Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee wants us to ‘ignore’ Web3: ‘Web3 is not the web at all’
source: cnbc.com | image: pexels.com
LISBON, Portugal — The creator of the web isn’t sold on crypto visionaries’ plan for its future and says we should “ignore” it.
Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web in 1989, said Friday that he doesn’t view blockchain as a viable solution for building the next iteration of the internet.
He has his own web decentralization project called Solid.
“It’s important to clarify in order to discuss the impacts of new technology,” said Berners-Lee, speaking onstage at the Web Summit event in Lisbon. “You have to understand what the terms mean that we’re discussing actually mean, beyond the buzzwords.”
Scientists at America’s top nuclear lab were recruited by China to design missiles and drones, report says
source: nbcnews.com | image: pexels.com
“China is playing a game that we are not prepared for, and we need to really begin to mobilize,” said Greg Levesque, the lead author of the report by Strider Technologies.
By Ken Dilanian
At least 154 Chinese scientists who worked on government-sponsored research at the U.S.’s foremost national security laboratory over the last two decades have been recruited to do scientific work in China — some of which helped advance military technology that threatens American national security — according to a new private intelligence report obtained by NBC News.
The report, by Strider Technologies, describes what it calls a systemic effort by the government of China to place Chinese scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where nuclear weapons were first developed.
Many of the scientists were later lured back to China to help make advances in such technologies as deep-earth-penetrating warheads, hypersonic missiles, quiet submarines and drones, according to the report.
We are about to get a new star, one that could outshine every other object in the night sky except the moon: a giant internet satellite the size of a typical New York studio apartment so that regular cellphones can access the internet from space.
Just a few years ago, something so bright would have meant something very different. A distant supernova, perhaps, that would have made us look up to reflect on our very existence and our place in the eternal cosmos. Or maybe a comet, the harbingers of terrible or great news that humans whisper about as they have done for millennia.
It could even have been a breathtaking new giant space station, a Space Odyssey structure to usher in a new era of exploration and excitement on our way to Mars and the Jovian moons.
But today, a new blinding point of light on the celestial sphere has nothing to do with the infinite star field that has captured our collective imagination since the dawn of consciousness—the giant nuclear forges that exploded eons ago, millions of light years away.
The rise in cyberattacks this year has forced many companies in critical sectors to make improvements to their cyber defenses in an effort to secure their networks from hacks.
Such companies are increasing their investments in cybersecurity and seeking to hire more cyber professionals — a task proving to be challenging amid a shortage of cyber workers across industries.
The Hill spoke to several security experts and industry leaders in the financial, health care and energy sectors to gauge how those critical industries are seeking to keep their networks secure amid the growing number of cyberattacks.
In the health care sector, which has seen a spike in ransomware this year targeting hospitals and other health care facilities, Christopher Plummer, a senior cybersecurity architect at Dartmouth Health, said having a cybersecurity program is crucial for hospitals, as they hold sensitive information — including patient data.
But he estimated that only about 10 to 20 percent of the nation’s hospitals have a dedicated cybersecurity program.
The 2020s will be recognized as the decade humans transitioned into a truly space-faring species that utilizes space resources to survive and thrive both in space and on Earth.
BY MICHELLE L.D. HANLON
It’s been 50 years since humans last visited the moon, and even robotic missions have been few and far between. But the Earth’s only natural satellite is about to get crowded.
At least six countries and a flurry of private companies have publicly announced more than 250 missions to the moon to occur within the next decade. Many of these missions include plans for permanent lunar bases and are motivated in large part by ambitions to assess and begin utilizing the moon’s natural resources. In the short term, resources would be used to support lunar missions; but in the long term, the moon and its resources will be a critical gateway for missions to the broader riches of the solar system.
But these lofty ambitions collide with a looming legal question. On Earth, possession and ownership of natural resources are based on territorial sovereignty. Conversely, Article II of the Outer Space Treaty—the 60-year-old agreement that guides human activity in space—forbids nations from claiming territory in space. This limitation includes the moon, planets, and asteroids. So how will space resources be managed?
I am a lawyer who focuses on the peaceful and sustainable use of space to benefit all humanity. I believe the 2020s will be recognized as the decade humans transitioned into a truly space-faring species that utilizes space resources to survive and thrive both in space and on Earth. To support this future, the international community is working through several channels to develop a framework for space resource management, starting with Earth’s closest neighbor, the moon. Continue reading “How will the moon’s resources be managed?”→
IoT devices from video conferencing systems to IP cameras are among the five riskiest IoT devices connected to networks, according to research highlighted by Forescout’s cybersecurity research arm, Vedere Labs.
The company identified recurring themes in their recent research, highlighting the growing attack surface due to more devices being connected to enterprise networks, and how threat actors are able to leverage these devices to achieve their goals.
“IP cameras, VoIP and video-conferencing systems are the riskiest IoT devices because they are commonly exposed on the internet, and there is a long history of threat actor activity targeting them,” The Forescout report said.
The attack surface now encompasses IT, IoT and OT in almost every organization, with the addition of IoMT in healthcare. Organizations must be aware of risky devices across all categories. Forescout recommends that automated controls are implement and that companies do not rely on siloed security in the IT network, OT network or for specific types of IoT devices.
This latest research provides an update to the company’s findings from 2020 in which networking equipment, VoIP, IP cameras and programmable logic controllers (PLCs) were listed and remain among the riskiest devices across IT, IoT, OT and IoMT in 2022.
However, new entries such as hypervisors and human machine interfaces (HMIs) are representative of trends including critical vulnerabilities and increased OT connectivity.
Vedere Labs analyzed device data between January 1 and April 30 in Forescout’s Device Cloud. The anonymized data comes from Forescout customer deployments and contains information about almost 19 million devices – a number that grows daily, according to the company.
The overall risk of a device was calculated based on three factors: configuration, function and behavior.
After measuring the risk of each individual device, Vedered Labs calculated averages per device type to understand which are the riskiest.
Caltech’s New Ultrafast Camera Captures Signals Traveling Through Nerve Cells
source: scitechdaily.com | image: pixels.com
Reach out right now and touch anything around you. Whether it was the wood of your desk, a key on your keyboard, or the fur of your dog, you felt it the instant your finger contacted it.
Or did you?
In actuality, takes a bit of time for your brain to register the sensation from your fingertip. However, it does still happen extremely fast, with the touch signal traveling through your nerves at over 100 miles per hour. In fact, some nerve signals are even faster, approaching speeds of 300 miles per hour.
Scientists at Caltech have just developed a new ultrafast camera that can record footage of these impulses as they travel through nerve cells. Not only that, but the camera can also capture video of other incredibly fast phenomena, such as the propagation of electromagnetic pulses in electronics.
Known as differentially enhanced compressed ultrafast photography (Diff-CUP), the camera technology was developed in the lab of Lihong Wang. He is the Bren Professor of Medical Engineering and Electrical Engineering, Andrew and Peggy Cherng Medical Engineering Leadership Chair, and executive officer for medical engineering.
‘Watched The Whole Time’: China’s Surveillance State Grows Under Xi
source: barrons.com | image: pixels.com
When Chen picked up his phone to vent his anger at getting a parking ticket, his message on WeChat was a drop in the ocean of daily posts on China’s biggest social network.
But soon after his tirade against “simple-minded” traffic cops in June, he found himself in the tentacles of the communist country’s omniscient surveillance apparatus.
Chen quickly deleted the post, but officers tracked him down and detained him within hours, accusing him of “insulting the police”.
He was locked up for five days for “inappropriate speech”.
His case — one of the thousands logged by a dissident and reported by local media — laid bare the pervasive monitoring that characterises life in China today.
Its leaders have long taken an authoritarian approach to social control.
But since President Xi Jinping took power in 2012, he has reined in the relatively freewheeling social currents of the turn of the century, using a combination of technology, law and ideology to squeeze dissent and preempt threats to his rule.
Ostensibly targeting criminals and aimed at protecting order, social controls have been turned against dissidents, activists and religious minorities, as well as ordinary people — such as Chen — judged to have crossed the line.
The average Chinese citizen today spends nearly every waking moment under the watchful eye of the state.
Teen cyber cartels: when world’s most prolific cybercriminals are minors
source: cybernews.com | image: pixels.com
As the announcement of two teenagers charged in relation to the Lapsus$ extortion group broke, we began to wonder: how do youngsters join the world’s biggest cyber gangs in the first place?
“Youth of cybercrime” is a relatively new yet quickly spreading phenomenon. It’s becoming increasingly less uncommon to discover that children were behind notorious hacks. Elliott Gunton, for example, was only 16 when he breached the UK telecoms operator TalkTalk, compromising the details of hundreds of thousands of customers. Another “self-proclaimed Apple fan” from Australia (who cannot be identified for legal reasons) was 13 when he first hacked into Apple’s private networks and stole 90GB worth of data. Both of these teenagers received jail time related to various cybercrimes.
Of course, such cases are not limited to hacking into big tech corporations. Jonathan James, a 15-year-old from Florida, managed to install a backdoor in US military servers and access the source code of the International Space Station (ISS). Other kids simply use malware to pull pranks on each other without fully recognizing that it’s still illegal.
“These kids grew up in an online world, and some become proficient in programming and cyber skills well before they reach their teens,” John Gunn, CEO of Token, told Cybernews.
What attracts teenagers to cybercrime?
In many ways, teenagers find themselves as attracted to cybercrime as they are to most unknowns of the big and yet so unfamiliar world. That’s why Kent Landfield, Chief Standards and Technology Policy Strategist at Trellix, considers the boom in “youth-led cybercrime” to be a cultural issue as much as a public policy one.
source: bloomberg.com | Image by Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay
How the arrest of a burned-out intelligence officer exposed an economic-espionage machine.
In January 2014, Arthur Gau, an aerospace engineer who was nearing retirement age, received an unexpected email from a long-lost acquaintance in China. Years before, Gau had made a series of trips from his home in Phoenix to speak at the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, or NUAA, one of China’s most prestigious research institutions. The original invitation had come from the head of a lab there studying helicopter design. Increasingly, however, Gau had heard from someone else, a man who worked at the university in a vague administrative capacity. Little Zha, as the man called himself, was the one who made sure Gau never had to pay his own airfare when he came to give talks. When Gau brought his mother on a 2003 visit, Zha arranged and paid for them to take a Yangtze cruise to see the river’s dramatically sculpted middle reaches before they were flooded by the Three Gorges Dam.
The relationship had ended awkwardly, though, when Zha offered Gau money to come back to China with information about specific aviation projects from his employer, the industrial and defense giant Honeywell International Inc. Gau ignored the request, and the invitations stopped.
Now, in 2014, Little Zha was reaching out again. The two started corresponding. In early 2016, Gau, whose interests extended far beyond avionics, said he’d planned a trip to China to visit some friends in the musical theater world. Zha was there that spring to meet him at the airport in Beijing. Waiting with him was a colleague Zha was eager for Gau to meet.
Xu Yanjun was on the tall side, at 5 feet 10 inches, with closely cropped hair, glasses, and a tendency toward bluntness. The three had dinner and met up again before Gau flew back to the US. Over pastries in Gau’s hotel room, they discussed Taiwanese politics—Gau grew up there—as well as the engineer’s evolving responsibilities at Honeywell. Late in the evening, Xu handed Gau $3,000 in cash. Gau would later testify that he tried to hand it back, but Xu was insistent. “And then, you know, back and forth, but I took it eventually.”The next year, Gau came back to China to give another lecture—this time a private one in a hotel room to several engineers and officials, including Xu. In preparation, Gau had emailed over PowerPoint slides containing technical information, including algorithms and other sensitive design data for the aircraft auxiliary power units Honeywell makes. “Because of the payment, I felt obligated,” he would later tell a judge.
Xu paid him $6,200 more, and two of his associates accompanied the visiting engineer on a two-day sightseeing trip to West Lake, famed for its picturesque gardens, islands, and temples. Gau was planning his next visit when, in the fall of 2018, agents from the FBI appeared at his home in Arizona to execute a search warrant. There would not be another trip. Xu, the agents explained, was not in Nanjing anymore. He wasn’t even in China. He was in Ohio, in a county jail awaiting trial.
