Tag: stem

NSA's automated hacking engine offers hands-free pwning of the world

NSA’s automated hacking engine offers hands-free pwning of the world
With Turbine, no humans are required to exploit phones, PCs, routers, VPNs.
by Sean Gallagher – Mar 12 2014, 3:20pm EDT
Since 2010, the National Security Agency has kept a push-button hacking system called Turbine that allows the agency to scale up the number of networks it has access to from hundreds to potentially millions. The news comes from new Edward Snowden documents published by Ryan Gallagher and Glenn Greenwald inThe Intercept today. The leaked information details how the NSA has used Turbine to ramp up its hacking capacity to “industrial scale,” plant malware that breaks the security on virtual private networks (VPNs) and digital voice communications, and collect data and subvert targeted networks on a once-unimaginable scale.
Turbine is part of Turbulence, the collection of systems that also includes the Turmoil network surveillance system that feeds the NSA’s XKeyscore surveillance database. While it is controlled from NSA and GCHQ headquarters, it is a distributed set of attack systems equipped with packaged “exploits” that take advantage of the ability the NSA and GCHQ have to insert themselves as a “man in the middle” at Internet chokepoints. Using that position of power, Turbine can automate functions of Turbulence systems to corrupt data in transit between two Internet addresses, adding malware to webpages being viewed or otherwise attacking the communications stream.
Since Turbine went online in 2010, it has allowed the NSA to scale up from managing hundreds of hacking operations each day to handling millions of them. It does so by taking people out of the loop of managing attacks, instead using software to identify, target, and attack Internet-connected devices by installing malware referred to as “implants.” According to the documents, NSA analysts can simply specify the type of information required and let the system figure out how to get to it without having to know the details of the application being attacked.
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How Academia and Publishing are Destroying Scientific Innovation

How Academia and Publishing are Destroying Scientific Innovation: A Conversation with Sydney Brenner | King’s Review – Magazine
 
Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers

The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense.

 Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013.

 

…Among the works were, for example, a paper published as a proceeding from the 2013 International Conference on Quality, Reliability, Risk, Maintenance, and Safety Engineering, held in Chengdu, China. (The conference website says that all manuscripts are “reviewed for merits and contents”.) The authors of the paper, entitled ‘TIC: a methodology for the construction of e-commerce’, write in the abstract that they “concentrate our efforts on disproving that spreadsheets can be made knowledge-based, empathic, and compact”. … The IEEE has now removed the paper)….

 

This has got to be an embarrassment to IEEE and Springer.
As of this moment, a scanned copy of the first page of the cited example is still online at
I read a bit of it to assure myself that it was really gibberish and not just a poor mechanical translation. It is definitely gibberish. Here’s the first paragraph:
“Replication must work. To put this in perspective, consider the fact that acclaimed researchers generally use wide-area networks to overcome this quagmire. Next, the notion that hackers worldwide collaborate with metamorphic algorithms is never considered unfortunate. Thus, unstable epistemologies and the location identity split have paved the way for the simulation of B-trees.”
There is also a diagram, a sort of flow chart, that has nonsensical conditions and transitions.
Is this a fraud perpetrated by the named authors or their assistants, a parody, a prank or an act of digital vandalism? In any event, Labbé’s discovery of 120 gibberish papers have exposed a flawed publication process.
This conference requests two versions of each paper: one to review and decide acceptance and one for the printer’s camera. The 2014 edition of the same conference has posted this schedule:
10 Apr 2014 Full Paper Submission Deadline
10 May 2014 Full Paper Acceptance Notification
30 May 2014 Camera Ready Papers Due
22 Jul 2014 Conference Begins
There’s not a whole lot of time for the handlers of the camera-ready copies (some of whom may not be fluent readers of English technical prose) to verify their integrity before they are printed. There is opportunity for a bad actor, whether author or vandal, to replace the submission by gibberish.
Larry Tesler

Engineers Allege Hiring Collusion in Silicon Valley – NYTimes.com

Who Owns the Moon?

Who exactly owns the moon?
Bigelow: Moon property rights would help create a lunar industry
http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2014/02/bigelow-moon-property-create-lunar-industry/
Bigelow:
Lunar private property rights covered by Outer Space Treaty
http://www.examiner.com/article/bigelow-lunar-private-property-rights-covered-by-outer-space-treaty
Moon Mining Rush Ahead?
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/11/131113-lunar-property-rights-bigelow-nasa/
No one owns the moon says scientist
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/10563369/No-one-owns-the-moon-says-scientist.html
NASA: Earth’s Moon
http://moon.nasa.gov/home.cfm
Moon facts
http://lro.gsfc.nasa.gov/moonfacts.html
You have probably wondered: who owns the moon? Technically, the ownership of the moon is governed by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty which requires nations to ensure that activities or experiments of their nation do not interfere with the peaceful exploration and use of outer space. Additionally, under current United Nations law, member states are “prohibited from appropriating the moon.” Recentlythis complex subject has been back in the news again as Robert Bigelow, founder and president of Bigelow Aerospace, has called for clarification from the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) on whether launching a Moon habitat allows them to have a zone of operation that other persons are prevented from entering. It would seem that such a zone would essentially allow Bigelow (and others, potentially) to run a privately run lunar base engaged in mining operations. While this seem outlandish, it’s a very real concern. Commenting on the matter, Professor Ian Crawford ofBirkbeck College noted that he thought space tourism is more likely to take place before the moon is mined for its minerals. [KMG]
The first link will take interested parties to an article from NASASpaceflight.com about Bigelow’s recent renewed interest in the possibility of private moon exploration. The second link will take users to a news article from the Examiner about the world of lunar private property rights. Moving along, the third link will take interested visitors to a great piece from National Geographic’s Dan Vergano about Bigelow’s quest to clarify private property rights on the moon. Next, visitors will find an article from the Telegraph which talks about the ownership of the moon and
various international treaties governing this matter. A great site from NASA follows, which provides information about the moon, complete with photos, videos, and an interactive map of its surface. The final link leads to a fun set of basic facts about the moon, specially selected for children. The Scout Report