Computer Worm Opens A New Era Of Warfare

Stuxnet: Computer Worm Opens New Era Of Warfare -- CBS News/60 Minutes

(CBS News) The most pernicious computer virus ever known wasn't out to steal your money, identity, or passwords. So what was the intricate Stuxnet virus after? Its target appears to have been the centrifuges in a top secret Iranian nuclear facility. Stuxnet showed, for the first time, that a cyberattack could cause significant physical damage to a facility. Does this mean that future malware, modeled on Stuxnet, could target other critical infrastructure -- such as nuclear power plants or water systems? What kind of risk do we face in this country? Steve Kroft reports.

The following script is from "Stuxnet" which originally aired on March 4, 2012 and was rebroadcast on July 1, 2012. Steve Kroft is the correspondent. Graham Messick, producer.

For the past year, the nation's top military, intelligence and law enforcement officials have been warning Congress and the country about a coming cyberattack against critical infrastructure in the United States that could affect everything from the heat in your home to the money in your bank account. The warnings have been raised before, but never with such urgency, because this new era of warfare has already begun.

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My Comment: When it comes to cyber security, my number one worry is my money in my bank account. I always say that if one wants to focus attention to the dangers of a cyber attack .... start messing around with individual banking information .... trust me .... everyone will notice.

Church Of The Nativity Has Been Designated As An Endangered Site

A nun walks outside the Church of the Nativity, the site revered as the birthplace of Jesus, in the West Bank town of Bethlehem June 28. Ammar Awad/REUTERS

UNESCO Designates Church Of The Nativity As Endangered Site -- Christian Science Monitor

Palestinian leaders consider the designation a political victory.

The Palestinians on Friday persuaded the U.N. cultural agency to list the Church of the Nativity — the place where Christians believe Jesus was born — as an endangered World Heritage site despite misgivings by churches in charge of the basilica.

The Palestinians hailed the nod by UNESCO as a step forward in their quest for global recognition of an independent Palestine in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, captured by Israel in 1967.

The centuries-old basilica is located in a part of the Israeli-occupied West Bank where the Palestinians have self-rule. UNESCO's decision was seen by them as validation of their rights to the territory.

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My Comment: Considering how important the site is ..... any steps to protect it are welcomed on my part.

Timbuktu Islamic Shrines Destroyed By Al Qaeda Linked Militants

Militants Destroy Timbuktu Islamic Shrines -- Voice of America

DAKAR -- In northern Mali, members of the Islamic militant group Ansar Dine are systematically destroying mausoleums and revered Muslim tombs in Timbuktu. UNESCO has listed the historic city as a World Heritage site for its ancient mosques and shrines.

Residents of Timbuktu told VOA that armed men from Ansar Dine began leveling the tombs early Saturday morning. The sites, including the tomb of 15th-century Muslim scholar Sidi Mahmoud, are considered sacred by the local population. Hardline Islamist groups like Ansar Dine regard such shrines as sacrilegious, but the sites are an important part of worship for Muslims around the world.

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More News On The Destruction of The Timbuktu Islamic Shrines By Al Qaeda Linked Militants

Ansar Dine fighters destroy Timbuktu shrines -- Al Jazeera
Mali: Islamists destroy Timbuktu heritage sites -- AP
Islamists destroy Timbuktu religious treasures‎ -- Euronews
Mali Islamists destroy Timbuktu shrines -- AFP
Islamic militants set fire to sacred tombs in Timbuktu -- CNN
Witnesses: Islamists destroy ancient sites in Timbuktu -- MSNBC
Islamists destroy rival holy shrines in Timbuktu, a UN heritage site -- Globe And Mail/Reuters
Militants Seek to Destroy Mali Shrines -- New York Times/Reuters

A Music-Robot Companion

Shimi, a musical companion developed by Georgia Tech’s Center for Music Technology, recommends songs, dances to the beat and keeps the music pumping based on listener feedback. (Credit: Image courtesy of Georgia Institute of Technology)

Musical Robot Companion Enhances Listener Experience -- Science Daily

ScienceDaily (June 26, 2012) — Wedding DJs everywhere should be worried about job security now that a new robot is on the scene.

Shimi, a musical companion developed by Georgia Tech's Center for Music Technology, recommends songs, dances to the beat and keeps the music pumping based on listener feedback. The smartphone-enabled, one-foot-tall robot is billed as an interactive "musical buddy."

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My Comment: Wow .... they have gone a long way on enhancing our appreciation for music.

France's Minitel To 'Go Dark'

Minitels like this one are set to go dark at the end of this week.

Minitel, France's Precursor To The Web, To Go Dark On June 30 -- Ars Technica

French fans bid "adieu" to the much loved dial-up 1980s-era computer terminals.

When I was in high school in the mid-1990s, I got to spend a few weeks with my French extended family at their country house east of Paris. Nearly each night, I watched my uncle stare into a small, old, dusty computer to monitor the results of the Tour de France. The little beige box had a fold-down keyboard and a pretty old-school text-only interface, even by mid-'90s standards. This was a Minitel.

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My Comment: I was approached by my business partner's associates to do a Quebec minitel version in Canada in the late 1980s. I declined for the same reason why it never evolved from where it developed in France .... too centralized and a limited list on what to visit.

U.S. Navy Caused 'Skyquake' Along San Diego County's Coastline

Getty Images

Navy Says It Caused Mysterious 'Skyquake' -- North County Times

After an initial couldn't-have-been-us denial, it turns out it was the military's fault after all.

A Navy spokesman confirmed late Friday that two Navy F/A-18 fighter jets went "supersonic," rattling doors and windows ---- and nerves ---- like an earthquake along San Diego County's coastline about 12:45 p.m. Friday.

The jets were showing off for about 2,000 family members and invited guests of sailors aboard the Carl Vinson during a daylong family cruise, said Lt. Aaron Kakiel, a spokesman for Naval Air Forces Pacific, at North Island Air Station.

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My Comment: The original story is here. It must have been impressive to experience such a sonic quake .... especially for the spectators who were close.

Can A Vaccine Eliminate Nicotine's Addictive Traits?

Smoking Kills Challiyil Eswaramangalath Vipin via Wikimedia

With New Nicotine Vaccine, Cigarettes Give You No Pleasure -- Popular Science

By denaturing nicotine before it reaches the heart and brain, a new vaccine could mute the addictiveness of tobacco products

Nicotine addiction is a hard habit to break. But what if you could never get hooked in the first place? Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York report in the journal Science Translational Medicine that they have developed a potential vaccine for nicotine addiction. In mice, the vaccine inhibits the effects of nicotine before they reach the heart or brain, making it seem as though the nicotine never entered the bloodstream.

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My Comment: I wonder if this science can also be used to eliminate the addictive properties of opiates like heroin?

It's The Nexus Generation

Future: Hugo Barra, director of product management of Google, unveils the Nexus 7 tablet today

It's The Nexus Generation: Google Hits The iPad Where It Hurts With Premium Tablet For Just £159 (And For Once, UK Shoppers Are Not Getting Ripped Off!) -- Daily Mail

* More than one million Android devices are purchased every single day
* No more 'dollars = pounds': Google gives 'Rip-Off Britain' a fair price compared to U.S.

Google has taken the battle to Apple in the tablet market, introducing a premium tablet for a 'bargain bucket' rate.

The seven-inch Google Nexus tablet, which goes on sale in three weeks, will cost $199 in the U.S. and just £159 in the UK.

It is a rare example of UK shoppers not being burnt by the usual tactic of companies - which usually simply switch the dollar sign for a pound sign.

The extremely competitive pricing may well lure Apple fans away from the iPad, which starts at $399 in the U.S. and £399 in the UK.

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My Comment: I like Apple's large screen ... so i guess I am still an Apple customer.

Army To Introduce It's Battlefield Network This October

Photo from KitUp/Military.com

It Only Took The Army 16 Years And 2 Wars to Deploy This Network -- Danger Room

In October, the Army will do something it’s wanted to do for more than a decade: send a pair of combat brigades to a warzone equipped with a new data network, and the hardware to operate it. It’ll let more than a thousand troops rapidly send voice, text, imagery and data across a warzone and to a soldier on patrol. It’s a milestone, following years of aspirations, setbacks and adjustments. And it arrives pretty much too late for the wars.

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Update #1: Army Strips Down Expectations -- And Battle Network -- For Faster Fielding -- Aol Defense
Update #2: Army Battlefield Network: Winners and Losers -- National Defense

My Comment: Only 16 years?

A Laser That Shoots Lightning

Guided lightning bolt travels horizontally, then hits a car.
(Credit: U.S. Army)

Brrzzzt! U.S. Army Checks Out Laser-Based Lightning Tech -- CNet

Future weapon would seek out targets that conduct electricity better than the air or ground that surrounds them.

Earlier this spring, the U.S. Army revealed the existence of a project underway to build a device that could shoot lightning bolts down laser beams to take out a target. Now the military's boffins report success in their first tests.

The technology -- known as laser-induced plasma channel -- is designed to seek out targets that conduct electricity better than the air or ground that surrounds them.

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More News On the U.S. Army's Laser That Shoots Lightning

US army builds lightning bolt laser weapon -- Wired
Army Developing Laser That Shoots Lightning -- CBS
The Power of Zeus, In The Hands Of The U.S Military -- Ubergizmo
U.S. Army weapon shoots lightning bolts down laser beams -- Gizmag
Army tests lightning weapon -- Salon/Global Post
Army looks to strike foes with lightning weapon -- FOX News

What Does A$168,000 Bottle Of Wine Taste Like?

The world’s most expensive wine, Penfolds 2004 Block 42, is housed in 750-ml glass ampoules. Photo: Penfolds

Record-Breaking Wine: What Does $168,000 Taste Like? -- Wired Science

Today, the Australian winery Penfolds announced the world’s most expensive wine sold directly from a winery, eloquently dubbed “2004 Block 42.” The $168,000 wine is a produced from a single vineyard, from what the winery claims are the oldest continuously producing Cabernet Sauvignon vines in the world. It will be sold in 12 glass ampoules (above), which look more like something you’d use to kill a vampire than to serve wine. Each holds the equivalent of a standard wine bottle.

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My Comment: This is overpriced wine .... but I must confess that I do like the design of the bottle.

How HyperStealth’s Algorithms Build Better Camo

A mock-up of HyperStealth’s Quantum Stealth technology. Photo: HyperStealth

Discreet by Design: How HyperStealth’s Algorithms Build Better Camo -- Danger Room

Guy Cramer was annoyed by the cost of Canada’s newest military uniform redesign. He’d been interested in camo since the ‘80s, when he wore it as a professional paintballer. He decided he could do better, so Cramer invested in a $100 design program, spent an hour retooling the pattern and posted the critique online.

This was back in 2003, when Cramer was selling plumbing supplies and working on science projects in his free time. A year later, Cramer gets a call from Jordan’s military office. The king, they said, wanted him to redesign the country’s uniforms. Within three months, Cramer whiped them up a new pattern.

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My Comment: I look forward to the day when they can be invisible.

What Did Ancient Humans Eat?

A high-tech dental analysis of a 2-million-year-old hominid from South Africa involving CU-Boulder researchers indicates it had a unique diet that included trees, bushes and fruits. (Credit: Photo courtesy Paul Sandberg, University of Colorado)

Ancient Human Ancestors Had Unique Diet -- Science Daily

ScienceDaily (June 27, 2012) — When it came to eating, an upright, 2 million-year-old African hominid had a diet unlike virtually all other known human ancestors, says a study led by the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany and involving the University of Colorado Boulder.

The study indicated that Australopithecus sediba -- a short, gangly hominid that lived in South Africa -- ate harder foods than other early hominids, targeting trees, bushes and fruits.

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My Comment: I guess pizza was not around at the time. :)

The Power Of Chess

Chessgames.com

24 Executives Who Are Exceptional At Chess -- Business Insider

Games like bridge, poker, and chess are great for business. These games all use methods that can can be incorporated into the way you view and make business decisions. Chess in particular requires strategic decision-making, concentration, tactics, and evaluation.

Bob Rice, author of Three Moves Ahead: What Chess Can Teach You About Business, wrote: "The more you look at the business world, the more you see that successful companies and the people who run them use chess strategies routinely (whether they know it or not)."

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My Comment: My rating was 2100 when I was 13. Loved the game .... but I drifted into business to make money.

The Pentagon Wants A Reddit Knockoff

Screencaps of several milSuite services. In July, the Pentagon plans to launch Eureka, a Reddit-style forum. Illustration: Army

TIL: The Pentagon Is Building a Reddit Knockoff -- Danger Room

For years, the military has struggled over what to do about social media. One response has been to create dull, Pentagon-controlled versions of popular websites Facebook and YouTube. Now the Pentagon is preparing to launch its own version of Reddit, in another small step in the military’s quest to strip the fun out of everything on the internet.

It’s called Eureka, and it’s supposed to be a rough analogue to the ginormous social news site where users vote on which content rises to the top — or which content falls to the bottom — of user-generated feeds.

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My Comment: Reddit's military forum is here.

A Look At Facebook's Newest Data Center

Over the past seven months, the traffic moving between Facebook’s server has nearly doubled, while the traffic between the servers and the outside world has grown at a far more steady rate. Image: Facebook

Facebook Future-Proofs Data Center With Revamped Network -- Wired Enterprise

When Facebook started work on its new data center in Forest City, North Carolina, the idea was to create pretty much an exact copy of the new-age facility the company had just built in the high desert of central Oregon. “The blueprint we’d put together was pretty good,” says Jay Parikh, the man who oversees Facebook’s entire data center infrastructure. “We felt that all we needed to do was lather, rise, and repeat.”

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My Comment: Facebook is clearly betting on a long future.

The Ultimate Heatsink?

A Heatsink That Could Be 30 Times More Efficient Than Today's Setups -- Popular Science

Computers get hot. Heat is bad for computers. To whisk it away, we use a combination of heatsinks and fans to snatch heat away from the internals and blast it out of the computer's case. But Sandia has a concept that combines the two in a way that, they claim, increases heat-removing efficiency by up to 30 times.

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My Comment: Smart and innovative .... kudos to the inventors.

Google Creates A "Computer Brain"

There's a certain grim inevitability to the fact that the YouTube company's creation began watching stills from cat videos

Google Creates 'Computer Brain' - And It Immediately Starts Watching Cat Videos On YouTube -- Daily Mail

* 16,000 processors create brain-style 'neural network'
* Network learns by itself to identify cat faces
* Works with pool of 10 million images from YouTube

Google has created an 'artificial brain' from 16,000 computer processors, and sat it down with an internet connection.

There's a certain grim inevitability to the fact that the YouTube company's creation began watching stills from cat videos.

The team, led by Google's Dr Jeff Dean, used the 16,000 processor array to create a brain-style 'neural network' with more than a billion connections.

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My Comment: I am not a "cat person".

Google Expected To Announce An In-House 'Nexus' Tablet

Tomorrow Google is expected to announce an in-house 'Nexus' tablet: To date, the best Android tablets have been models like the Samsung Galaxy Tab (pictured)

Google I/O Conference 2012 Predictions: Tech Giant To Present Its Vision For The Future Of Android And Search Tomorrow -- Daily Mail

Enthusiasts look forward to...

* Google Goggles: A pair of glasses with a built-in 'heads-up' display
* Google Nexus tablet: Google's first attempt at an in-house Android tablet
* Google Assistant: Google's take on Siri voice-controls
* Android@Home: Controlling your house appliances via Android
* Jellybean: The next version of Android's operating system

Google kicks off its annual developer's conference tomorrow - and we will get a glimpse of what Google sees in our future.

The three-day 'Input/Output Conference' is Google's way of keeping developers abreast of what is happening within the company, but it is a good chance for the public to find out what products and services to expect in the year or two ahead.

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My Comment: I wish them luck.

The Man Who Makes Sure That Facebook Remains Up And Running Each Day

Photo: Jay Parikh runs Facebook's infrastructure (Credit: Facebook)

The Man Who Keeps Facebook Humming (Q&A) -- CNet

Jay Parikh is a key person responsible for making sure Facebook remains up and running each day.

Jay Parikh is happy to never get a call from Mark Zuckerberg. Why? It means he's doing his job well. As the vice president of infrastructure engineering at Facebook, Parikh is charged with the enormous task of keeping the machines that run Facebook operating with as few hiccups as possible. As Facebook now approaches 1 billion users, and continues to roll out more features that connect people every which way, that challenge grows. Which is why Parikh, who this morning gave the keynote at the Velocity conference in Silicon Valley, has been hard at work building out Facebook's back-end technology and data centers.

I met up with Parikh at Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., and discussed a range of topics. Here's an edited version:

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My Comment: I suspect that he has Mark Zuckerberg's direct cell phone number .... and vice versa.