How graphics card supercomputers could help us map the universe

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Over three decades video cards have transformed computer graphics from monochrome line drawings to near photo realistic renderings.

But the processing power of the GPU is increasingly being used to tame the huge sums of data generated by modern industry and science. And now a project to build the world’s largest telescope is considering using a GPU cluster to stitch together more than an exabyte of data each day.

via How graphics card supercomputers could help us map the universe | TechRepublic.

Sex, Lies and Cyber-crime Surveys

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Much of the information we have on cyber-crime losses is derived from surveys. We examine some of the difficulties of forming an accurate estimate by survey. First, losses are extremely concentrated, so that representative sampling of the population does not give representative sampling of the losses. Second, losses are based on unverified self-reported numbers. Not only is it possible for a single outlier to distort the result, we find evidence that most surveys are dominated by a minority of responses in the upper tail (i.e., a majority of the estimate is coming from as few as one or two responses). Finally, the fact that losses are confined to a small segment of the population magnifies the difficulties of refusal rate and small sample sizes. Far from being broadly-based estimates of losses across the population, the cyber-crime estimates that we have appear to be largely the answers of a handful of people extrapolated to the whole population. A single individual who claims $50,000 losses, in an N=1000 person survey, is all it takes to generate a $10 billion loss over the population. One unverified claim of $7,500 in phishing losses translates into $1.5 billion.

via Sex, Lies and Cyber-crime Surveys – Microsoft Research.

hype-free: Parsing pcap files with Perl

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Recently I was reading the blogpost on the BrekingPoint labs log about parsing pcap files with Perl and I immediately said to myself: it is impossible that there isn’t a module on CPAN, because Perl is great. Turns out I was right, there is Net::TcpDumpLog which can be combined with the NetPacket family of modules to parse the higher level protocols. Because example code is rather sparse on the POD pages of the respective modules, here is a small example to illustrate their use:

via hype-free: Parsing pcap files with Perl.

Over 3 Million Americans Now on IPv6

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In the U.S. the latest numbers for IPv6 are impressive. APNIC’s global survey as of August 1st has IPv6 penetration in the U.S at 1.35 percent. That translates into an estimated IPv6 user base of 3.3 million users, the largest base of IPv6 users in the world.

via Over 3 Million Americans Now on IPv6.

“There are Tier 1 ISPs out there that refuse to go and get either transit or peering with other ISPs,” Nygren said. “So there are places on the IPv6 Internet, in particular in parts of Europe, where there is no path between point A and B.”

Are China’s Multinational Corporations Really Multinational?

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While ranking on the Fortune Global 500 list indicates the growing clout of Chinese corporations, it does not mean that a company is internationally active or even that it is a real multinational. When these companies are ranked by foreign assets and sales, it becomes clear that, with few exceptions, they all operate predominantly within China. In other words, despite the government’s directives and financial incentives to ‘go global’, many leading Chinese corporations have yet to do so.

via Are China’s Multinational Corporations Really Multinational? | Brookings Institution.

Second, the Achilles heel of Chinese multinationals is human resources—particularly management. Multilingual and multicultural managers are few and far between, and all assessments of Chinese corporations note this to be a fundamental weakness.

Hackers reveal critical vulnerabilities in Huawei routers at Defcon

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The vulnerabilities — a session hijack, a heap overflow and a stack overflow — were found in the firmware of Huawei AR18 and AR29 series routers and could be exploited to take control of the devices over the Internet, said Felix Lindner, the head of security firm Recurity Labs and one of the two researchers who found the flaws.

via Hackers reveal critical vulnerabilities in Huawei routers at Defcon – Computerworld.

According to the Huawei website, the AR series routers are used by enterprises and AR18 in particular is marketed as product intended for small and home offices.

Facebook Page Owners Can Pay $500 For 250,000 Eyeballs With ‘Promoted Posts’

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‘Promoted Posts’ didn’t come up much during Facebook’s recent earnings call despite being launched at the end of May, but COO Sheryl Sandberg did spend a lot of time talking about the importance of advertising — such as Sponsored Stories — that appear organically in Facebook News Feeds rather than explicitly as ads. This was Sandberg’s only nod to the new strategy of asking Facebook users to pay to reach more eyeballs with their “normal” posts, via the transcript of the call on Seeking Alpha:

via Facebook Page Owners Can Pay $500 For 250,000 Eyeballs With ‘Promoted Posts’ – Forbes.

How the Kindle Fire and the Nexus 7 harmed the tablet market

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So the problem with the Kindle Fire — and the Nexus 7 — is the same problem that’s plagued the PC industry. Deep and extreme price cuts give the makers no wriggle room to innovate. There’s no doubt that a $199 was an attractive price point for a tablet, but it’s possibly that it was unsustainably low, and that by driving prices down to this level so rapidly, both Amazon and Google have irrevocably harmed the tablet market by creating unrealistic price expectations. It’s quite likely that these impracticable price demands could harm Microsoft and its tablet ambitions.

via How the Kindle Fire and the Nexus 7 harmed the tablet market | ZDNet.