‘Spider-goats’ start work on wonder web

A HERD of goats containing spider genes is about to be milked for the ingredients of spider silk to mass-produce one of nature’s most sought-after materials.

Webster and Peter, genetically altered goats unveiled today by the Canadian company Nexia, are the founders of a GM herd whose offspring will produce spider silk protein in their milk that can be collected, purified and spun into the fibres. Females will begin mass-producing spider milk in the second quarter of this year for a variety of military and industrial uses.

Spider silk has long been admired by material scientists for its unique combination of toughness, lightness and biodegradability. Dragline silk, which comprises the radiating spokes of a spider web, is stronger than the synthetic fibre Kevlar, stretches better than nylon and, weight for weight, is five times stronger than steel.

These incredible qualities are the product of 400 million years of evolution. Now spider yarn has been spun by the US Army and the company Nexia Biotechnologies of Montreal, marking a milestone in efforts to ape arachnids.

The work “opens up a lot of things on the practical level and on a research level,” said Dr Randy Lewis, a spider silk expert at the University of Wyoming, Laramie. Dr Jeffrey Turner, President of Nexia, said: “Mimicking spider silk properties has been the holy grail of material science and now we’ve been able to make useful fibres.”

UK Telegraph
By Roger Highfield

Full article

Two decades ago a 23-year-old Cornell University graduate student brought the Internet to its knees with a simple software program that skipped from computer to computer at blinding speed, thoroughly clogging the then-tiny network in the space of a few hours.

The program was intended to be a digital “Kilroy Was Here.” Just a bit of cybernetic fungus that would unobtrusively wander the net. However, a programming error turned it into a harbinger heralding the arrival of a darker cyberspace, more of a mirror for all of the chaos and conflict of the physical world than a utopian refuge from it.

Since then things have gotten much, much worse.

Bad enough that there is a growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over.

What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a “gated community” where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety. Today that is already the case for many corporate and government Internet users. As a new and more secure network becomes widely adopted, the current Internet might end up as the bad neighborhood of cyberspace. You would enter at your own risk and keep an eye over your shoulder while you were there.

John Markoff
The New York Times

Read entire article

Research related articles:

1. Australia: No opt-out of filtered Internet
2. EU looks into telecoms blocking Internet calls
3. Pentagon: Internet needs to be dealt with as if an enemy “weapons system”
4. N.J. Court Requires Subpoena for Internet Subscriber Records
5. New York Cops Blame “Anarchists” for Times Square Bombing
6. China offers therapy to 4 million internet addicts
7. Terrorism on the New York Times Op-Ed Page
8. New York Times Misleads on Taliban Role in Opium Trade
9. Ron Paul #1 on New York Times Best Seller List
10. Pentagon Secretly Goes To War With The Internet
11. Pranksters Distribute Fake New York Times Declaring ‘Iraq War Over’
12. New York Times to Borrow $225 Million Against Its Mid-Manhattan Headquarters Building

The cheque, which is 350 years old on 16 February, is said to be in irreversible decline as innovation points towards a cashless society.

Banks will increasingly battle for a consumer to use one card exclusively.

But as consumers prepare to pay and access accounts using their mobiles, retailers are worried costs will rise.

Pay date

By 2015, the number of payments made by cash in the UK will be overtaken for the first time by other ways of paying, according to Apacs.

At the end of this year, three million Barclays customers will be able to press their debit card to a sensor in more than 8,000 UK shops to register a payment.

Meanwhile, the UK could mirror technology already used in East Asia where the chip now found in a plastic card is placed in an everyday item such as a mobile phone or a watch. This is then pushed against a sensor in a shop to pay, and is known as “contactless” technology.

Kevin Peachey and Carolyn Rice 
BBC News

Read entire article

Research related articles:

1. Elites Seek Control Over Rising Cashless Society
2. Shoppers to use fingerprints or eye scans to pay for goods
3. Consumers Feel the Next Crisis: It’s Credit Cards
4. The Surveillance Society Does Not Work
5. Ubiquitous Computing May Build Ultimate Surveillance Society
6. Cher Shills for Obama, Says Republicans Almost Killed Her
7. Banks Boosting Credit Card Rates and Fees
8. Masonicare Monitors the Elderly
9. Indy Star Shills NWO Martial Law Agenda
10. Kissinger Again Shills Obama and the New World Order
11. Engineers society accused of disaster probe cover-ups
12. Washington Post Columnist Shills for a North American Union

Amazing revelations have emerged concerning already existing government plans to overhaul the way the internet functions in order to apply much greater restrictions and control over the web.

Lawrence Lessig, a respected Law Professor from Stanford University told an audience at this years Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Half Moon Bay, California, that “There’s going to be an i-9/11 event” which will act as a catalyst for a radical reworking of the law pertaining to the internet.

Lessig also revealed that he had learned, during a dinner with former government Counter Terrorism Czar Richard Clarke, that there is already in existence a cyber equivalent of the Patriot Act, an “i-Patriot Act” if you will, and that the Justice Department is waiting for a cyber terrorism event in order to implement its provisions.

During a group panel segment titled “2018: Life on the Net”, Lessig stated:

There’s going to be an i-9/11 event. Which doesn’t necessarily mean an Al Qaeda attack, it means an event where the instability or the insecurity of the internet becomes manifest during a malicious event which then inspires the government into a response. You’ve got to remember that after 9/11 the government drew up the Patriot Act within 20 days and it was passed.

The Patriot Act is huge and I remember someone asking a Justice Department official how did they write such a large statute so quickly, and of course the answer was that it has been sitting in the drawers of the Justice Department for the last 20 years waiting for the event where they would pull it out.

Of course, the Patriot Act is filled with all sorts of insanity about changing the way civil rights are protected, or not protected in this instance. So I was having dinner with Richard Clarke and I asked him if there is an equivalent, is there an i-Patriot Act just sitting waiting for some substantial event as an excuse to radically change the way the internet works. He said “of course there is”.

Lessig is the founder of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. He is founding board member of Creative Commons and is a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and of the Software Freedom Law Center. He is best known as a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications.

These are clearly not the ravings of some paranoid cyber geek.

The Patriot Act, as well as its lesser known follow up the Domestic Security Enhancement Act 2003, also known as USA Patriot Act II, have been universally decried by civil libertarians and Constitutional scholars from across the political spectrum. They have stripped back basic rights and handed what have been described by even the most moderate critics as “dictatorial control” over to the president and the federal government.

Many believed that the legislation was a response to the attacks of 9/11, but the reality was that the Patriot Act was prepared way in advance of 9/11 and it sat dormant, awaiting an event to justify its implementation.

In the days after the attacks it was passed in the House by a majority of 357 to 66. It passed the Senate by 98 to 1. Congressman Ron Paul (R-Tex) told the Washington Times that no member of Congress was even allowed to read the legislation.

Now we discover that exactly the same freedom restricting legislation has already been prepared for the cyber world.

An i-9/11, as described by Lawrence Lessig, would provide the perfect pretext to implement such restrictions in one swift motion, as well as provide the justification for relegating and eliminating specific content and information on the web.

Such an event could come in the form of a major viral attack, the hacking of a major city’s security or transport systems, or some other vital systems, or a combination of all of these things. Considering the amount of unanswered questions regarding 9/11 and all the indications that it was a covert false flag operation, it isn’t hard to imagine such an event being played out in the cyber world.

However, regardless of any i-9/11 or i-Patriot Act, there is already a coordinated effort to stem the reach and influence of the internet.

We have tirelessly warned of this general movement to restrict, censor, control and eventually completely shut down the internet as we know it, thereby killing the last real vestige of free speech in the world today and eliminating the greatest communication and information tool ever conceived.

Our governments have reams of legislation penned to put clamps on the web as we know it. Legislation such as the PRO-IP Act of 2007: H.R. 4279, that would create an IP czar at the Department of Justice and the Intellectual Property Enforcement Act of 2007: S. 522, which would create an entire ‘Intellectual Property Enforcement Network’. These are just two examples.

In addition, we have already seen how the major corporate websites and social networks are decentralizing and coming together to implement overarching identification, verification and access systems that have been described by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as “the beginning of a movement and the beginning of an industry.”

Some of these major tech companies have already joined efforts in projects such as the Information Card Foundation, which has proposed the creation of a system of internet ID cards that will be required for internet access. Of course, such a system would give those involved the ability to track and control user activity much more effectively. This is just one example.

In addition, as we reported yesterday, major transportation hubs like St. Pancras International, as well as libraries, big businesses, hospitals and other public outlets that offer wi-fi Internet, are blacklisting alternative news websites and making them completely inaccessible to their users.

These precedents are merely the first indication of what is planned for the Internet over the next 5-10 years, with the traditional web becoming little more than a vast spy database that catalogues people’s every activity and bombards them with commercials, while those who comply with centralized control and regulation of content will be free to enjoy the new super-fast Internet 2.

We must speak out about this rampant move to implement strict control mechanisms on the web NOW before it is too late, before the spine of the free internet is broken and its body essentially becomes paralyzed beyond repair.

Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Related: Get Outraged And Get Active About Internet Censorship

Hat Tip: Harold Gray, JustGetThere.us

Ignorance Is Futile:

The vision of Google’s future, according to Google co-founder, Sergey Brin, is “it would be like the mind of God”. And it’s a future that they’re working feverishly to make a reality today.

While that quote was in reference to “the ultimate search engine”, this analysis is going to make it more than clear that he was in fact referring to Google in particular. In doing so, we’ll see numerous other quotes demonstrating their intentions, what they mean by “all of the worlds information”, how they’re on precisely the right path to achieve their goal with the U.S. military in this vast project that is set to change humanity forever.

Trailer for my upcoming film “an unholy alliance”.

“AI” is actually too “narrow” of a term for a cognitive system, but a “broad” cognitive system would contain many narrow AI parts. To even contemplate the notion of cognitive “Artificial General Intelligence” one must first embrace emergence. Emergence is the key to all complex systems that could be considered in attempting to create a model for an AGI system. Google’s methodology in their quest is to exploit and harness the powers of emergence, while adding ‘parts’ that perform cognitive tasks in their own right. The idea is to push the term superorganism to the fullest potential. The insights are the ant colony, and the beehive. The models are the Internet, and the human brain. The entire premise of emergence is ‘the sum is greater than its parts’.

Ants are abysmally stupid, in our terms, yet the colony as a superorganism often gives rise to give the impression of the individual ants being intelligent. With beehives this feature expands even further. Under the right conditions, a complex systems analysis of the collective can be indistinguishable from that as a single organism. Compare to cells in the human body, or brain alone. Each human mind is a hive, of neurons; a hivemind. Each neuron is abysmally stupid, and each brain part is nearly worthless alone, yet the interconnected cells of each part and each part interconnected give rise to consciousness and higher brain functions.

Then there’s the Internet, with its millions of routers and billions of computers all interconnected as one that is already evolving into a ’smart’ semantic web on its own. It’s no wonder that philosophers often compare the Internet -as a complex system- to the brain, and many thinkers argue that at some point the Internet itself may become unintendedly conscious via emergence. But what if a collective of intelligent beings harnessing global scale supercomputers armed with state of the art algorithms made the goal of turning their symbiotic co-evolving component of the Internet their life’s work?

Enter Google: Google seeks to “gather & organize”, in their words, “all of the worlds information“. It’s the company slogan, and when you hear them speak it they place much emphasis on “all”. But what’s more, according to both co-founders of the company, they intend for it to “understand” what all of the worlds information means. In many cases, they’re going to extremes in order to “gather all” of it, but they’re lettings us do the work for them wherever they can. A look over their “Product” list is as far as one must go to get an idea, yet it goes further than that. But first, the main search feature must be highlighted.

Google, like other search engines, “crawls” the Internet. That is, their algorithm laden interconnected supercomputer automatons scour the Internet, link-by-link literally archiving the entire history of the Internet, page by page, day by day. A page changes and Google finds the change and adds it to its own archives. It then saves these archives for all time. This includes content from social networks, blogs, news sites, and so forth. Feeding a link into Archive.org’s Wayback Machine paints a candid picture of this process. Their urgency to archive all possible acquirable data also extends to other areas, such as your personal life via Gmail, Health, Calendar & Google Desktop (which scans all of the files in your “personal” computer) .

Another technique is the ‘transfer of human intelligence‘, which involves monitoring our behavior as we surf the Web and more. This is achieved via many routes, such as the standard Google Search, Google cookies, Google Toolbar (that embeds in most web browser programs), Google Desktop, sites with AdSense integrated, “Powered by Google” complete site integration, and last-but-not-least their new Google Chrome web-browser. Add to that Docs and  Knol.

There isn’t even room in this article to explain the ramifications that each one of their “Products” poses in what it’s set to “understand” about yourself & your habits, and everything about the human race from the genetic to the social scale. But note their new “Android” mobile device service, which has 2 alarming features. First, is one app that records the users iris scan, for login purposes. Second, nearly every other app encourages the use of real-time navigational GPS tracking. So on one hand it conditions you to submit your eye iris scans, and on the other it conditions you to embrace constant real-time GPS tracking of your every move. The latter is dually striking as virtually all modern cell phones already embody GPS tracking, except most people aren’t yet aware of that.

In other cases they go out of their way to acquire ‘their’ data: Google Books, Patent Search, Scholar, Maps & Street View, Earth, Translate, Finance and now even Newspaper (archiving the history of all possible print newspapers). For some insight into the implications of their machine eventually having in its ‘intellectual possession’ virtually the entire history of humanity’s books, newspaper, scholarly academic papers and so forth, consider the statement from a Google Factory Tour guide: “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people, we are scanning them to be read by an AI.” The point is proven in the fact that they’re scanning the entire books whether or not the entire contents will be browsable online. Perhaps my publishing of this article online is giving the Machine even more focused insight into itself?

Then there’s the darker side. First, they intend to -if not already- use your PC’s microphone to monitor ‘background audio’ ‘in order to listen to TV’s and so forth to garner better ads for the user’. As US intelligence agencies already monitor subjects via their cell phone microphones, which can only be prevented by removing the phones battery, you can expect Google equipped mobile devices and automobiles to do the same. Second, another goal is acquiring every persons DNA code, and then making it searchable online as another “Product”. This could prove to be their most challenging ambition, but in Google tradition they’ve rolled out the (on the surface) independent “23andMe” social networking personalized genome service which is already showing signs of targeting children for systematic indoctrination in DNA databanks.

Much of their epic archiving quest wont even immediately pay off, but it’s being kept as fruit waiting to ripen, or rather waiting for their conscious entity to ripen to be able to harness it. By this point many would declare that AGI isn’t possible, but regardless of beliefs and possibilities (external possibilities aren’t dependent on one persons beliefs), the stated goal exists.

Peter Norvig, former head of the now Intelligent Systems Division at NASA’s ARC, and now Google’s Director of Research, in 2007, claimed that Google is already co-evolving with the Internet. “We hadn’t expected that”, he said. But the Googler’s seem to be right on course to reach their ambitions by conscious direction of that delves beyond mere emergence alone. There are many cases of the 2 Google co-founders going on the record about “AI”, and between them and their related media’s, it’s quite clear that their intentions aren’t merely ‘narrow AI’ nor is any of it mere accident.

Take for instance machine vision. Begin with Google Video and shortly afterwards they acquired Youtube. These are both sites where the user does the work in providing the profitable content for them. For some it was neat for Youtube results to appear in Google Video searches, but then Google began crawling most of all other streaming video hosts including many of their competitors. During that shuffle, Google acquired Neven Vision, the worlds most advanced machine vision firm. One desirable prospect for Google was that NV’s technology was already geared for mobile devices. Another was that it was designed for both still photos and videos. It can be understood as advanced biometrics that’s designed to recognize all types of objects, not just human faces.

So while you’re walking around your neighborhood waving your GPS equipped Google mobile device around, it’s possible that Google is storing your cameras data in building Google’s omnipresent worlds eye. But I see a scarier side: When their infantile systems grow conscious enough, not only would they -or It- know and understand everything humanity has ever written, it would also have to a certain degree all of our videos from film to personal cams. One side is it helps it become sentient, the other is it accelerates its ability to understand humans individually and socially. After all, you couldn’t expect a machine to become conscious & intelligent without vision, nor could it understand humans without seeing them in action.

An intelligent thinking machine would also needs ears, and ears they are giving it. Make a call to 1-800-GOOG411 and experience their speech recognition algorithms for yourself. No surprise that the service is free, because the more people use it the more you help them reach their goal of omniscience. And it’s safe to assume to this technology is busy helping it listen to all of the videos it’s looking at. Meanwhile, their Translate efforts has their system rapidly learning how to translate any language from any language, guided by a handful of engineers who in most cases don’t even know the languages themselves. You can see this by doing the typical search, and you can bet they’re already working on integrating the technology into audio speech recognition.

Above we have the perfect outline of inherent rise of sentience via emergence, but they aren’t leaving it to just that. In May of 2008, Google hosted their own “Machine Learning Summit“, of which “most of the material covered (documents, videos, presentations) at these types of events is confidential and proprietary and can’t be released.” Prior to that, in 2006, internal documents leaked stating their plans the build “the worlds largest AI laboratory”. That lab might be already existent somewhere in their own properties, or it might be in or set to be in a government / military facility.

The facility could be in one of their many data-centers or other secretive locations. A ‘secretive‘ data-center of public fame is known best as “PROJECT02“, which has direct access to cheap power via a hydroelectric damn owned and operated by the US Army Corp of Engineers. Being the size of ‘2 football fields’, it sounds reminiscent of what everyone used to say in reference to the NSA’s Echelon system that was and is used to monitor virtually every form of telecommunications in the US and much of the Earth.

There’s no telling how many Google facilities exist, but is can be said that they wouldn’t need one centralized location for the ‘worlds largest AI lab’. With global telecommunications now being radically different than 60 years ago, private intranets can connect up any remote office or personal computer as a collective. This means that a modern day Manhattan Project could be operated across the planet in secret with great ease. This would especially be the case if you had literally a million or more parallel platformed CPU’s at your disposal (like Google does). Consider that computing power per $1000 is literally less than millionth what was during the Manhattan Project, and that project only cost about US$24 billion. Anything even resembling a modern semiconductor computer hadn’t even been invented yet. Meanwhile, every year their capabilities expand as CPU prices drop and work gets easier, exponentially, thanks to Moore’s Law and the Law of Accelerating Returns.

On the surface, Google seems to be poised to be able go it alone in their effort, yet they are in deep cahoots with the US military’s parallel initiative. Since the US military maintains global supremacy via its Navy, one could almost Google to roll out plans for ‘naval’ data-centers (which they have). The full scope of government & military involvement with Google’s AGI project goes well beyond the scope of this analysis, but suffice to say that Google have in 2008 signed a 40-90 year lease, with their geographical neighbors, at NASA’s Ames Research Center (ARC), in Silicon Vally, for a 1.2 million square feet collaborative research facility. But not only does Google get to build on the government land there, they already have exclusive access to land and park their private Google jumbo jets on ARC’s “Moffitt Field”.

ARC is historically NASA’s prime hub of AI & AGI research, so it’s of little surprise that Sergey Brin, when asked about the partnership, repeatedly mentioned “AI” as the primary strategic interest. Also relevant in this summary, is the fact that Google was initially funded by DARPA, NASA, ane the National Science Foundation. It’s also been alleged by a former CIA agent that not only did the CIA fund them during their earlier years, but that the CIA has an actual office in the main Googleplex headquarters, while it’s a fact that Google hardware runs the US Intelligence Community’s ‘spy wikipedia‘. DARPA claims the fame of inventing the Internet, and by visiting their website you can browse through their extensive list of various inter-related “cognitive” “self-aware” artificial intelligence projects. Vint Cerf, Google’s “Chief Internet Evangelist” VP, ‘invented the Internet’ together with Bob Kahn via DARPA. Vint still works with NASA on the “Interplanetary Internet”, as well as on other projects for the United States military.

Lastly, in terms of a so-called ‘god on earth’ status, Larry Page has stated the desires to get started on “climate modification”, a dream of military strategists since ancient times. Fostering such a sentiment with Google’s de-facto government-operation status via NASA & DARPA, humanity doesn’t just face whatever typically assumed degrees of ‘computer control’ by the omnipresent and omniscient Machine, the Machine is on the path of geophysical omnipotence. NASA, in recent years, has pursued the perfect program to mesh with this. The goal of the “Intelligent Archives” sounds familiar to everything Google is doing in terms of “understanding” massive amounts of data. They even used the phrases “self-aware” and “cognitive”. The projects webpage now speak in the past tense, and it’s unclear its true status after its parent division became the “Intelligent Systems Division”. In any case, with deep integration with NASA and their Earth sciences, and the military and their hundreds of top secret satellites, and AI all in-between, I’d say Page has found the perfect scenario to pursue this dream.

In closing, lets just say that Google manages to actually understand what the data in its own text data-holdings ‘means’. This could be kept simply between webpages and books. Consider hundreds of thousands of texts related to related to programming languages and software engineering (essentially everything on the subject). By using Google Search we can tell the system is very much in perpetual tune with its own complete data-holdings. One could argue that they’re flirting with “hard-takeoff” AGI emergence on this front alone. And if you spend enough time putting complex worded search strings ‘into’ Google Calculator and Code Search you might help make that a reality.

Imagine what it would mean if the Google co-founders get their wish of Google being directly connected to human minds via neural interface. That might make people reconsider that Google fought for the new wireless Internet spectrum, and are working to bring 3 billion new people the Internet, good things.

*We taught Google’s new advanced speech recognition how to hear.
*Obama’s NBIC (nano-bio-info-cogno convergence) Agenda.
-Obama appoints Google CEO as economic adviser.
-Google Founders’ Fighter Jet Will Fly NASA Missions.
*Google funding Artificial General Intelligence research via Novamente.
Google Adds Searching by Voice to iPhone Software - New York Times

One idea, for example, would be to require the equivalent of drivers’ licenses to permit someone to connect to a public computer network.

I remember on the usenet people would say “we need to have internet licenses to protect us from trolls and spammers”. Well they’re gonna get their wish, but internet licenses won’t do a thing about trolls and spammers. Instead, those internet licenses will be used to put them - the very ones calling for an internet license - in databases and sell their identity to the highest bidder.
This quote from the article surprised me:

“If you’re looking for a digital Pearl Harbor, we now have the Japanese ships streaming toward us on the horizon,” Rick Wesson, the chief executive of Support Intelligence, a computer consulting firm, said recently.

Last year, law professor Lawrence Lessig claimed that the counter-terrorism czar told him there would be a “cyber-9/11″ which would result in a “cyber-PATRIOT Act”. There are people who believe that the U.S. government had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks and intentionally failed to act accordingly (the LIHOP - Let It Happen On Purpose - Theory), and some of the LIHOPers also believe that the U.S. government actually carried out the attacks themselves (the MIHOP - Made It Happen On Purpose - Theory). Could a false-flag attack on the internet be used to force people to have internet licenses in order to use the internet? Could this be the “cyber-9/11″ that Lessig spoke of?

———————————–
Do We Need a New Internet?
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: February 14, 2009
Two decades ago a 23-year-old Cornell University graduate student brought the Internet to its knees with a simple software program that skipped from computer to computer at blinding speed, thoroughly clogging the then-tiny network in the space of a few hours.
The program was intended to be a digital “Kilroy Was Here.” Just a bit of cybernetic fungus that would unobtrusively wander the net. However, a programming error turned it into a harbinger heralding the arrival of a darker cyberspace, more of a mirror for all of the chaos and conflict of the physical world than a utopian refuge from it.
Since then things have gotten much, much worse.
Bad enough that there is a growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over.
What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a “gated community” where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety. Today that is already the case for many corporate and government Internet users. As a new and more secure network becomes widely adopted, the current Internet might end up as the bad neighborhood of cyberspace. You would enter at your own risk and keep an eye over your shoulder while you were there.
“Unless we’re willing to rethink today’s Internet,” says Nick McKeown, a Stanford engineer involved in building a new Internet, “we’re just waiting for a series of public catastrophes.”
That was driven home late last year, when a malicious software program thought to have been unleashed by a criminal gang in Eastern Europe suddenly appeared after easily sidestepping the world’s best cyberdefenses. Known as Conficker, it quickly infected more than 12 million computers, ravaging everything from the computer system at a surgical ward in England to the computer networks of the French military.
Conficker remains a ticking time bomb. It now has the power to lash together those infected computers into a vast supercomputer called a botnet that can be controlled clandestinely by its creators. What comes next remains a puzzle. Conficker could be used as the world’s most powerful spam engine, perhaps to distribute software programs to trick computer users into purchasing fake antivirus protection. Or much worse. It might also be used to shut off entire sections of the Internet. But whatever happens, Conficker has demonstrated that the Internet remains highly vulnerable to a concerted attack.
“If you’re looking for a digital Pearl Harbor, we now have the Japanese ships streaming toward us on the horizon,” Rick Wesson, the chief executive of Support Intelligence, a computer consulting firm, said recently.
The Internet’s original designers never foresaw that the academic and military research network they created would one day bear the burden of carrying all the world’s communications and commerce. There was no one central control point and its designers wanted to make it possible for every network to exchange data with every other network. Little attention was given to security. Since then, there have been immense efforts to bolt on security, to little effect.
“In many respects we are probably worse off than we were 20 years ago,” said Eugene Spafford, the executive director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security at Purdue University and a pioneering Internet security researcher, “because all of the money has been devoted to patching the current problem rather than investing in the redesign of our infrastructure.”
In fact, many computer security researchers view the nearly two decades of efforts to patch the existing network as a Maginot Line approach to defense, a reference to France’s series of fortifications that proved ineffective during World War II. The shortcoming in focusing on such sturdy digital walls is that once they are evaded, the attacker has access to all the protected data behind them. “Hard on the outside, with a soft chewy center,” is the way many veteran computer security researchers think of such strategies.
Despite a thriving global computer security industry that is projected to reach $79 billion in revenues next year, and the fact that in 2002 Microsoft itself began an intense corporatewide effort to improve the security of its software, Internet security has continued to deteriorate globally.
Even the most heavily garrisoned military networks have proved vulnerable. Last November, the United States military command in charge of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars discovered that its computer networks had been purposely infected with software that may have permitted a devastating espionage attack.
That is why the scientists armed with federal research dollars and working in collaboration with the industry are trying to figure out the best way to start over. At Stanford, where the software protocols for original Internet were designed, researchers are creating a system to make it possible to slide a more advanced network quietly underneath today’s Internet. By the end of the summer it will be running on eight campus networks around the country.
The idea is to build a new Internet with improved security and the capabilities to support a new generation of not-yet-invented Internet applications, as well as to do some things the current Internet does poorly — such as supporting mobile users.
The Stanford Clean Slate project won’t by itself solve all the main security issues of the Internet, but it will equip software and hardware designers with a toolkit to make security features a more integral part of the network and ultimately give law enforcement officials more effective ways of tracking criminals through cyberspace. That alone may provide a deterrent.
This is not the first time a replacement has been proposed for the current Internet. For example, modern Windows and Macintosh computers already come equipped to support a new Internet protocol known as IPv6 that would fix many of the shortcomings of the current IPv4 version. However, because of cost, performance and compatibility questions it has languished.
That has not discouraged the Stanford engineers who say they are on a mission to “reinvent the Internet.” They argue that their new strategy is intended to allow new ideas to emerge in an evolutionary fashion, making it possible to move data traffic seamlessly to a new networking world. Like the existing Internet, the new network will almost certainly have no one central point of control and no one organization will run it. It is most likely to emerge as new hardware and software are built in to the router computers that run today’s network and are adopted as Internet standards.
For all those efforts, though, the real limits to computer security may lie in human nature.
The Internet’s current design virtually guarantees anonymity to its users. (As a New Yorker cartoon noted some years ago, “On the Internet, nobody knows that you’re a dog.”) But that anonymity is now the most vexing challenge for law enforcement. An Internet attacker can route a connection through many countries to hide his location, which may be from an account in an Internet cafe purchased with a stolen credit card.
“As soon as you start dealing with the public Internet, the whole notion of trust becomes a quagmire,” said Stefan Savage, an expert on computer security at the University of California, San Diego.
A more secure network is one that would almost certainly offer less anonymity and privacy. That is likely to be the great tradeoff for the designers of the next Internet. One idea, for example, would be to require the equivalent of drivers’ licenses to permit someone to connect to a public computer network. But that runs against the deeply held libertarian ethos of the Internet.
Proving identity is likely to remain remarkably difficult in a world where it is trivial to take over someone’s computer from half a world away and operate it as your own. As long as that remains true, building a completely trustable system will remain virtually impossible.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/weekinreview/15markoff.html?_r=1

The scheme would replace the current system, which sees sewage charges based on a home’s value - not its waste water output.

CSIRO Policy and Economic Research Unit member Jim McColl and Adelaide University Water Management Professor Mike Young plan to promote the move to state and federal politicians and experts across the country.

“It would encourage people to reduce their sewage output by taking shorter showers,recycling washing machine water or connecting rainwater tanks to internal plumbingto reduce their charges,”Professor Young said.

“Some people may go as far as not flushing their toilet as often because the less sewage you produce, the less sewage rate you pay.”

Professor Young said sewer pricing needed to be addressed as part of the response to the water crisis.

Read entire article

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Perth Now
February 13, 2009

Damning research findings could spell the end of VeriChip…

The Associated Press will issue a breaking story this weekend revealing that microchip implants have induced cancer in laboratory animals and dogs, says privacy expert and long-time VeriChip opponent Dr. Katherine Albrecht.

Verichip Cancer

As the AP will report, a series of research articles spanning more than a decade found that mice and rats injected with glass-encapsulated RFID transponders developed malignant, fast-growing, lethal cancers in up to 1% to 10% of cases. The tumors originated in the tissue surrounding the microchips and often grew to completely surround the devices, the researchers said.

Albrecht first became aware of the microchip-cancer link when she and her “Spychips” co-author, Liz McIntyre, were contacted by a pet owner whose dog had died from a chip-induced tumor. Albrecht then found medical studies showing a causal link between microchip implants and cancer in other animals. Before she brought the research to the AP’s attention, the studies had somehow escaped public notice.

A four-month AP investigation turned up additional documents, several of which had been published before VeriChip’s parent company, Applied Digital Solutions, sought FDA approval to market the implant for humans. The VeriChip received FDA approval in 2004 under the watch of then Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson who later joined the
company’s board.

Under FDA policy, it would have been VeriChip’s responsibility to bring the adverse studies to the FDA’s attention, but VeriChip CEO Scott Silverman claims the company was unaware of the research.

Albrecht expressed skepticism that a company like VeriChip, whose primary business is microchip implants, would be unaware of relevant studies in the published literature.

“For Mr. Silverman not to know about this research would be negligent. If he did know about these studies, he certainly had an incentive to keep them quiet,” said Albrecht. “Had the FDA known about the cancer link, they might never have approved his company’s product.”

Since gaining FDA approval, VeriChip has aggressively targeted diabetic and dementia patients, and recently announced that it had chipped 90 Alzheimer’s patients and their caregivers in Florida. Employees in the Mexican Attorney General’s Office, workers in a U.S. security firm, and club-goers in Europe have also been implanted.

Albrecht expressed concern for those who have received a chip implant, urging them to get the devices removed as soon as possible.

“These new revelations change everything,” she said. “Why would anyone take the risk of having a cancer chip in their arm?”

RFID ‘Powder’ - The World’s Smallest RFID Tag…

The world’s smallest and thinnest RFID tags were introduced yesterday by Hitachi. Tiny miracles of miniaturization, these RFID chips (Radio Frequency IDentification chips) measure just 0.05 x 0.05 millimeters.

The previous record-holder, the Hitachi mu-chip, is just 0.4 x 0.4 millimeters. Take a look at the size of the mu-chip RFID tag on a human fingertip. Now, compare that with the new RFID tags. The “powder type” tags are some sixty times smaller.

The new RFID chips have a 128-bit ROM for storing a unique 38 digit number, like their predecessor. Hitachi used semiconductor miniaturization technology and electron beams to write data on the chip substrates to achieve the new, smaller size.

Hitachi’s mu-chips are already in production; they were used to prevent ticket forgery at last year’s Aichi international technology exposition. RFID ‘powder,’ on the other hand, is so much smaller that it can easily be incorporated into thin paper, like that used in paper currency and gift certificates. Science fiction fans will have a field day with this new technology. In his 1998 novel Distraction, Bruce Sterling referred to bugged money:

“They always played poker with European cash. There was American cash around, flimsy plastic stuff, but most people wouldn’t take American cash anymore. It was hard to take American cash seriously when it was no longer convertible outside U.S. borders. Besides, all the bigger bills were bugged. (Read more about bugged money)”

These tiny RFID tags could be worked into any product; combined with RFID readers built into doorways, theft of consumer goods would be practically impossible. These devices could also be used to identify and track people. For example, suppose you participated in some sort of protest or other organized activity. If police agencies sprinkled these tags around, every individual could be tracked and later identified at leisure, with powerful enough tag scanners.

To put it in the context of popular culture, see the picture below, which was taken from the 1996 movie Mission Impossible. One of the IMF operatives places a tracking tag on the shoulder of a computer programmer. Pretty clunky-looking tag…

Take a look at these earlier stories related to RFID, and consider how much easier it will be with tinier chips: RFID Sensor Tag Shower For Disasters (gentle rain of RFID), RFID-Maki: Easy Payment Sushi (just tag the sushi directly, then scan customer’s stomach) and VeriChip Chairman Proposes RFID Chips For Immigrants (just dust the border).

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MEXICO CITY - Security has reached the subcutaneous level for Mexico’s attorney general and at least 160 people in his office — they have been implanted with microchips that get them access to secure areas of their headquarters.

It’s a pioneering application of a technology that is widely used in animals but not in humans.

Mexico’s top federal prosecutors and investigators began receiving chip implants in their arms in November in order to get access to restricted areas inside the attorney general’s headquarters, said Antonio Aceves, general director of Solusat, the company that distributes the microchips in Mexico.

Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha and 160 of his employees were implanted at a cost to taxpayers of $150 for each rice grain-sized chip.

More are scheduled to get “tagged” in coming months, and key members of the Mexican military, the police and the office of President Vicente Fox might follow suit, Aceves said. Fox’s office did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

A spokeswoman for Macedo de la Concha’s office said she could not comment on Aceves’ statements, citing security concerns. But Macedo himself mentioned the chip program to reporters Monday, saying he had received an implant in his arm. He said the chips were required to enter a new federal anti-crime information center.

Chips read by RFID scanners
Aceves said his company eventually hopes to provide Mexican officials with implantable devices that can track their physical location at any given time, but that technology is still under development.

The chips that have been implanted are manufactured by VeriChip Corp., a subsidiary of Applied Digital Solutions Inc. of Palm Beach, Fla.

They lie dormant under the skin until read by an electromagnetic scanner, which uses a technology known as radio frequency identification, or RFID, that’s now getting hot in the inventory and supply chain businesses.

However, while those systems often employ encryption, Applied Digital’s implantable chips do not as yet. Silverman said his company’s system is nevertheless safe because its chips can only be read by the company’s proprietary scanners.

Thousands sold to distributors worldwide

In addition to the chips sold to the Mexican government, more than 1,000 Mexicans have implanted them for medical reasons, Aceves said. Hospital officials can use a scanning device to download a chip’s serial number, which they then use to access a patient’s blood type, name and other information on a computer.

The Food and Drug Administration has yet to approve microchips as medical devices in the United States.

Still, Silverman said that his company has sold 7,000 chips to distributors worldwide and that more than 1,000 of those had likely been inserted into customers, mostly for security or identification reasons.

In 2002, a Florida couple and their teenage son had Applied Digital Solutions chips implanted in their arms. The family hoped to someday be able to automatically relay their medical information to emergency room staffers.

The chip originally was developed to track livestock and wildlife and to let pet owners identify runaway animals. The technology was created by Digital Angel Corp., which was acquired by Applied Digital Solutions in 1999.

Because the Applied Digital chips cannot be easily removed — and are housed in glass capsules designed to break and be unusable if taken out — they could be even more popular someday if they eventually can incorporate locator capabilities. Already, global positioning system chips have become common accouterments on jewelry or clothing in Mexico.

In fact, in March, Mexican authorities broke up a ring of used-car salesmen turned kidnappers who were known as “Los Chips” because they searched their victims to detect whether they were carrying the chips to help them be located.

AP Technology Writer Brian Bergstein in New York contributed to this report.

Read Full Article
By Will Weissert
The Associated Press

BBC News | March 24, 2008

Vehicles driving on roads in planned eco-towns will have to stick to 15mph speed limits, it has emerged.

The restriction is among proposals designed to minimise the environmental impact of the settlements.

Government sources say the new town centres are to be car-free, and the 15mph limit will be enforced on “key roads” leading into them.

Environmental protesters have criticised the scheme for focusing too narrowly on carbon emissions.

‘Revolutionary living’

More than 50 bids to create the zero-carbon developments have been entered by companies.

Housing minister Caroline Flint will set out standards expected of them later this week and the announcement of the shortlist of 10 new towns is expected in the coming weeks.

Ms Flint said: “These developments will be exemplars for the rest of the world, not just the rest of the country. It’s critical that we get it right - and I make no apology for setting the bar as high as possible.

“We have a unique opportunity to deliver a programme which will genuinely revolutionise the way people live.”

Up to five eco-towns are expected to be built by 2016, and up to 10 by 2020.

They will have populations of around 5,000 to 20,000 and be linked to larger towns and cities.

FULL ARTICLETwo children should be limit, says green guru

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