December 2008
21 posts
2 tags
Can Strategy Be Crowdsourced? →
Criminal, terrorist, and insurgent networks have become powerful world actors. They utilize network forms of organization to make fast decisions, cover a wide operational space, remain resilient in the face of state reprisals, and have a capacity for learning and self-correction that many top-down organizations lack. Lately, many analysts have written about decentralized network forms that exhibit...
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US computers still the source of most malware →
The ISP shutdowns of 2008 may have cut the overall amount of spam flooding across the Internet, but the largest share of the world’s malware is still being hosted right here in the United States. According to the most recent Sophos report, the US hosts 37 percent of all malware sites followed by China (27.7 percent) and Russia (9.1 percent). Despite the well-publicized Atrivo and McColo...
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Prof: IP law only needs tweak to encourage open... →
The technology marketplace is littered with competing standards, some open, others proprietary. A number of academics, both in the legal field and out, have argued that open standards are superior for both the market and consumers. They allow companies to produce products that compete on their merits, rather than their ability to play nice with other hardware or content, and they prevent consumers...
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Adult brain neurons can remodel connections →
Overturning a century of prevailing thought, scientists are finding that neurons in the adult brain can remodel their connections. In work reported in the Nov. 24 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Elly Nedivi, associate professor of neurobiology at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, and colleagues found that a type of neuron implicated in...
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Open source makes serious headway in the U.S.... →
As I listened to David Mihelcic, CTO with the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency talk about the benefits of open source on Federal News Radio’s presentation of “Open Source Solutions - 2 Years In Review,” I couldn’t help but be impressed with just how far open source has come in the past decade. When I first got involved with open source back in 1998, it was perceived...
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Commentary and refutation: CSIS & Securing... →
The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) recently released a report titled “Securing Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency: A report of the CSIS commission on cybersecurity for the 44th presidency”. This report is an in depth look at policy recommendations. Realizing that this an effort of many people and not to denigrate the work by those people this report unfortunately does not...
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$50 billion at stake Bernard Madoff is arrested... →
Andrew Calamari, a senior enforcement official at the US Securities and Exchange Commission, described the scheme as “a stunning fraud that appears to be of epic proportions”.
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Madoff’s $50 Billion ‘Lie’ Ensnares Victims From... →
Dec. 15 (Bloomberg) — Bernard Madoff’s scam that allegedly cost investors $50 billion ensnared firms stretching from Paris to Tokyo to Madrid. BNP Paribas SA, France’s biggest bank, has as much as 350 million euros ($472 million) at risk from Madoff’s investment advisory business, the bank said yesterday. Nomura Holdings Inc., Japan’s largest brokerage, has 27.5 billion yen ($302 million) at...
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Did our cosmos exist before the big bang? →
ABHAY ASHTEKAR remembers his reaction the first time he saw the universe bounce. “I was taken aback,” he says. He was watching a simulation of the universe rewind towards the big bang. Mostly the universe behaved as expected, becoming smaller and denser as the galaxies converged. But then, instead of reaching the big bang “singularity”, the universe bounced and started...
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Weighing the black hole at the center of the Milky... →
Over the past decades, the black hole has gone from a theoretical construct to the subject of observation. Obviously, it’s impossible to observe an object that traps light itself, but it has been possible to observe some of the matter in its immediate neighborhood and use those observations to make inference about the black hole itself. Although small black holes can form during the death of...
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Stop Sharing Your Twitter Credentials →
At Twitpay, we obviously needed to work with Twitter, and since they don’t yet offer OAuth (or something similar) yet, we explored the options on how best to do this. There has been a proliferation lately of sites that ask you to provide your username and password to other sites in order to exploit some sort of functionality, usually searching through your address book. While this tradeoff of...
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Black hole confirmed in Milky Way →
There is a giant black hole at the centre of our galaxy, a study has confirmed. German astronomers tracked the movement of 28 stars circling the centre of the Milky Way, using two telescopes in Chile. The black hole is four million times heavier than our Sun, according to the paper in The Astrophysical Journal.
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U.S. Is Losing Global Cyberwar, Commission Says -... →
The U.S. faces a cybersecurity threat of such magnitude that the next President should move quickly to create a Center for Cybersecurity Operations and appoint a special White House advisor to oversee it. Those are among the recommendations in a 44-page report by the U.S. Commission on Cybersecurity, a version of which will be made public today. The bipartisan panel includes executives,...
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FBI: widespread copper theft puts US... →
Up until recently, economies around the globe were on a fairly steady upward trajectory, a growth that put pricing pressure on some of the raw materials needed for both production and infrastructure. That pricing pressure has, in some cases, led to a bit of a black market where the materials are forcibly recycled through various forms of theft. Copper is one of these materials, and a variety of...
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A New Twist on Hydropower →
The world’s river and ocean currents carry an enormous amount of kinetic energy, but most of this water flows slower than four miles per hour. Existing turbine and water-mill technologies can’t generate enough electricity at such speeds to make their deployment economically viable.
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The Day The Web Went Dead →
Imagine life without the Internet. Hard? Just ask state officials in Maine to tell you about the ugly surprise they had on Halloween. On Oct. 30, Sprint Nextel (nyse: S - news - people ) severed its last connection to Cogent Communications (nasdaq: CCOI - news - people ), disconnecting two of the Internet’s five largest backbones. Instantly, major American and Canadian universities lost...
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Odd microtransactions may point to credit card... →
A wave of unauthorized microtransactions is currently sweeping the accounts of a number of US credit card holders, though the size and scope of the fraud scheme have not yet been determined. Beginning on or around November 20, consumers apparently began to notice small charges—typically for 19-29¢—appearing on their bank statements or online account information. These small withdrawals or deposits...
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Change.gov Now Under Creative Commons License →
Barack Obama’s transition site, Change.gov, is now under a Creative Commons license—specifically, the highly permissive Attribution 3.0 Unported license, which allows unfettered copying and remixing of content, subject only to an attribution requirement. Lest anyone worry that they’re wild-eyed radicals, though, the copyright policy makes sure to assert the site’s conformity with...
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Antivirus programs unreliable during critical... →
The reactive nature of IT security is a well-known weakness that puts defenders at an inherent disadvantage against attackers. Unfortunately, it’s also a flaw that’s extremely difficult to correct; teaching virus scanners to correctly identify new threats without also generating false positives is no simple task. In theory, anti-malware products have gotten considerably better at this...
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How Gadgets Helped Mumbai Attackers →
The Mumbai terrorists used an array of commercial technologies — from Blackberries to GPS navigators to anonymous e-mail accounts — to pull off their heinous attacks.
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