http://www.technologyreview.com/news/532256/dark-web-version-of-facebook-shows-a-new-way-to-secure-the-web/

Mobile News 3 comments

“Dark Web” Version of Facebook Shows a New Way to Secure the WebA new way to access Facebook securely and anonymously via the “dark Web” could provide a model for other sites.

By Tom Simonite on November 3, 2014

Why It MattersSafely using the Internet to communicate is still difficult for many people around the world.

Facebook.com is one of the most frequently accessed URLs in the world, but on Friday the social network unveiled a new one: facebookcorewwwi.onion.

That address serves up a version of Facebook’s service accessible only via the Tor anonymity software. Tor users include dissidents trying to avoid censorship, criminals, and U.S. government workers who need to escape scrutiny from foreign security services.

Facebook says it launched the site to better serve people who already access its services via Tor but are sometimes blocked by its automatic security controls. The organization behind Tor says hundreds of thousands of people access the site this way, for example from within Iran and China, countries where government authorities block Facebook access.

The new .onion site will prevent Tor users from being blocked and also offers additional security. Security experts that advised Facebook on its new service say it shows how Web companies can help people preserve their security and anonymity online.

If you access Facebook’s .onion address, your Internet service provider or authorities won’t be able to tell that you did so. That could be useful to people trying to share news of protests from inside a country where the Internet is monitored and censored, such as Syria. Once you are logged onto Facebook, the company will log your activity as normal.http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22429934.000-brain-decoder-can-eavesdrop-on-your-inner-voice.html

Brain decoder can eavesdrop on your inner voice

29 October 2014 by Helen Thomson Magazine issue 2993. Subscribe and save For similar stories, visit the The Human Brain Topic Guide

As you read this, your neurons are firing – that brain activity can now be decoded to reveal the silent words in your head

TALKING to yourself used to be a strictly private pastime. That's no longer the case – researchers have eavesdropped on our internal monologue for the first time. The achievement is a step towards helping people who cannot physically speak communicate with the outside world.

"If you're reading text in a newspaper or a book, you hear a voice in your own head," says Brian Pasley at the University of California, Berkeley. "We're trying to decode the brain activity related to that voice to create a medical prosthesis that can allow someone who is paralysed or locked in to speak."

When you hear someone speak, sound waves activate sensory neurons in your inner ear. These neurons pass information to areas of the brain where different aspects of the sound are extracted and interpreted as words.

In a previous study, Pasley and his colleagues recorded brain activity in people who already had electrodes implanted in their brain to treat

epilepsy, while they listened to speech. The team found that certain neurons in the brain's temporal lobe were only active in response to certain aspects of sound, such as a specific frequency. One set of neurons might only react to sound waves that had a frequency of 1000 hertz, for example, while another set only cares about those at 2000 hertz. Armed with this knowledge, the team built an algorithm that could decode the words heard based on neural activity alone (PLoS Biology , doi.org/fzv269 ).

The team hypothesised that hearing speech and thinking to oneself might spark some of the same neural signatures in the brain. They supposed that an algorithm trained to identify speech heard out loud might also be able to identify words that are thought.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/532186/how-to-exchange-encrypted-messages-on-any-website/

Computing News

How to Exchange Encrypted Messages on Any WebsiteA new tool brings simple encrypted messaging to any webmail or social networking site.

By Tom Simonite on November 5, 2014

Why It MattersStrong encryption is the best way to ensure that no one can read messages you send online.

After last year’s revelations about U.S. Internet surveillance raised interest in privacy tools, Google and Yahoo both announced they were working on software to let people who use their e-mail services easily exchange encrypted messages.

Now a prototype browser extension called ShadowCrypt, made by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Maryland, goes even further. It makes it easy to

send and receive encrypted text on Twitter, Facebook, or any other website.

Using ShadowCrypt, a person who writes or is authorized to read a tweet or e-mail sees normal text. The site operator or anyone else looking at or intercepting the posting would see a garbled string of letters and numbers.

ShadowCrypt was created to show that strong encryption could be made both simple to use and compatible with popular services such as Twitter, says Devdatte Akhawe, a security engineer at Dropbox who helped develop ShadowCrypt as a grad student at Berkeley. “We wanted to show how you could make a practical, fast mechanism that is easy to use,” he says. Akhawe and colleagues tested ShadowCrypt on 17 different major Web services; it worked more or less flawlessly on 14, including Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail.http://www.technologyreview.com/news/532191/googles-half-finished-attempt-to-take-over-the-living-room/

Computing News

Google’s Half-Finished Attempt to Take Over the Living RoomGoogle’s Nexus Player should appeal to those who want smarter TVs. But it will need to do much more to be the hub of all home entertainment.

By Rachel Metz on November 4, 2014

Why It MattersConsumers still spend a lot of their screen time in front of the TV.

Google’s Nexus Player lets you stream videos and music to your TV from the Web, and play games, too.

Last year, Google invited itself into the living room with the Chromecast, a $35 dongle that plugs into the back of any TV with an HDMI port and lets you play online videos and other content on your television from another device.

Now, Google hopes to get even comfier on the couch with the Nexus Player, a $99 black disc with a Bluetooth remote control that turns any TV with an HDMI port into an Internet-connected TV that can stream movies, play music and video games, and run select Android apps.http://www.technologyreview.com/news/532181/reality-check-for-googles-nanoparticle-health-tests/

Reality Check for Google’s Nanoparticle Health TestsGoogle will face big challenges developing a nanotechnology-based test for cancer and other diseases.

By Kevin Bullis on October 31, 2014

Why It MattersBetter cancer tests can help save lives.

This week Google described its ambitious plan to use magnetic nanoparticles circulating through the blood to detect and report back on signs of cancer or an impending heart attack. Some nanotechnology experts, however, have responded by asking whether Google’s project is more science fiction than medical reality.

“It’s very exciting that a company with Google’s financial firepower is taking on this big challenge,” says Chad Mirkin, who directs the International Institute for Nanotechnology at Northwestern University. But he says that what Google has described is “an intent to do something, not a discovery or a pathway to get there.” At this point, he says, the technology is speculative: it’s basically “a good Star Trek episode.”

Google’s basic idea is nothing new—researchers have been developing magnetic nanoparticle diagnostics and treatments for years (see “Nanomedicine”). In the announcement, Andrew Conrad, head of the Life Sciences team at the Google X research lab, said “essentially the idea is simple.”http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/28/7085023/google-wants-to-flood-your-body-with-tiny-magnets-to-search-for

Google wants to flood your body with tiny magnets to search for disease Google X's latest moonshot: trying to develop nanoparticles that can identify cancer and other illnesses

By Casey Newton on October 28, 2014 02:08 pm

Google's ambition to cure death is beginning to take shape in a new product from its Google X division. Andrew Conrad, the head of the company's life sciences division, today announced the details of an effort that would use nanotechnology to identify signs of disease. The project would employ tiny magnetic nanoparticles, said to be one-thousandth the width of a red blood cell, to bind themselves to various molecules and identify them as trouble spots.

Google's nanotechnology project, which would also involve a wearable magnetic device that tracks the particles, is said to be at least five years off, according to an accompanying report in the Wall Street Journal. The company is still figuring out how many nanoparticles are necessary to identify markers of disease, and scientists will have to develop coatings for the particles that will let them bind to targeted cells. One idea is to deliver the nanoparticles via a pill that you would swallow.

Fundamentally, our foe is death."

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/11/04/was-foley-rescue-delayed-administration-had-strong-intelligence-on-hostages/

Was Foley rescue delayed? Administration had strong intelligence on hostages, location weeks before raid sign-off

By Catherine Herridge

Published November 04, 2014

EXCLUSIVE: As early as May, the Obama administration had strong and specific information about the location of American James Foley and other hostages held in Syria, a source close to the discussions told Fox News, but the rescue mission was not approved until early July.

The gap raises new and compelling questions about whether the operation to save the American and British hostages was unnecessarily delayed for at least five weeks because the administration wanted the intelligence to develop further.

“We had a lot of really good information on where they were being held, very specific information,” said the source, who agreed to discuss the details on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. The source added that the Islamic State captors felt so secure in their stronghold of Raqqa, Syria, that the hostages were moved between only a handful of locations. By late spring, the

American and British hostages had been held for at least three weeks in one facility.

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2014/11/05/jawbone-shakes-up-fitness-tracker-space-with-50-up-move-and-180-up3-devices/

Jawbone shakes up fitness-tracker space with $50 UP Move and $180 UP3 devices

By Trevor Mogg

Published November 05, 2014

Facebook0 Twitter0 livefyre Email Print

UP3 (Jawbone)

Jawbone on Tuesday night unveiled two new devices to complement its current line-up of fitness bands, with each landing at opposite ends of the scale in terms of functionality and price.

At the lower end Jawbone has introduced the UP Move. With a $50 price tag, the new wearable is aimed at those looking to dip their toe into the world of fitness

trackers, with the “simple yet savvy” device able to track your steps, exercise, and calories burned as you go through the day. 

On top of that, it also tracks your shut-eye, providing data on hours slept as well as sleep quality.

Jawbone’s latest tracker hooks up with its new ‘Smart Coach’ insight and coaching engines. Smart Coach processes all the collected data and uses it to offer personalized suggestions on how to improve your health and lifestyle.

If having it strapped around your wrist isn’t your style, the provided clip means you can attach it just about anywhere you like, keeping it out of sight if you prefer.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/532121/computers-could-talk-themselves-into-giving-up-secrets/

Computers Could Talk Themselves into Giving Up SecretsMalware might use a voice synthesizer to bypass some security controllers, researchers say.

By David Talbot on October 30, 2014

Why It MattersVoice control and other assistive technologies are on hundreds of millions of PCs and smartphones.

Voice-control features designed to make PCs and smartphones easier to use, especially for people with disabilities, may also provide ways for hackers to bypass security protections and access the data stored on those devices.

Accessibility features are there for a good reason—they make it possible to control what’s happening on the graphical user

interface without typing. But if they aren’t designed carefully, these features can be abused.

Researchers at Georgia Tech found that they could sidestep security protocols by using voice controls to enter text or click buttons. In a paper on the work, the researchers describe 12 ways to attack phones with Android, iOS, Windows, or Ubuntu Linux operating systems, including some that would not require physical access to the device. The paper will be presented next week at the CCS’14 conference in Scottsdale, Arizona.http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/03/n-s-a-director-makes-another-visit-to-silicon-valley/?ref=technology&_r=0

Security

N.S.A. Director Makes Another Visit to Silicon ValleyBy Nicole Perlroth November 3, 2014 10:01 pmNovember 3, 2014 10:01 pm12 Comments

Photo

Adm. Michael S. Rogers, director of the National Security Agency, speaking at Stanford University on Monday.Credit Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Adm. Michael S. Rogers, director of the National Security Agency, said on Monday that a secure Internet was in the best interest of the United States, following disclosures that the N.S.A. had been exploiting weaknesses in the web for foreign intelligence gathering.

Admiral Rogers took over the post of N.S.A. director in April as the agency faced criticism over its mass-surveillance program, and particularly its efforts to undermine digital encryption and exploit security flaws to spy on foreigners, after the revelations by the former intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden.

Since then, technology companies like Google and Yahoo have taken significant steps to encrypt their data, both when it is stored and as it flows through their own data centers, because Mr. Snowden’s revelations showed the N.S.A. was gathering it in an unencrypted form as it passed between computers. More recently, Apple and Google have taken steps to encrypt mobile data by introducing fully encrypted cellphones.

Artificial intelligence’s age dawns with promise, peril

David Brooks, NY Times

Some days I think nobody knows me as well as Pandora. I create anew music channel around some band or song and Pandora feeds me aseries of songs I like just as well. In the current issue of Wired, the technology writer Kevin Kellysays that we had all better get used to this level of predictiveprowess. Kelly argues that the age of artificial intelligence isfinally at hand. He writes that the smart machines of the future won’t be humanlikegeniuses like HAL 9000 in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.” They willbe more modest machines that will drive your car, translate foreignlanguages, organize your photos, recommend entertainment options andmaybe diagnose your illnesses. Two big implications flow from this. The first is sociological. Ifknowledge is power, we are about to see an even greater concentrationof power. The Internet is already heralding a new era of centralization. AsAstra Taylor points out in her book, “The People’s Platform,” in 2001,the top 10 websites accounted for 31 percent of all U.S. page views,but, by 2010, they accounted for 75 percent of them. Advances in artificial intelligence will accelerate thiscentralizing trend. The bigger their network and the more data theycollect, the more eaective and attractive they become. As Kelly puts it, “Once a company enters this virtuous cycle, ittends to grow so big, so fast, that it overwhelms any upstartcompetitors. As a result, our A.I. future is likely to be ruled by anoligarchy of two or three large, general-purpose cloud-basedcommercial intelligences.” To put it more menacingly, engineers at a few gigantic companieswill have vast-though-hidden power to shape how data are collected andframed. If you think this power will be used for entirely benign ends,then you have not read enough history. The second implication is philosophical. A.I. will redefine whatit means to be human. For the last few centuries, reason was seen asthe ultimate human faculty. But now machines are better at many of thetasks we associate with thinking — like playing chess, winning atJeopardy, and doing math. On the other hand, machines cannot beat us at the things we do

without conscious thinking: developing tastes and affections,mimicking each other and building emotional attachments, experiencingimaginative breakthroughs, forming moral sentiments. In the age of smart machines, we’re not human because we have bigbrains. We’re human because we have social skills, emotionalcapacities and moral intuitions. I could paint two divergent A.I.futures, one deeply humanistic, and one soullessly utilitarian. In the humanistic one, machines liberate us from mental drudgeryso we can focus on higher and happier things. In the cold, utilitarianfuture, on the other hand, people become less idiosyncratic. Themachine prompts us to consume what is popular, the things that areeasy and mentally undemanding. I’m happy Pandora can help me find what I like. I’m a littlenervous if it so pervasively shapes my listening that it ends updetermining what I like. I think we all want to master these machines,not have them master us.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/532166/with-100-million-entrepreneur-sees-path-to-disrupt-medical-imaging/

With $100 Million, Entrepreneur Sees Path to Disrupt Medical ImagingWill ultrasound-on-a-chip make medical imaging so cheap that anyone can do it?

By Antonio Regalado on November 3, 2014

Why It MattersPortable, cheap, and high-quality ultrasound could make medicine’s most commonly used imaging technique accessible to more people.

Jonathan Rothberg

A scanner the size of an iPhone that you could hold up to a person’s chest and see a vivid, moving, 3-D image of what’s inside is being developed by entrepreneur Jonathan Rothberg.

Rothberg says he has raised $100 million to create a medical imaging device that’s nearly “as cheap as a stethoscope” and will “make doctors 100 times as effective.” The technology, which according to patent documents relies on a new kind of ultrasound chip, could eventually lead to new ways to destroy cancer cells with heat, or deliver information to brain cells.

Rothberg has a knack for marrying semiconductor technology to problems in biology. He started and sold two DNA-sequencing companies, 454 and Ion Torrent Systems (see “The $2 Million Genome” and “A Semiconductor DNA Sequencer”), for more than $500 million. The profits have allowed Rothberg, who showed up for an interview wearing worn chinos and a tattered sailor’s belt, to ply the ocean on a 130-foot yacht named Gene Machine and to indulge high-concept hobbies like sequencing the DNA of mathematical geniuses.

The imaging system is being developed by Butterfly Network , a three-year old company that is the furthest advanced of several ventures that Rothberg says will be coming out of 4Combinator, an incubator he has created to start and finance companies that combine medical sensors with a branch of artificial-intelligence science called deep learning . ** great he sees the importance of sensing – it isn’t the sensor you have to marry the processing ***

Rothberg won’t say exactly how Butterfly’s device will work, or what it will look like. “The details will come out when we are on stage selling it. That’s in the next 18 months,” he says. But Rothberg guarantees it will be small, cost a few hundred dollars, connect to a phone, and be able to do things like diagnose breast cancer or visualize a fetus.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/11/03/359655855/a-new-way-of-thinking-about-schizophrenia-could-lead-to-new-treatments

One of the patients sounds like the rain main link game:

"Punjab, Punjab, Punjab," Paul keeps repeating. Then: "I've never been to India, but I saw pictures of it, books. You go places you never been like books." Pretty soon he's talking about his brother Kenny, Chuck Norris, Stanley tools, Battlestar Galactica, and on and on.

Everything I say to Paul, or he says to me, triggers a jumble of tangentially related ideas. It's like playing pinball with a machine where the ball never comes back down the chute. It just keeps bouncing around.

Innovation Warfare: Technology Domain Awareness and America’s Military Edge

Adam Jay Harrison, Jawad Rachami and Christopher Zember

October 29, 2014 · in Commentary

http://warontherocks.com/2014/10/innovation-warfare-technology-domain-awareness-and-americas-military-edge/ <http://warontherocks.com/2014/10/innovation-warfare-technology-domain-awareness-and-americas-military-edge/>

On December 21, 2013, a small Japanese robotics start-up called Schaft claimed top honors at the DARPA Robotics Challenge. With minimal funding, team Schaft’s robot was the only performer to successfully complete all of the challenge events and beat robots built by companies like Boston Dynamics, who delivered a competing system through a $10.8 million contract from DARPA. In 2013, Google purchased Schaft and six other robotics companies as part of a new broad scale robotics initiative.

In May 2011, D-Wave Systems, a start-up spun out of the University of British Columbia, announced they had created the world’s first quantum computer. The current generation D-Wave Two is benchmarked to solve some computational problems 3,600 times faster than conventional computers. A complete D-Wave Two system can be purchased for $10-15 million.

At the 2014 International Manufacturing Technology Show in Chicago, Local Motors, a company that uses advanced manufacturing techniques and open collaboration to drive rapid product innovations, unveiled the world’s first 3-D printed vehicle. Over a 44-hour period on the floor of the trade show, Local Motors “printed” and assembled an entire vehicle, showing how direct digital manufacturing can quickly and cost effectively produce complex systems.

The genie is out of the bottle. Today, global commercial markets increasingly set the pace for advanced technology innovation. Enter Technology Domain Awareness (TDA) – a defense innovation concept that uses knowledge of the technology commons (i.e. the place where non-defense R&D intersects with defense applications) to incorporate the high tech outputs of the commercial marketplace. In the first of a series of three articles on this topic, we explored the underlying factors and goals of the TDA mission to develop a robust defense innovation base that cooperatively aligns the non-defense R&D marketplace with emerging defense capability needs. In this second article, we turn our attention to how TDA is accomplished.

An abundance of R&D capital, market-driven incentives, and efficient flows of information between technology producers and technology consumers are underwriting a global innovation engine that operates independently of traditional defense markets. This innovation marketplace does not function by technology suppliers picking “winners” so much as by letting the market determine those technologies and “killer apps” that will survive and thrive. In this context, the technological edge favors those organizations with the strategic flexibility to leverage the widest number of technology options and rapidly exploit the applications of these technologies that generate the most value. This model of competition has broad implications for future conflict scenarios where “leveraging to win” becomes just as important as “building to win.”