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Boba Fett on the Microsoft Payroll?
Microsoft is getting serious about security—really serious. Gates and crew have stepped forward and announced the Anti-Virus Reward Program, offering a quarter-million dollars for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the “saboteurs of cyberspace” behind the Blaster worm; a quarter-million dollars for helping capture and convict those behind the Sobig virus attack; and four-and-a-half million has been set aside for future rewards.
Will it work? Many have their doubts: Some say that this is just hype to show concern for the masses by offering to help the government. Others say the guilty parties and their kind will be less likely to ’fess up to each other, let alone tattle. According to FBI spokesman Paul Bresson, who worked with Microsoft to set up the bounty, “We’ve never suggested that this reward will deter future hackers or criminal activity from authors of this type of code. What deters criminals is jail time.”
To date, no arrests have been made, and no jail time has been served.
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http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,113331,00.asp
Wi-Fi Goes WAPI
China is regulating the sale of wireless networking equipment within its borders by requiring that all Wi-Fi goods sold there incorporate its own encryption.
The encryption is secret (that is, only 11 Chinese companies are authorized to work with it), so industry giants throughout the world must somehow learn to work around China’s WAPI (WLAN Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure).
Why, China, Why?
One possible explanation is that China wants to protect its citizens. With security holes wide enough to drive a truck through, the WEP alternative to WAPI, which the rest of the world uses, may have proved unattractive. But is there something more insidious at work? One additional feature of WAPI is that the Chinese government can decrypt the back-and-forth communications of those same WEP-free “protected” citizens.
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http://news.com.com/2100-7351_3-5122920.html
Photons and Molecules: A New Partnership
Researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, recently succeeded in bringing a beam of light to a complete stop. Rather awesome considering that the beam was half a mile long. It was slowed down by a parachute effect created by chilled sodium gas, and the entire beam was contained in a chamber for only a millisecond before continuing its journey full speed ahead.
This is particularly exciting news for those in the quantum computing world, who know how handy light particles could be for storing and processing data—if we could only manipulate them effectively.
Patience, though. Stopping light for a millisecond is a far cry from collecting—and using—millions of protons in a quantum computing core. From humble beginnings . . .
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http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20031212S0015
SETI Where Are You, Mersenne Prime?
Certainly you and your loved ones have discussed donating spare CPU cycles to projects promoting the common good? Perhaps you chose to donate your extra horsepower to the popular SETI@home project. Despite over 4.8 million users lending a hand, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has yet to sight ET.
Meanwhile, you could have been one the 60,000 volunteers on a grid project that has actually completed its work. The GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) project brought together math nerds near and far to calculate the latest Mersenne Prime (a fancy number for the largest known prime number). At present, the all-time high is 2 to the 20,996,011th power minus 1. A sweeping 6,320,430 digits long, this prime is more than 2 million digits larger than the previously discovered one.
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Originally published in Queue vol. 1, no. 10—
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