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.
source: axios.com | image by Mikhail Nilov for pexels.com
Uber is currently responding to what could be one of the worst breaches in the company’s history — all because of a few text messages.
Why it matters: The hacker who has claimed responsibility for the ongoing Uber breach is believed to have access to the company’s source code, email and other internal systems — leaving employee, contractor and customer data at risk.
Details: A hacker first gained access to Uber’s systems on Thursday after sending a text message to an employee claiming to be an IT person and asking for their login credentials, according to the New York Times, which first reported the breach.
Software engineers from big tech firms like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta are paying at least $75,000 to get 3 inches taller, a leg-lengthening surgeon says
source: businessinsider.com | image: pixabay.com
Workers from Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta are paying $75,000 to be taller, a surgeon told GQ.
The Las Vegas surgeon can lengthen patients’ legs via a painful months-long process.
He breaks the thigh bones and inserts nails that are extended every day for three months.
A Las Vegas cosmetic surgeon who specializes in leg-lengthening procedures that can extend people’s height by 3 to 6 inches told GQ magazine that many of his patients are tech workers.
Kevin Debiparshad founded LimbplastX Institute in 2016, and the clinic’s business has boomed during the pandemic, he told GQ.
Here’s how it works: The doctor breaks the patients’ femurs, or thigh bones, and inserts metal nails into them that can be adjusted. The nails are extended a tiny bit every day for three months with a magnetic remote control, GQ reported.
source: nbcnews.com | image by Luca Nardone for Pexels.com
Some privacy advocates are worried the move will increase surveillance without necessarily increasing safety.
New York, home of the largest rapid transit system in the country, will install surveillance cameras in every New York City subway car by 2025, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced Tuesday.
The move is aimed at increasing riders’ confidence in subway safety, Hochul said, as ridership numbers are still lagging behind pre-pandemic levels. It also follows several highly publicized crimes that have occurred in the transit system, including the rape of a touriston a subway platform this month; a mass shooting on a subway car in Brooklyn in April that left 10 passengers wounded; and the fatal shooting of a Goldman Sachs employee on a train in May.
Star American Professor Masterminded a Surveillance Machine for Chinese Big Tech
source: yahoo.com | image: pexels.com
A star University of Maryland (UMD) professor built a machine-learning software “useful for surveillance” as part of a six-figure research grant from Chinese tech giant Alibaba, raising concerns that an American public university directly contributed to China’s surveillance state.
Alibaba provided $125,000 in funding to a research team led by Dinesh Manocha, a professor of computer science at UMD College Park, to develop an urban surveillance software that can “classify the personality of each pedestrian and identify other biometric features,” according to research grant documents obtained via public records request.
“These capabilities will be used to predict the behavior of each pedestrian and are useful for surveillance,” the document read.
Alibaba’s surveillance products gained notoriety in 2020, when researchersfound that one of its products, Cloud Shield, could recognize and classify the faces of Uyghur people. Human rights group believe these high-tech surveillance tools play a major role in the ongoing Uyghur genocide in Xinjiang.
Purdue honored for counterintelligence contributions
source: purdue.edu | image: purdue.edu
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — In an on-campus ceremony on Tuesday (Aug. 16), the U.S. Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) recognized Purdue University as one of four recipients of its Excellence in Counterintelligence (CI) Award for fiscal year 2020. Those chosen were among more than 10,000 contractors considered.
The honor places Purdue among the top universities in protecting sensitive national information from foreign adversaries and makes Purdue one of only two universities singled out twice to receive the award. Texas A&M University was also so honored.
Purdue was named as a recipient of the award in 2020, but the ceremony conferring the award was delayed by COVID.
Senior DCSA leaders selected the award winners based on the organizations’ CI/insider threat reports.
History’s bloodiest wars often begin with underestimation. The architects of the First World War expected fighting to last less than a year. In starting a war of aggression against Ukraine, Vladimir Putin incorrectly thought Kyiv lacked the will and the capability to resist.
Changes in military technology will increase the frequency of these mistakes. Wars are increasingly being decided by capabilities that are hard to observe or demonstrate before conflict begins.
Today’s would-be Putins might count divisions of tanks, aircraft carrier strike group visits or missile siloes captured on satellite imagery — and think twice. But wars in Azerbaijan and Ukraine have demonstrated that victory often rests on immaterial conditions: the ability to out-detect and out-communicate the enemy and the ability to outpace the enemy’s speed of decision.
These are difficult to assess until war has already begun. More wars of underestimation will be fought if leaders fail to appreciate the dynamic of this change.
