The United States is engaged in an international race to develop both cyberweapons and cyberdefenses. Thousands of daily attacks on federal and private computer systems in the United States, some malicious and some testing for weak points in the U.S.’s firewalls, have prompted the Obama administration to review the nation’s strategy. Efforts include developing a highly classified replica of the Internet of the future to simulate what would be needed for the country’s enemies to shut down power stations, telecommunications, and aviation systems. Obama is expected to propose a significantly larger cyberdefensive effort, including the expansion of a $17 billion, five-year program approved by Congress last year, as well as an end to the bureaucratic battle over who is responsible for defending the country’s cyberinfrastructure. However, Obama is not expected to discuss the U.S.’s cyberoffensive capabilities, which has been a major investment area for the nation’s intelligence agencies, as many of these cyberweapons remain classified. The White House declined to comment on whether Obama supports or opposes the use of U.S. cyberweapons. Some exotic cyberweapons under consideration would enable a military programmer to enter a computer server in Russia or China and destroy a botnet, or activate malicious code that is secretly embedded on computer chips when manufactured, enabling the U.S. to take control of an enemy’s computer system.
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U.S. Steps Up Effort on Digital Defenses |
by sparky3887
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In Digital Combat, U.S. Finds No Easy Deterrent |
by sparky3887
The U.S. government is exploring ways to combat and deter cyberattacks from abroad. After a recent Pentagon simulated cyberattack, it became clear that the enemy had all the advantages–stealth, anonymity, and unpredictability. The situation has led some in the government to compare it to that of the Cold War era, and there is intense debate inside and outside the government about what the United States can realistically threaten. Diplomatic demarche, formal protest, economic retaliation, and criminal prosecution have all been suggested as possible responses to increased cyberattacks. “We are now in the phase that we found ourselves in during the early 1950s, after the Soviets got the bomb,” says Harvard University professor Joseph Nye. The Internet has blurred the line between military and civilian targets because an enemy can cripple a target without ever aiming at the government or military, which hinders the U.S. Department of Defense’s authority to intervene. The U.S. government has responded to increasing cyberattacks by creating a new United States Cyber Command, run though the Defense Department.
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ACM Announces Initiative for Long-Term Preservation of Content in Its Digital Library |
by sparky3887
ACM announced that it is providing institutional library customers with advanced electronic archiving services to help preserve their electronic resources. The services, which will be provided by Portico and CLOCKSS, address the scholarly community’s need for long-term solutions for reliable, secure, and deliverable access to their growing collections of digital content. ACM is providing these services to protect the online collection of resources in its Digital Library, which is used by more than 1 million computing professionals and students around the world. “By partnering with Portico and CLOCKSS, we are able to meet a growing demand in the library community for a trusted, reliable third-party archive, and to ensure that digital collections remain accessible to future scholars, researchers, and students,” says ACM Group Publisher Scott Delman. “Scientific discovery and the educational process are not possible without reliable access to the accumulated scholarship of the past and secure preservation of the scholarly record, and these agreements are a clear step forward with the relationship between the ACM and the library community.” ACM hopes that the long-term digital preservation of content will make it easier for libraries to free up resources invested in print collections in favor of innovative electronic products and services. Portico preserves material through migration, which involves transitioning content from one file format to another as technology advances and file formats become obsolete. CLOCKSS uses Archive Nodes, which are stored at libraries chosen to be the custodians of the archived materials, and are located throughout North America, Europe, and Asia.
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Training to Climb an Everest of Digital Data |
by sparky3887
A deluge of digital information exists thanks to rapid technological improvements, and the next generation of computer scientists has to think in terms of what could be described as Internet scale. IBM and Google are helping by making their vast computing resources accessible to university students. The computers have been equipped with software that Internet firms employ to execute their most difficult data analysis tasks, and IBM and Google established a system that allows students and researchers to tap into behemoth computers online. Furthermore, this year the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has divided $5 million among 14 universities that want to educate their students on tackling major data challenges. By making their big data sets, simpler software, and computing products available for research and experiments, IBM and Google are aiding both the universities and the government. “Historically, it has been tough to get the type of data these researchers need out of industry,” says NSF research director James C. French. “But we’re at this point where a biologist needs to see these types of volumes of information to begin to think about what is possible in terms of commercial applications.”
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New Digital Security Program Doesn’t Protect as Promised |
by sparky3887
The Vanish security system has been broken by a team of researchers from the University of Texas at Austin, Princeton University, and the University of Michigan. Developed by scientists at the University of Washington, Vanish is designed to protect a computer user’s data by restricting the availability of the encryption key used to access it after a certain amount of time, such as eight hours. Vanish splits up the keys into many small pieces and stores them at many different places on the network, which makes the data look like digital gibberish. However, the team has developed a program, Unvanish, which is capable of collecting and storing anything that looks like a fragment of a Vanish key on the network, checking its archive of fragments and finding the pieces needed to decrypt a message. The researchers say Unvanish can make messages reappear long after they should have disappeared, close to 100 percent of the time. “A true self-destruction feature continues to be challenging to provide,” says Texas professor Brent Waters. Texas professor Emmett Witchel says that “our goal with Unvanish is to discourage people from relying on the privacy of a system that is not actually private.”
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‘Rosetta Stone’ Offers Digital Lifeline |
by sparky3887
Researchers at Tokyo’s Keio University in Japan have developed what is being called the Digital Rosetta Stone, a sealed permanent memory bank that is designed to store data for more than a 1,000 years. The researchers, led by professor Tadahiro Kuroda, have proposed storing data on memory chips made of silicon, which Kuroda says is the most stable material on Earth. The device is capable of being tightly sealed, powered, and read wirelessly, Kuroda says. “Archiving the mountains of digitalized cultural heritage we have amassed for the future is paramount,” he says. The World Digital Library already is using the Digital Rosetta Stone to save the world’s digital cultural history. Meanwhile, the U.S. Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) also is working to solve digital preservation problems. “Be it in solid state technology, biomechanical, and other nano-technological formats, we now realize that most of our archiving for future generations will be in digital formats, and we are here to support development in both hardware and software in these areas,” says SNIA’s Rick Bauer. He says SNIA has been impressed with the Digital Rosetta Stone, but notes that the technology still faces a major hurdle, as all digital preservation techniques are susceptible to magnetic polarity, and the Earth’s magnetic field can wreak havoc on electromagnetic storage devices.
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ACM SIGGRAPH Announces Winners of New Award Honoring Achievement in Digital Art |
by sparky3887
Minneapolis College of Art & Design professor Roman Verostko and University of California, Davis professor Lynn Hershman Leeson are the winners of the first ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Awards for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art. ACM’s Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques created the award to honor digital artists who have made significant contributions to the field of digital art. Verostko, honored for helping to create and promote digital art, created the first software-driven “brushed” paintings with oriental brushes mounted on his pen blotter. Hershman Leeson, honored for her innovations involving a broad range of applications, has helped create a better understanding of how new technology can be used to bring artistic sensibilities to new formats. “The dual award serves to emphasize that artists with significantly different approaches in their use of technology have pushed the frontiers of the field of computer graphics, interactive techniques, and new media production,” says Cynthia Beth Rubin, chair of the ACM SIGGRAPH Arts Awards Committee. ACM SIGGRAPH plans to honor Verostko and Hershman Leeson at the 2009 SIGGRAPH conference on Aug. 3 in New Orleans.
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Digital Eyes Will Chart Baseball’s Unseen Skills |
by sparky3887
The game of baseball could be significantly affected by a new camera and software system capable of recording the precise speed and location of the ball and every player on the field, which will generate statistics that will grade players with greater accuracy. The data gathered by this method, which is in final testing, will be revealed to a group of baseball executives, statisticians, and academics on July 11. The system’s software and artificial intelligence algorithms, which will analyze what will likely be petabytes of raw data, are still under development. “We’ve gotten so much data for offense, but defensive objective analysis has been the most challenging area to get any meaningful handle on,” says Cleveland Indians general manager Mark Shapiro. The testing and refinement of the camera system has been carried out by Sportvision, which is collaborating with Major League Baseball Advanced Media. In the San Francisco’s Giants ballpark, a quartet of high-resolution cameras sit on light towers, capturing everything that happens on the field in three dimensions and transmitting it to a control room. Software tools link movements to balls, runners, and fielders, and more than 2 million meaningful location points are recorded in each game. “[The system] can be another tool to help you improve in areas of the game,” says Toronto Blue Jays center fielder Vernon Wells. “People will learn about playing defense, which has gone by the wayside as people have cared so much about offense and hitting the ball out of the ballpark.” Major League Baseball Advanced Media’s Bob Bowman says he would like the data to be available in some form to statistically minded fans and academics.
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U.S. Steps Up Effort on Digital Defenses |
by sparky3887
The United States is engaged in an international race to develop both cyberweapons and cyberdefenses. Thousands of daily attacks on federal and private computer systems in the United States, some malicious and some testing for weak points in the U.S.’s firewalls, have prompted the Obama administration to review the nation’s strategy. Efforts include developing a highly classified replica of the Internet of the future to simulate what would be needed for the country’s enemies to shut down power stations, telecommunications, and aviation systems. Obama is expected to propose a significantly larger cyberdefensive effort, including the expansion of a $17 billion, five-year program approved by Congress last year, as well as an end to the bureaucratic battle over who is responsible for defending the country’s cyberinfrastructure. However, Obama is not expected to discuss the U.S.’s cyberoffensive capabilities, which has been a major investment area for the nation’s intelligence agencies, as many of these cyberweapons remain classified. The White House declined to comment on whether Obama supports or opposes the use of U.S. cyberweapons. Some exotic cyberweapons under consideration would enable a military programmer to enter a computer server in Russia or China and destroy a botnet, or activate malicious code that is secretly embedded on computer chips when manufactured, enabling the U.S. to take control of an enemy’s computer system.
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Digital Images Reveal the Secrets of Roman Painting |
by sparky3887
Researchers from the University of Southampton, the University of Warwick, and the Herculaneum Conservation Project are using the latest imaging techniques to digitally restore a 2,000-year-old Roman statue. They are using Polynomial Texture Mapping (PTM) to determine the texture and color of the painted surfaces of the statue, which was found in the ruins of town of Herculaneum in 2006 and is believed to depict an Amazon warrior. The team has also developed a rig, camera structure, and custom software that allows for the fast acquisition of PTM data. The scanning process has given the team a series of images, and a single PTM file has been produced using the PTM fitter software. The researchers can move a virtual light source across the virtual scene, and also vary lighting intensity, add more lights, derive surface models, and perform edge detection and other image processing tasks. “Our work at Southampton bridges the gap between computing and archaeology in bringing the best that colleagues in engineering, electronics, and computer science have to offer to unique artifacts from our past,” says Graeme Earl of the university’s Archaeological Computing Research Group.
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