Researchers at IBM are so good at playing with atoms that they decided to make a movie (named A Boy and His Atom), by moving atoms. Awesome stuff. It is also named by the Guinness World Records organization, as the “world’s smallest movie.”
DeepEnd Research – Library of Malware Traffic Patterns + Blog lists
Quoted from here
Traffic analysis has been the primary method of malware identification and thousands of IDS signatures developed are the daily proof. Signatures definitely help but ability to visually recognize malware traffic patterns and see the trends when they change has been always an important skill for anyone tasked with network defense. The number of malware analysis blogs and papers is overwhelming and it is difficult to keep track of malware features if you don’t have access to a well designed and constantly updated malware database. This started as “personal notes” spreadsheet with GET and POST requests for different malware families with information from open sources. We decided others might find it useful too.
This is truly an exceptional and valuable community tool for researchers. On the same for those interested in these stuffs i.e. for whitehat researchers, here are some useful sites :
Operational cryptology and virology lab
Modern malware investigations and reviews
All the bloggers take the researching quite seriously, are frequently updated and provide and in-dept analysis. More blogs are listed in above blog.
Dirac’s Lectures
Steve Flammia, on the blog Quantum Pontiff, posted this remarkable and rare 1-hour talks by Paul Dirac in New Zealand :
There are four of his talks currently uploaded online. The first one (the above) is on quantum mechanics; the second one is on quantum electrodynamics; the third is on the Magnetic monopoles; and the fourth one is on large number hypothesis.
Surprisingly or perhaps not, there still is lots of interesting stuff in them especially to hear the finer points from the person who himself was part of the historical events of Physics.
Credits to Richard Smythe for digitizing them.
Around the Web [Cryptography]
- SSL/TLS broken again – A weakness in the RC4 stream cipher; More link : here
- GCHQ – Not a secure agency itself! by Dan Farrall
- The Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare ~ Surprisingly or perhaps not; it makes no maintain of US and Israels Stuxnet.
Fusion of Quantum Mechanics and Shakespeare
What would have happened if Shakespeare had known Quantum Mechanics and the Schrödinger’s cat? Apparently the following :
“To be, or not to be, or maybe both
–that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to calculate
The slings and arrows of outrageous quanta
Or to take arms against a sea of interpretations
And by opposing end them.
To sleep, to wake –
No more, but both –and by a sleep to say we end
The headache, and the thousand natural shocks
That Bohr bequeathed. ‘Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To wake, to sleep–
To sleep–perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of Copenhagen what dreams may come
When we have shuffled all our mortal calculations,
Must give us pause. There’s the Aspect
That makes calamity of so entangled a life.
For who would bear the Bells and Wittens of time,
Th’ position’s wrong, the proud momentum’s contumely
The pangs of despised theory, the quantal law’s decay,
The insolence of academic office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy unlearned takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bra-ket? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary state vector,
But that the dread of something not quite real,
The undiscovered counterfactual, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those classical ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus common sense does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of Heisenberg,
And enterprise of great position and momentum
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action. — Soft you now,
The fair Dirac — noble and precise, in thy orisons
Be all my spins remembered.”
via Wavewatching
Google fool day
Every year on April 1, Google enthusiastic audiences get many hilarious news. However, none of them can be compared to the prank with the news from April 1, 2004 the launch of the e-mail service Gmail capacity, one gigabyte, because that is really the news was true.
Google jokes on April 1 even have a devoted separate article in Wikipedia
This year, the company launched a “show” with the news of the suspension of the upload facility of new videos on Youtube until 2023. In the news it is reported that the service has already made enough movies to conduct a ”contest.” Out of them over a span of ten year, an overall winner will be selected.
Next, is a search engine that smells : Google nose
A character input system through the drums and one-button keypad build by Google Japan branch
The company has also launched a “treasure hunt” on Google Maps.
Finally, Youtube has started “selling” collection DVD-ROM drive with the best excerpts from the videos of Youtube.
Perhaps the list will continue to increse because the day is not over yet and Google may have more tricks up its sleeves.
Computer from a living cell designed at Stanford
Been busy since last almost 2 months, attended two National conferences as participant which was extremely exciting as I made new friends along with new contacts and of course learned a new thing or 2. This followed the unfortunate problem with uncertainty of examination (the teaching staff is boycotting the exams). Anyways now I am resuming blogging normally. This was brought to my attention by a friend.
Bio-engineering Department at Stanford University has managed to create a biological device that demonstrates the properties of conventional transistors and performs standard logical operations such as AND, NAND, OR, XOR, NOR, and XNOR. In fact, such transistors based on DNA and RNA – this is a tiny computer, in the classical definition. The authors call it the working logic of Boolean Integrase Logic, or abbreviated BIL gates.
Like the standard electronic transistor, a new biological transistor quite versatile, can work in different “schemes” of biological circuits. his opens up the opportunity for scientists designing new programmable biological devices from biological sensors and detectors to bio-fuels. For example, you can program a cell to conduct the event counter, for example, how many times she met with a particular substance. You can program it to respond in a special way to other external events or stimuli.
The scientific results scientists in the Science Journal.
The illustration shows the calculated result of computer simulation (top) and the actual output of the logic operations in a biological transistor (bottom).
Beauty in Mathematics
Excellent lecture on the true beauty in Mathematics. Worth listing to atleast once.
Enrico Bombieri
Professor Emeritus, Institute for Advanced Study
Often mathematicians refer to a “beautiful” result or a “beautiful” proof. In this special lecture, Enrico Bombieri, Professor Emeritus in the School of Mathematics, addresses the question, “What is beauty in mathematics?”
Cryptography Competitions
- Password Hashing Competition :
The Password Hashing Competition (PHC) is an effort organized to identify new password hashing schemes in order to improve on the state-of-the-art (PBKDF2, scrypt, etc.), and to encourage the use of strong password protection. Applications include for example authentication to web services, PIN authentication on mobile devices, or key derivation for full disk encryption.
Motivations behind the PHC include:
The poor state of passwords protection in web services: passwords are too often either stored in clear (these are the services that send you your password by email after hitting “I forgot my password”), or just hashed with a cryptographic hash function (like MD5 or SHA-1), which exposes users’ passwords to efficient brute force cracking methods.
The low variety of methods available: the only standardized construction is PBKDF2 (PKCS#5, NIST SP 800-132), and there are mainly just two alternatives: bcrypt and scrypt.
A number of new ideas discussed within the security and cryptography communities, but which have not yet led to a concrete proposal. - CryptoChallenge : The ultimate code-breaking test. It will take all your savvy and experience to crack the cipher. The code will be available soon; and first prize is an Apple iPad 16Gb. So pre-register now. Good luck!
CFP: Seminar on the Philosophical Foundations of Quantum Gravity
26-28 September 2013 – University of Illinois at Chicago
Invited Speaker : Jeremy Butterfield (Cambridge), Bianca Dittrich (Perimeter Institute), Nick Huggett (UIC), Christian Wüthrich (UCSD), + others to be announced.
Dear colleague (apologies for mass mailing),
Chris Wüthrich and I are organizing a seminar on the foundations of quantum gravity, which will take place at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 26 to 28 September 2013.
The idea of this meeting is to bring together physicists and philosophers of physics interested in the foundations of quantum gravity (primarily canonical approaches and string theory), and to offer various formats such as keynote addresses, seminar-style talks, and sessions with contributed papers and works in progress.
Because the field is new, we are making efforts to make the meeting accessible to graduate students and recent PhDs with research agendas in quantum gravity (we hope to have some travel bursaries to help them attend, even if they do not present). In addition, we are especially keen to attract participation from women and minorities (whether or not junior).
We seek your help (a) to make sure that such people see the call for papers, and (b) to encourage them to submit work or attend.
To that end, please distribute this message to anyone that you think may be interested — hopefully with appropriate words of encouragement! If you have students or colleagues that you think we should know about, please give us their names, so that we can encourage them too. (Naturally you are also encouraged if the topic falls within your areas of research).
With gratitude,
Nick Huggett (UIC)
Christian Wüthrich (UCSD)Quantum Gravity Seminar
9/26-28/13 – University of Illinois at ChicagoEmail: beyondspacetimeseminar@gmail.com
Website: beyondspacetime.blog.com
The above quoted directly from quantum-foundations mailing list. For more information on it visit the blog.
