50821455
submission
holy_calamity writes:
Harvard researchers went undercover to provide the most detailed look yet inside China's online censorship, MIT Technology Review Reports. By setting up a website in China and contracting with a major Internet company they got get first hand access to the automated censorship tools offered to website operators. That and experiments with making posts to existing social sites lead the researchers to conclude that China's government-mandated censorship relies on a thriving competitive market for software and services aimed at Web companies trying to censor their users in the most efficient way possible.
49309269
submission
holy_calamity writes:
The two encryption systems used to secure the most important connections and digital files could become useless within years, reports MIT Technology Review, due to progress towards solving the discrete logarithm problem. Both RSA and Diffie-Hellman encryption rely on there being no efficient algorithm for that problem, but French math professor Antoine Joux has published two papers in the last six months that suggest one could soon be found. Security researchers that noticed Joux's work recommend companies large and small begin planning to move to elliptic curve cryptography, something the NSA has said is best practice for years. Unfortunately, key patents for implementing elliptic curve cryptography are controlled by BlackBerry.
49215779
submission
holy_calamity writes:
MIT Technology Review reports that APT1, the China-based hacking group said to steal data from U.S. companies, has been caught taking over a decoy water plant control system. The honeypot mimicked the remote access control panels and physical control system of a U.S. municipal water plant. The decoy was one of 12 set up in 8 countries around the world, which together attracted more than 70 attacks, 10 of which completely compromised the control system. China and Russia were the leading sources of the attacks. The researcher behind the study says his results provide the first clear evidence that people actively seek to exploit the many security problems of industrial systems.
48598717
submission
holy_calamity writes:
When Microsoft re-engineered its online services to assist NSA surveillance programs, the company was either acting voluntarily, or under a new kind of court order, reports MIT Technology Review. Existing laws were believed to shelter companies from being forced to modify their systems to aid surveillance, but experts say the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court may now have a new interpretation. Microsoft's statement about its cooperation with NSA surveillance doesn't make it clear whether it acted under legal duress, or simply decided that to helping out voluntarily was in its best interest.
48195103
submission
holy_calamity writes:
U.S. citizens have historically been protected from government surveillance by technical limits, not legal ones, writes independent security researcher Ashkan Soltani at MIT Tech Review. He claims that recent leaks show that technical limits are loosening, fast, with data storage and analysis cheap and large Internet services taking care of data collection for free. "Spying no longer requires following people or planting bugs, but rather filling out forms to demand access to an existing trove of information," writes Soltani.
46776445
submission
holy_calamity writes:
Digital currency Bitcoin is gaining acceptance with mainstream venture capitalists, reports Technology Review, but at the price of its famed anonymity and ability to operate without central authority. Technology investors have now ploughed millions of dollars into a handful of Bitcoin-based payments and financial companies that are careful to follow financial regulations and don't offer anonymity. That's causing tensions in the community of Bitcoin enthusiasts, some of whom feel their currency's success has involved abandoning its most important features.
39803431
submission
holy_calamity writes:
PCs will inevitably shift over to ARM-based chips because efficiency now matters more than gains in raw performance, the CEO of chip designer ARM tells MIT Technology Review. He also claims that the greater competition in the ARM-chip will cause more companies to follow Microsoft in building PCs without x86, as it did with the Surface tablet, for cost reasons.
38451677
submission
holy_calamity writes:
A machine learning breakthrough from Google researchers that grabbed headlines this summer is now being put to work improving the company's products. The company revealed in June that it had built neural networks that run on 16,000 processors simultaneously, enough power that they could learn to recognize cats just by watching YouTube. Those neural nets have now made Google's speech recognition for US English 25 percent better, and are set to be used in other products, such as image search.
38403435
submission
holy_calamity writes:
Canadian company D-Wave has claimed for years it can build quantum computers, and now has the backing of the CIA's investment fund In-Q-Tel and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Between them they will put $30 million into the company, which academics say is yet to conclusively prove its technology works.
