Monday, October 14, 2013

TechEye

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There's a clear shortage of cyber warriors

Posted: 14 Oct 2013 02:14 AM PDT

It looks like all this talk of cyber warriors, and elite teams of internet butt kickers is being stymied by a lack of skilled hackers willing to work for the men in black.

While the US military's Cyber Command is due to quadruple in size by 2015 with 4,000 new personnel while Britain announced a new Joint Cyber Reserve last month, Reuters claims that there is little chance of the jobs being filled.

To make matters worse, every time a hacker is hired, they are often headhunted by corporations.

Chris Finan, who is now a senior fellow at the Truman National Security Project, warned that there was not enough human capital for cyber security plans.

Part of the problem is culture. A hacker will choose where they get a lot of dosh, have a good lifestyle and a lack of bureaucracy. Neither of which are the sort of things that a government job offers them.

Governments say that most cyber expertise remains in the private sector where firms bid for cyber expertise.

To make matters worse, to get a government job you need a degree, yet a western university degree is considered too theoretical to do much that is useful.

Hackers don't need a computer science degree as long as they can do the tricky jobs such as finding bugs in software, identifying elusive infections and reverse engineering computer viruses.

The only way the government is attracting hackers is to appeal to people's sense of public service and patriotism. This is a little tricky when most of them are anti-establishment.

Russia, China, Iran and North Korea solve the problem by doing deals with their own criminal hacker community to borrow their expertise to assist with attacks. 

Snowden was a security risk years back

Posted: 14 Oct 2013 02:12 AM PDT

Edward Snowden's boss warned his CIA bosses in 2009 that he thought that the techie was a security risk.

According to the New York Times, which has mysteriously been able to get its paws on Snowden's CIA personal file, his supervisor wrote a derogatory report. The report said that there had been a distinct change in Snowden's behaviour and work habits, as well as a suspicion he was abstracting documents.

The CIA suspected that Snowden was trying to break into classified computer files and decided to send him home from his foreign assignment.

The red flags were ignored and Snowden left the CIA to become a contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA).

Apparently, the supervisor's warning and the CIA's suspicions apparently were not forwarded to the NSA or its contractors. His personal file surfaced only after federal investigators began looking at Snowden's record once the leaks began.

The NYT said it stood up the story by talking to half a dozen law enforcement, intelligence and Congressional officials with direct knowledge of the supervisor's report.

In hindsight, officials admitted the spooks missed opportunity to review Snowden's top-secret clearance or at least put his future work at the NSA under much greater scrutiny. 

MIT comes up with Kinect through walls

Posted: 14 Oct 2013 02:10 AM PDT

Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have emerged from their smoke filled labs with a Kinect type of device which can see through walls and pinpoint a person with incredible accuracy.

According to IT World, the gizmo uses three radio antennae spaced about a metre apart and pointed at a wall. The system tracked the movements with an accuracy of plus or minus 10 centimetres, which is about the width of an adult hand.

One of the designers, Fadel Adib, said that gaming is an obvious use for the technology, but that Wi-Fi localisation was another important thing to come out of the research.

At the moment, working out someone's position based on Wi-Fi, requires a person to hold a transmitter.

The machine can identify a person through a wall without requiring them to hold any transmitter or receiver by using reflections off a human body, he said.

The next stage is to offer a real-time silhouette of a person, which will enable full Kinect interpretation. It also needs to be able to track more than one moving person at a time.

Unlike previous versions of the project that used Wi-Fi, the new system allows for 3D tracking and could tell if a person has fallen or injured themselves.

It also needs to be miniaturised before it will be any real use.

It might take a while to do all these things and get a product into the market. The researchers filed a patent last week and there are no immediate plans for commercialisation. 

There's bad news for Intel tomorrow

Posted: 14 Oct 2013 02:08 AM PDT

The cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street are expecting the fashion bag maker Intel to have a rotten day tomorrow.

Chipzilla is to announce its third-quarter earnings report and the word on the strasse is that it is going to be down for the third quarter in a row.

Research analyst Deepon Nag at Macquarie Equities Research downgraded Intel stock to neutral from outperform, citing 'pressure in the core PC market'.

Last week Canaccord Genuity analyst Bobby Burleson lowered his estimates for Intel's sales and earnings in 2013 and 2014.

According to the US Finance Post, the blame is being attributed to a mythical shift towards smartphones and tablets, along with a more than likely sluggish adoption of Windows 8.

But analysts claim that moves towards cloud computing are also hurting Intel. Cloud computing allows PCs to get by with far less processing power than before.

While Intel does sell chips used in cloud data centres, it is unclear whether the cloud server market can match the volume of the PC market.

According to a Thompson Reuters poll this morning, Wall Street analyst expect Intel to post results of $ .53 per share on sales of $ 13.47 billion for the third quarter.

If you look at the same time last year, this means a nine percent drop in earnings per share on flat sales. This would also be the fourth straight quarter where sales have been flat or down and the sixth straight quarter where EPS has done the same.

What is worse is that Wall Street does not really expect things to improve for Intel. Apparently, analysts think that Intel is struggling to find its role in the post-PC marketplace. Others just think that the IT industry is buggered up by the economy and things will pick up for Intel when companies can afford to splash out on PCs again. 

Google will steal your pictures

Posted: 14 Oct 2013 02:06 AM PDT

Your smiling mug could be used by Google to advertise products under a change of the company's terms of service.

Under the cunning plan, Google will be allowed to use your photograph and name to advertise anything from cars, to anal cream and you will not get a cent.

According to the New York Times, Google is introducing an update to its terms of service that will classify users' comments, follows, shares, and other social activity as "shared endorsements" for its own products and services.

Shared endorsements can then be used as a premise for customers' names and profile photos to appear in ads for the company, though it's so far unclear what those ads will look like.

Apparently, the changes will only apply to adults over the age of 18. There is an opt-out clause and users who previously chose not to share +1s with friends.

The updated terms of service will go into effect on November 11, and the company has begun rolling out ads to its homepage in a bid to inform all users before then.

Facebook already runs similar endorsement ads. Last week it changed its search settings to make it harder for users to hide from other people trying to find them on the social networks. 
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