Time Holes!

I try to keep abreast of the latest in science and technology, especially when that science is related to Sci-Fi. Since I already keep track of Sci-Fi, it's rare for me to find a breakthrough that I've heard about the first time. Which is why this one is so mind-numbing to me:

Time Cloaking

The premise is so simple that I did a mental forehead-slap when I read about it. To cloak time, all you do is compress light in time (take a beam of light which travels in 15ns, compress it so that it seems like it travelled 10ns) and then decompress it (after 5ns, so that it appears to have travelled for 15ns).
The end result is a "hole" of 5ns which can't be observed by whoever is actually observing that light beam. For a better idea, see the image at the link.

This poses immense potential for applications of the unethical kind. Even at the microscopic level, optic fibers could be hacked, manipulated and the data would have no evidence of being tampered with since time and light both would appear to be the same for the observer.

Anti-Bore Rating: 3/5 TARDIS

Digital Armageddon

Bitcoin Price Tumbles After Massive Account Hack and Sell-Off on Trading Site Mt.Gox - Gizmodo

Ok. So maybe that particular piece of fiction turning to reality is not exactly just around the corner. But we are inching our way there. My theme for the last post was digital Armageddon. Apparently it continues.

Bitcoin, for the neophyte, is a digital currency. It was created to "revolutionize" global economy. In fact, It's complex enough that I have no shame in stating that I am largely clueless about how it works. Finance was never my forte.

The unique thing about Bitcoin is that you can generate it yourself. Just like RBI or Federal Reserve Banks print currency, with the proper software kit, you can generate this digital currency on your local machine. No doubt at this point you will be "Hah!"-ing at the fact that if you can generate money yourself, it will have absolutely no value whatsoever. Wrong. Bitcoin generation is tightly controlled using P2P network and hardware encryption and only a fixed amount of Bitcoins are actually allowed into the economy and in a controlled manner. Which is why Bitcoins are (or were, as you will read) running at a whopping exchange rate of $17.50

Until someone pulled an "Ocean" on the Bitcoin market. Much like ordinary currency and/or stocks and shares, if someone comes and tries to offload a huge amount into the market, the value goes down. Plummets, in fact. Now it's next to impossible to be able to generate a huge amount of Bitcoin instantaneously, there are people out the who did get into the act early on. Unfortunately one of these individuals had their account hacked and the hacker tried to off-load the entire stash and tried to sell the Bitcoins to themselves and then exchange it for cash, about $1000. Bitcoins crashed to a few pennies in a matter of hours.
Fortunately safeguards and alarm bells saved the day and MT.Gox stopped the fiasco. In fact, they reversed all exchanges for 20 Jun 2011 to bring the Bitcoin back to $17.50

What's this got to do with Digital Armageddon? We are living in a digital age where valuable information is cheap. And hackers are having a field day because every one goes open-source with whatever exploit they manage to find in the name of justice. Bitcoin has certain flaws in that they hardly have any password system. Just a digital signature which is a file that can be copied a it too easily for comfort.

Unfortunately we work with 100GBs of space which we use indiscriminately along with Operating Systems with security holes that are half the reason we have ended up in this muck. Our personal laptops and official PCs are filled with tons of cookies, "temporary files", unprotected Word docs and lord know what that are a gold mine for the people with the wrong intent. Corporate are not much better at protecting this data and it's just a dream come true for hackers. And here we are working to moving all our personal, medical, financial data online at our very finger-tips without pausing to see that the light at the end of the tunnel is a train coming our way.

Anti Bore rating: 3/5 BTC

Armageddon Online!

If you have been following the news lately, you won't be surprised to know of the various hack attacks that have been plaguing the WWW. In fact it has become a trend and hackers are now vying for "Anonymous Celebrity" status.

UPDATE: I'll try updating this list as I come across interesting news
March 2011   - Pentagon suffered the most damaging cyberattack till date
April 20 2011 - Sony PSN and Qriocity hacked to steal credit card info of customers
May 10 2011 - Citibank was hacked to steal financial data of more than 210,000 customers
May 17 2011 - RSA announced it was hacked and Security Tokens were compromised
May 20 2011 - Lockheed, manufacturer of high end aero-weapons  was "almost" hacked
June 01 2011 - Gmail accounts of politicians and activists hacked
June 27 2011 - Washington Post hacked. 1.27MM accounts compromised.
June 28 2011 - Universal Music and Viacom hacked
July 02 2011 - Florida Voter Database leaked


The list is endless. There is an excellent post of the timeline of hacks by Lulz. Unfortunately most people don't seem to be realize the acceleration of these attacks. Since last year the hackers have been speeding up and attacking more high profile targets. And the one thing that has become absolutely certain is that trusting your personal data to big companies is not a good idea.

This excellent video about STUXNET is an excellent infovid about the anatomy of a manufactured virus that has the potential to affect facilities like nuclear reactors, power grids, oil rigs and so forth.

Here's an extremely detailed read about how STUXNET was discovered: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/how-digital-detectives-deciphered-stuxnet/all/1

Things are quickly spiraling and there is no one to keep watch. The next few months will be interesting to say the least. If you've seen 12 monkeys, you'd know of the concept of a man releasing a virus that wipes out humanity from the face of the planet. To say that there is a possibility that a virus/worm that has the potential to bring down the WWW is hardly a case of fiction any more. But hey, look at the bright side: people may step out and see the sun more often.

Anti-Bore rating: 4/5 Nukes!

Black Hole Sun

When I heard that these guys are working towards Armageddon, I thought the media had gone off on another wild tangent of ludicrousness. After reading this report about how CERN is using LHC to create the densest material in the universe (that's QGP, duh!) after black holes, I heard a distinctly ominous ring of truth.

Quark-Gluon Plasma is a kind of "soup" (seriously, it's called soup) of quarks and gluons which can exist only at unearthly pressure and temperatures, something like 4 trillion degrees Celsius. 4 trillion is more zeroes at the end of the string than I can count. I tried and I gave up. This is the kind of Fringe Science that caused Walter to mess up Walternate's universe...
Meanwhile, here's another Black Hole Sun by an awesome guitarist:

Anti-Bore rating: 3/5 Quarks

3 MILLION Pre-Orders, A change of history and 6 weeks of downtime

3 Million Pre-Orders!
Samsung Galaxy S II at 3 MILLION Pre-Orders | Android Community

I don't know what Samsung did right (or wrong) but to say that they under-estimated the demand would be an under-statement. For a handset they predicted to sell 10 million units of in a year, getting 3 million pre-orders is something of an overkill. I'm guessing that some sales managers are popping the cork this entire month. Probably taking a bath in it.

Woe to the market forecast people though ;)

A Change of History

In other news, a bunch of idiots did this: Hillary Clinton Photoshopped

Not on your best day can you justify this. This is actually trying to change history. I am not concerned about whether they were trying to prevent "sexually suggestive" images of women appearing on a mass publication. What I am concerned about is the fact that whoever does follow this crap would forever be under the impression that women don't make world-changing decisions. How would they ever know that women have come a long way from the biblical times. In fact, they were already there if you consider Deborah, the first woman judge of Israel.

I'd love to see how they handle the headline when America gets her first POTUS (President of the US, for u neophytes who haven't stampeded to the nearest bookstore to pick up Tom Clancy's books after the recent Osama operation).

6 weeks of downtime

And the last bit of news which really pisses me off: SONY PSN to come up by May 31st

It'll take 6 weeks for PSN to come online. 6 weeks! By the time I am able to go online and head-to-head against my friends in Battlefield Bad Company 2, I'll be a bloody noob! It'll take me a week to get back to "headshots only" form. But leave that aside, I still have two burning questions:

1. What did the hackers do to bring PSN down for six weeks? If they can do it to PSN, there are way more critical systems which can be brought down like it.

2. How is Sony handling the loss of revenue? That's an estimated $20 million of revenue, from just one attack (Cost of Sony PSN downtime)

Services like MS Xbox Live, WoW, or even non-gaming one's like Amazon MP3 and online Magazines better sit up and take a look at how vulnerable they are. Cos I don't thint Sony would have had to shell out $20MM for protecting their system, but they sure did lose it for not protecting it.

Aamasutra

Am I the only one who sees how they are blatantly portraying oral sex in this ad (Rasiya, wink wink)?If you think I'm being paranoid, see the clip at around 0:30, in black and white.


I just wonder which marketing guru came up with this. Were they trying to separate the customer segment from Maaza which clearly targets the family and kids segment? Is Slice trying to tap into the "latent sexual desires" of the urban youth? Or simply put, what the hell were these guys smoking?

Slice is a great drink. I prefer it over Maaza anytime. However every time I look a Katrina doing various weird things to that mango which no normal woman would do, I am left with this slight feeling of having witnessed something dirty. Which oft puts me off Slice. Go figure.

Wierdness rating: 5/5 Mangifera

Rotten Apples

I just read this article: http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-responds-to-location-scandal-2011-4

The "official response" from Apple really pisses me off. I am constantly amazed by their audacity to think that the consumers are a bunch of nit-wits.
"Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so".

Is that way people have been creating maps of their location history based of location data gleaned from their iphones?

And what about the reports where people noticed their iphone taking anonymous candid photos?

"Users are confused, partly because the creators of this new technology (including Apple) have not provided enough education about these issues to date"
Users are confused? The only ones confused are the marketing boffins at Apple. When addressing a public issue, you don't go about calling your customers confused. Users were the ones who pointed this out in the first place. And if this is an official statement, why is Apple dragging in the other "creators" of this technology?

"anonymous and encrypted" -bullshit.
"This is a bug" - more bullshit.

I am an Android fan. I am waiting to see how google addresses this issue (even though they don't track your location info if you opt out of it). Probably cos they didn't "build" a bug into their OS.

Rotten rating: 3/5 Anti-iPhones