Just got back home from watching Interstellar. If you haven’t seen the movie go watch it. It is one of the best movies I have seen in a long time. A classic like 2001: A Space Odyssey. The science behind most of the movie is amazing. A small part of the logic didn’t make sense and felt contrived but overall the movie plot worked out beautifully.
– Suramya
All of us know stupid people and at times have thought about how could a human be so dumb and still survive. Now after years of research Scientists at the Johns Hopkins Medical School and the University of Nebraska have found a possible reason for some of the folks being so dumb. There is a virus that exists in the green algae found in ponds and lakes that affects cognitive functions in the brain. In their tests 44% of the test subjects had the virus infection and those who tested positive for the virus scored 7-9 points lower on tests designed to measure the brain’s accuracy and speed.
They then ran some tests on mice after infecting them with the virus and found that the infected mice had a harder time exiting from the test maze than uninfected mice.
The researchers were conducting a completely unrelated study into throat microbes when they realised that DNA in the throats of healthy people matched the DNA of a chlorovirus virus known as ATCV-1.
ATCV-1 is a virus that infects the green algae found in freshwater lakes and ponds. It had previously been thought to be non-infectious to humans, but the scientists found that it actually affects cognitive functions in the brain by shortening attention span and causing a decrease in spatial awareness.
The researchers then studied how ATCV-1 affected mice by injecting the virus into their digestive tracts.
They then put the mice into a maze, where the animals infected by the virus had a more difficult time finding their way round and were less likely to pay attention to a new object or notice a new entry that had been previously inaccessible.
ATCV-1 was able to get into the hippocampus pathways of the mice and alter the expression of genes relating to memory formation, learning and synaptic plasticity (an important foundation of learning and memory), as well as how the immune systems of the mice responded to being exposed to the virus.
The full study is is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal.
Thanks to Slashdot.org for the link to the original story.
– Suramya
Yesterday (well, technically today) I was trying to find some data on my old phone to copy to my new phone so I decided to copy over all the folders from the phone to my desktop to make it easier to look through it. While I was going through the data I found a folder called .keepsafe under the Android/data folder so I looked in it cause I got curious and found some interesting data. Actually before I tell you what I found lets take a step back and go over what Keepsafe is: It is an app for both iOS and android that allows you to hide photos/files on your phone and then only people with the correct PIN can view them. From their site: “You lock your rings in a jewelry box. You lock your certificates in a cabinet. Now KeepSafe makes sure your personal files are locked down and hidden, using privacy features such as PIN Pad and Fake PIN.” I had installed this version of Keepsafe a few years ago to try it out but had since uninstalled it as I didn’t find it useful.
Coming back to the folder and what I found. It had two files under it: .local and .email. The .email file had my email address in it but the contents of the .local file were shocking. It had my ‘secret pin’ in clear-text in the file. So anyone with some idea of how apps store data and access to a file browser would have been able to get my pin and view images/data that was supposed to have been protected.
Since this was an older version of the software I downloaded and installed the latest version on my S5 to see if the issue was still there. Thankfully someone at the company figured out that storing the data in clear-text was extremely stupid and in the latest version of the software the same two files are still there but the data is encrypted. Not sure how strong the encryption is because I don’t have the knowledge/skill set to try to figure that out. I did however identify where the files are being stored (they are all encrypted as well) so someone with the original image and an encrypted copy could potentially reverse engineer the encryption and assuming they are using a static encryption key decrypt the remaining files as well.
Moral of the story is that if you want to ‘hide’ data on your phone be very careful of the software you use to do it. Ideally you should avoid storing any data that is sensitive on the phone. There are plenty of ways to get access to the data if someone is interested and has time. This is not an isolated case of a badly written software, There are other cases as well where other software was found to have similar amazing security. So be careful out there.
I did find some more interesting data on the phone that I will take a stab at when I get some time.
Well this is all for now. Will write more later.
– Suramya
Security pro Laurens Van Houtven has created a free introduction cryptography course to help programmers, by giving them a bird’s eye view of how cryptosystems work and teaching them to apply the same principles in real software. This is an extension of his talk given last year on breaking crypto.
Comes with everything you need to understand complete systems such as SSL/TLS: block ciphers, stream ciphers, hash functions, message authentication codes, public key encryption, key agreement protocols, and signature algorithms.
Learn how to exploit common cryptographic flaws, armed with nothing but a little time and your favorite programming language.
Forge administrator cookies, recover passwords, and even backdoor your own random number generator.
Check it out at: Crypto 101
Thanks to The Register for the link to this great resource.
– Suramya
If you are like me then you must have spent a ton of money and time playing classic arcade games like Frogger, Pac-man plus etc over many long afternoons. A few days ago (2 days to be exact) over 900 of such games were released online and the best part is that you can play them right in the browser. Say good-bye to the possibility of doing any productive work for the next couple of days. 🙂
Check it out at: The Internet Arcade.
Of the roughly 900 arcade games (yes, nine hundred arcade games) up there, some are in pretty weird shape – vector games are an issue, scaling is broken for some, and some have control mechanisms that are just not going to translate to a keyboard or even a joypad.
But damn if so many are good enough. More than good enough. In the right browser, on a speedy machine, it almost feels perfect. The usual debates about the “realness†of emulation come into play, but it works.
Obviously, a lot of people are going to migrate to games they recognize and ones that they may not have played in years. They’ll do a few rounds, probably get their asses kicked, smile, and go back to their news sites.
A few more, I hope, will go towards games they’ve never heard of, with rules they have to suss out, and maybe more people will play some of these arcades in the coming months than the games ever saw in their “real†lifetimes.
Well this is all for now. I am off to relive some memories and to try getting the stupid frog across the road without getting squished.
Source: Slashdot.org
– Suramya
Those who know me know that I am a big fan of Doctor Who and have been a fan for a while. It is one of the most iconic Science Fiction shows out there along with Star Trek and Star Wars. Now BBC is planning on using that popularity to encourage children to learn coding. Yes, you read that right: “Dr Who is going to help kids learn how to code”. The game is called “The Doctor and the Dalek†and it aims to get children to use logical reasoning, variables and loops and repetition to help the Doctor save the universe from the Daleks, teaching them the basics of programing while having fun.
Unfortunately the game is only accessible if you are based out of UK 🙁 which is not surprising considering this is BBC we are talking about. They are famous for restricting content based on geographical boundaries. But from what I have read about it online, it looks like a lot of fun and even though I know programing I want to try it out. Hopefully they will open it up to a broader audience in the near future as I would love to have my Nieces and Nephews take it out for a spin. (and I will of course be there to ‘help’ them play the game)
If you are located in UK you can check it out at the cbbc site.
– Suramya
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No, this is not a joke or a toy for a 5 year old. In the 70’s the computers were still not in the affordable range for 99% of the population so a bright chap by the name of David Hagelbarger working at Bell Laboratories designed CARDIAC (CARDboard Illustrative Aid to Computation) as an educational tool to give people without access to computers the ability to learn how computers work. Basically it is a micro-processor made out of cardboard.
The CARDIAC computer is a single-accumulator single-address machine, which means that instructions operate on the accumulator alone, or on the accumulator and a memory location. The machine implements 10 instructions, each of which is assigned a 3-digit decimal opcode. The instruction set architecture includes instructions common to simple Von Neumann processors, such as load, store, add/subtract, and conditional branch.
Operating the computer is fairly simple–the cardboard slides guide you through the operation of the ALU and instruction decoder, and the flow chart shows you which stage to go to next. The program counter is represented by a cardboard ladybug which is manually moved through the program memory after each instruction completes.
Even though the CARDIAC is dated and very simplistic, it is still a useful tool to teach how microprocessors work. Although modern processors include multi-stage pipelines, finely-tuned branch predictors, and numerous other improvements, the basic principles of operation remain the same
You can print your own by visiting Kyle Miller’s Site. More information about CARDIAC and how to use it is available at cs.drexel.edu and on it’s Wikipedia site.
Thanks to Hackaday.com for the story.
– Suramya
Here’s an interesting site that teaches Cybersecurity to folks in the form of a game. As you know cyber criminals are getting more and more sophisticated and the best way to counter that is to train more folks on the basic principles of Cyber Security. It is targeted towards children but is good fun for adults as well.
Take cybersecurity into your own hands. In this Lab, you’ll defend a company that is the target of increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks. Your task is to strengthen your cyber defenses and thwart the attackers by completing a series of cybersecurity challenges. You’ll crack passwords, craft code, and defeat malicious hackers.
Check it out at: NovaLabs Cybersecurity
Source: Popsci.com
– Suramya
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