Nvidia- Tianhe-1A, a new supercomputer designed by the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in China has set a new performance record of 2.507 petaflops, making it the fastest system in the world today.
I tweet, therefore I am...
You may think of yourself as a user of Google, Facebook or Amazon, but you are actually their product.
Sure, Google will provide you with search results, but they are not in the search business; they are in the advertising business. Their profits come from marketing firms that buy your behavior.
Similarly, Amazon is not in the book business, although they will send you the books you've ordered. They are in the personal information business.
The assets of modern web-based companies are the intimate profiles of those who "use" them, like you and me. Time to forget the nice pronouncements like "Do no evil" that accompany the wholesale destruction of privacy now taking place on the web, or rather within the walled gardens that companies like Facebook, Google and Apple are erecting around us on the web. Compared to them, the Chinese censors re-inventing their Great Wall are a bunch of sissies.
Well, who cares? Look at what we've gained: We now have access to unprecedented new riches. Movies and songs by the thousands; new "friends" by the hundreds; timely pieces of data by the millions. Our lives have become richer, more intelligent, more interesting.
The world moves on. You may have had privacy rights as a customer or a user but what makes you think you should retain those rights now that you're just a product?
Read More at the Boing2SCHNEIER On Monday, The New York Times reported that President Obama will seek sweeping laws enabling law enforcement to more easily eavesdrop on the internet. Technologies are changing, the administration argues, and modern digital systems aren't as easy to monitor as traditional telephones.
...Formerly reserved for totalitarian countries, this wholesale surveillance of citizens has moved into the democratic world as well. Governments like Sweden, Canada and the United Kingdom are debating or passing laws giving their police new powers of internet surveillance, in many cases requiring communications system providers to redesign products and services they sell. More are passing data retention laws, forcing companies to retain customer data in case they might need to be investigated later.
Obama isn't the first U.S. president to seek expanded digital eavesdropping. The 1994 (CLINTON) CALEA law required phone companies to build ways to better facilitate FBI eavesdropping into their digital phone switches. Since 2001, the National Security Agency has built substantial eavesdropping systems within the United States.
These laws are dangerous, both for citizens of countries like China and citizens of Western democracies. Forcing companies to redesign their communications products and services to facilitate government eavesdropping reduces privacy and liberty; that's obvious. But the laws also make us less safe. Communications systems that have no inherent eavesdropping capabilities are more secure than systems with those capabilities built in.
Any surveillance system invites both criminal appropriation and government abuse. Function creep is the most obvious abuse: New police powers, enacted to fight terrorism, are already used in situations of conventional nonterrorist crime. Internet surveillance and control will be no different.
Please read more from the SCHNEIER
"When hackers crash Windows in the course of developing malware, they'll often accidentally agree to send the virus code straight to Microsoft, according to senior security architect Rocky Heckman. 'It's amazing how much stuff we get.' Heckman also said Microsoft was a common target for people testing their attacks. 'The first thing [script kiddies] do is fire off all these attacks at Microsoft.com. On average we get attacked between 7000 and 9000 times per second.'" Read more at /.
cbs3.com - Teenagers are becoming addicted to texting, according to a new study. In fact experts are saying being hooked on texting can be like being addicted to drugs.
Walking, sitting, it doesn't matter where it happens, teenagers seem to need to text. Statistics show 80 percent of all 15 to 18-year-olds own a cell phone. And the rate of texting has sky rocketed 600 percent in three years. The average teen sends 3,000 texts a month
ComputerWorld About 40 different Windows applications contain a critical flaw that can be used by attackers to hijack PCs and infect them with malware, a security researcher said Wednesday through iTunes bug...
HD Moore, chief security officer at Rapid7 and creator of the open-source Metasploit penetration-testing toolkit. Moore did not reveal the names of the vulnerable applications or their makers, however.
"The cat is out of the bag, this issue affects about 40 different apps, including the Windows shell,"
"Solving the flaw requires every affected vendor to produce a patch," he said. "
The bug in Apple in its iTunes... According to Apple, the bug does not affect Mac machines.
Moore confirmed that the flaw "applies to a wide range of Windows applications," and added that he stumbled across it while researching the Windows shortcut vulnerability, a critical bug that Microsoft acknowledged in July and patched on Aug. 2 using one of its rare "out of band" emergency updates.
Moore declined to name the applications that contain the bug or to go into great detail about the vulnerability. But he was willing to share some observations.
"The vector is slightly different between applications, but the end result is an attacker-supplied .dll being loaded after the user opens a 'safe' file type from a network share [either on the local network or the Internet]," Moore said in an e-mail reply to questions. "It is possible to force a user to open a file from the share, either through their Web browser or by abusing other applications, for example, Office documents with embedded content."
Some of what Moore described was reminiscent of the attacks using the Windows shortcut vulnerability. For instance, hackers were able to launch drive-by attacks exploiting the shortcut bug from malicious sites via WebDAV, and could embed their exploits into Office documents, which would presumably be delivered to victims as seemingly innocuous e-mail attachments.
His advice until the vulnerable applications are patched was also taken from Microsoft's shortcut bug playbook.
"Users can block outbound SMB [by blocking TCP ports] 139 and 445, and disable the WebDAV client [in Windows] to prevent these flaws from being exploited from outside of their local network," Moore recommended.
Both work-arounds were among those Microsoft told users they could apply if they were unable to apply the emergency update.
But although Microsoft was able to plug the shortcut hole with a patch for Windows, Moore was pessimistic that the company would be able to do the same with this vulnerability.
Please read full at ComputerWorld
SlashDot:
"The National Park Service... Last fall, a group of hikers in the Grand Canyon called in rescue helicopters three times by pressing the emergency button on their satellite location device. When rangers arrived the second time, the hikers complained that their water supply tasted salty. 'Because of having that electronic device, people have an expectation that they can do something stupid and be rescued,' said a spokeswoman for Grand Teton National Park. 'Every once in a while we get a call from someone who has gone to the top of a peak, the weather has turned and they are confused about how to get down and they want someone to personally escort them. The answer is that you are up there for the night.'"
The Harm Of Gaming: We Present The Facts
The perennial questions of the harm that games may be causing us and our children are extremely troubling. Every week seems to bring a new survey or study that demonstrates links between gaming and problematic behavior, with renowned psychologists, sociologists and publicists explaining to us what it is we need to be scared of. Over the last fifteen years I have been studying this data and reading these papers, and I am now ready to publish my findings. Below is the result of a decade-and-a-half's research, and I think will once and for all answer the questions every parent, teacher, child and teenager should be asking.
Grand Theft Auto Causes Marriages To Break Down
While no one is left in any doubt that playing Grand Theft Auto causes anyone under the age of 17 to become dangerously exposed to murder, the longer-term effects on adults have been less examined. As part of my research I thought to compare the sales of each GTA game with what the orce rate must have been when each came out. As you can see each new GTA game has been directly correlated with an increase in orces. While the graph may give the impression that GTA IV has caused fewer orces than Vice City or San Andreas, this game only came out in 2008, so most of the orces it has induced will still be going through the courts and awaiting completion. Expect to see this number soar in the next twelve months.
Owning Consoles More Serious Than Gun Crime
A lot of videogames include the use of guns. While these may not be real guns, but rather recreations made of pixels and polygons, it is obvious to anyone playing one of these "simulations" that it is in no meaningful way different from firing a real gun in a school. But it's far scarier than you might have first thought. Nearly twice as many Americans own gun-displaying consoles than those who own the types of guns that require a license and paperwork to purchase. No such paperwork is necessary when buying an Xbox, and yet still teenagers will kill each other in the streets.
MSNBC - ", over the last two decades there has been a three-fold increase in the number of Americans who report having no confidant," they added.
"Such findings suggest that despite increases in technology and globalization that would presumably foster social connections, people are becoming increasingly more socially isolated."
...got to love the irony that social networks and communication devices are creating the most anti-social environment the world has ever witnessed.
Why
do you think you found this page "random chance"? Hardly
Not possible on the internet...
The 57 Million blogs maintained on the internet and that number doubles in size approximately every 230 days.
So, about 100,000 new weblogs are created each day...
In the December 2006 survey we received responses from 105,244,649 Web sites with content...
While Al Gore has done a lot to promote his books & movies... he did not create and does not maintain the internet, these guys do ;-)
Why "Who Maintains the Internet Matters"... Here’s a little something to think about while the UN makes the case for greater international control of the internet turning a large class of people into social misfits, deviants and criminals and terrorists...
Who maintains YOUR internet? - Hoz
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