By Roblimo from
Slashdot's keeping-up-with-the-jetsons department:
Detroit recently hosted the
North American Science Fiction Convention, drawing thousands of SF fans to see and hear a variety of talks on all sorts of topics. One of the biggest panels featured a discussion on perhaps the greatest technological disappointment of the past fifty years: Where are our d@%& flying cars? Panelists included author and database consultant
Jonathan Stars, expert in Aeronautical Management and 20-year veteran of the Air Force
Douglas Johnson, author and founder of the Artemis Project
Ian Randal Strock, novelist
Cindy A. Matthews, Fermilab physicist
Bill Higgins, general manager of a nanotechnology company
Dr. Charles Dezelah, and astrobiology expert
Dr. Nicolle Zellner. This video and the one you'll see tomorrow show their lively discussion about the economic, social, and political barriers to development and adoption of affordable flying cars. (
Alternate Video Link)
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By Unknown Lamer from
Slashdot's bad-movie-plot department:
WIRED published a
long piece on Edward Snowden today (worth a read on its own), and simultaneously broke news of "MonsterMind," an NSA program to monitor all network traffic and detect attacks, responding with a counterattack automatically. From the article:
Although details of the program are scant, Snowden tells WIRED in an extensive interview with James Bamford that algorithms would scour massive repositories of metadata and analyze it to differentiate normal network traffic from anomalous or malicious traffic. Armed with this knowledge, the NSA could instantly and autonomously identify, and block, a foreign threat. More than this, though, Snowden suggests MonsterMind could one day be designed to return fire — automatically, without human intervention...Snowden raised two issues with the program: the source of an attack could be spoofed to trick the U.S. into attacking an innocent third party, and the violation of the fourth amendment since the NSA would effectively need to monitor all domestic network traffic for the program to work. Also in Bamford's interview are allegations that
the NSA knocked Syria offline in 2012 after an attempt to install intercept software on an edge router ended with the router being bricked.
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By Unknown Lamer from
Slashdot's shotgun-network-intrusion department:
An anonymous reader writes
New research was released on cyber-attacks via human-rights NGO World Uyghur Congress over a period of four years. Academic analysis was conducted through the lense of a human-rights NGO representing a minority living in China and in exile when most targeted attack reports are against large organizations with apparent or actual financial or IP theft unlike WUC, and reported by commercial entities rather than academics. The attacks were a combination of sophisticated social engineering via email written primarily in the Uyghur language, in some cases through compromised WUC email accounts, and with advanced malware embedded in attached documents. Suspicious emails were sent to more than 700 different email addresses, including WUC leaders as well as journalists, politicians, academics and employees of other NGOs (including Amnesty International and Save Tibet — International Campaign for Tibet).The study will be
presented at USENIX on August 21, and the
full paper is already available.
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