NASA Beams “Hello, World!” Video from Space via Laser

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Optical communication tools like OPALS use focused laser energy to reach data rates between 10 and 1,000 times higher than current space communications, which rely on radio portions of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Because the space station orbits Earth at 17,500 mph, transmitting data from the space station to Earth requires extremely precise targeting. The process can be equated to a person aiming a laser pointer at the end of a human hair 30 feet away and keeping it there while walking.

via NASA Beams “Hello, World!” Video from Space via Laser | NASA.

Dan Farmer Presents Research on IPMI Vulnerabilities

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IPMI runs regardless of the underlying operating system and operates on UDP port 623 through a server’s network port or its own Ethernet port. It runs continuously, Farmer said, unless the plug is literally pulled. Moore’s scan pulled up 230,000 responses over port 623, an admittedly tiny slice of the overall number of implementations. Yet Farmer concludes that 90 percent of BMCs running IPMI could be compromised because of default or weak passwords or weaknesses in the protocol, not only implicating the host server but others in the same management group because, as he discovered, some vendors share common passwords.

via Dan Farmer Presents Research on IPMI Vulnerabilities | Threatpost | The first stop for security news.

BMC = Baseboard Management Controller, a separate device attached to motherboards for management purposes.  This isn’t the first article to point out vulnerabilities in IPMI.  It has been noted that IPMI should run on its own intranet and not the public internet.  Providing another layer of security to this interface may mitigate any problems.  IPMI can’t be any less secure than SNMP.

Startup Has a New Way to Make Rare Earths and Other Metals

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The ceramic material Powell showed me—which is made of zirconium oxide—replaces the carbon electrode and eliminates those emissions. Researchers have been trying to replace carbon for many years, but the molten salts have corroded the alternatives. The key advance for Infinium was developing alternative molten salts that don’t react with the zirconium oxide, so that it can last long enough to be practical.

via Startup Has a New Way to Make Rare Earths and Other Metals | MIT Technology Review.

Finding an alternative to carbon has long been the “dream” of the metals industry, says Donald Sadoway, a professor of materials science at MIT who is not involved with the company. “I believe [Infinium’s] technology is sound. It’s real,” he says. Whether the company succeeds “is all about the economics,” he says. “No one cares about the flow chart for the process. You care about the prices. If it produces a good metal at a lower cost, people will be interested.”

Instrumental Variables Methods

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Estimating causal impacts is fraught with difficulty. Even randomized trials are imperfect, in part because we can seldom, if ever, conduct true experiments (though experimental design is still the gold standard of statistical research). IV is one of the more compelling quasi-experimental methods of estimating impacts, largely because the assumptions needed to justify the IV method are often more plausible than those needed to justify other methods, such as regression.

via The Urban Institute | Toolkit | Data Methods | Instrumental Variables Methods.

Hundreds of Cities Are Wired With Fiber—But Telecom Lobbying Keeps It Unused

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Throughout the country, companies like Comcast, Time Warner Cable, CenturyLink, and Verizon have signed agreements with cities that prohibit local governments from becoming internet service providers and prohibit municipalities from selling or leasing their fiber to local startups who would compete with these huge corporations.

via Hundreds of Cities Are Wired With Fiber—But Telecom Lobbying Keeps It Unused | Motherboard.

First patent troll ordered to pay “extraordinary case” fees

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“Lumen’s motivation in this litigation was to extract a nuisance settlement from FTB on the theory that FTB would rather pay an unjustified license fee than bear the costs of the threatened expensive litigation,” Cote stated in the order she issued on Friday. “Lumen’s threats of ‘full-scale litigation,’ ‘protracted discovery,’ and a settlement demand escalator should FTB file responsive papers, were aimed at convincing FTB that a pay-off was the lesser injustice.”

via Payback time: First patent troll ordered to pay “extraordinary case” fees | Ars Technica.

TrueCrypt Website Says To Switch To BitLocker

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I do not know precisely what this means, as I have no contact with the developers anymore: but this is what was agreed upon.

They should no longer be trusted, their binaries should not be executed, their site should be considered compromised, and their key should be treated as revoked. It may be that they have been approached by an aggressive intelligence agency or NSLed, but I don’t know for sure.

While the source of 7.2 does not appear to my eyes to be backdoored, other than obviously not supporting encryption anymore, I have not analysed the binary and distrust it. It shouldn’t be distributed or executed.

via TrueCrypt Website Says To Switch To BitLocker – Slashdot.

From:   TrueCrypt Final Release Repository

TrueCrypt’s formal code audit will continue as planned. Then the code will be forked, the product’s license restructured, and it will evolve. The name will be changed because the developers wish to preserve the integrity of the name they have built. They won’t allow their name to continue without them. But the world will get some future version, that runs on future operating systems, and future mass storage systems.

There will be continuity . . . as an interesting new chapter of Internet lore is born.

How MIT and Caltech’s coding breakthrough could accelerate mobile network speeds

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An RLNC transmission can recover from errors with neither sender nor receiver retaining and updating transmission-state information and requesting lost packets to be retransmitted. This is because RLNC can recreate any packet lost on the receiving side from a later sequenced packet. In over-simplified terms, each RLNC encoded packet sent is encoded using the immediately earlier sequenced packet and randomly generated coefficients, using a linear algebra function. The combined packet length is no longer than either of the two packets from which it is composed. When a packet is lost, the missing packet can be mathematically derived from a later-sequenced packet that includes earlier-sequenced packets and the coefficients used to encode the packet.

Since the RLNC encoding sender doesn’t need to listen for acknowledgements of successful transmission and perhaps retransmit, the sender can continuously transmit at near-wire speed optimized for latency and network throughput.

via How MIT and Caltech’s coding breakthrough could accelerate mobile network speeds.

Update:  After posting this I remembered I had read about an algorithm recreating earlier lost packets from future packets.  So I clicked on the mit tag and on 10/25/2012 I posted this blurb:  A Bandwidth Breakthrough

… The technology transforms the way packets of data are sent. Instead of sending packets, it sends algebraic equations that describe series of packets. So if a packet goes missing, instead of asking the network to resend it, the receiving device can solve for the missing one itself. …

That must mean they’re still working on it.