A presentation at Black Hat on hacking into ATM’s was halted. Reassuring.
Barnaby Jack, a security researcher at the computer networking giant Juniper, had planned to hack into an automatic teller machine (ATM) live onstage at the Black Hat Security Conference in Las Vegas later this month. But his presentation, designed to demonstrate the insecurity of various ATMs, attracted the attention of the financial industry as well as security professionals, and under pressure from ATM manufacturers, Juniper canceled the presentation last week, citing concerns that the vulnerabilities involved had still not been fixed… The presentation would have focused on exploiting vulnerabilities in devices running the Windows CE operating system, including some ATMs… In November 2008, thieves stole nearly $9 million from more than 130 cash machines in a matter of hours using fake payroll cards…
The US and Russia are at odds in negotiations to limit the militarisation of cyberspace. The Russians want a treaty, similar to those on chemical and biological weapons. The US wants better information sharing among law enforcement and the right for government actors to investigate suspected violations without the knowledge or permission of the host country.
Many countries, including the United States, are developing weapons… like “logic bombs” that can be hidden in computers to halt them at crucial times or damage circuitry; “botnets” that can disable or spy on Web sites and networks; or microwave radiation devices that can burn out computer circuits miles away… The Pentagon is planning to create a military command to prepare for both defense and offensive computer warfare… Russia’s proposed treaty would ban a country from secretly embedding malicious codes or circuitry that could be later activated from afar in the event of war…
Some charts to consider regarding the new energy supply vs demand balance. as oil is back above $70 per barrel today on data showing dwindling US inventories going into summer.
Production is falling away quite rapidly. The last time production was at this level the suppliers were getting about half as much for it – and exporting a lot more of it.
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I’ve been meaning to post on the newspaper business for some time, and a couple of recent articles have pushed me over the line.
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China will invest $15bn to increase wind power generation from 12kMW to 30kMW by 2010.
The world’s third-largest economy will increase its wind power capacity by fivefold to 100,000 megawatts by 2020… five megawatts is sufficient to power about 1,000 households in China on average…
Healthy competition on fuel standards (and autos).
Chinese officials have drafted automotive fuel economy standards that are even more stringent than those outlined by President Obama… The new plan would require automakers in China to improve fuel economy by an additional 18 percent by 2015… The average fuel economy of family vehicles in China is already higher than in the United States, mainly because cars in China tend to be considerably smaller… China was self-sufficient in oil until 1995, but soaring demand means that China now imports nearly three-fifths of its oil, much of it from potentially unstable countries along sea lanes controlled by the United States Navy.
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This sale surprises me. E Ink is one of the most promising and successful private tech companies, with its technology key to the Kindle, the Sony e-reader and many other new consumer products, yet it’s selling itself to a key supplier at only a 50% premium to capital invested over a decade. That is not a win for the VC’s.
E Ink Corp. said it has agreed to be acquired by Prime View International, a Taiwanese company, for $215 million. Prime View has been E Ink’s partner in making “electronic ink” displays for Amazon.com Inc. and Sony Corp. The deal will help the combined company develop color versions of its displays and mass produce them by the end of 2010… Current models show shades of gray. E Ink’s displays are used in e-book readers because they look similar to regular paper and consume very little power. However, they take a relatively long time to switch between images, making navigation slow.
More hype on the Plastic Logic e-reader coming out next year from the UK. Big build-up for a vapor device.
Semi sales have moved up month-on-month, but still down 25% yoy. Lots of people are mistaking seasonality for “green shoots”. Autos use a lot of chips.
Global chip sales rose to $15.6 billion in April, up 6.4 percent from March… still down 25 percent from April sales of $20.9 billion a year ago… PC demand is better than expected as inventory is replenished… now expected to fall 6 percent [vs] expected decline of 12 percent… Cell phone sales also aren’t as bad as expected… Cell phones and PCs account for 60 percent of chip sales.
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Apparently the Chinese have decided they can do better on computer security (via Schneier). They are using linux. You can download your own copy if you don’t mind being seen as a cyberwar threat.
China has developed more secure operating software for its tens of millions of computers and is already installing it on government and military systems… The secure operating system, known as Kylin, was disclosed to Congress during recent hearings… U.S. offensive cyberwar capabilities have been focused on getting into Chinese government and military computers outfitted with less secure operating systems like those made by Microsoft Corp.
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It’s been a while since I’ve put up the charts I’m watching, and there is hence quite a virtual pile. The first pair (like many others from dshort.com) shows the breakdown in diversification benefits in the past year. Correlations tend to trend to one just when you need them to be low…
like in October 2007.
We’re in the middle of an historic bear market.
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Very clever work by Byung-Gon Chun, a research scientist at Intel Research Berkeley, which shares processing between your Android mobile and a cloned version in the cloud. This will happen and become the norm.
CloneCloud, invented by Chun and his colleague Petros Maniatis, uses a smart phone’s high-speed connection to the Internet to communicate with a copy of itself that lives in a cloud-computing environment on remote servers. The prototype runs on Google’s Android mobile operating system and seamlessly offloads processor-intensive tasks to its cloud-based double… because CloneCloud creates a perfect copy of the phone’s software, it can take on literally any processor-intensive task that it calculates it can do faster than the phone itself, after weighing the amount of time and battery life required to transfer the required data…
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Swine flu is still developing rapidly. For an hour by hour update subscribe to the W.H.O. RSS feed. Otherwise, there are pages from WHO, CDC, and CIDRAP.
As of 07:30 GMT, 10 May 2009, 29 countries have officially reported 4379 cases of influenza A(H1N1) infection.
Unintended consequences. Helmet laws reduce net health.
A model is developed which permits the quantitative evaluation of the benefit of bicycle helmet laws. The efficacy of the law is evaluated in terms of the percentage drop in bicycling, the percentage increase in the cost of an accident when not wearing a helmet… The approach balances the health benefits of increased safety against the health costs due to decreased cycling. Using estimates suggested in the literature of the health benefits of cycling, accident rates and reductions in cycling, suggest helmets laws are counterproductive in terms of net health.
Animal trials showing a new human antibody effective against flu.
In a development that could create new tools to prevent and treat seasonal and pandemic influenza, researchers have identified and tested human monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) that can neutralize influenza A viruses, including lethal H5N1 avian influenza. The findings raise hopes for a universal flu vaccine and shed light on new options for preventing and treating influenza infections… A team from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, scanned billions of mAbs produced in bacteriophages and found 10 that were active against the four major H5N1 virus subtypes…
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Not sure if this is a red herring like Bush’s mission to Mars but GM and Segway have collaborated to do a dual wheel-chair type version of the Segway.
The PUMA prototype is designed to work much like the original Segway Personal Transporter, balancing on two wheels and stabilized (or not) by the rider’s body motion. It features electric drive and batteries, along with all-electronic acceleration, steering, and braking… The lithium ion battery-powered vehicle will also feature vehicle-to-vehicle communications, plus autonomous driving and parking capabilities… The PUMA is supposed to reach 35 miles per hour, and travel up to 35 miles between charges.
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