Geek Coefficient™

“At the RSA computer security conference last week, Gary Kenworthy of Cryptography Research held up an iPod Touch on stage and looked over to a TV antenna three meters away. The signal picked up by the antenna, routed through an amplifier and computer software, revealed the secret key being used by an app running on the device to encrypt data. An attacker with access to this key could use it to perfectly impersonate the device he stole it from—to access e-mail on a company server, for example.

The antenna was detecting radio signals “leaking” from the transistors on the chip inside the phone performing the encryption calculations. Transistors leak those signals when they are active, so the pattern of signals from a chip provides an eavesdropper a representation of the work the chip is doing. When Kenworthy tuned his equipment to look in the right place, a clear, regular pattern of peaks and troughs appeared on his computer screen. They could be seen to come in two varieties, large and small, directly corresponding to the string of digital 1s and 0s that make up the encryption key.”

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This is right on target! Post your comments… The author is a reader.

Created by: Clinical Psychology

Computer hackers are avenging the Occupy movement by exposing the personal information of police officers who evicted protesters and threatening family-values advocates who led a boycott of an American Muslim television show. In three Internet postings last week, hackers from the loose online coalition called Anonymous published the email and physical addresses, phone numbers and, in some cases, salary details of thousands of law enforcement officers all over the country. The hackers said they were retaliating for police violence during evictions of Occupy protest camps in cities around the country, but law enforcement advocates slammed the disclosures as dangerous. “I hope the individuals behind these cyberattacks understand the consequences of what they are doing,” said John Adler, president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association. “There are very dangerous criminals out there who might seek retribution” against any of these police officers.

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Apple Inc. is moving forward with its assault on television, following up on the ambitions of its late co-founder, Steve Jobs.
In recent weeks, Apple executives have discussed their vision for the future of TV with media executives at several large companies, according to people familiar with the matter. Apple is also working on its own television that relies on wireless streaming technology to access shows, movies and other content, according to people briefed on the project. In the recent meetings with media companies, the Apple executives, including Senior Vice President Eddy Cue, have outlined new ways Apple’s technology could recognize users across phones, tablets and TVs, people familiar with the talks said.

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This January, the FAA will be proposing new rules on the use of drones in American airspace — a possibility some see as positively Orwellian, but others, including some journalists, see as an opportunity.Drones play a controversial role in a largely unseen U.S. war carried out beyond the country’s declared battlefields. Iran claimed to have shot down a U.S. drone along its eastern border Sunday. In Pakistan, U.S. drone strikes target terrorist networks in the northwest. In Yemen, a U.S. drone killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a propagandist for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and killed his 16-year-old American son. But drones are moving outside the military sphere and into the private sector. The FAA has allowed for more the two hundred permits on civilian drone applications, the Los Angeles Times reports. And though it has not opened the national airways to everyone, it seems less a question if they will allow drones, and more a question of when they will…

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Does anyone remember the animated version of Star Trek from the 1970s? The Emmy-Award-winning series was the very first outing for the now familiar Holodeck, although it was called the recreation room back then.

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“George, I love you,” says a long-suffering Star Wars fan in this exclusive clip from The People vs. George Lucas DVD extras. “I make fun of you, I rip on what you’ve done lately, because I care. Because I love you. But as fans, we’re getting sick of it.”

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For a long time, the holy grail of solar photovoltaics (PV) has been “grid parity,” the point at which it would be as cheap to generate one’s own solar electricity as it is to buy electricity from the grid. And that is indeed an important market milestone, being achieved now in many places around the world. But recently it has become clear that PV is set to go beyond grid parity and become the cheapest way to generate electricity.

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“One of the things we tried to do was use the missions to introduce new tidbits in the game. We’d lead you up onto this rooftop where you’d get the sniper rifle. Even though it had been there the whole time, you probably weren’t going to find it on your own. Using little things like that helped to keep the missions interesting.”

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The University of Groningen, in the Netherlands, has converted a 3D theater into the world’s largest touchscreen, used for teaching mathematics and computer science students interactivity. The screen has a curvature of 135 degrees and is transparent.

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