Category Archives: Tangential Art and Science
Since we became our own secretaries, it seems that we have to know nearly everything these days.
BSPR – Ultimate Acronym or Cloud Guarantee?
We bring it up because we like the idea of someone certifying their safety, and taking responsibility for it. There must be some ‘out’, since hithertoo unknown flaws seem to take precidence over following all the compliance rules. But it is nice that the EU might put this in place, which will make it harder for cloud providers, yet by leveling the playing field toward quality it will make the whole system shine.
From the artilce:
When the EU drafts a new data protection law in November, it will introduce rules designed to ensure cloud providers are offering a safe service, IT Pro has learned.
The Binding Safe Processor Rules (BSPR) will ask cloud service providers working in the EU to agree to becoming legally liable should any data offences occur at their data centres, lawyers said yesterday.
It will effectively act as an accreditation scheme for cloud providers, meaning it will need vendors to sign up to the initiative.
However, the driving force behind the new rules, partner at Field Fisher Waterhouse Eduardo Ustaran, said service providers were certain to sign up as it would give them a much-needed selling point and, if they didn’t, they would be seen as unsafe to use.
To get that accreditation, vendors would have to prove their security models were adequate as well, Ustaran said.
“Cloud service providers would be given an accreditation from their data protection authority,” Ustaran told IT Pro.
Verizon Business is one organisation that has been pushing for the EU to enshrine the BSPR concept in data protection law, which is now set to happen.
Stewart Room, partner in FFW’s Privacy and Information Law Group, described it as the “bridge” for cloud adoption, given the fears around being legally liable if data offences occur in the cloud.
However, it will do little to allay fears around the US Patriot Act, which is fast emerging as a real threat to cloud adoption. The law effectively means the US can search through any US-run cloud provider’s data centres to find information on illegal activities.
For companies planning on using vendors with data centres in the US, this poses a significant obstacle to cloud adoption.
The European Parliament has already raised concerns about the impact of the Patriot Act and its effective overriding of EU data protection laws.
Legal changes incoming
In November, the EU will publish the draft new data protection law, which will form the basis of national legislations for the next 15-20 years. This will replace the current Data Protection Directive and the Data Protection Act in the UK.
Outside of the new Binding Safe Processor Rules, mandatory breach disclosure will be embedded in the draft law.
“We are certain that mandatory breach disclosure laws will be contained with the new EU data protection law. The European Commission has made this clear already,” Room said.
This means companies will be required to report any breaches, making more work for Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). It makes it much more likely private companies will be reprimanded by the watchdog, if it decides to show its teeth.
Room believes the ICO will order companies to provide records of any breaches on a monthly basis.
For further coverage of cloud computing visit our sister siteCloud Pro.
Women in STEM: A Gender Gap to Innovation
• Although women fill close to half of all jobs in the U.S. economy, they hold less than 25 percent of STEM jobs. This has been the case throughout the past decade, even as college-educated women have increased their share of the overall workforce.
• Women with STEM jobs earned 33 percent more than comparable women in non-STEM jobs – considerably higher than the STEM premium for men. As a result, the gender wage gap is smaller in STEM jobs than in non-STEM jobs.
• Women hold a disproportionately low share of STEM undergraduate degrees, particularly in engineering.
• Women with a STEM degree are less likely than their male counterparts to work in a STEM occupation; they are more likely to work in education or healthcare.
There are many possible factors contributing to the discrepancy of women and men in STEM jobs, including: a lack of female role models, gender stereotyping, and less family-friendly flexibility in the STEM fields. Regardless of the causes, the findings of this report provide evidence of a need to encourage and support women in STEM.
A good synopsis is at: Study: Women Aren’t Taking Science And Tech Jobs | TPM Idea Lab
iPad Security & Network Management Tips
Excellent Security Articles for iPhone/iPad users:
iOpener – How safe is your iPhone data? – The H Security: News and Features
Three iPhone and iPad security tips – The H Security: News and Features
Excellent iPad/iPhone Network Management Article:
Manage heterogenous systems with your iPad | ITworld
Video to iPad/iPhone/Android Direct
The Vulkano Flow gives consumers the freedom to watch their TV anywhere in the world using smartphones, tablets and computers. Vulkano users can now instantly begin recording their favorite television programming so they never miss historic news or memorable sporting moments.
“The Vulkano line of devices has been created to offer consumers the ultimate flexibility in entertainment and we are proud to be the first to offer direct recording and DVR for mobile devices,” said Colin Stiles, EVP Sales and Marketing at Monsoon. “Consumers are making smartphones and tablets an essential part of their every day lives and are expecting to view and browse the TV content that they pay for at their leisure, no matter where they are in the world.”
Summary of Direct to Mobile Recording and DVR features on Vulkano Devices:
- Direct to mobile recording supports iPhone, iPad, and Android phones and tablets
- Full DVR capabilities including Pause, Rewind and Fast Forward
- iPhone/iPad recording in mp4 formats containing H264+AAC
- Android recording in mp4 formats containing H264+AAC
- iPhone/iPad recording in D1 or 640×480 or 352×240 resolutions
- Android recording in D1 or 640×480 or 352×240 resolutions
- Insufficient memory alert
Pricing and Availability
The Vulkano Flow ($99.99) is now available at Fry’s Electronics, Amazon, MicroCenter, other leading retailers and etailers as well as at www.myvulkano.com. Android, tablet and additional smartphone applications can be purchased for $12.99 each in their respective app stores.
About Monsoon Multimedia
Monsoon Multimedia provides advanced, standards-based multimedia products and convergence technologies for the PC, Mac, iPad and major smartphones. Founded by the founders of Dazzle and Emuzed, the company has offices in California,India, Russia and Singapore. For more information, please visit www.monsoonmultimedia.com.
Photopic Sky Survey
We deal in light, they deal in light. We’ve waited 15 years for d-cinema to mature. They’ve waited billions of years for dust to become sand and sand to become computers and computers to become cameras.
The site says: “The Photopic Sky Survey is a 5,000 megapixel photograph of the entire night sky stitched together from 37,440 exposures. Large in size and scope, it portrays a world far beyond the one beneath our feet and reveals our familiar Milky Way with unfamiliar clarity.” Take a break. Check it out: Photopic Sky Survey
Ohga-san Passes
Growing up in entertainment technology in the 70’s meant growing up with relationships with Sony in many areas of the business. The myth of the company revolved around two people; co-Founder Akio Morita and Ohga-san, Mr. Norio Ohga. (The other founder, Mr. Masaru Ibuka didn’t have as much of a public profile, for us gaijin at least.)
Your editor has had many incarnations of relationships with members of the Sony group, in Tokyo and Atsugi in Japan, in Los Angeles and New York and London. The spirit of the two pioneers most always seemed to have infused everyone with the desire for the highest quality in every aspect of the many games they played.
Ohga-san has passed. This article in the New York Times explains some of the attributes of the man: Norio Ohga, Who Led Sony Beyond Electronics, Dies at 81. May there be many more people like him.
PDF/A: Federal Court Requirement
The is a blog on the Adobe site, Acrobat for Legal Professionals, which has an article of interest:
Federal Courts Moving to Requiring PDF/A for Filings « Acrobat for Legal Professionals
It is interesting for the DCinema world because pdf files are regularly sent to projectionist’s computers which also have keys and critical private information on them. Even if company policy restricts non-cinema related material on a computer it would still be subject to the vagaries of chance that some pdf contained some version of malware. Unlike mail attachments, pdf files can have embedded files that don’t get caught at firewalls or by virus checkers.
And frankly, who has the time to keep up with all the updates that Adobe has thrown at us in the last two years?
Back to the article about the US Federal Court system not allowing any other version of pdf file except for PDF/A. They are not the first and won’t be the last to go this way. A lot of work went into making PDF/A an archival standard and many organizations mandate it. What is interesting is that it finally made it into the mainstream as lawyers file documents every hour and now have to learn how to create a PDF/A file correctly, constantly and easily.
In the article the author makes the following points about PDF/A
In a nutshell, here’s what you need to know about PDF/A:
- PDF/A is a specific flavor of PDF
- PDF 1.4 format (Acrobat 5 level file)
- All fonts embedded
- PDF/A is designed for long term archiving.
Files must be self-contained with no reliance on external players or links.
- PDF/A does not allow:
- Cross-document links (e.g. a link to a separate PDF file)
- Dynamic media such as movies or sounds
- Links to destinations outside the PDF itself including other PDFs and websites
- Security of any kind
- [Editor: Links can be made using standard HTML code.]
The entire article is worth reading. It is premised upon the user using Microsoft products, but it should be known that open source products like OpenOffice have an easy PDF/A creation tool, and Apple Macintosh products from Adobe also can follow this standard.
Eye better than camera capturing simultaneous contrast and faint detail
“One of the big success stories, and the first example of information processing by the nervous system, was the discovery that the nerve cells in the eye inhibit their neighbors, which allows the eye to accentuate edges,” said Richard Kramer, UC Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology. “This is great if you only care about edges. But we also want to know about the insides of objects, especially in dim light.”
This terrific story comes from the terrific Terra Daily
Why the eye is better than a camera at capturing contrast and faint detail simultaneously
Kramer and former graduate student Skyler L. Jackman, now a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University, discovered that while light-sensitive nerve cells in the retina inhibit dozens of their close neighbors, they also boost the response of the nearest one or two nerve cells.
That extra boost preserves the information in individual light detecting cells – the rods and cones – thereby retaining faint detail while accentuating edges, Kramer said. The rods and cones thus get both positive and negative feedback from their neighbors.
“By locally offsetting negative feedback, positive feedback boosts the photoreceptor signal while preserving contrast enhancement,” he said.
Jackman, Kramer and their colleagues at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha report their findings in the journal PLoS Biology. Kramer also will report the findings at the 2011 annual meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.
Read the rest of the article at: Why the eye is better than a camera at capturing contrast and faint detail simultaneously
Cones normally release the neurotransmitter glutamate in the dark, while light decreases glutamate release. This graph of neurotransmitter release shows what happens when cone cells are exposed to a dark spot in a light background (top) under various scenarios, including no feedback (green trace) and only negative feedback from horizontal cells (red trace). Negative feedback to many cones enhances edges, but would decrease detail in dark areas were it not for newly discovered positive feedback that is localized to only a few cone cells (blue trace). Credit: Richard Kramer lab, UC Berkeley
Stuxnet Solved
The worm then appears to have been introduced into Natanz via infected laptops or USB drives. There, Stuxnet infected the Siemens control systems and, specialists say, manipulated centrifugal speeds to a degree that caused permanent damage to the motors.
This article is derived from Stuxnet: five companies used as spring-boards – The H Security: News and Features which was taken from Symantics papers that can be seen here: Updated W32.Stuxnet Dossier is Available | Symantec Connect
It is interesting to the community because it shows that an attack on somewhat secure, but somewhat monoculture systems can be done. And since we have somewhat secure, but somewhat monoculture systems, it is a lesson toward the premise of being constantly vigilant.
Symantec managed to trace the worm’s dissemination pathways and infection figures because Stuxnet itself apparently logs the computers it infects. The logged information contained exact timings and served as the basis for Symantec’s analyses. According to the AV vendor, 3,280 unique samples of the worm were responsible for approximately 12,000 infections.
Reportedly, the first attack took place in June 2009, and further attacks followed in July 2009, March 2010, April 2010 and May 2010. Various organisations were targeted repeatedly by the Stuxnet authors, and some computers were successfully infected several times.
The creators of the worm deployed three variants of Stuxnet via targeted attacks, but only the variant deployed in March contained what was a zero-day exploit for the LNK hole in Windows at that time. Using the timestamps in the compiled code, Symantec concluded that the first infection was already successful only 12 hours after the first version of Stuxnet was completed.
The new analyses show that Stuxnet actually contained two sabotage routines to infect and manipulate two separate types of control, but that the second routine was incomplete and disabled. Experts assume that the developers ran out of time.
Understand IPv6 Addresses
IPv6 Address Types
Increasing the IP address pool was one of the major forces behind developing IPv6. It uses a 128-bit address, meaning that we have a maximum of 2¹²⁸ addresses available, or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456, or enough to give multiple IP addresses to every grain of sand on the planet. So our friendly old 32-bit IPv4 dotted-quads don’t do the job anymore; these newfangled IPs require eight 16-bit hexadecimal colon-delimited blocks. So not only are they longer, they use numbers and letters. At first glance, those mondo IPv6 addresses look like impenetrable secret code:
2001:0db8:3c4d:0015:0000:0000:abcd:ef12
We’ll dissect this in a moment and learn that’s it not such a scary thing, but first let’s look at the different types of IPv6 addressing.
Get more info and links to other data about “Preparing for the Migration” to IPv6 at Enterprise Networking Planets. This article is:
Understand IPv6 Addresses
September 20, 2006 By Carla Schroder
Under IPv4 we have the old familiar unicast, broadcast and multicast addresses. In IPv6 we have unicast, multicast and anycast. With IPv6 the broadcast addresses are not used anymore, because they are replaced with multicast addressing.
IPv6 Unicast
This is similar to the unicast address in IPv4 – a single address identifying a single interface. There are four types of unicast addresses:
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Global unicast addresses, which are conventional, publicly routable address, just like conventional IPv4 publicly routable addresses.
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Link-local addresses are akin to the private, non-routable addresses in IPv4 (10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, 192.168.0.0/16). They are not meant to be routed, but confined to a single network segment. Link-local addresses mean you can easily throw together a temporary LAN, such as for conferences or meetings, or set up a permanent small LAN the easy way.
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Unique local addresses are also meant for private addressing, with the addition of being unique, so that joining two subnets does not cause address collisions.
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Special addresses are loopback addresses, IPv4-address mapped spaces, and 6-to-4 addresses for crossing from an IPv4 network to an IPv6 network.
If you read about site-local IPv6 addresses, which are related to link-local, these have been deprecated, so you don’t need to bother with them.
Multicast
Multicast in IPv6 is similar to the old IPv4 broadcast address a packet sent to a multicast address is delivered to every interface in a group. The IPv6 difference is it’s targeted instead of annoying every single host on the segment with broadcast blather, only hosts who are members of the multicast group receive the multicast packets. IPv6 multicast is routable, and routers will not forward multicast packets unless there are members of the multicast groups to forward the packets to. Anyone who has ever suffered from broadcast storms will appreciate this mightily.
Anycast
An anycast address is a single address assigned to multiple nodes. A packet sent to an anycast address is then delivered to the first available node. This is a slick way to provide both load-balancing and automatic failover. The idea of anycast has been around for a long time; it was proposed for inclusion in IPv4 but it never happened.
Several of the DNS root servers use a router-based anycast implementation, which is really a shared unicast addressing scheme. (While there are only thirteen authoritative root server names, the total number of actual servers is considerably larger, and they are spread all over the globe.) The same IP address is assigned to multiple interfaces, and then multiple routing tables entries are needed to move everything along.
IPv6 anycast addresses contain fields that identify them as anycast, so all you need to do is configure your network interfaces appropriately. The IPv6 protocol itself takes care of getting the packets to their final destinations. It’s a lot simpler to administer than shared unicast addressing.
Last of the IPv4 Addresses Allocated
Early this morning, the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) announced that it had been allocated two /8 address blocks from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA ). Those two blocks, 39/8 and 106/8, were the last unallocated blocks in the IANA free pool of IPv4 address available to Regional Internet Registries (RIR). With the allocation, the final days of IPv4 have moved closer as the number of available addresses that can be allocated will dwindle.
“Please be aware, this will be the final allocation made by IANA under the current framework and will trigger the final distribution of five /8 blocks, one to each RIR under the agreed global policy for the allocation of the remaining IPv4 address space,” APNIC wrote on its website.
From the Enterprising Networking Planet article:
Last of the IPv4 Addresses Allocated
By Sean Michael Kerner February 1, 2011
IANA has scheduled a press conference for Thursday morning to discuss the final allocation of the last five blocks of IPv4 space. The policy of distributing the final five equally among the RIRs is a long standing policy designed for the endgame of IPv4.
While the IANA free pool is now gone, that doesn’t mean that IPv4 address space itself has been exhausted. The RIRs make requests from IANA for free, …
APNIC expects to continue to make normal allocations of IPv4 address space to its constituents for the next three to six months. After that,….
In the U.S., the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) is the RIR responsible for address allocation. John Curran, CEO of ARIN, …
“We have no official forecast, and any estimate would change rapidly depending on requests received,” …
More impetus for the IPv6 migration
With freely available, unallocated IPv4 addresses almost gone, the move to the next generation IPv6 addressing system which provides significantly more address space than IPv4 must begin in earnest….
To date, IPv6 adoption has been slow, though the RIRs have been advocating for its adoption.
“The RIRs have been working with network operators at the local, regional, and global level for more than a decade …
Pawlik added that the transition to IPv6 from IPv4 represents an opportunity for even more innovative applications …
Though IPv4 is now nearly exhausted, the move to IPv4 will take time. The Internet Society has scheduled World IPv6 day for June ….
“Internet users need to realize that the Internet will be in transition over several years, with both IPv4 and IPv6 running in parallel,…
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.
The Internet Kill Switch–Strom
The senator got his wish for a simple on/off switch for the Internet, but it didn’t go down quite as he had planned when he first proposed the idea before Congress last year. Early last Friday just after midnight local time, the Egyptian telecoms authority turned off almost all Internet and cell phone access to its 80 million residents. What is astounding is how easy and effective this action seemed to be. While no one directly involved is actually talking, savvy folks have figured out it was a series of phone calls to the network operations staffs of the service providers involved. Egypt is served by only a few Internet providers and cell carriers. Within a few minutes, the entire country went offline. SInce then, some cell service has been restored.
Read the entire article and other interesting tech ruminations from David Strom at strominator.com:
The Internet Kill Switch
Another article, much more technical, at ars technica:
How Egypt did (and your government could) shut down the Internet By Iljitsch van Beijnum
Similarly, this BBC article has a statement from Vodafone:
Egypt severs internet connection amid growing unrest
A statement issued by Vodafone Egypt said it had been instructed to suspend services in some areas.
“Under Egyptian legislation the authorities have the right to issue such an order and we are obliged to comply with it,” it said.
The Lieberman reference above is explained in this PCMag article:
Egypt Flips Internet Kill Switch. Will the U.S.?
No, the thing that surprises me is that the U.S. government has plans for its own Internet Kill Switch.
The legislation was first introduced last summer by Sens. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), and the former has promised to bring it to the floor again in 2011. It isn’t called anything as obvious as the Internet Kill Switch, of course. It is called the “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act.” Who could be against that? Anyone who’s watching the news on TV today, that’s who.
The proposal calls for the Department of Homeland Security to establish and maintain a list of systems or assets that constitute critical cyber-infrastructure. The President would be able to be able to control those systems. He or she would have ability to turn them off. The kicker: none of this would be subject to judicial review. This is just a proposal, mind you, but it
What makes this noteworthy is that there are dozens of countries that try to control their net access with a series of firewalls and content filters, most notably Iran and China. These countries allow most Internet traffic through. Egypt has been wide open …
But there is very little traffic coming in or out of the country, according to Renasys, which tracks this kind of thing and the source of the graphic above. So the first step towards total control ironically is…
There are some countries that use more than just an off switch for their blockades: …
Finally, what also helped Egypt’s ability to turn off its Internet is …
I hope this column becomes quickly obsolete and access is turned on in Egypt. But in the meantime, they have provided a roadmap that others should take heed.
Scratched glasses give perfect vision
Zeev Zalevsky at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, has developed a technique to turn a standard lens into one that perfectly focuses light from anything between 33 centimetres away and the horizon.
[Taken from New Scientist:
Scratched glasses give perfect vision for any eyesight – tech – 04 October 2010]
It involves engraving the surface of a standard lens with a grid of 25 near-circular structures each 2 millimetres across and containing two concentric rings. The engraved rings are just a few hundred micrometres wide and a micrometre deep. “The exact number and size of the sets will change from one lens to another,” depending on its size and shape, says Zalevsky.
The rings shift the phase of the light waves passing through the lens, leading to patterns of both constructive and destructive interference. Using a computer model to calculate how changes in the diameter and position of the rings alter the pattern, Zalevsky came up with a design that creates a channel of constructive interference perpendicular to the lens through each of the 25 structures. Within these channels, light from both near and distant objects is in perfect focus.
“It results in an axial channel of focused light, not a single focal spot,” Zalevsky says. “If the retina is positioned anywhere along this channel, it will always see objects in focus.”
Zalevsky has fitted one of his lenses to a cellphone camera to confirm the extended focus effect, and he has also tested the lenses on 12 volunteers (Optics Letters, vol 35, p 3066). He has now co-founded a company, Xceed Imaging, to develop the technology.
The approach is not without its problems, though: the interference pattern tends to cancel out some of the light passing through the lens, which reduces the contrast of images viewed through it. Pablo Artal of the University of Murcia, Spain, warns that if the contrast reduction becomes too large, the brain will struggle to interpret the information.
Zalevsky counters that people wearing the lenses do not notice a loss in contrast because the eye is very sensitive to light at low intensity. “Unlike a camera, the brain has a logarithmic and not linear [response to light].” He says that the brain adapts to and minimises the reduced contrast within a few seconds.
This is not the only way in which the brain must adapt to the new lenses. Fixed in a pair of glasses, the lenses would not move as the eye looked in different directions, so the focusing effect would be lost in the regions between the circles. But Zalevsky says that the eye learns to fill in the gaps as it moves from one engraved structure to another, generating a continuous effect.
7 Scripts You Gotta Read
1) You can pick up on techniques that you may want to incorporate into your own writing style.
2) Reading early drafts of the films you admire reveals great lessons behind all of the revisions that were made. This is the heart of screenwriting. How well you put together a first draft means little in terms of your abilities. It’s how well you handle revisions and shape a story into greatness that proves your worth. The art of effective rewrites is what separates the amateurs from the pros.
3) I don’t believe there’s any one formula or structure for successful stories, much less one model screenplay that all writers should follow. How ridiculous is that? Each genre has its own unique set of rules and clichés. What succeeds in one story in one genre does not necessarily mean it’ll succeed in another story in another genre. However, reasons why stories fail are universal. For example,..
Mystery Man’s Seven Scripts You Gotta Read!
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