Ambient Computing: Marc Andreessen's Vision of the Internet of Things 2.0

The hype around the Internet of Things has been rising steadily over the past five years. In tech analyst Gartner's Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies report in 2015, the IoT is at the peak of "inflated expectations", particularly for areas like the smart home, which involve controlling your lights, thermostat or TV using your mobile phone.

But the era of sensors has only just dawned, according to renowned technology investor and internet pioneer Marc Andreessen. In 10 years, he predicts mobile phones themselves could disappear.

"The idea that we have a single piece of glowing display is too limiting. By then, every table, every wall, every surface will have a screen or can project," he told the Telegraph. "Hypothetically you walk upto a wall, sit at a table and [talk to] an earpiece or eyeglasses to make a call. The term is ambient or ubiquitous computing."

link.

Russian Submarines, Intel Ships Operating Near Undersea Internet Cables, Worry Pentagon

Russian submarines and spy ships are aggressively operating near the vital undersea cables that carry almost all global Internet communications, raising concerns among some American military and intelligence officials that the Russians might be planning to attack those lines in times of tension or conflict.

The issue goes beyond old worries during the Cold War that the Russians would tap into the cables — a task American intelligence agencies also mastered decades ago. The alarm today is deeper: The ultimate Russian hack on the United States could involve severing the fiber-optic cables at some of their hardest-to-access locations to halt the instant communications on which the West’s governments, economies and citizens have grown dependent.

While there is no evidence yet of any cable cutting, the concern is part of a growing wariness among senior American and allied military and intelligence officials over the accelerated activity by Russian armed forces around the globe. At the same time, the internal debate in Washington illustrates how the United States is increasingly viewing every Russian move through a lens of deep distrust, reminiscent of relations during the Cold War.

link.

Robopocalypse Report #12: Attacking the Drones, Hacking the Car and the WTF Econonmy of the Internet of Compromised Things

Last time we dodged having the drone in the report.  This time, however, the drone wins the internet. The largest contingent of of drone news is about how to kill them though!

The US Navy practiced killing drones from helicopters during its Black Dart exercises (seen above).  

Boeing also demonstrated its 'man portable' Compact Laser Weapon System (2 kw) to shoot down a drone. 

Think tanks are starting to wonder what it means to operate in the era of persistent UAV surveillance.  

For us civvies, Popular Mechanics has an article on what to do to shoot down a drone.  Shotguns are best but supersoakers (if you can hit the drone) and sling shots work pretty well, too.  However, BB and paintball guns do not.

The drone which was shot down in Kentucky apparently only hovered with 22 seconds over the property before the owner took a shotgun to it.  There was a video out to 'prove' this, but the owner has changed the viewing to private.

Even mother nature has got it in for the drones!

The European Regions Airlines Association has continued to call for more regulation of drones in European airspace.

Shifting away from the anxiety sectors of drones, Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross just dropped a $1 million investment in the Drone Racing League.

Switching to the self driving car, we don't have articles which deal directly with the technology iself, but ones which will act in a supporting role.   Or terrify us.  Hackers remotely cut the brakes on a Corvette and the Brits are considering testing technologies which will allow electric cars to charge while driving on the highway.  The fear from the hackers and self driving cars is pretty obvious.  The promise of robo taxis which recharge as they drive around town, never having a down time to charge, is exciting.

Bar tenders!  MIT wants the robopocalypse to come for you, too!

A George Washington University professor is working on robo flippers based on sea lions. 

Microsoft, those traitors! has helped develop an AI able to spot jokes in cartoons.

Jeff Atwood writes about the thing which actually scares me more than the Robopocalypse, the internet of things, more specifically The Internet of Compromised Things.

Tim O'Reilly worries about dealing with the Robopocalypse in his article called "The WTF Economy."

Will Cyberwarfare Destroy the Global Internet?

Today, understanding national security means understanding the ‘cyber’ dimension of warfare. For the last twenty years we have lived in a world where every day more people gain access to the global online commons and benefit financially, politically and educationally from that access. The concept of cyber warfare, taken to its logical extreme, will threaten the very nature of the global commons and force policy makers to improvise strategies to defend it.

The tools, tactics and strategies of cyber warfare are rapidly evolving in complex ways – a process that will be greatly accelerated in the event of conflict between two or more nation-states with mature cyber capabilities. While it is impossible to predict exactly how cyber warfare will shape the future battlespace, a sustained cyber conflict will likely pose an existential threat to the global, lightly regulated internet most liberal democracies know today. The Chinese model of the internet (a tightly regulated national network with few connections to the global system) will likely seem increasingly attractive to policymakers under intense political pressure to stop the constant barrage of foreign cyber-attacks. The global consequences of a shift to such a system would be devastating to the current paradigm of free-flowing information upon which much of the global economy is based.

link.

DOH! A Hacker & Cyber Warrior's Wet Dream: the Internet of Things

Democracy Should be Updated for the Information Age?

They Ought to Have Done it on Twitter

Comments by a top telecom official suggesting that Russia might soon block access to Twitter were swiftly condemned Friday — even by other government officials — providing a rare window into differences of opinion inside the Kremlin over how best to censor voices of dissent.

In an interview with a local newspaper, Maxim Ksenzov, deputy head of the government’s telecommunications watchdog, Roskomnadzor, called Twitter a “political” tool that undermines the state’s authority. “We can block Twitter or Facebook tomorrow for several minutes,” Ksenzov said. “We do not see any risks in that.”

link.

Beyond Cryptography: Hiding Communications

Sometimes encrypting messages isn’t enough, and the very act of sending them must be hidden as well. Now physicists have discovered how to camouflage messages and guarantee that they remain hidden.

The world of cryptography has undergone a quiet revolution in recent years. That’s largely because of the advent of techniques that exploit the laws of quantum mechanics to send messages with perfect privacy. So-called quantum cryptography ensures that an eavesdropper cannot decode a message under guarantee by the laws of physics.

But sometimes perfect privacy isn’t enough. Sometimes the knowledge that a message has been sent is all that an adversary needs. So the question arises of how to hide a message so that an eavesdropper cannot tell whether it has been sent or not.

The discipline, known as steganography or covert communication, is as old as its cryptographic cousin but has received much less attention in recent years. But that changes today thanks to the work of Boulat Bash at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and a few pals who have worked out how to camouflage messages in a way that is guaranteed mathematically.

And they’ve put their ideas into practice with a proof-of-principle demonstration. “We have built the first operational system that provides mathematically proven covert communication over a physical channel,” they say.

The technique is relatively straightforward, relying on a method of communication known as pulse position modulation. This divides each second (or other unit of time) into a number of time bands which each correspond to a symbol. Alice sends a message to Bob by transmitting pulses during bands that correspond to the required symbol, which Bob then looks up in the order he receives them.

There’s an important caveat, of course. This system requires the sender and receiver to agree on the band structure and the symbols they refer to. And this must be done in advance in secret.

This allows Alice and Bob to send encrypted messages (the length of which depend on the length of the information shared in advance).

The question is how to hide this information. And the answer is in plain view. Bash and co assume that the message is sent using photons and that the environment supplies a certain amount of noise against which their signal is camouflaged. For example, they assume that photon detectors are not perfect and so always produce a certain number of dark counts in which they register a photon without receiving one.

link.

Putin Claims Internet a CIA Project

President Vladimir Putin on Thursday called the Internet a CIA project and made comments about Russia's biggest search engine Yandex, sending the company's shares plummeting.

The Kremlin has been anxious to exert greater control over the Internet, which opposition activists — barred from national television — have used to promote their ideas and organize protests.

Russia's parliament this week passed a law requiring social media websites to keep their servers in Russia and save all information about their users for at least half a year. Also, businessmen close to Putin now control Russia's leading social media network, VKontakte.

Speaking Thursday at a media forum in St. Petersburg, Putin said that the Internet originally was a "CIA project" and "is still developing as such."

To resist that influence, Putin said, Russia needs to "fight for its interests" online.

link.

tsk.  its an NSA project, Putty-pie.  ;)

A Step Forward in Quantum Routing

The prospect of a quantum Internet has excited physicists for two decades. A quantum Internet will allow the transmission of information around the world with perfect security and make cloud-based quantum computing a reality.

But first, physicists must perfect the technology of quantum routing—the ability to receive and transmit quantum information without destroying it.

That’s a significant challenge. The key is a technique called quantum teleportation, which transmits information from one point to another without it passing through the space in between. This is a routine operation in any decent quantum optics lab but quantum routing—which concatenates the process—is another challenge altogether.

Today, Wolfgang Pfaff at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience Delft in the Netherlands and a few pals say they’ve take a significant step toward this goal with the first demonstration of diamond teleporters that can act as nodes in a quantum network. “These results establish diamond spin qubits as a prime candidate for the realization of quantum networks for quantum communication and network-based quantum computing,” they say.

The fundamental difficulty in quantum routing is that quantum information is fragile stuff. So quantum teleportation has always involved creating a qubit, teleporting it and then immediately measuring it to check whether teleportation has been successful.

However, the process of measurement destroys quantum information. So an important goal is to create routers that can read and write quantum information without destroying it.

link.

The Mask Spyware Supposedly Built by Spanish Speakers

Researchers have uncovered a sophisticated cyber spying operation that has been alive since at least 2007 and uses techniques and code that surpass any nation-state spyware previously spotted in the wild.

The attack, dubbed “The Mask” by the researchers at Kaspersky Lab in Russia who discovered it, targeted government agencies and diplomatic offices and embassies, before it was dismantled last month. It also targeted companies in the oil, gas and energy industries as well as research organizations and activists. Kaspersky uncovered at least 380 victims in more than two-dozen countries.

The attack – possibly from a Spanish-speaking country — used sophisticated malware, rootkit methods and a bootkit to hide and maintain persistence on infected machines. The attackers sought not only to steal documents, but to steal encryption keys, data about a target’s VPN configurations, and Adobe signing keys, which would give the attackers the ability to sign .PDF documents as if they were the owner of the key.

The Mask also went after files with extensions that Kaspersky has not been able to identify yet. The Kaspersky researchers believe the extensions may be used by customer government programs, possibly for encryption.

“They are absolutely an elite APT [Advanced Persistent Threat] group; they are one of the best that I have seen,” Costin Raiu, director of Kaspersky’s Global Research and Analysis Team said at a conference here today. “Previously in my opinion the best APT group was the one behind Flame . . . these guys are better.”

link.

Computer Security, Cyberwarfare Firms Being Attracted to Washington DC

Washington D.C. business leaders like venture capitalist Jonathan Aberman want to make the D.C. region a more attractive place for tech start-ups as the U.S. government — specifically the military – increases its spending on tech innovation and cybersecurity.

Defense Department leaders have said cybersecurity poses one of the top threats to the U.S. military and these generals are backing it up with their spending. Cybersecurity is one of the few areas where the U.S. military will spend more this year as their overall budget is cut. The Defense Department will spend $4.7 billion on cyber operations this year – a 21 percent increase over 2013.

Overall, the cybersecurity industry receives about $80 billion in government spending and more than $300 billion in spending within the private sector. Those numbers are expected to expand as it is estimated that cyber theft costs as much as $400 billion in economic losses per year.

This is good news for tech entrepreneurs like Anup Ghosh, who is the type of innovator that D.C. wants to keep in the region rather than see him and his company head to California.

link.

Marrying the 1000 Years of the Venetian Archives to the Internet

Beyond the "Internet of Things:" the Industrial Internet

How the NSA's Quantum Program Works

The internet backbone — the infrastructure of networks upon which internet traffic travels — went from being a passive infrastructure for communication to an active weapon for attacks.

According to revelations about the QUANTUM program, the NSA can “shoot” (their words) an exploit at any target it desires as his or her traffic passes across the backbone. It appears that the NSA and GCHQ were the first to turn the internet backbone into a weapon; absent Snowdens of their own, other countries may do the same and then say, “It wasn’t us. And even if it was, you started it.”

link.

A European Call to Action to Overturn the American Hegemony of the Internet

Wikileaks Advisor to Snowden: Unsafe to Return Home

A WikiLeaks staffer who has been accompanying Edward Snowden said Wednesday she had left Russia for Germany, but the threat of prosecution made it unsafe for her to return home to Britain.

In August, Sarah Harrison helped former US National Security Agency contractor Snowden flee Hong Kong to Russia, where he has now been granted temporary asylum from US authorities who want to prosecute him for leaking official secrets.

In a statement datelined from Berlin and issued by anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks, Harrison said she had now left Snowden's side and had "arrived in Germany over the weekend".

She said that after spending 39 days with Snowden in a Moscow airport while he sought asylum, "I then remained with him until our team was confident that he had established himself and was free from the interference of any government".

But she said the detention under British anti-terror laws of David Miranda -- the partner of journalist Glenn Greenwald who landed the scoop of the Snowden leaks -- showed there was a climate of "persecution" in her own home country, Britain.

"Almost every story published on the GCHQ and NSA bulk spying programs falls under the UK government's interpretation of the word 'terrorism'," she wrote.

"In response, our lawyers have advised me that it is not safe to return home."

link.

How Online Money Laundering Works

Money laundering is increasingly becoming a cybercrime. Gone are the days when the bad guys would pop down to the casino and hope to convert their loot into a clean win on the roulette table. And less popular is the old scam of taking out an insurance policy and then redeeming it at a discount.

Instead, modern criminals are focusing on the internet. And the opportunities for turning dirty money into a spotless shade of green are plentiful.

So today, Jean-Loup Richet, a research associate at the ESSEC Business School just outside Paris, surveys the new techniques that criminals are using in a report written for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. And he reveals just how creative and opportunistic money launderers have become.

Researching these kinds of operations is inherently difficult. As Richet puts it: “Bad guys and their banks don’t share information on criminal pursuits. “

Instead, he has had to cast his net a little wider. Richet’s main sources of information are online hacker forums where anonymous criminals exchange tips on the best ways to launder money and are surprisingly frank about their methods.

link.

Are We Returning to the Era of the Privateer? Online at least...

Go. Read.

Been Saying This For Years...

A climate scientist widely known for his “hockey stick” graph showing a steep climb in global temperature over the last century, can go ahead and sue two right-wing blogs for libel, a judge ruled last week.

The blogs compared the scientist, Michael E. Mann (pictured), to convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky. Mann teaches at Penn State University where Sandusky was a top assistant football coach under coaching legend Joe Paterno.

The case stems from two separate blog posts that ran in July of 2012. The first appeared on the web site OpenMarket.org and was then quoted approvingly at length in the online version of the conservative magazine National Review.

Both posts referenced a supposed scandal that conservative media labeled “Climategate.” The scandal involved a series of e-mails stolen by hackers off various university computers that were said to reveal prominent climate scientists discussing how to cover up data that contradicted their theory of global warming.

The “Climategate” scandal was widely discredited and the e-mails were shown to be taken out of context.

In the post quoted on National Review, writer Rand Simberg calls Mann, “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science.”

I've been warning folks for years - long before social media and whatnot, back in the dark days of Usenet and before the web whatsoever - what they say can come back to haunt them.   Now it has.  In a huge way.  What was done was stupid.  And a price will be paid.  Its just a lawsuit, right?  Might go either way, right?  Its free speech, right?

Lawyers already tried to have the case dismissed, but...

[Judge] Green ruled that Mann’s claims can go forward. She added that Mann’s case was likely to succeed “on the merits.”

“Plaintiff is a member of the scholarly academy and it is obvious that allegations of fraud could lead to the demise of his profession and tarnish his character and standing in the community,” the judge wrote.

 link.

What have I been saying all these years? 

Don't be stupid online.