Marissa A. Ramsier, Andrew J. Cunningham, Gillian L. Moritz, James J. Finneran, Cathy V. Williams, Perry S. Ong, Sharon L. Gursky-Doyen, and Nathaniel J. Dominy (2012), "Primate communication in the pure ultrasound," Biology Letters. Abstract: Few mammals -- cetaceans, domestic cats and select bats and rodents -- can send and receive vocal signals contained within the ultrasonic domain, or pure...
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Beautiful sculpture. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered....
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Funny comic....
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Self-domestication happens when the benefits of cooperation outweigh the costs: But why and how could natural selection tame the bonobo? One possible narrative begins about 2.5 million years ago, when the last common ancestor of bonobos and chimpanzees lived both north and south of the Zaire River, as did gorillas, their ecological rivals. A massive drought drove gorillas from the...
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From the abstract of the paper: In this paper, we analyze the encryption systems used in the two existing (and competing) satphone standards, GMR-1 and GMR-2. The first main contribution is that we were able to completely reverse engineer the encryption algorithms employed. Both ciphers had not been publicly known previously. We describe the details of the recovery of the...
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There's some excellent research (paper, news articles) surveying public keys in the wild. Basically, the researchers found that a small fraction of them (27,000 out of 7.1 million, or 0.38%) share a common factor and are inherently weak. The researchers can break those public keys, and anyone who duplicates their research can as well. The cause of this is almost...
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Geotagged images of children: Joanne Kuzma of the University of Worcester, England, has analyzed photos that clearly show children's faces on the photo sharing site Flickr. She found that a significant proportion of those analyzed were geotagged and a large number of those were associated with 50 of the more expensive residential zip codes in the USA. The location information...
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This writer wrestles with the costs and benefits of tighter controls on pseudoephedrine, a key chemical used to make methamphetamine: Now, personally, I sincerely doubt that the pharmaceutical industry has reliable estimates of how many of their purchasers actually have colds--or that they would share data indicating that half of their revenues came from meth cooks. But let's say this...
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Interesting....
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Adam Shostack explains to Verisign that trust requires transparency. This is a lesson Path should have learned....
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