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Submission + - BitTorrent Launches Its Torrent-Based Browser Project Maelstrom In Beta

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: BitTorrent today launched Project Maelstrom, the company's distributed browser, in beta. The company also released new tools on GitHub that let developers and publishers build content for the browser. Announced in December, BitTorrent described Project Maelstrom, then just an invite-only alpha, as “the first torrent-based browser.” The launch today is an open beta, meaning anyone can now try an early version of Maelstrom. You do, however, need a Windows computer. Windows users can download the beta now from here. Since the alpha, BitTorrent says it has improved stability, integrated support for automatic updates, and added DHT visualization for users when loading torrents.

Submission + - MIT May Help Lead Bitcoin Standards Effort (xconomy.com)

Submitted by gthuang88
gthuang88 writes: With everyone from PayPal merchants to Rand Paul starting to accept Bitcoins as payment, the race is on to develop technical standards for the virtual currency. Now MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito is getting ready to unveil a plan for MIT to become an independent, neutral home for standards development. Ito is enlisting cryptographer Ron Rivest and economist Simon Johnson to help with the effort, which could provide an academic alternative to the Bitcoin Foundation for conversations about the currency’s future.

Submission + - "Let's Encrypt" Project Strives To Make Encryption Simple

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: As part of an effort to make encryption a standard component of every application, Linux Foundation has launched its Let's Encrypt project (announcement) along with its intention to provide access to a free certificate management service. Jim Zemlin, executive director for the Linux Foundation, says that the goal for the project is nothing less than universal adoption of encryption to disrupt a multi-billion dollar cracker economy. While there may never be such a thing as perfect security, Zemlin says it's just too easy to steal data that is not encrypted. In its current form, encryption is difficult to implement and a lot of cost and overhead is associated with managing encryption keys. Zemlin claims that the Let's Encrypt project will reduce the effort it takes to encrypt data in an application down to two simple commands. The project is being hosted by the Linux Foundation, but the actual project is being managed by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG). This work is sponsored by Akamai, Cisco, EFF, Mozilla, IdenTrust, and Automattic, which all are Linux Foundation patrons. Visit Let's Encrypt official website to get involved.

Submission + - The 'Page 63' Backdoor to Elliptic Curve Cryptography 3

Submitted by CRYPTIS
CRYPTIS writes: The security of Elliptic curve cryptography is facilitated by the perceived 'hard' problem of cracking the Discrete Logarithm Problem (DLP) for any given curve. Historically, for FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standards) compliance it was required that your curves conformed to the FIPS186-2 document located at http://csrc.nist.gov/publicati... . Page 63 of this specifies that the 'a' and 'b' elliptic curve domain parameters should conform to the mathematical requirement of c*b^2 = a^3 (mod p).

Interestingly, back in 1982, A. M. Odlyzko, of AT & T Bell Laboratories, published a document entitled “Discrete logarithms in finite fields and their cryptographic significance” ( http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzk... ). Page 63 of this document presents a weak form of the DLP, namely a^3 = b^2*c (mod p).

It seems then, that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), driven in turn by the NSA, have required that compliant curves have this potentially weak form of the DLP built in; merely transposing the layout of the formula in order to obtain what little obfuscation is available with such a short piece of text.

Submission + - Ten U.S. senators seek investigation into the replacement of U.S. tech workers (computerworld.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: Ten U.S. senators, representing the political spectrum, are seeking a federal investigation into displacement of IT workers by H-1B-using contractors. They are asking the U.S. Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security and the Labor Department to investigate the use of the H-1B program "to replace large numbers of American workers" at Southern California Edison (SCE) and other employers. The letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and the secretaries of the two other departments, was signed by U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has oversight over the Justice Department. The other signers are Sens. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), a longtime ally of Grassley on H-1B issues; Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), David Vitter (R-La.), Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.), James Inhofe (R-Okla.). Neither California senator signed on. "Southern California Edison ought to be the tipping point that finally compels Washington to take needed actions to protect American workers," Sessions said. Five hundred IT workers at SCE were cut, and many had to train their replacements.

Submission + - DARPA wants software that adapts, lasts over 100 years (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: The program, called Building Resource Adaptive Software Systems, or BRASS is expected to lead to significant improvements in software resilience, reliability and maintainability by developing the computational and algorithmic requirements necessary for software systems and data to remain robust in excess of 100 years.

Submission + - What Would A Year in Space Do to Your Mind?

Submitted by Press2ToContinue
Press2ToContinue writes: This week, NASA and the Russian Federal Space Agency will send two astronauts to spend a year in the International Space Station. This will be one of the first times people have stayed in space for such a long period of time, and the first time anybody has spent so much time aboard the ISS. While they're up there, American Scott Kelly and Russian Mikhail Kornienko will take part in more than a dozen studies about the physical and mental effects of working in space longer-term.

NASA tests aspiring astronauts strictly —and somewhat mysteriously— before choosing them for missions. Those selected are easygoing with good social skills. If they're married, they can't have marital problems.

Even after weeding out those with mental disorders, depression and conflicts still arise among well-adjusted crews. After all, they're in a situation that's basically new to humanity. Longtime space-psychology researcher Nick Kanas listed someknown problems long-term astronauts can face: anxiety, depression, and psychosis, psychosomatic symptoms [one Soviet astronaut had psychosomatic toothaches], emotional problems related to the stage of the mission, and postflight personality changes. Interpersonal issues include interpersonal tension, decreased cohesiveness over time, need for privacy, and task vs emotional leadership.

Over the past several years, NASA has been funding a group of psychologists to develop a software program astronauts could use, while aboard spacecraft, to help them work through depression and conflicts with their fellow space-goers. Because astronauts are often reluctant to admit to anxiety or depression, out of fear they won't be allowed to go to space again, the software is designed so nobody can track whether an astronaut uses it,

Submission + - Feds Eavesdropped for Ten Years - Still Failed to Stop 9/11 (usatoday.com)

Submitted by Press2ToContinue
Press2ToContinue writes: One of the big arguments trotted out repeatedly by surveillance state defenders concerning the NSA's Section 215 program to collect records on all phone calls is that such a thing "would have prevented 9/11" if it had been in place at the time. Here's former FBI boss Robert Mueller making just that argument right after the initial Snowden leaks. Here's Dianne Feinstein making the argument that if we had that phone tracking program before September 11th, we could have stopped the attacks. And here's former NSA top lawyer and still top NSA supporter Stewart Baker arguing that the program is necessary because the lack of such a program failed to stop 9/11.

Except, it turns out, the feds did have just such a program prior to 9/11 — run by the DEA. As you may recall, back in January it was revealed that the DEA had its own database of phone call metadata of nearly all calls from inside the US to foreign countries. Brad Heath at USA Today came out with a report yesterday that goes into much more detail on the program, showing that it dates back to at least 1992 — meaning that the feds almost certainly had the calls that Feinstein and Mueller pretended the government didn't have prior to 9/11.

Submission + - Snowden's handler criticizes universities' funding-driven collaboration with NSA (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Speaking at 'Secrecy Week' at the University of Utah, one of the two journalists who helped disseminate Edward Snowden's revelations about the scope of National Security Agency surveillance has criticized [http://www.sltrib.com/home/2331830-155/utah-data-center-has-ominous-role?fullpage=1] universities which open up their campuses to government agencies in exchange for funding. Ex-Guardian journalist and lawyer Glenn Greenwald, one of Snowden's first contacts after his flight from the NSA, commented: "That sort of subverts the concept of universities'. The statement has some implicit criticism of the University of Utah, which provides a curriculum for students intended to lead to work at Utah's NSA data center at Bluffdale.

Submission + - The Solar System is Awash in Water (nasa.gov)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: NASA has published an article detailing the vast amount of water found on other worlds in our solar system. "There are several worlds thought to possess liquid water beneath their surfaces, and many more that have water in the form of ice or vapor. Water is found in primitive bodies like comets and asteroids, and dwarf planets like Ceres. The atmospheres and interiors of the four giant planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — are thought to contain enormous quantities of the wet stuff, and their moons and rings have substantial water ice. Perhaps the most surprising water worlds are the five icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn that show strong evidence of oceans beneath their surfaces: Ganymede, Europa and Callisto at Jupiter, and Enceladus and Titan at Saturn." They've released an inforgraphic to accompany the article. It's also bolstered by new research from the Niels Bohr Institute, which confirmed that glaciers on Mars do contain a large quantity of water ice. These glaciers are separate from the ice caps, existing in belts closer to the planet's equator. This ice has a total volume of roughly 150 billion cubic meters — enough to cover the entirety of Mars' surface with one meter of ice (abstract).

Submission + - Giant Bust Of Edward Snowden Erected In A Brooklyn Park (huffingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A giant sculpture of National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden was installed in a Brooklyn park early Monday morning. A group of unidentified artists wearing yellow construction vests erected the 100-pound, bronze patina bust atop a stone column at the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument in Fort Greene Park before dawn Monday. On the bottom of the column, capital letters spell out Snowdenâ(TM)s name in a font similar to one often used on war memorials.

Submission + - Planes Without Pilots

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: John Markoff writes in the NYT that in the aftermath of the co-pilot crashing a Germanwings plane into a mountain, aviation experts are beginning to wonder if human pilots are really necessary aboard commercial planes. Advances in sensor technology, computing and artificial intelligence are making human pilots less necessary than ever in the cockpit and government agencies are already experimenting with replacing the co-pilot, perhaps even both pilots on cargo planes, with robots or remote operators. What the Germanwings crash “has done has elevated the question of should there or not be ways to externally control commercial aircraft,” says Mary Cummings. NASA is exploring a related possibility: moving the co-pilot out of the cockpit on commercial flights, and instead using a single remote operator to serve as co-pilot for multiple aircraft. In this scenario, a ground controller might operate as a dispatcher managing a dozen or more flights simultaneously. It would be possible for the ground controller to “beam” into individual planes when needed and to land a plane remotely in the event that the pilot became incapacitated — or worse. “Could we have a single-pilot aircraft with the ability to remotely control the aircraft from the ground that is safer than today’s systems?" asks Cummings. "The answer is yes.”

Automating that job may save money. But will passengers ever set foot on plane piloted by robots, or humans thousands of miles from the cockpit? In written testimony submitted to the Senate last month, the Air Line Pilots Association warned, “It is vitally important that the pressure to capitalize on the technology not lead to an incomplete safety analysis of the aircraft and operations.” The association defended the unique skills of a human pilot: “A pilot on board an aircraft can see, feel, smell or hear many indications of an impending problem (PDF) and begin to formulate a course of action before even sophisticated sensors and indicators provide positive indications of trouble.” Not all of the scientists and engineers believe that increasingly sophisticated planes will always be safer planes. "Technology can have costs of its own,” says Amy Pritchett. “If you put more technology in the cockpit, you have more technology that can fail.”

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