anr blogja

This paper is a short summary of the first real world detection of a backdoor in a military grade FPGA. Using an innovative
patented technique we were able to detect and analyse in the first documented case of its kind, a backdoor inserted into the Actel/Microsemi
ProASIC3 chips for accessing FPGA configuration. The backdoor was
found amongst additional JTAG functionality and exists on the silicon
itself, it was not present in any firmware loaded onto the chip. Using
Pipeline Emission Analysis (PEA), our pioneered technique, we were
able to extract the secret key to activate the backdoor, as well as other
security keys such as the AES and the Passkey. This way an attacker
can extract all the configuration data from the chip, reprogram crypto
and access keys, modify low-level silicon features, access unencrypted
configuration bitstream or permanently damage the device. Clearly this
means the device is wide open to intellectual property (IP) theft, fraud,
re-programming as well as reverse engineering of the design which allows
the introduction of a new backdoor or Trojan. Most concerning, it is
not possible to patch the backdoor in chips already deployed, meaning
those using this family of chips have to accept the fact they can be easily
compromised or will have to be physically replaced after a redesign of
the silicon itself.
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sps32/ches2012-backdoor.pdf

The machine, named “Iridis-Pi” after the University’s Iridis supercomputer, runs off a single 13 Amp mains socket and uses MPI (Message Passing Interface) to communicate between nodes using Ethernet. The whole system cost under £2,500 (excluding switches) and has a total of 64 processors and 1Tb of memory (16Gb SD cards for each Raspberry Pi).
http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/09/engineers-at-university-of-southampton…

The steps to make the computer are here
http://www.southampton.ac.uk/~sjc/raspberrypi/pi_supercomputer_southamp…

The IT sector has been creating 7,000 jobs a year but last year only 1,500 students graduated in computing, according to E-skills UK.
...
The industry body said the skills shortfall in technology was deepening.

Polly Purvis, executive director of ScotlandIS, said: "The technology sector is growing four times faster than the Scottish average.

"But, despite being a highly paid sector with excellent working conditions, we don't have enough skilled staff to fill the vacancies."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-19529703

jó utat annak, aki munkát keres :)

http://cheezburger.com/6550185472

Researchers working for the Sandia National Laboratories developed a unique new architecture for air-based cooler. The “Sandia Cooler” as it is known improves the cooling efficiency of conventional air based coolers by an order of magnitude and more while drastically reducing noise and keeping the entire unit free of dust.
http://thefutureofthings.com/news/11498/revolutionary-cpu-cooler-develo…

Unlike traditional air coolers, the Sandia Cooler transfers heat efficiently from a stationary base plate to a rotating at 2000 RPMs in a counterclockwise motion. This architecture forces dead air to move due to a powerful centrifugal pumping effect which increase the efficiency of the cooler by up to 30X compared to a conventional design. The entire unit hovers very close to its base providing a drastic improvement in aerodynamic efficiency which in turns improves the acoustic performance of the unit making it extremely quite.

Most Americans Confused By Cloud Computing According to National Survey
http://www.citrix.com/English/NE/news/news.asp?newsID=2328309

A collaboration between a Stanford ant biologist and a computer scientist has revealed that the behavior of harvester ants as they forage for food mirrors the protocols that control traffic on the Internet.
...

Deborah Gordon, a biology professor at Stanford, has been studying ants for more than 20 years. When she figured out how the harvester ant colonies she had been observing in Arizona decided when to send out more ants to get food, she called across campus to Balaji Prabhakar, a professor of computer science at Stanford and an expert on how files are transferred on a computer network. At first he didn't see any overlap between his and Gordon's work, but inspiration would soon strike.

In an interview with CVG, visual effects supervisor Kim Libreri shared his view that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference between live action and rendered footage.

"The way its going, it's gonna be pretty hard to tell the difference between something that is interactive and rendered in real-time, and something that was done for an animated TV show, or even a live action thing," he said.

"Ten years from now, I'm pretty sure, if you extrapolate where we've gone with the console generations and the changes in video and ATI hardware... We're getting to the point right now [with real-time rendered graphics] where we're matching the quality of an animated movie seven or eight years ago, and another ten years from now, it's just going to be indistinguishable from reality."
http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/08/06/industrial-light-magic-games-to-…

IDC - Android and iOS powered 85% of all smartphones shipped in the second quarter of 2012 (2Q12), establishing a new combined high for the mobile operating systems from Google and Apple. Meanwhile, BlackBerry and Symbian, two pioneers and former leaders of the smartphone market, both saw their market shares fall below five percent.

Android smartphones outshipped Apple iPhone by 4 to 1.

Android's success in the market can be traced directly to Samsung, which accounted for 44.0% of all Android smartphones shipped in 2Q12 and totaled more than the next seven Android vendors' volumes combined.

---
Canalys published its final Q2 2012 country-level shipment estimates to clients yesterday. Results show that China saw phenomenal growth of 199% year-on-year and 32% over the previous quarter. In total, more than 42 million smart phones were shipped into the channel in China in Q2 2012, representing the second consecutive quarter of record breaking volumes in a single country market. China accounted for 27% of the 158 million global smart phone shipments, compared to 16% for the United States.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/08/android-smartphones-outshipped-apple.h…

ok csinaltak a Curiosity-t is

http://lars-lab.jpl.nasa.gov/JPL_Coding_Standard_C.pdf

http://chartporn.org/2012/07/17/infographics-explained-with-legos/
http://visual.ly/what-infographic-2

Unspooling fiber-optic cable that will soon be laid on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/07/16/chartist-mapping-internet/

Once upon a time, Microsoft dominated the tech industry: indeed, it was the wealthiest corporation in the world. But since 2000, as Apple, Google, and Facebook whizzed by, it has fallen flat in every arena it entered: e-books, music, search, social networking, etc. etc. Talking to former and current Microsoft executives, KURT EICHENWALD finds the fingers pointing at Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates’s successor, as the man who led them astray”: “[W]hat began as a lean competition machine led by young visionaries of unparalleled talent has mutated into something bloated and bureaucracy-laden, with an internal culture that unintentionally rewards managers who strangle innovative ideas that might threaten the established order of things. … [The cash-cow] Windows and Office divisions [were allowed to dictate] the direction of product development [derailing e-books, mobile and tablets] … Many of the longtime executives let new employees handle the work while they themselves lolled around, waiting for the next vesting period when they could exercise more options – a behavior known derisively by the younger hires as ‘rest and vest.’ …

Microsoft took a $6.2 billion charge for the purchase of performance of aQuantive, an online advertising service that it bought in 2007 for $6.3 billion. Since it bought aQuantive, Microsoft's online division has reported losses totaling nearly $9 billion.

Google spent $3.2 billion to acquire DoubleClick, an online ad service that used to compete against aQuantive. Google last year earned $9.7 billion on nearly $38 billion in revenue, with most of the money coming from online ads.

In 2011, Google's search and advertising tools helped provide $80 billion of economic activity for 1.8 million businesses, website publishers and non-profits across the U.S.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/07/google-earns-97-billion-from-online-ad…

Apple and Foxconn have yet to confirm Seeking Alphaª's report which said Apple plans to invest up to $7 billion in robots and place them in Foxconn factories.

As I see it, this is an important story for at least three reasons:

Exclusivity - a strategic move on Apple's part to tie up a huge chunk of global robot and electronics production and stay ahead of the competition.

Forward thinking - by investing so much in robotics at this point in time, Apple retains it's leadership in manufacturing technology and product quality for the next few years.

Productivity - by deploying robots to do the dull, dirty and dangerous tasks previously done by low-paid humans, Apple will be improving not only it's image, but also work conditions, product quality, and worker efficiency.

http://i.top500.org/stats
http://i.top500.org/overtime

az elso haromba keruleshez 10Pflops kell

Rank Site Cores Rmax (TFlop/s) Rpeak (TFlop/s) Power (kW)
1 DOE/NNSA/LLNL 1572864 16324.8 20132.7 7890
2 RIKEN Japan 705024 10510.0 11280.4 12659.9
3 DOE/SC/Argonne 786432 8162.4 10066.3 3945


In the latest Top 500 Supercomputer Sites list unveiled Monday morning, a newly assembled cluster built with IBM hardware at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) takes the top prize. Its speed? A whopping 16.32 petaflops, or 16 thousand trillion calculations per second. With 96 racks, 98,304 compute nodes, 1.6 million cores, and 1.6 petabytes of memory across 4,500 square feet, the IBM Blue Gene/Q system installed at LLNL overtakes the 10-petaflop, 705,000-core “K computer” in Japan's RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/with-16-petaflops…
The cluster is extremely efficient for one so large, with 7,890 kilowatts of power, compared to 12,659 kilowatts for the second-best K Computer. It’s primarily cooled by water running through tiny copper pipes encircling the node cards. Each card holds 32 chips, with each chip having 16 cores.

Design Spark - a Raspberry Pi ($39) can be used to emulate a mainframe which would have filled a large computer room, and to run the same software which it would have run. Of course, the only reason you would do this is for fun, learning or perhaps as part of computer conservation efforts, e.g. in providing continued access to old computer software and/or data. A modern mainframe would massively outperform a Raspberry Pi and offer many benefits beyond simple processing power.

Having configured a mainframe on a Raspberry Pi, it was time to try out a Raspberry Pi on a mainframe! The image below shows the Pi sat on top (centre) of the CPU from an IBM 4381.

They should be better at all things related to food preparation. It’s in their namesake (Apple, amirite?).

From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.
Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.

The small computer has an AllWinner A10 single-core 1.5GHz ARM CPU, a Mali 400 GPU, and 512MB of RAM. An HDMI port on the exterior allows users to plug the computer into a television. It outputs at 1080p and is said to be capable of playing high-definition video.
http://www.cnx-software.com/2012/05/17/74-usd-allwinner-a10-android-4-0…

http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/05/new-74-android-thumb-drive-sized.html

The project, which Google has dubbed its “G-Scale Network,” replaced all existing switches and routers with equipment that used the OpenFlow protocol. The protocol, which was initially conceived by a graduate student at Stanford University named Martin Casado, represents a new way to control network switches and routers that has come to be known as software defined networking, or SDN.
http://www.openflow.org/wp/learnmore/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenFlow
By separating the software that controls network traffic from the physical routers and switches, SDN should make networks more secure, more dependable and much easier to manage. Because SDN runs on commodity hardware, it could translate into siginficant savings for network operators. Perhaps most important, it opens up the network to the possibility of vast innovation.