- Emerging Cyber Threats Report (Georgia Tech) — no surprises, but another document to print and leave on the desk of the ostrich who thinks there’s no security problem.
- Apple’s Secrecy Hurts Its AI Development (Bloomberg) — “Apple is off the scale in terms of secrecy,” says Richard Zemel, a professor in the computer science department at the University of Toronto. “They’re completely out of the loop.”
- Swimming Robobees (Harvard) — The Harvard RoboBee, designed in Wood’s lab, is a microrobot, smaller than a paperclip, that flies and hovers like an insect, flapping its tiny, nearly invisible wings 120 times per second. It can fly and swim.
- Android and Chrome — starting next year, the company will work with partners to build personal computers that run on Android, according to sources familiar with the company’s plans. The Chrome browser and operating systems aren’t disappearing — PC makers that produce Chromebooks will still be able to use Chrome. Security gurus sad because ChromeOS is most secure operating system in use.
"operating systems" entries
Four short links: 30 October 2015
Cyber Threats, Secrecy Hurts R&D, Robot Bee, Long Live ChromeOS
Four short links: 29 July 2014
Community Detection, Proven Kernel, Graph Processing on GPUs, and Browser Vision
- Online Community Detection for Large Complex Networks (PLosONE) — readable recount of earlier algorithms and inventions in the area, as well as a new algorithm with linear time complexity for large complex networks.
- sel4 — open source OS kernel (GPLv2, most userland is BSD) with end-to-end proof of implementation correctness and security enforcement. (For a discussion of what’s verified, see this blog post)
- mapgraph.io — Massively Parallel Graph processing on GPUs. (via Leo Meyerovich)
- tracking.js — browser framework and algorithms for computer vision algorithms and frameworks.
Four short links: 11 October 2013
DNA Coding, Quartz2D Shell, Hardware Sadness, and Manycore OS
- Programming Synthetic DNA (Science Daily) — eventually enabling the reification of bugs.
- Schwartz — a shell for Quartz 2D with Python.
- The Slow Winter — best writing about the failure of Moore’s Law and the misery of being in hardware. Ever.
- Akaros — an open source, GPL-licensed operating system for manycore architectures. Our goal is to provide support for parallel and high-performance applications and to scale to a large number of cores.
Security on the industrial Internet
Roel Schouwenberg on Kaspersky Lab's forthcoming industrial OS and building a system with security in mind.
Security must evolve along with the industrial Internet. The Stuxnet attack on Iran’s centrifuges in 2010 highlighted both the risks of web-borne attacks and the futility of avoiding them by disconnecting from the Internet (the worm spread, in part, using USB keys). Potential attackers range from small-time corporate spies to sophisticated government units that might use infrastructure disruption as a weapon.
Comparing industrial Internet security to consumer and enterprise web security is difficult; requirements, challenges, and approaches differ significantly. In industrial systems, stability is crucial, and isolating an infected system — or adding an air gap as a preventative measure — can be enormously costly. Some tools that are difficult to apply to the unstructured web are effective in industry, though: since industrial systems usually have known, simplified network structures with highly regular traffic patterns, anomaly detection and other machine-learning techniques hold great promise as ways to find and stop attacks. The addition of more computing power at the network level as companies connect their industrial systems will make these approaches more powerful.
Back in October, Eugene Kaspersky announced that his security firm is developing an industrial operating system — a “highly-tailored system,” one that “by design won’t be able to carry out any behind-the-scenes, undeclared activity.” Last fall, I interviewed Roel Schouwenberg (@Schouw), a researcher at Kaspersky Lab who is working on the new industrial OS. What follows is a lightly-edited transcript of our wide-ranging conversation.
Tell me a bit about how the OS project came about — does it have its origins in Kaspersky’s Stuxnet research?
Roel Schouwenberg: Eugene [Kaspersky] and a few others started talking about this a decade ago, actually. Eugene’s idea was that the only way to solve the malware problem would be to build something that was constructed with security in mind — what he called secure OS. That was just a concept for a while, and then Stuxnet came along and it became increasingly clear that the secure OS implementation would be best suited for the industrial control world, where you have this very specific set of circumstances where it would just work best.
Industrial Internet links: NYC Data Week sensors, industrial Internet in transportation, and more
Sensors at NYC Data Week, the industrial Internet in transportation, industrial operating systems, and networked carbon sequestration
By mayoral proclamation this is NYC Data Week, featuring lots of events that bring together innovators who work with data in any capacity. To see the industrial Internet as it’s being approached by entrepreneurs and hackers, be sure to stop by the free Data Sensing Lab in the Rhinelander North room at the Hilton hotel at 6th Avenue and 53rd Street. Participants in the lab work on networked devices–some of which they’re using to measure the environment at the O’Reilly Strata Conference + Hadoop World. They’ll report on what their sensors discovered at the end of the week.
The Internet of Things Moving Us Forward (Digi) — The transportation sector is where just about every American interacts with big machines, whether by driving a car, riding on an airplane or waiting safely at a grade crossing while a train passes by. And it’s in transportation that the typical consumer will feel the first benefits of the industrial Internet. Digi, which provides a pay-per-transaction cloud platform for controlling devices, here takes a look at a handful of ways that connected vehicles are starting to improve the way we get around.
Kaspersky Lab developing its own operating system? (Eugene Kaspersky) — Networked industrial devices have become common enough to get the attention of Kaspersky Lab, Russia’s security giant, which confirmed last week that it’s developing an operating system for industrial control systems. The system is still under development and, as Kaspersky himself notes, will only take final form after it goes through lots of application-specific development. Kaspersky will have plenty of competition from established producers of industrial-control software with large installation bases, so his move seems to anticipate lots of total retrofits of industrial systems in the next several years.
Four short links: 16 April 2012
Competition, Creation, Minimalism, and Monop{ol,son}y
- Peter Thiel’s Class 4 Notes — in perfect competition, marginal revenues equal marginal costs. So high margins for big companies suggest that two or more businesses might be combined: a core monopoly business (search, for Google), and then a bunch of other various efforts (robotic cars, TV, etc.). Cash builds up because it turns out that it doesn’t cost all that much to run the monopoly piece, and it doesn’t make sense to pump it into all the side projects. In a competitive world, you would have to be funding a lot more side projects to stay even. In a monopoly world, you should pour less into side projects, unless politics demand that the cash be spread around. Amazon currently needs to reinvest just 3% of its profits. It has to keep running to stay ahead, but it’s more easy jog than intense sprint. I liked the whole lecture, but this bit really stood out for me.
- Kickstarter Disrupting Consumer Electronics (Amanda Peyton) — good point that most people wouldn’t have thought that consumer electronics would lend itself to the same funding system as CDs of a one-act play about artisanal beadwork comic characters. Consumer electronics as a market has been ripe for disruption all along. That said, it’s ridiculously not obvious that disruption would come from the same place that allows an artist with a sharpie, a hotel room and a webcam a way to make the art she wants.
- OmniOS — OmniTI’s JEOS. Their team are engineers par excellence, so this promises to be good.
- Understanding Amazon’s Ebook Strategy (Charlie Stross) — By foolishly insisting on DRM, and then selling to Amazon on a wholesale basis, the publishers handed Amazon a monopoly on their customers—and thereby empowered a predatory monopsony. So very accurate.
Four short links: 20 September 2011
Android Plan 9, Virtualization OS, Rogue Games, and Wikipedia Semantics
- Plan 9 on Android — replacing the Java stack on Android fans with Inferno. Inferno is the Plan 9 operating system originally from Bell Labs.
- SmartOS — Joyent-created open source operating system built for virtualization. (via Nelson Minar)
- libtcod — open source library for creating Rogue-like games. (via Nelson Minar)
- Wikipedia Miner — toolkit for working with semantics in Wikipedia pages, e.g. find the connective topics that link two chosen topics. (via Alyona Medelyan)
Why files need to die
Files are an anachronism in the digital age. It's time for something better.
The idea of files and folders no longer fits today's connected world. It's time for new ways of organizing our data based on what data means, what it relates to, and how we think about the world.