From the file marked “Evidently, many scientists have never seen even one scary sci-fi movie”: The Defense Department is funding research into battlefield robots that power themselves by eating human corpses. What could possibly go wrong?

Since they apparently don’t own TVs or DVD players, researchers at Robotic Technology say the robots will collect organic matter, which “could” include human corpses, to use for fuel. But if you picked up anything on flesh-eating robots over the years you know they’ll ignore that tasty soybean field and make a chow line right to the nearest dead body. And, if the machines can’t find enough dead people to eat, they can always make new ones.

Researchers seem to get a kick out of ensuring the demise of the human species, so the project is called the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot, or EATR. Wired.com readers looking to save time and trouble are invited to begin marinating themselves in a mix of 10W30 and Heinz 57 Sauce immediately.

Via wired.com

Some researchers believe that the solar cycle influences global climate changes.  They attribute recent warming trends to cyclic variation.  Skeptics, though, argue that there’s little hard evidence of a solar hand in recent climate changes.

Now, a new research report from a surprising source may help to lay this skepticism to rest.  A study from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland looking at climate data over the past century has concluded that solar variation has made a significant impact on the Earth’s climate.  The report concludes that evidence for climate changes based on solar radiation can be traced back as far as the Industrial Revolution.

Past research has shown that the sun goes through eleven year cycles.  At the cycle’s peak, solar activity occurring near sunspots is particularly intense, basking the Earth in solar heat.  According to Robert Cahalan, a climatologist at the Goddard Space Flight Center, “Right now, we are in between major ice ages, in a period that has been called the Holocene.”

Thomas Woods, solar scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder concludes, “The fluctuations in the solar cycle impacts Earth’s global temperature by about 0.1 degree Celsius, slightly hotter during solar maximum and cooler during solar minimum.  The sun is currently at its minimum, and the next solar maximum is expected in 2012.”

According to the study, during periods of solar quiet, 1,361 watts per square meter of solar energy reaches Earth’s outermost atmosphere.  Periods of more intense activity brought 1.4 watts per square meter (0.1 percent) more energy.

While the NASA study acknowledged the sun’s influence on warming and cooling patterns, it then went badly off the tracks.  Ignoring its own evidence, it returned to an argument that man had replaced the sun as the cause current warming patterns.  Like many studies, this conclusion was based less on hard data and more on questionable correlations and inaccurate modeling techniques.

The inconvertible fact, here is that even NASA’s own study acknowledges that solar variation has caused climate change in the past.  And even the study’s members, mostly ardent supports of AGW theory, acknowledge that the sun may play a significant role in future climate changes.

Via DailyTech

Sometimes, even a great firewall isn’t enough. China has apparently ordered PC makers to bundle access control software—ostensibly to protect its citizens from porn—that may allow it to remotely update a blacklist of sites.

Late last month, China quietly ordered PC manufacturers to bundle Internet access control software with all computers sold in the country. The software, which appears to be Windows-only, looks to provide a mix of features, including whitelists, blacklists, and on-the-fly content-based filtering. But the key feature that appeals to the government may be the fact that it allows blacklists to be updated remotely.

The government has already worked with the developers of the software, called “Green Dam-Youth Escort,” previously. Jinhui Computer System Engineering Co, which developed it, apparently worked out the basic features of the filtering when assisting the Chinese military in securing the distribution of internal documents, according to The Wall Street Journal, which broke the story over the weekend.

Rebecca MacKinnon, who is an Open Society Fellow and worked previously at the University of Hong Kong, has translated some of Jinhui’s press materials, which indicate that the Chinese government has worked with Jinhui to make Green Dam available as a free download, and assisted in getting it installed in schools. Jinhui had apparently already arranged to have the software bundled by a number of manufacturers.

There seems to be some confusion about the exact capabilities of Green Dam, as The Journal reported that one of Jinhui’s founders indicated that the software relies on a database of blocked sites that allows it to be updated remotely. Reuters, however, talked with the same person, who indicated that it can perform semantic and image-based evaluation of incoming content—as such, the founder claimed that it’s impossible for the software to be used for general censorship purposes. Still the two capabilities aren’t mutually exclusive, and it would certainly be possible to tune Green Dam’s semantic engine in a way that enabled it to filter out politics in addition to porn.

In any case, Green Dam will have to have been fairly well integrated into the host operating system in order to function well, which presents manufacturers with a whole host of potential problems. Manufacturers tend to bundle a lot of software with their machines, which raises the possibility of conflicts between Green Dam and other software on the machine. The auto-updating of the blacklist is also mentioned as another potential security risk, and certainly raises the prospect that computer makers will have to support software with behavior that changes over time. Although the government seems to have given manufacturers little time to adjust to the mandatory policy—it’s set to take effect July 1—for now, it appears that they’re being given the option of simply shipping disks in the box, rather than installing and enabling Green Dam.

Although China clearly exerts great control over the political content that reaches its citizens, the government appears to be extremely squeamish about is citizens’ interest in porn. As such, it’s tempting to take this policy announcement at face value: an attempt at social, rather than political control. Still, if the software does have the ability to perform remote updates of a blacklist, it will mean that the Chinese government has given itself the option of having the capacity to filter political content, available at the flick of a server-side switch.

Via Ars Technica

Even by the standards of the Pentagon fringe science arm, this project sounds far-out: “” that can be ordered to “self-assemble or alter their shape, perform a function and then disassemble themselves.” But researchers back by Darpa are actually making progress on this incredible goal, Henry Kenyon at Signal magazine reports.

One day, that could lead to “morphing aircraft and ground vehicles, uniforms that can alter themselves to be comfortable in any climate, and ’soft’ robots that flow like mercury through small openings to enter caves and bunker complexes.” A soldier could even reach into a can of unformed goop, and order up a custom-made tool or a “universal spare part.”

One team from Harvard is working on a kind of “generalized Rubik’s Cube” that can fold into all kinds of shapes. Another is trying to order large strands of synthetic DNA to bind together in a “molecular Velcro.” An MIT group is building “’self-folding origami’ machines that use specialized sheets of material with built-in actuators and data. These machines use cutting-edge mathematical theorems to fold themselves into virtually any three-dimensional object.”

The Programmable Matter project is five months into its second phase, which is supposed to wind up early next Spring. When they’re done, the researchers ought to “assemble four or five three-dimensional solids of a specific size and shape from a set of building blocks.”

Intel, which has done a bunch of programmable matter work on its own, is looking beyond those basic steps. Way, way beyond. The malleable stuff could one day “mimic the shape and appearance of a person or object being imaged in real time, and as the originals moved, so would their replicas,” according to their website. “These 3D models would be physical entities, not holograms. You could touch them and interact with them, just as if the originals were in the room with you. ”

Via Wired

The rules and decisions on key internet governance issues, such as the creation of top level domains (such as .com and .eu) and managing the internet address system that ensures computers can connect to each other, are currently made by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a private, not-for profit corporation based in California which operates under an agreement with the US Department of Commerce.

The decisions made by ICANN affect the way the internet works all around the world.

EU information society commissioner Viviane Reding on Monday (4 May) suggested a new model for overseeing the internet from October this year, when the Commerce Department agreement runs out.

She called on US President Barack Obama to fully privatise ICANN and set up an independent judicial body, described as a “G12 for internet governance,” which she described as a “multilateral forum for governments to discuss general internet governance policy and security issues.”

“I trust that President Obama will have the courage, the wisdom and the respect for the global nature of the internet to pave the way in September for a new, more accountable, more transparent, more democratic and more multilateral form of Internet Governance,” she said via a video message posted on her commission website.

The expiry of the agreement between ICANN and the US government “opens the door for the full privatisation of ICANN, and it also raises the question of to whom ICANN should be accountable,” she said.

“In the long run, it is not defendable that the government department of only one country has oversight of an internet function which is used by hundreds of millions of people in countries all over the world.”

Instead, Brussels would prefer that an international government forum that to meet twice a year makes recommendations by majority vote to the newly privatised ICANN. The forum would be restricted to representatives from 12 countries, with a regional balance taken into consideration.

Her “Internet G12″ would include two representatives each from North America, South America, Europe and Africa, three representatives from Asia and Australia, as well as the Chairman of ICANN as a non-voting member. International organisations with competences in this field meanwhile could be given observer status.

The new US administration’s position on global internet governance is not yet clear. However, during the Bush administration, Washington was steadfastly opposed to handing ICANN over to the United Nations.

The commission will hold a conference on Wednesday (6 May) in Brussels to discuss the issue with Europe’s internet community.

Via euobserver

The controversy was a good example of the danger of popculture references when explaining science. You’ve got to make sure it’s accurate in these days of Susan-Boyle-instant-stories.

The research in question, published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesfound that emotions of compassion and admiration are triggered deep within the brain, where anger and fear resides. The study also found that the brain takes four to six seconds longer to process compassion for social pain, than for physical pain.

This is where Twitter comes in: any so-called painful Tweets may literally arrive and disappear too fast for our brain to register the appropriate deep-felt emotion.  Or so claimed some press coverage. Facebook and Twitter may thus make us bad people; instant messaging makes us mean, the headlines read. To be sure, the original “leap” to Twitter came from the university’s own press release. (The reference has since been removed.)

Blogs erupted: Neurocritic, Language Log, Bad Science, and others, all posted piecescorrecting the hype. Because of a research embargo, the actual paper was released to journalists a week before release to the public and other scientists. And the paper makes zero mention of Twitter or social media. It’s most interesting finding, in fact, is that the neural source for such complex emotions is well below the cortex, and thus far from the influence of “cultural artifacts.”

Which sort of says it all, doesn’t it?  Tweet, tweet.

Listen to this podcast:

Via Scientific American

There are some factors that suggest the swine flu killing people in Mexico may be a biological weapon, but obviously no such conclusion can be drawn at this time. The World Health Organization and the U.S. government have been quick to deny such claims.

The swine flu virus is described as a completely new strain, an intercontinental mixture of human, avian and swine viruses. Tellingly, there have been no reported A-H1N1 infections of pigs.
According to a source known to former NSA official Wayne Madsen, “A top scientist for the United Nations, who has examined the outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in Africa, as well as HIV/AIDS victims, concluded that H1N1 possesses certain transmission “vectors” that suggest that the new flu strain has been genetically-manufactured as a military biological warfare weapon.

Madsen claims that his source, and another in Indonesia, “Are convinced that the current outbreak of a new strain of swine flu in Mexico and some parts of the United States is the result of the introduction of a human-engineered pathogen that could result in a widespread global pandemic, with potentially catastrophic consequences for domestic and international travel and commerce.”
However, it’s important to stress that it is far too early to make this assumption. We have to bear in mind that the number of victims has been comparatively low when one considers the fact that hundreds of thousands in Mexico contract infectious diseases every year related to poverty like tuberculosis and malaria.

Fort Detrick, the U.S. Army Medical Command installation that was the source of the 2001 anthrax attacks, is again attracting suspicion in light of the swine flu panic after it was revealed that criminal investigators are probing whether virus samples recently went missing from its biolabs.

“Chad Jones, spokesman for Fort Meade, said CID is investigating the possibility of missing virus samples from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases,” reports The Frederick News.

In February, USAMRIID halted their work when virus samples were discovered that were not listed in its inventory. Criminal investigators from the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division unit at Fort Meade are now probing whether virus samples are missing from the Army’s top biolab, which also studies pathogens including ebola, anthrax and plague.

Obviously, in light of the current swine flu scare, and the new strain’s possible synthetic origin, the fact that virus samples may have gone missing from the same Army research lab from which the 2001 anthrax strain was released is extremely disturbing.

A 2008 FBI and DOJ investigation concluded that Bruce Edwards Irvins, a microbiologist, vaccinologist, and senior biodefense researcher at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick, Maryland, was responsible for mailing anthrax to members of Congress and the media in September and October 2001.

The fact that Irvins apparently committed suicide shortly before the announcement led many to suspect that he was a patsy in a wider plot. Despite the suspicious circumstances, no autopsy was carried out on Irvins’ body. His attorney was certain that Irvins, who had cooperated with the 6-year investigation, was innocent of the five anthrax deaths.

The Department of Justice initially considered Dr. Steven Jay Hatfill to be a strong suspect in the anthrax attacks, but he later sued the government and won $5.8 million in damages. A New York Times piece on Irvins’ suicide asked the hypothetical question: “What if Dr. Hatfill had committed suicide in 2002, as friends feared he might? Would the investigators have released their evidence and announced that the perpetrator was dead?”

Fears that a mass pandemic was being readied as a biological attack have rumbled on in the conspiracy community ever since 9/11. Investigators point to the highly unusual number of deaths of top microbiologists to suggest that people with knowledge of the program are being eliminated.

Via Prison Planet

The attacks, says Bryan Sartin, director of investigative response for Verizon Business, are behind some of the millions of dollars in fraudulent ATM withdrawals that have occurred around the United States.

“We’re seeing entirely new attacks that a year ago were thought to be only academically possible,” says Sartin. Verizon Business released a report Wednesday that examines trends in security breaches. “What we see now is people going right to the source … and stealing the encrypted PIN blocks and using complex ways to un-encrypt the PIN blocks.”

The revelation is an indictment of one of the backbone security measures of U.S. consumer banking: PIN codes. In years past, attackers were forced to obtain PINs  piecemeal through phishing attacks, or the use of skimmers and cameras installed on ATM and gas station card readers. Barring these techniques, it was believed that once a PIN was typed on a keypad and encrypted, it would traverse  bank processing networks with complete safety, until it was decrypted and authenticated by a financial institution on the other side.

But the new PIN-hacking techniques belie this theory, and threaten to destabilize the banking-system transaction process.

Information about the theft of encrypted PINs first surfaced in an indictment last year against 11 alleged hackers accused of stealing some 40 million debit and credit card details from TJ Maxx and other U.S. retail networks. The affidavit, which accused Albert “Cumbajohnny” Gonzalez of leading the carding ring, indicated that the thieves had stolen “PIN blocks associated with millions of debit cards” and obtained “technical assistance from criminal associates in decrypting encrypted PIN numbers.”

But until now, no one had confirmed that thieves were actively cracking PIN encryption.

Sartin, whose division at Verizon conducts forensic investigations for companies that experience data breaches, wouldn’t identify the institutions that were hit or indicate exactly how much stolen money was being attributed to the attacks, but according to the 2009 Data Breach Investigations report, the hacks have resulted in “more targeted, cutting-edge, complex, and clever cybercrime attacks than seen in previous years.”

“While statistically not a large percentage of our overall caseload in 2008, attacks against PIN information represent individual data-theft cases having the largest aggregate exposure in terms of unique records,” says the report. “In other words, PIN-based attacks and many of the very large compromises from the past year go hand in hand.”

Although there are ways to mitigate the attacks, experts say the problem can only really be resolved if the financial industry overhauls the entire payment processing system.

“You really have to start right from the beginning,” says Graham Steel, a research fellow at the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control who wrote about one solution to mitigate some of the attacks. “But then you make changes that aren’t backwards-compatible.”

PIN hacks hit consumers particularly hard, because they allow thieves to withdraw cash directly from the consumer’s checking, savings or brokerage account, Sartin says. Unlike fraudulent credit card charges, which generally carry zero liability for the consumer, fraudulent cash withdrawals that involve a customer’s PIN can be more difficult to resolve since, in the absence of evidence of a breach, the burden is placed on the customer to prove that he or she didn’t make the withdrawal.

Some of the attacks involve grabbing unencrypted PINs, while they sit in memory on bank systems during the authorization process. But the most sophisticated attacks involve encrypted PINs.

Sartin says the latter attacks involve a device called a hardware security module (HSM), a security appliance that sits on bank networks and on switches through which PIN numbers pass on their way from an ATM or retail cash register to the card issuer. The module is a tamper-resistant device that provides a secure environment for certain functions, such as encryption and decryption, to occur.

According to the payment-card industry, or PCI, standards for credit card transaction security, PIN numbers are supposed to be encrypted in transit, which should theoretically protect them if someone intercepts the data. The problem, however, is that a PIN must pass through multiple HSMs across multiple bank networks en route to the customer’s bank. These HSMs are configured and managed differently, some by contractors not directly related to the bank. At every switching point, the PIN must be decrypted, then re-encrypted with the proper key for the next leg in its journey, which is itself encrypted under a master key that is stored in the module.

The most common method Sartin says criminals are using to get the PINs is to fool the application programming interface (or API) of the hardware security module in to helping them “understand or manipulate one key value.”

“Essentially, the thief tricks the HSM into providing the encryption key,” he says. “This is possible due to poor configuration of the HSM or vulnerabilities created from having bloated functions on the device.”

“The battle over our privacy and the hunt on filesharers is fought down in Brussels. That is why we want to go there,” the party’s leader Rickard Falkvinge told EUobserver.

The group’s electoral platform is based on three principles: to fundamentally reform copyright law, get rid of

the patent system, and ensure that citizens’ rights to privacy are respected.

“Not only do we think these are worthwhile goals. We also believe they are realistically achievable on a European basis. The sentiments that led to the formation of the Pirate Party in Sweden are present throughout Europe,” reads a party declaration.

It was in 2006, after a new law forbidding the downloading of copyright protected material from the internet, such as music and films, was introduced, that a group of Swedish file sharers decided to start a political movement, attracting over 4000 supporting signatures within the first 24 hours of the party’s launch.

A list of possible future MEPs has now been drafted, and the party is convinced it stands a good chance of winning a seat in the European assembly.

“All the way up to the election in June, controversial legislation surrounding our issues are in the pipelines. The debate puts the spotlight on us, and attract voters,” Rickard Falkvinge said.

The Pirate Party has already surpassed the long-established Green and Left parties in number of active members, while its youth wing, “Young Pirates”, has become the second biggest political youth group in the country.

The group needs an estimated 100,000 votes to cross the country’s four percent threshold in the election – a number the party thinks can be achieved by appealing to those who normally would not bother to vote but who do regularly share their strong views on computer freedoms: students, particularly at technical universities.

Perfect timing

The timing of the European elections is perfect for those who defend cost-free consumption of culture online.

The Swedish media, political establishment and public opinion has for over a year been involved in heated discussions about surveillance in society, bringing file-sharing and online rules to the top of the political agenda.

Last summer, a controversial law on tapping e-mails was passed by the Swedish parliament, giving officials the power to open all emails and listen to any telephone conversation in the country. The bill provoked widespread opposition, with protesters handing out copies of George Orwell’s 1984.

Soon after, the new “Ipred-law”, based on the European Union’s Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive, which would give copyright holders the right to seek a court order requiring internet service providers to reveal the names of people linked to IP-addresses through which illegal downloading occurs, caused a fresh ruckus.

Over 50,000 internet users immediately signed up to the “Stop the Ipred-law” group on Facebook, and the Pirate Party signed up 600 new members in only one day.

Expressen, a daily newspaper, wrote in an editorial that even though the EU has given young people things like the Erasmus study programme, aka the possibility of drinking wine in another EU country with other European youngsters, it has not made EU politics more interesting to them.

But the fact that the Brussels makes proposals such as the Ipred-law and the data retention directive has caught the young voters interest in the EU, the paper stated, guessing that election participation among the young would reach unexpected heights in June if for no other reason than pure “Ipred-fury”.

Media-hyped trial

More than 10 percent of the Swedish population participates in file-sharing, according to Statistics Sweden. For men between the ages of 26 to 35, the figure rises to 56 percent.

With new anti-piracy measures, around 1.3 million ‘ordinary people’ – and voters – of all ages, professions and social backgrounds, risk being criminalised for a hobby they have no intention of giving up, and they are closely following the state of play with legislation that affects file-sharing.

On 16 February, a highly publicised trial of the content industry begnan against those responsible for the Pirate Bay, a site that enables people to find others willing to share audio, video, games and other files with them.

Four individuals have been charged with being accessories to breaking copyright law, facing fines or up to two years in prison if found guilty.

Plaintiffs in the case include media giants such as Warner Bros, MGM, Colombia Pictures Industries, 20th Century Fox, Sony BMG, Universal and EMI, led by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). They are claiming damages of €12 million.

The first day of the trial was such an event that Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter’s reported that tickets to get the courtroom were selling on the black market for as high as €50.

The trial’s political undercurrent has been powerful, with the Pirate Party accepting more than 2000 new members since it began. The court’s decision on the Pirate Bay trial is due on April 17.

European pirates unite

While Sweden is home to the first Pirate Party, similar groupings have since sprung up all over Europe, many of which are planning to run in the June elections on the same manifesto as their Swedish peers.

The German Pirate Party is busy trying to collect enough signatures to be able to run in the election.

“We have got a lot of hard work to do… but we really want to reach the goal we set for ourselves, to take part in the European elections,” a spokesperson for the German pirate branch states on the party’s website.

In an interview with Canal Plus, the leader of the Spanish Pirate Party, Carlos Ayala, explains that his party will use the internet rather than traditional campaigning methods to reach disaffected voters ahead of the June elections.

Other countries with their own pirate branches include Finland, Poland, Austria, Belgium and France. But not all have the same instant appeal to their voters.

“It’s not realistic to hope for our own all-pirates political group in the European Parliament this year, but definitely for 2014,” Rikard Falkvinge told this website.

Under current EU assembly rules, a party must have at least 25 members from seven member states.

Via euobserver

Further Reading :

The Pirate Bay Blog

Pirate Bay Founders Jailed For A Ship Already Plundered

Pirate Bay’s Neo-Nazi Sugar Daddy

A court in Sweden has jailed four men behind The Pirate Bay (TPB), the world’s most high-profile file-sharing website, in a landmark case.

Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde were found guilty of breaking copyright law and were sentenced to a year in jail.

They were also ordered to pay 30m kronor (£2.4m) in damages.

In a Twitter posting, Mr Sunde said: “Nothing will happen to TPB, this is just theatre for the media.”

Mr Sunde went on to say that he “got the news last night that we lost”.

“It used to be only movies, now even verdicts are out before the official release.”

It is almost certain that The Pirate Bay will keep on sailing, long after today’s court judgement  Read more at the dot.life blog

The damages were awarded to a number of entertainment companies, including Warner Bros, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI, and Columbia Pictures.

Speaking to the BBC, the chairman of industry body the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) John Kennedy said the verdict sent out a clear message.

“These guys weren’t making a principled stand, they were out to line their own pockets. There was nothing meritorious about their behaviour, it was reprehensible.

“The Pirate Bay did immense harm and the damages awarded doesn’t even get close to compensation, but we never claimed it did.

The Pirate Bay’s first server is now a museum exhibit in Stockholm

“There has been a perception that piracy is OK and that the music industry should just have to accept it. This verdict will change that,” he said.

The Pirate Bay is the world’s most high profile file-sharing website and was set up in 2003 by anti-copyright organisation Piratbyran, but for the last five years it has been run by individuals.

Millions of files are exchanged using the service every day.

No copyright content is hosted on The Pirate Bay’s web servers; instead the site hosts “torrent” links to TV, film and music files held on its users’ computers.

The four indicated earlier this week that they would appeal if convicted.

Via BBC