
Source: Facebook Founder Accused of Hacking Into Rivals’ Email
wjr writes “Many cars these days contain black boxes that record information (speed, accelerator position, etc) and can preserve information in the case of an accident. Ford and Chrysler say that they use ‘open systems’ so anyone can read out the data; General Motors has licensed Bosch to produce a device capable of reading its cars’ black boxes. On the other hand, Toyota has only a single laptop in the US capable of reading its cars’ black boxes, and generally won’t allow the data to be read without a court order. Honda seems to have a similar policy. This is emerging as an issue in the investigation into unintended acceleration.”
Spanish authorities announced this week that they shut down one of the largest botnets ever discovered. The Mariposa botnet, which first appeared in 2008, was a network of nearly 13 million virus-infected PCs, remotely operated by thieves stealing private information from computers in half the Fortune 1000 companies and 190 countries. Though three men are now in custody, worries over the bot are far from over.
Juan Salon at the Spanish Civil Guard was relieved to catch the three men, aged between 25 and 31, whose names have not yet been released. But the guard was troubled to find that none of the three possessed the technical know-how to design something like the Mariposa. “We have not arrested the creator of the botnet. We have arrested the administrators of the botnet, the ones who spread it and were administering and controlling it,” Salon said [San Jose Mercury News]. They are following a fourth suspect, he says.
Just finding the first three alleged culprits was no easy task, as investigators dealt with international boundaries and the reluctance of service providers housing the command machines, or that have sold the rights to web addresses used in the infection process, to assist in them. In the case of the so-called Mariposa botnet, service providers helped private researchers, Spanish police and the American FBI [Financial Times]. By the time authorities shut down the botnet, it reportedly held 800,000 people’s private information.
But while Salon worries about not catching the mastermind, he’s happy that the three men apprehended weren’t criminal geniuses. “Thank God, their criminal mentality wasn’t very sophisticated,” said Salon, who said the men apparently tried to offer their botnet to criminal gangs for hire [Reuters]. Despite amassing so much potential for destruction—police say they could have brought down a whole country’s computers systems—the alleged operators lived just a “comfortable” life. Says Civil Guard Captain Cesar Lorenza: “They’re not like these people from the Russian mafia or Eastern European mafia who like to have sports cars and good watches and good suits. The most frightening thing is they are normal people who are earning a lot of money with cybercrime” [The Guardian].
Of course, there are still thousands of other botnets in operation, but this appears to be the largest ever brought down.
Image: Wikimedia Commons / Tom B.
Source: Massive Spanish Botnet Busted, but Hacker Mastermind Remains Unknown
An anonymous reader tips an account up at Wired of a hot new field of mathematics and applied algorithm research called “compressed sensing” that takes advantage of the mathematical concept of sparsity to recreate images or other datasets from noisy, incomplete inputs. “[The inventor of CS, Emmanuel] Candès can envision a long list of applications based on what he and his colleagues have accomplished. He sees, for example, a future in which the technique is used in more than MRI machines. Digital cameras, he explains, gather huge amounts of information and then compress the images. But compression, at least if CS is available, is a gigantic waste. If your camera is going to record a vast amount of data only to throw away 90 percent of it when you compress, why not just save battery power and memory and record 90 percent less data in the first place? … The ability to gather meaningful data from tiny samples of information is also enticing to the military.”
Source: Recovering Data From Noise
An anonymous reader writes “I am considering buying a penthouse apartment in Manhattan that happens to be about twenty feet away from a pair of panel antennas belonging to a major cellular carrier. The antennas are on roughly the same plane as the apartment and point in its direction. I have sifted through a lot of information online about cell towers, most of which suggest that the radiation they emit is low-level and benign. Most of this information, however, seems to concern ground-level exposure at non-regular intervals. My question to Slashdot is: should the prospect of persistent exposure to microwave radiation from this pair of antennas sitting twenty feet from where I rest my head worry me? Am I just being a jackass? Can I, perhaps, line the walls of the place with a tight metal mesh and thereby deflect the radiation? My background is in computer engineering — I am not particularly knowledgeable about the physics of devices such as these. Please help me make an enlightened decision.”
xsee writes “Only hours after the earthquake and resulting tsunami from Chile, hackers began manipulating search results to direct people seeking information on the event to infected webpages. Exercise caution as to where you get information on this tragedy. Chester Wisniewski describes what happened after he saw a suspicious site listed second on a Google search: ‘It appears to be a normal website with information and videos about different Asian tsunamis over the past few years. It is difficult to tell whether this particular page was SEO-optimized, or was an innocent victim of a malicious script. SophosLabs got back to me that this page contains some obfuscated malicious JavaScript that we detect as MAL/ObfJS-R. This script was appended after the normal code on the page’”
DallasMay writes “This article describes an experiment that demonstrates that people don’t put as much weight on facts as they do their own belief about how the world is supposed to work. From the article: ‘In one experiment, Braman queried subjects about something unfamiliar to them: nanotechnology — new research into tiny, molecule-sized objects that could lead to novel products. “These two groups start to polarize as soon as you start to describe some of the potential benefits and harms,” Braman says. The individualists tended to like nanotechnology. The communitarians generally viewed it as dangerous. Both groups made their decisions based on the same information. “It doesn’t matter whether you show them negative or positive information, they reject the information that is contrary to what they would like to believe, and they glom onto the positive information,” Braman says.’
jetlib.sec