silence – Jupiter Broadcasting https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com Open Source Entertainment, on Demand. Fri, 11 Jan 2013 06:24:10 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.3 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/cropped-favicon-32x32.png silence – Jupiter Broadcasting https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com 32 32 Hiding in the Silence | TechSNAP 92 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/29956/hiding-in-the-silence-techsnap-92/ Thu, 10 Jan 2013 17:40:46 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=29956 A zero day vulnerability takes down some major wikis, how Polish researchers hide secret messages in Skype’s silence.

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A zero day vulnerability takes down some major wikis, how Polish researchers hide secret messages in Skype’s silence.

Plus quitting your job and make your successors life a little easier, a war story, and a big batch of your questions, and our answers!

All that and more on this week’s TechSNAP!

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    • Zero day vulnerability in MoinMoin wiki software takes down many Major Wikis

    Polish researchers hide secret messages in silence

    • A group from the Warsaw University of Technology (I was there a few months ago, for EuroBSDCon), have developed a way to communicate in secret using the silences during a skype call
    • The new form of steganography takes advantage of the specially formatted packets that the Skype protocol uses to denote silence (to try to suppress background noise and save bandwidth)
    • Skype transmits voice data in 130 byte packets, but packets representing silence are only 70 bytes long
    • They have created software called SkyDe (SkypeHide), which intercepts some of the silent packets and replaces them with an encrypted message. On the other end, the software decrypts the hidden message, which can contain text, audio or video.
    • The hidden messages are indistinguishable from a regular silence packet, and allow data to be transferred at up to 1 kilobit per second (128 bytes per second, not very useful for real time audio/video, but could easily hide text messages or files)
    • The researchers will be presenting the details of their system at the 1st ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security in Montpellier, France, this June

    Cloud ‘secure ftp’ client Accellion contains password reset bug

    • A security researcher investigating Facebook stumbled upon a bug that allowed him to reset the password of any facebook user whose email address he knew
    • By using his own account, and then modifying the parameters of an HTTP POST, the researcher was able to reset the password of any other user
    • The bug turned out to be in Accellion, a mobile file sharing application
    • The bug has since been fixed by Accellion and Facebook, but many private cloud instances are still vulnerable
    • The HTTP POST passed the new password and email address as parameters, and was only secured by a cookie containing referrer= base64 encoded email address
    • In a secure setup, this cookie should have at least been the MD5 of the email address and a secret key, something that an attacker could not predict/create
    • Youtube video demonstrating the attack

    John McAfee – One man intelligence agency

    • John McAfee is a British American computer programmer, and the founder of McAfee Inc. (Acquired by Intel in 2010 for $7.68 billion)
    • On April 30, 2012 John McAfee’s home in Belize was raided, but he was never charged with a crime
    • After this incident, John McAfee decided to start fighting back
    • Below and some highlights from his blog post, detailing what he claims were his activities against the Belize government, and the results
    • He purchases 75 inexpensive laptops and infected them with malware that could log keystrokes, activate webcam and microphones, etc and reported the results back to him, and then released the packaging
    • He then began giving these laptops as gifts to government employees, police officers, Cabinet Minister’s assistants, girlfriends of powerful men, boyfriends of powerful women, etc
    • He also hired ‘social engineers’ to get close to certain people, to infect their computers, to change settings on their cell phones (disable auto-delete of old text messages), etc
    • With these key loggers in place, he was able to gain access to the usernames and passwords for email, facebook, and internal government accounts, as well as the content of emails and other correspondence, even if it was later deleted
    • With the webcam and microphone malware, he was also able to capture the face and voices of some of his targets
    • He also claims to have found evidence that the Belize government was issuing fake passports to lebanese terrorists to allow them to enter the United States

    War Story:

    Ben noted it has been a while since we’ve had a War Story, so he submitted this one:

    *
    It was the summer of 2005 and I was attending a local University of Wisconsin 2-year community college and working in IT there at the same time. The entire IT department consisted of my boss, who was the “everything admin,” myself, and one other student. That place was jinxed. Every time the boss left for any reason at all, all hell would break loose–whether it be our ISP would have an outage, power outages, fiber patches that would just die, or whatever. Needless to say, I was a bit nervous when my boss announced he was going to be gone fishing somewhere in Canada for 2 weeks with no access to a cellular signal. If anything broke that we couldn’t handle, we were to contact the higher-ups in Madison.

    Everything ran smoothly Monday and Tuesday. Things were looking up. I arrived at work Wednesday morning and the dean met me at the door. He informed me that there was a power outage overnight and none of the admin staff had access to voicemail. I was not pleased to hear this as I had never so much as touched the voicemail system. The other student employee had never done anything with it either, but we decided to take a peek and see if we could figure it out. To make things even better, my office phone was dead and so were all the other phones in the newer buildings on campus.

    The phone system at the campus was made up of two small Nortel DMS–100 switches. The first one was installed sometime in the early 1980s and was mostly full. This one serviced the older buildings on campus. The newer buildings were serviced by a newer DMS–100 that included a voicemail module on one of the line cards. I powered on the serial terminal sitting on top of the newer DMS–100 and found an error message indicating the source of the problem. One of the fans in the chassis failed and the unit would not boot until the fan had been replaced.

    Nortel could have used a few lessons in making parts replaceable. It took 10 minutes of tinkering to get the front panel off and find the failed fan. It was completely seized up. A few more minutes with the screwdriver and the fan was removed. It looked like a standard 120mm case fan at first but then my co-worker noticed that it was a 24v fan. So much for that idea. I called down to Madison and talked to one of the admins there. Naturally, this unit hadn’t been covered under a service contract in the past 5 years or so. He told me to see what I could come up with.

    I did some googling and found a few fans that might work, but none of them had a speed sensor wire and they would take a few days to arrive. That wasn’t going to work. My next thought was to get a 12v regulator or some resistors to build a regulator and run a standard 120mm fan. The physics lab didn’t have any of the parts I needed and the local Radio Shack was useless (I could do it now but back then I didn’t have the hardware skills to hack one together from the parts RS had…) Meanwhile, my co-worker was fooling around with the dead fan. He grabbed the fan blades and twisted and it came unstuck. It didn’t spin very well but we figured it might not have to. We went back downstairs and re-mounted the fan. I power-cycled the chassis while my co-worker used a can of compressed air to spin the blades of the fan. Success! The switch booted up. We quickly unhooked the fan so it wouldn’t short anything out and put the covers back on the cabinet. Luckily there were no line cards behind the fan so it’s failure wouldn’t affect the switch too much. Everything booted up and was stable. The bosses in Madison were impressed and said they would work on a replacement fan. When I left a year later there was still a can of compressed air on the top of the switch in case the power went out… Thinking back, I wonder what my tuition money got spent on.

    Thanks for your continued efforts on TechSnap, LAS, Unfilter, Coder Radio, Sci Byte, and the Faux Show. They keep me company when the dog is running me after work.

    A subscriber and serial affiliate user,

    Ben

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    The post Hiding in the Silence | TechSNAP 92 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

    ]]> Spinal Cord Injuries & Venus Transit | SciByte 49 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/20252/spinal-cord-injuries-venus-transit-scibyte-49/ Tue, 05 Jun 2012 22:18:17 +0000 https://original.jupiterbroadcasting.net/?p=20252 We take a look at new rehabilitation for spinal cord injuries, nanotech medical diagnosis, Guinness bubbles, tomato's, spacecraft updates and back into history.

    The post Spinal Cord Injuries & Venus Transit | SciByte 49 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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    We take a look at new rehabilitation for spinal cord injuries, nanotech medical diagnosis, Guinness bubbles, tomato’s, a quiet room, tornado map, spacecraft updates and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.

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    Spinal Cord injury treatment



    YouTube channel Sergeytule | Credit: Courtesy of EPFL

    • The low down
    • Most spinal injuries in people do not sever the spinal cord completely
    • Spinal injuries cause paralysis because they sever or crush nerve fibers that connect the brain to neurons in the spinal cord that move muscles throughout the body
    • These fibers, or axons, are the long extensions that convey signals from one end of a neuron to another, and unfortunately, they don’t regrow in adults
    • Restoring axons’ ability to regrow using growth factors, stem cells, or other therapies has been a longstanding and elusive goal for researchers.
    • Significance
    • To approximate a spinal injury in rats, researchers made two surgical cuts in the spinal cord, severing all of the direct connections from the brain, but leaving some tissue intact in between the cuts (it wouldn’t work for a completely severed cord)
    • The rats then began a rehab regime intended to bypass the fractured freeway, as it were, by pushing more traffic onto neural back roads and building more of them
    • The physical therapy began about a week after the rats were injured, and lasted about 30 minutes a day
    • During each session, the researchers injected the animals with a cocktail of drugs to improve the function of rats’ neural circuits in the part of the spinal cord involved in leg movements
    • They then stimulated this area with electrodes to prime the spinal cord for action
    • A rat was then fitted into a harness attached to a robotic device that supported its weight and allowed it to walk forward on its hind legs to the extent that it was able
    • At first, the rats could not move their legs at all, after 2 or 3 weeks, the rodents began taking steps toward a piece of food after a gentle nudge from the robot
    • By 5 or 6 weeks, they were able to initiate movement on their own and walk to get the food
    • After a few additional weeks of intensified rehab, they were able to walk up rat-sized stairs and climb over a small barrier placed in their path
    • Rats suspended over a moving treadmill that elicited reflex-like stepping movement
    • The amount of recovery depending on making intentional movements, not just any movement
    • Additional experiments in the paper make a compelling case that the rats’ recovery is due to new neural connections forming to create a detour around the injury
    • This study suggests that all three components of the rehab strategy are needed; the drugs, the electrical stimulation, and the robot-assisted physical therapy
    • Of Note
    • A case study published last year reported some recovery of voluntary movements in a man paralyzed in a vehicle accident, after he underwent a combination of electrical stimulation and physical therapy
    • Two more patients are undergoing similar rehab now, and his group hopes to add drug therapy to enhance nerve repair in the future
    • For the rats they could only make voluntary movements while the electrical stimulation was turned on, and the same was mostly true of the human patient in case study
    • YouTube
    • Robotic Rehab Helps Paralyzed Rats Walk Again | Sergeytule
    • Further Reading / In the News
    • Robotic Rehab Helps Paralyzed Rats Walk Again | news.sciencemag.org

    — NEWS BYTE —

    Nanotechnology meets medical diagnosis



    Credit: Stephen Chou/Analytical Chemistry

    • The low down
    • A common biological test called immunoassay, mimics the action of the immune system to detect the presence of biomarkers
    • When biomarkers are present they produce a fluorescent glow (light) that can be measured in a laboratory
    • The greater the glow, the more of the biomarker is present; however, if the amount of biomarker is too small, the fluorescent light is too faint to be detected
    • Princeton researchers have tackled this limitation by using nanotechnology to greatly amplify the faint fluorescence
    • Significance
    • The key to the breakthrough lies in a new artificial nanomaterial called D2PA
    • The new material consists of a series of glass pillars in a layer of gold, speckled on their sides with gold dots and capped with a gold disk.
    • The sides of each pillar are speckled with even tinier gold dots about 10 to 15 nanometers in diameter Each pillar is just 60 nanometers in diameter, 1/1,000th the width of a human hair
    • The pillars are spaced 200 nanometers apart and capped with a disk of gold on each pillar
    • Using this material laboratory test used to detect disease and perform biological research could be made more than 3 million times more sensitive
    • Increased performance could greatly improve the early detection of cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and other disorders by allowing doctors to detect far lower concentrations of telltale markers than was previously practical.
    • Of Note
    • When a sample such as blood, saliva or urine is added to small glass vials containing antibodies that are designed to “capture” or bind to biomarkers of interest in the sample
    • Another set of antibodies that have been labeled with a fluorescent molecule are then added to the mix
    • When biomarkers are not present in the vials the fluorescent detection antibodies do not attach to anything and are washed away
    • This new technology could play a significant role in other areas of chemistry and engineering, from light-emitting displays to solar energy harvesting
    • Further Reading / In the News
    • Nanotechnology breakthrough could dramatically improve medical tests

    — TWO-BYTE NEWS —

    The rise and fall of Guinness bubbles

    Credit : E. S. Benilov, et al.

    • The low down
    • Why do the bubbles in a glass of stout beer such as Guinness sink while the beer is settling, even though the bubbles are lighter than the surrounding liquid?
    • Stout beers such as Guinness foam due to a combination of carbon dioxide and nitrogen bubbles, while other beers foam due only to carbon dioxide bubbles
    • In 2004 high-speed photography proved that bubbles do indeed sink
    • Significance
    • Simulations of the elongated vortices in a pint glass, where bubbles sink near the glass wall, and an anti-pint glass, where bubbles rise near the wall
    • A team of mathematicians from the University of Limerick has shown that the sinking bubbles result from the shape of a pint glass
    • As the glass narrows downwards and causes a circulation pattern that drives both fluid and bubbles downwards at the wall of the glass
    • It is not just the bubbles themselves that are sinking (in fact, they’re still trying to rise), but the entire fluid is sinking and pulling the bubbles down with it.
    • Of Note
    • Researchers are still uncertain of the specific mechanism responsible for reducing the bubble density near the wall for the pint geometry and increasing it for the anti-pint one.
    • The same flow pattern occurs with other types of beers, but the larger carbon dioxide bubbles are less subject to the downward drag than the smaller nitrogen bubbles in stout beers.
    • For a tilted straight-sided glass the side in the direction of the tilt represents the normal situation of a pint glass, while the opposite side is the “anti-pint” – and bubbles can be seen to both rise and fall in the same glass.
    • Further Reading / In the News
    • Irish mathematicians explain why Guinness bubbles sink | Phys.org
    • Falling stout bubbles explained | BBC News

    You say tomato I say potato?

    • The low down
    • The genome of the tomato has been sequenced one from the “Heinz 1706” tomato as well as the sequence of a wild relative
    • Researchers report that tomatoes possess some 35,000 genes arranged on 12 chromosomes
    • Significance
    • The team has captured virtually all the genes for various characteristics, such as taste, natural pest resistance or nutritional content
    • Now that the genome sequence of one variety of tomato is known, it will also be easier and much less expensive for seed companies and plant breeders to sequence other varieties
    • The sequencing of the tomato genome has implications for other plant species such as Strawberries, apples, melons, bananas and many other fleshy fruits, share some characteristics with tomatoes
    • Information about the genes and pathways involved in fruit ripening can potentially be applied to them, helping to improve food quality, food security and reduce costs
    • Of Note
    • The gene sequencing confirms that the tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable
    • The tomato shares 92% of its more than 34,000 protein-coding genes with its close relative, the recently sequenced potato
    • Further Reading / In the News
    • Tomato genome fully sequenced | phys.org
    • ScienceShot: Tapping the Tomato’s Secrets | news.sciencemag.org

    Hear your own heart beat



    Credit: Renee Jones Schneider / Minneapolis Star Tribune.

    56 years of Tornado’s



    Credit: John Nelson

    • The low down
    • Using information from data.gov, tech blogger John Nelson has created this spectacular image of tornado paths in the US over a 56 year period
    • The storms are categorized by F-scale with the brighter neon lines representing more violent storms
    • The tracker shows straight lines, but it is only because the data used in this study only tracked start and stop points
    • Also provided are some stats on all the storms in the different categories
    • Further Reading / In the News
    • Stunning Visualization of 56 Years of Tornadoes in the US | UniverseToday.com
    • Data.gov

    SPACECRAFT UPDATE

    Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo receives permit



    Credit: VirginGalactic YouTube Channel | Credit: TSC

    • The low down
    • Virgin Galactic’s flight system consists of two vehicles, SpaceShipTwo and its WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft
    • SpaceShipTwo is designed to launch six passengers and two pilots into suborbital space and offer a few minutes of weightlessness, then return to Earth
    • Significance
    • Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo suborbital space tourism vehicle has won U.S. regulatory approval to begin powered flight testing of the rocket-propelled craft later this year
    • The experimental launch permit from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) authorizes the Scaled Composites development team "to progress to the rocket-powered phase of test flight
    • Before the rocket-powered testing phase they will perform aerodynamic performance of the spacecraft with the full weight of the rocket motor system on board
    • Integration of key rocket motor components, already begun during a now-concluding period of downtime for routine maintenance, will continue in the autumn
    • Multimedia
    • YouTube Video : SS2 First Feather Flight, Mojave, May 2011)
    • Further Reading / In the News
    • FAA Clears Virgin Galactic to Begin SpaceShipTwo Rocket Test Flights | Space.com

    GRAIL Moon mission extension



    Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MIT

    Dragon SpaceCraft Splashdown



    Credit: YouTube Channel ReelNASA

    SCIENCE CALENDAR

    Looking back

    • June 09 1822 : 190 years ago : False teeth : Charles Graham received the first patent for false teeth. His were not the first false teeth in use, however. In the Colonial years, rotten teeth were considered the cause of many illnesses, and they would be extracted. Varied ways of replacing them were tried. For example, George Washington had at least four sets of false teeth (though none were wooden, despite a myth to that effect). Washington’s first dentures were made using human teeth inserted into carved ivory. In 1789, dentist John Greenwood of New York, made Washington another set from gold, hippo teeth, and hippo and elephant ivory. The one natural remaining tooth was a molar, and a hole was left for that.
    • June 08 1937 : 75 years ago : Titan Arum : A specimen of the world’s largest flower, first bloomed in the U.S. in the NY Botanical Garden. The giant Sumatran Titan Arum, Amorphophallus titanum, measured 8½-ft high and 4-ft diam. Its putrid rotting-corpse fragrance repelled visitors. Native in Sumatran jungles of Indonesia, it is known there as the “corpse flower.” Dr. Odoardo Beccari, an Italian botanist, was the first western expert to find the Titan Arum in the Pading Province during 1878. Seeds he sent back to his patron, the Marchese Corsi Salviati were grown in Italy, and a few plants were at Beccari’s request sent to Kew Gardens in England in 1879. One of those seedlings flowered in June 1887. Another plant bloomed there in 1926, to wide attention.

    Looking up this week : You May Have Seen

    Looking up this week

    The post Spinal Cord Injuries & Venus Transit | SciByte 49 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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