GCHQ chief reports 'disturbing' cyber attacks on UK

The UK has been subject to a "disturbing" number of cyber attacks, the director of communications intelligence agency GCHQ has said.

The UK says cyber crime is as serious a threat as international terrorism


Sensitive data on government computers has been targeted, along with defence, technology and engineering firms' designs, Iain Lobban said in the Times.

There was a "significant" unsuccessful internet-based attack on Foreign Office computer systems this summer, he added.

On Tuesday, the government hosts a two-day conference over the issue.

Foreign Secretary William Hague convened the London Conference on Cyberspace against a backdrop of the UK treating the threat from cyber warfare as seriously as that from international terrorism.

It aims to bring together political leaders, such as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and EU digital supremo Neelie Kroes, with leading cyber security experts and technology entrepreneurs such as Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Cisco vice-president Brad Boston.

'Threat to economy'

Mr Hague believes a "global co-ordinated response" is required to forge policy on cyber development.

Writing in the Times, Mr Lobban said such an inclusive approach was vital.

"The volume of e-crime and attacks on government and industry systems continues to be disturbing," he wrote.

"I can attest to attempts to steal British ideas and designs - in the IT, technology, defence, engineering and energy sectors, as well as other industries - to gain commercial advantage or to profit from secret knowledge of contractual arrangements.

"Such intellectual property theft doesn't just cost the companies concerned; it represents an attack on the UK's continued economic wellbeing."

Mr Lobban added that government online taxation and benefits services could be targeted in future and said a black economy had already developed which saw UK citizens' credit card details offered for sale.

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How Nokia can make a comeback in the U.S.: 7 theories

How Nokia can make a comeback in the U.S. -  7 

theories

Ten years ago, half of U.S. cellphone users had a Nokia, but now iPhones and Androids rule. What must Nokia do to succeed in the smartphone age?

Nokia once dominated the U.S. mobile phone market, with a 50 percent market share. But that was a decade ago. Today, it has less than 7 percent of the U.S. market, and most of its phones are lower-end models. Now, Nokia is hoping to make a comeback. On Wednesday, it announced two Windows Phone-powered smartphones — its first"legitimate forays into the modern smartphone space."While Nokia's Lumia 800 and 710 phones won't be available in the U.S. until next year — they're first launching in Europe and Asia — there's already talk that this could be the start of a comeback. How can Nokia rise again? Here are seven theories:

1. Offer something truly unique
Nokia needs to "focus on design" and "be very, very different," says Mike Isaac at Wired. It shouldn't even try to compete with the beautifully designed clean modernism of the iPhone, or the boring "techie stylings" of Android offerings. With its polycarbonate casing in whimsical, "candy-coated" colors, the Lumia is a good start. 

2. Stick with Windows Phone over Android
Going with Microsoft's "underdog" operating system is a "bet the company" move, but it could pay off, says analyst Ross Rubin, as quoted atWired. Consumers, carriers, and businesses just might be looking for "a strong global alternative to iOS and Android." Instead of "trying to out-iPhone Apple, or out-Android the host of Android handsets," says the article's author, Mike Isaac, Nokia and Microsoft are "looking to become a healthy, respectable David to the smartphone industry's two Goliaths."

3. Attract app developers by offering them visibility
The Windows Phone has around 30,000 apps, compared to the Android's 300,000 and the iPhone's half million. "What's Nokia to do?" asks Isaac. It needs to entice developers with the prospect of discovery. Countless apps go unnoticed in the Apple App store, but with the Windows Phone, up-and-coming app developers can be big fish in a small pond.

4. Patch things up with carriers
First and foremost, Nokia needs to mend fences with AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, and T-Mobile USA, says Eric Zeman at InformationWeek. Nokia insisted on making its phones its own way instead of responding to requests from the carriers, and as a result they aren't selling many Nokia phones. The company should heed that lesson. "Without U.S. network operator support, Nokia isn't going to gain any traction."

5. Give customers want they want
Rather than design phones specifically for the U.S. market, Nokia has typically just modified its European and Asian phones, says Zeman. That has often meant that features Americans wanted got dropped. Nokia needs to design phones specifically for the U.S., with features cellphone users here need, like mobile hotspot support and expandable memory. Americans also want user-facing cameras for video chat and fast, dual-core processors — both of which the new Lumia is lacking. 

6. Go after people who don't own smartphones
Sure, Apple and Android are way ahead in the smartphone market, but only 40 percent of wireless subscribers own a smartphone, says Marguerite Reardon at CNET. Nokia can succeed by targeting the 60 percent who are looking for a simple, easy-to-use smartphone, which Andriod certainly isn't. Nokia has a shot at these late adopters, many of whom value the Microsoft brand and associate it with their friendly Windows desktop.

7. Marketing, marketing, marketing
Many Americans have forgotten Nokia, and that's a problem, say Zeman. The company is planning a big advertising and promotion campaign to get some of its U.S. mind share back. It is also setting up partnerships with retailers. Nokia "is going all-out to make sure its Windows Phone 7 smartphones are successful," and it has to. "If Nokia can't make its new smartphones a hit with buyers, both it and Microsoft will be in a lot of trouble."

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By Amrut Deshmukh

New Technique Turns Viruses Into Useful Tools

New Technique Turns Viruses Into Useful Tools

Viral films: Complex, highly structured films made using viruses could be used as optical devices and as templates for engineering tissue, bone, and teeth. 
Credit: Woo-Jae Chung, UC Berkeley

In one simple step, viruses can be turned into sophisticated structures with novel optical or biomedical properties.

Researchers have demonstrated a simple, one-step process in which genetically engineered viruses arrange themselves into extremely ordered patterns with distinctive properties, such as color or strength. The technique could be used to make novel optical devices or biological scaffolds to grow soft tissue, teeth, and bone.

The researchers, led by Seung-Wuk Lee, a bioengineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, used the technique to make structured films. “We want to mimic nature and create many different types of functional structures with a very simple building block,” Lee says.

This work is part of a broader effort to make new types of materials using viruses as microscopic building blocks. Researchers at MIT, led by Angela Belcher, a biological engineering and materials science professor, have previously engineered viruses to bind to inorganic materials—something they would never do naturally—and have them assemble into battery components.

Lee and his colleagues have found a way to fine-tune the arrangement of individual viruses to create sophisticated structures with complex designs all on their own. Using a single virus as a building unit is “pretty exquisite,” says Belcher, because its traits can be genetically modified and you can attach many different useful materials to its surface. What’s even more important about the new work, which was published in the journalNature last week, is the precise control over viral self-assembly, resulting in large-scale structures with multiple levels of organization. “This is very beautifully laid out,” she says. “They can do so much with a single virus.”

The researchers used a rod-shaped bacterial virus, called M13, for their work. First, they dip a flat glass sheet into a saline solution containing the viruses. As they pull the glass out slowly at a controlled speed, the viruses spontaneously configure themselves on the glass surface into orderly patterns. This assembly happens as the solvent evaporates. “Self-assembly is hard to achieve in a systematic way, but what the authors have come up with shows a potentially powerful route to do this,” says George Schatz, a chemistry professor at Northwestern University.

By changing the virus concentration in the solution and the pulling speed, the researchers were able to create different structured films. One has regularly placed stripes made of virus bundles in which the viruses are aligned and twisted like corkscrews.

The most complex film has a “ramen-noodle-like” structure that bends light in certain ways. Various pulling speeds change the spacing and width of the viruses in this wavy structure, so that it shows distinct colors. Such films could be used as light reflectors and filters found in displays and photography. The technique could also be used to fabricate photonic crystals and organic photovoltaics.

The researchers also showed that the material could be made into a scaffold to engineer complex tissues. To do this, they genetically tweaked the virus to make it express certain proteins on its surface, which influence the growth of the tissue. They cultured cells on top of the films and found that the cells aligned themselves with the microstructure. What’s more, when the films were dipped in a solution of calcium and phosphate ions, the ions mineralized on the film to form a tough material similar to tooth enamel.

“Developing a system like this that could regenerate bone or could be used for growth of materials for teeth is a very possible application,” says Belcher.

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By Amrut Sharad Deshmukh

Quantum Processor Hooks Up with Quantum Memory

Quantum Processor Hooks Up with Quantum Memory


Connecting the two could make it possible to perform complex calculations that are far beyond the power of conventional computers.

 

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have become the first to combine a quantum processor with memory that can be used to store instructions and data. This achievement in quantum computing replicates a similar milestone in conventional computer design from the 1940s.
Although quantum computing is now mostly a research subject, it holds out the promise of computers far more capable than those we use today. The power of quantum computers comes from their version of the most basic unit of computing, the bit. In a conventional computer, a bit can represent either 1 or 0 at any time. Thanks to the quirks of quantum mechanics, the equivalent in a quantum computer, a qubit, can represent both values at once. When qubits in such a "superposition" state work together, they can operate on exponentially more data than the same number of regular bits. As a result, quantum computers should be able to defeat encryption that is unbreakable in practice today and perform highly complex simulations.
Linking a processor and memory elements brings such applications closer, because it should make it more practical to control and program a quantum computer can perform, says Matteo Mariantoni, who led the project, which is part of a wider program at UCSB headed by John Martinis and Andrew Cleland.
The design the researchers adopted is known as the von Neumann architecture—named after John von Neumann, who pioneered the idea of making computers that combine processor and memory. Before the first von Neumann designs were built in the late 1940s, computers could be reprogrammed only by physically reconfiguring them. "Every single computer we use in our everyday lives is based on the von Neumann architecture, and we have created the quantum mechanical equivalent," says Mariantoni.
The only quantum computing system available to buy—priced at $10 million—lacks memory and works like a pre-von Neumann computer.
Qubits can be made in a variety of ways, such as suspending ions or atoms in magnetic fields. The UCSB group used more conventional electrical circuits, albeit ones that must be cooled almost to absolute zero to make them superconducting and activate their quantum behavior. They can be fabricated by chip-making techniques used for conventional computers. Mariantoni says that using superconducting circuits allowed the team to place the qubits and memory elements close together on a single chip, which made possible the new von Neumann-inspired design.
The processor consists of two qubits linked by a quantum bus that enables them to communicate. Each is also connected to a memory element into which the qubit can save its current value for later use, serving the function of the RAM - for random access memory - of a conventional computer. The links between the qubits and the memory contain devices known as resonators, zigzagging circuits inside which a qubit's value can live on for a short time.
Mariantoni's group has used the new system to run an algorithm that is a kind of computational building block, called a Toffoli gate, which can be used to implement any conventional computer program. The team also used its design to perform a mathematical operation that underlies to the algorithm with which a quantum computer might crack complex data encryption.
David Schuster leads a group at the University of Chicago that also works on quantum computing, including superconducting circuits. He says that superconducting circuits have recently proved to be comparatively reliable. "One of the next big frontiers for these techniques now is scale," he says. By replicating the Von Neumann architecture the UCSB team have expanded that frontier.
That's not to say that quantum computers must all adopt that design, though, as conventional computers have. "You could make a computer completely out of qubits and it could do every kind of calculation," says Schuster. However there are advantages to making use of resonators like those that make up the new design's memory, he says. "Resonators are easier and more reliable to make than qubits and easier to control," says Schuster.
Mariantoni agrees. "We can easily scale the number of these unit cells," he says. "I believe that arrays of resonators will represent the future of quantum computing with integrated circuits."

Written By
Amrut Deshmukh

Banned By Google And Back Again.

Banned By Google And Back Again.

The date: 29th July 2005. The time: early morning. I got out of bed and fired up my PC. Opened my browser to check my site. Had a look at the third-party Google toolbar plugin (http://toolbar.google.com/) on said browser (FireFox). It showed grey.
Ice formed in my stomach. I opened my bugged version of Internet Explorer: my PageRank was 0. By now I was frantic. I went to http://www.google.com and typed in „site:www.tigertom.com„: no pages listed. I did this for two other satellite sites of mine: ditto.
What had happened?
TigerTom.Com (http://www.tigertom.com) had been banned by Google. I went to the WebmasterWorld forum (http://www.webmasterworld.com), and found out the awful truth. Google was doing one of its periodic updates of its algorithm, and had filtered out my sites completely.
Further research there, and a bit of soul-searching, revealed why. I had too many pseudo-directory pages with auto-generated external links. Snippets from search engine results were used as descriptions of said links. Said links were run though a redirect script. These are hallmarks of pseudo-directories and „AdSense scraper‟* sites. Google is reportedly trying to filter these from its „SERPs‟**. I say reportedly, because Google doesn‟t announce these purges. They are inferred.
To compound my sins, these pages were also effectively doorway pages.
The theory was that legitimate sites had been hit as „collateral damage‟. I say theory, in that Google rarely comments on individual cases. It won‟t tell you exactly why your site was banned. I guess this is for reasons of time, and to give no clues to spammers.
In my case the ban was justified for my two satellite sites; while not looking like spam, they were effectively doorway sites.
My main site was different. It had offending pages, but was mostly a diverse labour of seven years; a personal site on steroids.
Google bans sites algorithmically: a site that fits their „spammer‟ profile gets dropped via software from their index automatically. Real spammers shrug their shoulders and move on; honest webmasters write emails begging for mercy.
Like me.
I did some searching via Google, to find out how to do a re-inclusion request. Here‟s how:
1. First, you check your site is truly gone, by going to http://www.google.com, typing „site:www.yourdomain.com„ without the apostrophes. If it returns no pages at all …
2. You check Google‟s webmaster guidelines athttp://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. These are not really guidelines; you should treat them as iron-clad rules.
3. You stop the offending content from being web-accessible, permanently.
If you‟re familiar with Apache web-server mod_rewrite you can:
- Send a 410 „Gone‟ response to requests for the offending pages, or - CHMOD them to 600, which will return a 403 „Forbidden‟ response, or - Move them to a different directory if you need to keep them, or - Just delete them.
Don‟t try to be clever. Just get rid of them.
4. You go to http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py, tick the relevant boxes, and type „Re-inclusion request‟ in the subject box of the form.
4a. You add the complete URL of your site i.e. http://www.naughtydomain.com,
4b. You state that you have read the webmaster guidelines above,
4c. You admit what you did wrong; simply, succinctly, with no carping or special pleading.
Don‟t try to be clever. Don‟t argue. Don‟t lie. Don‟t waffle.
Google has cached copies of your site. When an engineer checks your site, he‟ll look for the offending content, and compare it against their cache. He‟ll spend about two minutes on it; don‟t give him a reason to continue to exclude you.
5. You ask for re-inclusion.
6. You wait.
In my case, it took about a week; a long, unpleasant, fretful week. I sent follow up emails saying what I was doing, and a fax, and I was going to write letters if that didn‟t work. That was probably excessive. Once you have a ticket number, that‟s all that should be necessary.
They emailed a standard reply saying “the problem had been passed to their engineers”. That‟s good. I understand they send no reply to spammers.
A week later my site was back in. Lesson learnt. To make sure I‟m not so vulnerable again, I‟m splitting my content to different sites, on the principle of „best not to have all your eggs in one basket‟.
Have I learnt anything from this? Yes. Have more than one site as your „money-maker‟. Spend less time on search engine optimization and more on traditional marketing. Come up with a unique selling proposition that compels people to link to your site. Easy(!)

Written By

Amrut Deshmukh

Amrut Deshmukh

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