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Submission + - 8 Of China's Top 9 Gov Officials Are Engineers (singularityhub.com)

Submitted by

kkleiner

on Tuesday May 17, 2011 @02:37PM

kkleiner writes: "Did you know that the president of China is a scientist? President Hu Jintao was trained as a hydraulic engineer. Likewise his Premier, Wen Jiabao, is a geomechanical engineer. In fact, 8 out of China’s top 9 government officials are scientists or engineers. What does the scientific prominence atop China’s ruling body say, if anything, about the role of science and technology in China’s ability to compete against the U.S. and the world in terms of innovation and economic might?"

Submission + - Powerline Networks Interfere With Spooks? (eweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 17, 2011 @12:36PM

An anonymous reader writes: Powerline technology which ships network data over mains cables, could be causing interference for spies, according to a letter from the UK’s top secret listening station, GCHQ, However, the British regulator says that objections to powerline all come from radio amateurs — and a Google search reveals that the writer of the letter (which GCHQ seems to be disowning) comes from a ham.

Simple Comm Technique Beats Quantum Crypto 164

Posted by Zonk on Sunday May 27, 2007 @09:25AM from the dot-dot-dash-dot-dot-dash-dash-dot dept.

Atario wrote us with a link to a New Scientist article about an innovative new way of encrypting communications. An engineer at Texas A&M may have a way to exploit the thermal properties of a wire to create a secure channel. The result could be an effectively impenetrable way of securing communications, possibly outperforming quantum cryptography keys. "In their device, both the sender Alice and the receiver Bob have an identical pair of resistors, one producing high resistance, the other low resistance. The higher the total resistance on the line, the greater the thermal noise. Both Alice and Bob randomly choose which resistor to use ... Half the time ... they will choose different [resistances], producing an intermediate level of thermal noise, and it is now that a message can be sent. If Bob turns on his high resistor, and records an intermediate level of noise, he instantly knows that Alice has chosen her low resistor, in essence sending a bit of information such as 1 or 0. Kish's cipher does this many times, sending a random series of 1s and 0s that can form the basis of an encryption key, the researchers say."

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