NightLion» Researchers Cripple Pushdo Botnet

Researchers Cripple Pushdo Botnet

NightLion — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 19:56:41 +0000

Researchers Cripple Pushdo Botnet:
“Trailrunner7 writes with this from ThreatPost: ‘Researchers have made a huge dent in the Pushdo botnet, virtually crippling the network, by working with hosting providers to take down about two thirds of the command-and-control servers involved in the botnet. Pushdo for years has been one of the major producers of spam and other malicious activity, and researchers have been monitoring the botnet and looking for ways to do some damage to it since at least 2007. Now, researchers at Last Line of Defense, a security intelligence firm, have made some serious progress in crushing the botnets spam operations. After doing an analysis of Pushdos command-and-control infrastructure, the researchers identified about 30 servers that were serving as C&C machines for the botnet. Working with the hosting providers who maintained the servers in question, the LLOD researchers were able to get 20 of the C&C servers taken offline, the company said.’

(Via Slashdot.)

Drugs encased in nanoparticles travel to tumors on the surface of immune-system cells

NightLion — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 23:41:31 +0000

Drugs encased in nanoparticles travel to tumors on the surface of immune-system cells
(Nanowerk News) Clinical trials using patients’ own immune cells to target tumors have yielded promising results. However, this approach usually works only if the patients also receive large doses of drugs designed to help immune cells multiply rapidly, and those drugs have life-threatening side effects.

Now a team of MIT engineers has devised a way to deliver the necessary drugs by smuggling them on the backs of the cells sent in to fight the tumor. That way, the drugs reach only their intended targets, greatly reducing the risk to the patient.

MIT engineers have developed a way to attach drug-carrying pouches (yellow) to the surfaces of cells.

The new approach could dramatically improve the success rate of immune-cell therapies, which hold promise for treating many types of cancer, says Darrell Irvine, senior author of a paper describing the technique in the Aug. 15 issue of Nature Medicine (“Therapeutic cell engineering with surface-conjugated synthetic nanoparticles”).

ATM Hack Gives Cash On Demand

NightLion — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:47:58 +0000

Via: ATM Hack Gives Cash On Demand

Barnaby Jack hit the jackpot at Black Hat on Wednesday. Twice.

Exploiting bugs in two different ATM machines, the researcher from IOActive was able to get them to spit out money on demand and record sensitive data from the cards of people who used them.

He showed the attacks on two systems he had purchased himself — the type of generic ATM machines typically found in bars and convenience stores. Criminals have been hitting this type of machine for years, using ATM skimmers to record card data and PIN numbers, or in some cases simply pulling up a truck and hauling the machines away.

Patches have already been developed the systems, built by ATM-makers Triton and and Tranax, Jack said. Triton patched the issue in November 2009, said Bob Douglas, Triton’s vice president of engineering.

Douglas showed up at Black Hat to attend the talk and a subsequent press conference. Tranax could not immediately be reached for comment.

Tranax has had security problems before. In 2006, CNN reported that a Virginia Beach, Virginia, criminal used a keypad code to reprogram a Tranax machine into thinking it was dispensing $5 bills. Then, using an anonymous prepaid debit card, he withdrew $20 bills, but was only debited for one-quarter of the money he took. A manual showing how to do this, wasreportedly available on the web.

But according to Jack there’s an easier, much more alarming way to get the money out. Criminals can connect to the machines by dialing them up — Jack believes a large number of them have remote management tools that can be accessed over a telephone — and then launching an attack.

After experimenting with his own machines, Jack developed a way of bypassing the remote authentication system and installing a homemade rootkit, named Scrooge, that lets him override the machine’s firmware. He also developed an online management tool, called Dillinger, that can keep track of compromised machines and store data stolen from people who use them.

Criminals could find vulnerable ATMs by using open-source “war-dialling” software to call hundreds of thousands of numbers, looking for those that respond by saying they have the vulnerable management software installed. Criminals have already used a similar technique over the Internet to break into vulnerable point-of-sale systems.

Jack’s tools are just proof-of-concept software, designed to show how vulnerable the machines really are, he said. “The goal of the talk is to spark discussion on the best ways to remediate,” he said.

“It’s time to give these devices an overhaul,” Jack said. “Companies who manufacture the devices aren’t Microsoft. They haven’t had 10 years of continual attacks against them.”

The machines Jack hacked were, however, based on Microsoft’s Windows CE operating system.

In an dramatic on-stage demonstration at Black Hat, he connected remotely to an ATM and ran a program called Jackpot that caused the ATMs to spit out cash, while playing a tune and splashing the word “Jackpot” across the screen of the machine.

In a second demo, he walked up to the machine, opened it with a key he had obtained on the Internet, and installed his own firmware. A single, standard key can open many different types of machines, he said, presenting another serious security problem.

He demonstrated the remote attack on an unpatched Tranax system; the hands-on attack was on an older Triton machine, he said.

Jack had planned to deliver the talk at last year’s conference, but it was pulled after ATM vendors asked for more time to patch the issues he’d discovered.

He got the green light for the talk after leaving his former employer, Juniper Networks, and taking a job with IOActive, a company that sells — among other things – ATM security consulting services.

The security researcher seems to have had a good time researching ATM bugs. When a delivery man showed up, asking him why on earth he’d want a machine delivered to his home, Jack quipped, “Oh I just don’t’ like the transaction fees, mate.”

Robert McMillan covers computer security and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Robert on Twitter at@bobmcmillan. Robert’s e-mail address is robert_mcmillan@idg.com

(Via Slashdot.)

Android App Sends Personal Data to China

NightLion — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:29:44 +0000

Is your voice mail password now the property of some Chinese hacker? Millions of Android users who downloaded an innocuous wallpaper app from Google’s Android Market may be nodding their heads ‘yes.’ Turns out, that wallpaper app was sending voice mail passwords and many other bits of personal data to someone in Shenzhen, China, according [...]

The exploit was downloaded “anywhere from 1.1 million to 4.6 million times,” reports Dean Takahashi of VentureBeat. The application grabs your browsing history, text messages, phone’s SIM card number and subscriber ID and sends it all to the www.imnet.us website, according to the report.

The data theft was first discovered by mobile security firm Lookout and announced at the Black Hat conference of security experts in Las Vegas. Unlike the recent security hole found in the AT&T website that could have allowed hackers access to 144 thousand iPad owner email addresses, the Android exploit was more extensive, involved more serious data theft and most importantly – it wasn’t a hypothetical threat.

Nearly half (43 percent) of the apps offered by Android Marketplace include third-party instructions, compared to 23 percent of iPhone apps, Lookout said. Another difference between the two app sources: iOS applications require Apple approval before appearing in the App Store. By comparison, Google’s Market only warns users during the installation process.

Additionally, applications distributed through the App Store carry digital certificates from Apple, reducing the likelihood malicious hackers could anonymously distribute data-stealing code.

(Via Cult of Mac. Android App Sends Personal Data to China)

RNA-Loaded Nanoparticles Fight Cancer

NightLion — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 00:40:42 +0000

RNA-Loaded Nanoparticles Fight Cancer: “DirkDaring writes ‘It’s been promised for years: that nanoparticles offer a treatment to many forms of cancer. Today, an important first step has been announced. In a new human trial, nanoparticles carrying RNA have successfully reached cancer cells and silenced the target gene. ‘The researchers developed a nanoparticle carrying a molecular marker that binds to the surface of cancer cells, triggering the cells to absorb it. The siRNA carried within the particle was designed to silence a gene called ribonucleotide reductase M2 (RRM2), which regulates DNA synthesis and repair and is known to be an anticancer target. Because it was the first trial using targeted RNAi delivery for cancer, says Mark Davis, a professor of chemical engineering at Caltech and the study’s lead author, ‘we wanted to choose a gene that was suspected to be hugely upregulated in a broad spectrum of cancers’ in order to increase the likelihood of being able to observe the novel therapy’s effect. The researchers analyzed biopsy samples from three melanoma patients in the trial who had received different doses of the therapy. They tracked the particles in the different samples, finding that the amounts they could see in the tumor cells correlated with the doses the patients received.”

Apple Raids Home for Missing iPhone 4G

NightLion — Thu, 27 May 2010 16:12:15 +0000

Keith Olbermann from MSNBC on police raid:

Read the related articles:

Police Seize Jason Chen’s Computers

The investigation into that missing iPhone

http://gizmodo.com/5525388/the-investigation-into-that-missing-iphone-[updated]

Potential for new nanoparticle-based cancer detection

NightLion — Sat, 22 May 2010 19:50:53 +0000

(Nanowerk News) Recent studies support the idea that the standard methods of screening men for prostate cancer leave much to be desired, particularly in terms of their inability to have much effect on prostate cancer survival. Now, a team of investigators at the University of Missouri School of Medicine have created a targeted gold nanoparticle that appears to offer a more sensitive and accurate method for detecting early stage prostate cancer. These nanoparticles may also be useful for detecting lung and breast cancers, too.

The investigators, led by Raghuraman Kannan and Kattesh Katti, published the results of their studies in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (“Bombesin functionalized gold nanoparticles show in vitro and in vivo cancer receptor specificity”). Dr. Katti is the principal investigator of a National Cancer Institute Cancer Nanotechnology Platform Partnership.

Drs. Kannan and Katti and their colleagues created their potential imaging agent by coating gold nanoparticles with bombesin, also known as Gastrin Release Peptide (GRP), a naturally occurring molecule that binds to a specific receptor that is abundant on prostate, breast, and small cell lung cancer cells. To do so, they had to develop new synthetic methods for linking this peptide, as well as other related peptides, to the gold nanoparticles.

With the nanoparticles in hand, the research team used them to image prostate tumors growing in mice. These experiments demonstrated that the nanoparticles were very specific at binding to prostate tumors and that this binding enabled the tumors to be spotted easily using computed tomography x-ray imaging. Moreover, tumors took up approximately 10 times more of the targeted nanoparticles than bombesin linked directly to the radioactive element technetium, a construct now in clinical trials as an imaging agent. These experiments also showed that injecting the nanoparticles into the peritoneal cavity produced better results than when the nanoparticles were injected directly into the blood stream, in large part because fewer nanoparticles became trapped in the liver and spleen.

Source: National Cancer Institute

Self-assembling gold nanoparticles use light to kill tumor cells

NightLion — Sat, 22 May 2010 19:43:24 +0000

Self-assembling gold nanoparticles use light to kill tumor cells

(Nanowerk News) A variety of studies by numerous investigators are demonstrating that gold nanoparticles have real promise as anticancer agents. When irradiated with light, gold nanoparticles become hot quickly, hot enough to generate explosive microbubbles that will kill nearby cancer cells, a physical process known as the photothermal effect. To boost this approach, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, have developed a method for creating supramolecular assemblies of gold nanoparticles that function as highly efficient photothermal agents of a size designed to optimize their delivery to tumors.

Hsien-Rong Tseng and his colleagues reported their work in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition (“Photothermal Effects of Supramolecularly Assembled Gold Nanoparticles for the Targeted Treatment of Cancer Cells”). Dr. Tseng is a member of the Nanosystems Biology Cancer Center, a National Cancer Institute Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence.

To create their self-assembling supramolecular gold nanoparticles, the researchers took advantage of a pair of molecules, cyclodextrin and adamantine, that bind very tightly to each other. They first took gold nanoparticles, 2 nanometers in diameter, and decorated the nanoparticles’ surface with adamantane.They then added two other constructs: cyclodextrin attached to a biocompatible polymer known as polyethyleneimine, and adamantane linked to polyethylene glycol, another biocompatible polymer. When combined in various ratios, these three constructs quickly assemble into nanoparticles with well defined sizes ranging from 40 to 118 nanometers in diameter. Once the complexes were purified, the researchers then attached a tumor targeting molecule to the surface of the resulting supramolecular complexes.

Read the Full Article: National Cancer Institute

Record-Breaking Galaxy Cluster Found

NightLion — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:30:06 +0000

Record-Breaking Galaxy Cluster Found: “The Bad Astronomer writes ‘Astronomers are reporting that they have detected the most distant cluster of galaxies ever seen: a mind-smashing 9.6 billion light years away, 400 million light years more distant than the previous record holder. The cluster, handily named SXDF-XCLJ0218-0510, was seen in infrared images by the giant Subaru telescope, and confirmed with spectroscopy and the X-ray detection of million-degree gas (a smoking gun of clusters). Every time astronomers push back the record for clusters, they learn more about the early conditions of the universe, so this cluster will provide insight into how the universe itself changed over the first few billion years after the Big Bang.’

Read the full article here

(Via Slashdot.)

DNA could be backbone of next generation logic chips

NightLion — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:28:08 +0000

DNA could be backbone of next generation logic chips: “In a single day, a solitary grad student at a lab bench can produce more simple logic circuits than the world’s entire output of silicon chips in a month. So says a Duke University engineer, who believes that the next generation of these logic circuits at the heart of computers will be produced inexpensively in almost limitless quantities.”

(Via Nanowerk Nanotechnology News.)

Nanotechnology sensor detects type 1 diabetes in breath

NightLion — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:27:17 +0000

Nanotechnology sensor detects type 1 diabetes in breath: “ETH-Zurich researchers have developed a new kind of sensor that can immediately gauge whether a person is suffering from type 1 diabetes upon coming into contact with their breath.”

(Via Nanowerk Nanotechnology News.)

Google Chrome Speed Test Video

NightLion — Fri, 07 May 2010 14:36:54 +0000

New Google Chrome Mac Beta adds Extensions

The Birth of a Supernova

NightLion — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:01:51 +0000

For the last 20 years, astronomers seeking to measure the cosmos have used a special type of exploding star, known as Type 1a supernovas, as distance markers. They are thought to result when stars known as white dwarfs grow beyond a certain weight limit, setting off a thermonuclear cataclysm that is not only bright enough to be seen across the universe but is also remarkably uniform from one supernova to the next. Using them, two teams of astronomers a little more than a decade ago reached the startling and now widely held conclusion that some “dark energy” was speeding up the expansion of the universe.

But astronomers, to their embarrassment, have not been able to agree on how the white dwarf gains its fatal weight and explodes, whether by slowly grabbing material from a neighboring star or by crashing into another white dwarf.

Read the full article, ‘Tracing the Origin of Supernovas to a Clash of White Dwarfs‘

New Google Chrome Mac Beta adds Extensions

NightLion — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 20:35:25 +0000

Google has now announced that after some testing of this new browser beta version, they are ready for a more widespread release. In addition to extensions, the new beta will also support bookmark synchronization. Currently, Chrome users will have access to some 2,200 different extensions that are available through the extensions gallery.

These extensions can add to the browsing experience by adding new features that can be just plain old fun or supplement your surfing with additional information. The availability of 2,200 Chrome extensions is a good start, but Google does have a ways to go compared to the more established and mature browser Firefox which boasts some 161,000,000 different extensions. In addition to the new extensions, the latest beta release will also include bookmark synchronization. To enable this feature, you will need to have a Google account into which you are actively logged into. With this feature, users will be able to access all of their bookmarks and saved favorites regardless of which machine they use. Bookmark synchronization is supported on Chrome for Linux, Mac and Windows.

“For this release, we remained focused on providing a snappy, safe, and simple browsing experience on the Mac. If you haven’t tried Chrome on the Mac yet and are curious about its features, this video will take you on a brief tour:”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Posted from the Google Chrome Blog

Auto hide tab-bar in Mozilla Thunderbird 3

NightLion — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 06:12:44 +0000

Having tabs in Mozilla’s Thunderbird 3 email client is a nice feature, but for the most part I hardly ever use them. I’ve find that they are bulky and take up a lot of space. Here’s a quick way to disable them:

Open Thunderbird’s Preferences window (Tools -> Options on Windows, Edit -> Preferences on Linux and Thunderbird -> Preferences on Mac)
Click on “Advanced”
Click on the “Config Editor” button (which is under the “General” tab)
Search for “mail.tabs.autoHide”
Double-click on the setting so that it becomes “true” (and the font changes to bold)

Enjoy.

Nanoscale: Robot Arm Places Atoms and Molecules With 100% Accuracy

NightLion — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:57:02 +0000

In a 2009 article in Nature Nanotechnology, Dr. Seeman shared the results of experiments performed by his lab, along with collaborators at Nanjing University in China, in which scientists built a two-armed nanorobotic device with the ability to place specific atoms and molecules where scientists want them. The device was approximately 150 x 50 x 8 nanometers in size — over a million could fit in a single red blood cell. Using robust error-correction mechanisms, the device can place DNA molecules with 100% accuracy. Earlier trials had yielded only 60-80% accuracy.

The nanorobotic arm is built out of DNA origami: large strands of DNA gently encouraged to fold in precise ways by interaction with a few hundred short DNA strands. The products, around 100 nanometers in diameter, are eight times larger and three times more complex than what could be built with a simple crystalline DNA array, vastly expanding the space of possible structures. Other nanoscale structures or machines built by Dr. Seeman and his collaborators including a nanoscale walking biped, truncated DNA octahedrons, and sequence-dependent molecular switch arrays. Dr. Seeman has exploited structural features of DNA thought to be used in genetic recombination to operate his nanoscale devices, tapping into the very processes underlying all life.

The advances in DNA nanotechnology keep coming, and many observers are wondering if this will be the path that leads us to the next Industrial Revolution. Only time — and many more experiments — will tell.

Schematics (a) and Atomic Force Micrographs (b) of the Origami Arrays and Capture Molecules. Panel i of (a) illustrates the origami array containing slots for the cassettes and a notch to enable recognition of orientation; the slots and notches are visible in the AFM in (b). Panels ii show the cassettes in place; the color coding in (a) used throughout the schematics is green for the PX state and violet for the JX2 state; the presence of the cassettes is evident in the AFM image in (b). Panels iii illustrate the PX-PX state which captures a triangle pointing towards the notch in the schematic (a) and in the AFM image (b). Panels iv illustrate the PX-JX2 state (a), containing a triangle that points away from the notch, which is evident in the AFM image (b). Panels v illustrate the JX2- PX state which captures a diamond-shaped molecule (a); its shape is visible in the AFM image (b). Panels vi show the linear molecule captured by the JX2-JX2 state, both schematically (a) and in the AFM image (b).

via Nanoscale: Robot Arm Places Atoms and Molecules With 100% Accuracy | h+ Magazine.

Robot shows how to Solve Rubicks Cube

Machine Translates Thoughts Into Speech

NightLion — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 22:21:03 +0000

A brain wave study presented at the 2009 annual meeting of the American Epilepsy Society shows that people with electrodes in their brains can “type” (input data into a computer) using just their minds. Neurologist Jerry Shih, M.D. Shih and other Mayo Clinic researchers worked with Dean Krusienski, Ph.D., from the University of North Florida in an experiment involving two patients with epilepsy. Both patients were already being monitored for seizure activity using electrocorticography (ECoG), in which a sheet of electrodes is laid directly on the surface of the brain. This procedure requires a craniotomy, a surgical incision into the skull. Dr. Shih and colleagues hypothesized that feedback from electrodes placed directly on the brain would be much more specific than data collected with EEG (electroencephalography) alone, in which electrodes are placed on the scalp. Most studies of mind-machine interaction have occurred with EEG. “There is a big difference in the quality of information you get from ECoG compared to EEG. The scalp and bony skull diffuses and distorts the signal, rather like how the Earth’s atmosphere blurs the light from stars,” says Dr. Shih. “That’s why progress to date on developing these kinds of mind interfaces has been slow.”

Dr. Shih’s patients at the Mayo Clinic were asked to look at a computer screen containing a 6-by-6 matrix with a single alphanumeric character inside each square. Every time the square with a certain letter flashed, the patient focused on it and a computer application recorded the brain’s response to the flashing letter. The computer software calibrated the system with the individual patient’s specific brain wave patterns. When the patient then focused on a letter, the letter appeared on the screen. “We were able to consistently predict the desired letters for our patients at or near 100 percent accuracy,” Shih explains. “While this is comparable to other researchers’ results with EEGs, this approach is more localized and can potentially provide a faster communication rate.”

In addition to the ability to “mind read” vowels, consonants, and individual letters, brain wave applications also include algorithms to turn brain waves into music and even “tweeting” (using the popular Twitter Internet application) by thought alone. Brain music therapy is a form of neurofeedback using EEG based on a variable ratio of fast and slow rhythms –- it can be used to turn a person’s brain waves into music notes using a computerized mathematical formula. Dr. Galina Mindlin, a neuropsychiatrist with the Brain Music Therapy Center in New York City brought this to the U.S. from Moscow in 2006 as a form of entrainment therapy. Interviewed on NBC’s Today Show, she said, “Brain waves are translated into music digitally with a special algorithm. Once the brain waves are converted into musical sounds, they are placed on a CD with a relaxing file and activating file and instructions on how to use them.” What does this mind-machine interface sound like? “It sounds like classical piano music,” says Dr. Mindlin. Here’s a video showing the use of an EEG mind-machine interface to control sampled sound clips on a piano:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Article From: By Thought Alone: Mind Over Keyboard via H+ Magazine

The Known Universe, Scientifically Rendered for All to See

NightLion — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 16:10:11 +0000

The Known Universe, a new film produced by the American Museum of Natural History that is part of a new exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The magic of this film, though, happens as the inky black expands.

Pulling farther and farther from Earth, you see the deep blue of the Pacific give way to night as the Sun comes into focus, the orbits of the solar system shrink smaller and smaller, the constellations Sagittarius and Scorpio stretch and distort, and, as the Milky Way receeds, the spidery structure of millions of other galaxies come into view. Then, you reach the limit of the observable universe, the afterglow of the Big Bang. This light has taken more than 13.7 billion years to reach our planet, and you return, back to Earth, to two lakes that are nestled between Mount Kailash and Mount Gurla Mandhata in the Himalayas.

The structure of The Known Universe is based on precise, scientifically-accurate observations and research.

The Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History maintains the Digital Universe Atlas, the world’s most complete four-dimensional map of the universe. The Digital Universe started nearly a decade ago. It is continually updated and is the primary resource for production of the Museum’s Space Shows such as the current Journey to the Stars, and is used in live, real-time renderings for Virtual Tours of the Universe, a public program held on the first Tuesday of every month. Last year, some 30,000 people downloaded the Digital Universe to their personal computers, and the Digital Universe will soon be updated with a more accurate and user-friendly software interface. Digital Universe is licensed to many other planetariums and theaters world-wide.

“I liken the Digital Universe to the invention of the globe,” says Curator Ben R. Oppenheimer, an astrophysicist at the Museum. “When Mercator invented the globe, everyone wanted one. He had back orders for years. It gave everyone a new perspective on where they live in relation to others, and we hope that the Digital Universe does the same on a grander, cosmic scale.”

The new film was produced by Michael Hoffman, and directed by Carter Emmart. Brian Abbot manages and Ben R. Oppenheimer curates the Digital Universe Atlas. The exhibition at the Rubin, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, opened on December 11 and continues through May 10.

Reposted from “The Known Universe Scientifically Rendered For All to See“, American Museum of Natural History.

Robot shows how to Solve Rubicks Cube

NightLion — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 19:02:23 +0000

Deemed ‘the cubinator’, a robot with a series of camera can see and work through a Rubicks Cube Puzzle. It seems as though we are well on our way to Artificial Intelligence.
Watch the video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Splitting Time from Space—New Quantum Theory Topples Einstein’s Spacetime

NightLion — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 17:47:26 +0000

Was Newton right and Einstein wrong? It seems that unzipping the fabric of spacetime and harking back to 19th-century notions of time could lead to a theory of quantum gravity.

Physicists have struggled to marry quantum mechanics with gravity for decades. In contrast, the other forces of nature have obediently fallen into line.

For instance, the electromagnetic force can be described quantum-mechanically by the motion of photons. Try and work out the gravitational force between two objects in terms of a quantum graviton, however, and you quickly run into trouble—the answer to every calculation is infinity. But now Petr HoYava, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, thinks he understands the problem. It’s all, he says, a matter of time.

More specifically, the problem is the way that time is tied up with space in Einstein’s theory of gravity: general relativity. Einstein famously overturned the Newtonian notion that time is absolute—steadily ticking away in the background. Instead he argued that time is another dimension, woven together with space to form a malleable fabric that is distorted by matter. The snag is that in quantum mechanics, time retains its Newtonian aloofness, providing the stage against which matter dances but never being affected by its presence. These two conceptions of time don’t gel.

The solution, HoYava says, is to snip threads that bind time to space at very high energies, such as those found in the early universe where quantum gravity rules. “I’m going back to Newton’s idea that time and space are not equivalent,” HoYava says. At low energies, general relativity emerges from this underlying framework, and the fabric of spacetime restitches, he explains.

HoYava likens this emergence to the way some exotic substances change phase. For instance, at low temperatures liquid helium’s properties change dramatically, becoming a “superfluid” that can overcome friction. In fact, he has co-opted the mathematics of exotic phase transitions to build his theory of gravity. So far it seems to be working: the infinities that plague other theories of quantum gravity have been tamed, and the theory spits out a well-behaved graviton. It also seems to match with computer simulations of quantum gravity.

HoYava’s theory has been generating excitement since he proposed it in January, and physicists met to discuss it at a meeting in November at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. In particular, physicists have been checking if the model correctly describes the universe we see today. General relativity scored a knockout blow when Einstein predicted the motion of Mercury with greater accuracy than Newton’s theory of gravity could.

Can HoYYava gravity claim the same success? The first tentative answers coming in say “yes.” Francisco Lobo, now at the University of Lisbon, and his colleagues have found a good match with the movement of planets.

Others have made even bolder claims for HoYava gravity, especially when it comes to explaining cosmic conundrums such as the singularity of the big bang, where the laws of physics break down.

If HoYava gravity is true, argues cosmologist Robert Brandenberger of McGill University in a paper published in the August Physical Review D, then the universe didn’t bang—it bounced. “A universe filled with matter will contract down to a small—but finite—size and then bounce out again, giving us the expanding cosmos we see today,” he says. Brandenberger’s calculations show that ripples produced by the bounce match those already detected by satellites measuring the cosmic microwave background, and he is now looking for signatures that could distinguish the bounce from the big bang scenario.

HoYava gravity may also create the “illusion of dark matter,” says cosmologist Shinji Mukohyama of Tokyo University.

In the September Physical Review D, he explains that in certain circumstances HoYava’s graviton fluctuates as it interacts with normal matter, making gravity pull a bit more strongly than expected in general relativity. The effect could make galaxies appear to contain more matter than can be seen. If that’s not enough, cosmologist Mu-In Park of Chonbuk National University in South Korea believes that HoYava gravity may also be behind the accelerated expansion of the universe, currently attributed to a mysterious dark energy. One of the leading explanations for its origin is that empty space contains some intrinsic energy that pushes the universe outward. This intrinsic energy cannot be accounted for by general relativity but pops naturally out of the equations of HoYava gravity, according to Park.

HoYava’s theory, however, is far from perfect. Diego Blas, a quantum gravity researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne has found a “hidden sickness” in the theory when double-checking calculations for the solar system. Most physicists examined ideal cases, assuming, for instance, that Earth and the sun are spheres, Blas explains: “We checked the more realistic case, where the sun is almost a sphere, but not quite.” General relativity pretty much gives the same answer in both the scenarios. But in HoYava gravity, the realistic case gives a wildly different result.

HoYava welcomes the modifications. “When I proposed this, I didn’t claim I had the final theory,” he says. “I want other people to examine it and improve it.”

Gia Dvali, a quantum gravity expert at CERN, remains cautious. A few years ago he tried a similar trick, breaking apart space and time in an attempt to explain dark energy. But he abandoned his model because it allowed information to be communicated faster than the speed of light.

“My intuition is that any such models will have unwanted side effects,” Dvali thinks. “But if they find a version that doesn’t, then that theory must be taken very seriously.”

Article Re-posted from Scientific American: Splitting Time from Space, by Zeeya Merali

The Known Universe, Scientifically Rendered for All to See

Custom Fonts on your website: Fast, Free and Cross Browser compatible, with TTFGen

NightLion — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 19:52:47 +0000

Definitely worth checking out, TTFGen provides a great way to embed custom TTF (true type) fonts on your website. The TTFGen script uses a PHP image renderer and your TTF giles to generate the image. The generated image takes parameters from your CSS file, and even includes support for rollover images.

It’s Fast Because it Displays Rendered Images, not Flash Objects

I used SiFR for a long time and the reason I didn’t stick with it was because of the amount of system resources and load time associated with the flash objects.

Fully SEO Complaint

Because it replaces text found within HTML tags, it is fully SEO compliant.

Tight CSS Integration

All of the parameters that generate the image are modeled after the standard CSS font parameters. So any styling that you do in your CSS will be reflected in your image.

WordPress Integration

For the not so technical, the is also a WordPress version. I’ve been using TTFGen on this website for a while and I recently switched to the WordPress version because it’s easier to manage.

Font Caching

Going back to my SiFR argument, once the image is generated, it is stored in a font cache folder on your webserver.

Benefits of the TTFGen WordPress Plugin Interface

Ability to Upload and Manage Fonts via a web interface
Ability to define and manage CSS associations without knowledge of jQuery
Make changes on the fly
Easily specify the replacement of div IDs, classes or full elements
Ability to easily whether or not the text is a link, and your desired rollover color

Where to get it?

TTFGen is a free download, available at www.ttfgen.com

IBM Takes a (Feline) Step Toward Thinking Machines

NightLion — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 17:52:06 +0000

“A computer with the power of a human brain is not yet near. But this week researchers from IBM Corp. are reporting that they’ve simulated a cat’s cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, using a massive supercomputer. The computer has 147,456 processors (most modern PCs have just one or two processors) and 144 terabytes of main memory — 100,000 times as much as your computer has.”

Scientists say they’ve made a breakthrough in their pursuit of computers that “think” like a living thing’s brain — an effort that tests the limits of technology.

Even the world’s most powerful supercomputers can’t replicate basic aspects of the human mind. The machines can’t imagine a wall painted a different color, for instance, or picture a person’s face and connect that to an emotion.

If researchers can make computers operate more like a brain thinks — by reasoning and dealing with abstractions, among other things — they could unleash tremendous insights in such diverse fields as medicine and economics.

A computer with the power of a human brain is not yet near. But this week researchers from IBM Corp. are reporting that they’ve simulated a cat’s cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, using a massive supercomputer. The computer has 147,456 processors (most modern PCs have just one or two processors) and 144 terabytes of main memory — 100,000 times as much as your computer has.

“A truly unprecedented scale of simulation.”

Dharmendra Modha, manager of cognitive computing for IBM Research and senior author of the paper, called it a “truly unprecedented scale of simulation.” Researchers at Stanford University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory were also part of the project.

Modha says the research could lead to computers that rely less on “structured” data, such the input 2 plus 2 equals 4, and can handle ambiguity better, like identifying the corporate logo even if the image is blurry. Or such computers could incorporate senses like sight, touch and hearing into the decisions they make.

“We’ve made tremendous advances in collecting data, but we don’t have a collective theory yet for how this complex organ called the brain produces things like Shakespeare’s sonnets and Mozart’s symphonies,” he said. “The holy grail for neuroscientists is to map activity from single nerve cells, which they know about, into how billions of nerve cells act in concert.”

Modha says a simulation of a human cortex could come within the next decade if Moore’s Law holds. That’s the rule of thumb that the number of transistors on a computer chip tends to double every two years.

Yet Olds cautioned that simulating the human brain is “such a complex problem that we may not be able to get to an answer, even with supercomputing.”

“There are no guarantees in this game because the sheer complexity of the problem really dwarfs anything we’ve tried to do,” he said.

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IBM takes a (feline) step toward thinking machines By JORDAN ROBERTSON, AP Technology Writer – Wed Nov 18, 2009 12:02AM EST

Mind Over Matter: Neural Decoding – The Control of the Movement of Objects Using Thought

NightLion — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 12:00:16 +0000

In light of a recent announcement at the 2009 Society for Neuroscience conference in Chicago, “mind reading” has taken another scientific leap forward. Researchers are now able to determine what vowel and consonants a person is thinking of by recording activity from the surface of the brain. Jack Gallant, and colleague Shinji Nishimoto, leading “neural decoders” at the University of California, Berkeley, have produced some of the field’s most impressive results yet.

They showed that they could create a crude reproduction of a movie clip that someone was watching just by viewing their brain activity.

Other neuroscientists claim that such neural decoding can be used to read memories and future plans and even to diagnose eating disorders. These developments are raising concerns about the potential exploitation of “mind reading” technologies by advertisers or oppressive governments. So it’s understandable that researchers are wary of having their work referred to as mind reading. Emphasizing its limitations, they call it neural decoding.

Toyota is developing an advanced brain-sensing system that controls the movement of a wheelchair by reading a user’s thoughts alone.

By detecting and processing brain wave patterns, the system can “propel a wheelchair forward, as well as make turns, with virtually no discernible delay between thought and movement,” according to a recent press release. Rival automaker Honda’s Asimo robot can also be manipulated by detecting brain signals. Honda is exploring the concept that humanoid robots may one day replace home care nurses:

Click here to view the embedded video.

What was once speculative fiction — the ability to read minds and to control the movement of objects using thought alone, sometimes called mind-over-matter –- is rapidly becoming neurotechnological fact.

The upside of this technology will more freedom for the physically impaired –- imagine wheelchair-bound physicist Stephen Hawking able to control his wheelchair and capture and communicate his thoughts and sentences with a neuroheadset. The obvious downside is the potential dystopian nightmare of “thought police” strapping you to a chair to view the contents of your mind and gain a confession.

Article Reposted from H+ Magazine “Mind Reading (Neural Decoding) Goes Mainstream“.

Subversion SVN, OSX and Finder Integration: SmartSVN (Finally, a Tortoise equivalent)

NightLion — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:13:29 +0000

I’ve spent the last few months looking for a suitable subversion client that integrates with the Mac OSX finder. Mainly, I have been looking the closest equivalent to Tortoise SVN for OSX. Scplugin is a good choice, but it is very limited in featured and does not work with Snow Leopard.

SmartSVN Plugin is definitely worth checking out. Click here.

SmartSVN Finder Integration

P12 Private SSL Certificate Support

My biggest grief with SCPlugin (and pretty much every other SVN client for OSX) is it’s lack of support for P12 open client certificate files for SSH connections. As you may have already guessed, SmartSVN supports P12 files.

OSX Dock Notifications

Definitely an added bonus, the OSX dock notifications are very cool.

Worth Every Penny

No, SmartSVN is not open source. But $39 isn’t a lot to pay for a product so incredibly useful. There is also a 31 day demo available at http://www.syntevo.com/smartsvn/index.html

Experimenter Breeds Swarm Intelligence – Robots ‘Evolve’ the Ability to Deceive

NightLion — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:44:36 +0000

Researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland have found that robots equipped with artificial neural networks and programmed to find “food” eventually learned to conceal their visual signals from other robots to keep the food for themselves. The results are detailed in an upcoming PNAS study.
The team programmed small, wheeled robots with the goal of finding food: each robot received more points the longer it stayed close to “food” (signified by a light colored ring on the floor) and lost points when it was close to “poison” (a dark-colored ring). Each robot could also flash a blue light that other robots could detect with their cameras.

“Over the first few generations, robots quickly evolved to successfully locate the food, while emitting light randomly. This resulted in a high intensity of light near food, which provided social information allowing other robots to more rapidly find the food,” write the authors.

The team “evolved” new generations of robots by copying and combining the artificial neural networks of the most successful robots. The scientists also added a few random changes to their code to mimic biological mutations.

Because space is limited around the food, the bots bumped and jostled each other after spotting the blue light.

By the 50th generation, some eventually learned to not flash their blue light as much when they were near the food so as to not draw the attention of other robots.

After a few hundred generations, the majority of the robots never flashed light when they were near the food. The robots also evolved to become either highly attracted to, slightly attracted to, or repelled by the light. “Because robots were competing for food, they were quickly selected to conceal this information,” the authors add.

The researchers suggest that the study may help scientists better understand the evolution of biological communication systems.

(Article via: Technology Review.)

CuteFTP to FileZilla Site Manager TXT to XML Converter

NightLion — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:09:04 +0000

I’ve recently decided to switch from CuteFTP to FileZilla and I needed a way to import the huge amount of sites that I had saved in my site manager. There were a few resources out there, but none that imported the full site information (including site name and comments).

This php script will take an exported CuteFTP TXT file and convert it into an XML file which can be imported by FileZilla.

Instructions & Download

Export your CuteFTP sites to TEXT format.
Replace the $inputFIle variable below with the correct exported file name
Since CuteFTP does not export passwords, you may use your comments field as the password. If so, change the $commentsAsPass variable to true. If left as false, no password will be imported.
Run the PHP file (make sure your exported CuteFTP sites file is in the same folder).
Import the newly created XML file into FileZilla.
Enjoy!

Click here to download the CuteFTP to FileZilla PHP Converter

Connect to OSX shared folders from Vista using Samba

NightLion — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:24:07 +0000

After my recent switch to OSX, I have been having some issues getting Vista to access shared folders with OSX. Specifically, authentication to the OSX machine from Vista across the network would not work. As it turns out, the default Windows Vista is set to use only NTLMv2 authentication, which Samba (OSX’s authentication handler) does not work with.

Solution with Vista Ultimate

To solve the problem run secpol.msc to get into the Local Security Policy screen. Goto “Security Options” then find “Network Security: LAN Manager authentcation level.” Change it from “NTVLM2 responses only” to “LM and NTLM – use NTLMv2 session security if negociated”.

Solution with Vista Home Premium and all other versions.

Vista Home Premium does not have secpol.msc. Instead you must manually edit the registry. Run regedit. Navigate to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa. Look for the key LmCompatibilityLevel. The default value for this key is 3. To support Samba, you should change the value from 3 to 1 (Right click on the value and choose modify). Exit regedit (no saving necessary), and reboot.

How to setup Shared Keys with SSH on Centos 5

URL to HTML Hyperlink Converter

NightLion — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 17:53:21 +0000

Create a clickable HTML link from a URL so you can save the files to your computer.

How many times do you receive a link from someone and can't click on it because it automatically tries to play the item? Haven't you ever wished that there was a way to just right-click (or ctrl-click) on the link so you can save it? Enter the URL below and press submit, and you will receive a hyperlink.

Enter your URL

How to Automatically Backup Multiple MySQL Databases on Centos Linux

NightLion — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 06:44:07 +0000

AutoMySQLBackup is shell script to take daily, weekly and monthly backups of your MySQL databases using mysqldump. Features – Backup mutiple databases – Single backup file or to a seperate file for each DB – Compress backup files – Backup remote servers – E-mail logs – More..

http://sourceforge.net/projects/automysqlbackup/

How to setup Shared Keys with SSH on Centos 5

NightLion — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 21:41:27 +0000

I found this great article while trying to learn how to setup Shared SSH keys on Centos 5, Linux. It’s a great set by step tutorial provided by Shapeshed.

What are shared keys?

Shared Keys consist of a Public and Private key and allow a remote machine to authenticate a machine trying to connect it. The Private key resides on your machine and is used to identify you against the public key which resides on the machine you are trying to login to. You might think of it as a handshake. The remote machine has a description of what to expect from the handshake. It is unique to the client machine so if the handshake doesn’t match then the authentication will fail.

Why use shared keys?

Shared keys have two main benefits. Firstly they allow you to turn off password authentication. Malicious bots regularly crawl the web trying to login to servers using SSH. They have large dictionaries of passwords and try to get into your server using brute force attacks. You can limit this by having a strong password and changing the port that you use to login to SSH with. You can also completely turn off password authentication if you use shared keys. Shared keys mean that no one can access your server without the shared key.

Read the Full tutorial here: Using Shared Keys with SSH on Centos 5 | Shape Shed.