Source: [Jan 19 Update] An Update on Credit Card Security – OnePlus Forums
Daily Archives: January 19, 2018
Real-world intercontinental quantum communications enabled by the Micius satellite
A joint China-Austria team has performed quantum key distribution between the quantum-science satellite Micius and multiple ground stations located in Xinglong (near Beijing), Nanshan (near Urumqi), and Graz (near Vienna). Such experiments demonstrate the secure satellite-to-ground exchange of cryptographic keys during the passage of the satellite Micius over a ground station. Using Micius as a trusted relay, a secret key was created between China and Europe at locations separated up to 7,600 km on the Earth.
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Within a year after launch, three key milestones for a global-scale quantum internet were achieved: satellite-to-ground decoy-state QKD with kHz rate over a distance of ~1200 km (Liao et al. 2017, Nature 549, 43); satellite-based entanglement distribution to two locations on the Earth separated by ~1200 km and Bell test (Yin et al. 2017, Science 356, 1140), and ground-to-satellite quantum teleportation (Ren et al. 2017, Nature 549, 70). The effective link efficiencies in the satellite-based QKD were measured to be ~20 orders of magnitude larger than direct transmission through optical fibers at the same length of 1200 km. The three experiments are the first steps toward a global space-based quantum internet.The satellite-based QKD has now been combined with metropolitan quantum networks, in which fibers are used to efficiently and conveniently connect numerous users inside a city over a distance scale of ~100 km. For example, the Xinglong station has now been connected to the metropolitan multi-node quantum network in Beijing via optical fibers. Very recently, the largest fiber-based quantum communication backbone has been built in China, also by Professor Pan’s team, linking Beijing to Shanghai (going through Jinan and Hefei, and 32 trustful relays) with a fiber length of 2000 km. The backbone is being tested for real-world applications by government, banks, securities and insurance companies.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-01-real-world-intercontinental-quantum-enabled-micius.html#jCp
Source: Real-world intercontinental quantum communications enabled by the Micius satellite
Information engine operates with nearly perfect efficiency
Physicists have experimentally demonstrated an information engine—a device that converts information into work—with an efficiency that exceeds the conventional second law of thermodynamics. Instead, the engine’s efficiency is bounded by a recently proposed generalized second law of thermodynamics, and it is the first information engine to approach this new bound.
The results demonstrate both the feasibility of realizing a “lossless” information engine—so-called because virtually none of the available information is lost but is instead almost entirely converted into work—and also experimentally validates the sharpness of the bound set by the generalized second law.
The physicists, Govind Paneru, Dong Yun Lee, Tsvi Tlusty, and Hyuk Kyu Pak at the Institute for Basic Science in Ulsan, South Korea (Tlusty and Pak are also with the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology), have published a paper on the lossless information engine in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.
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Traditionally, the maximum efficiency with which an engine can convert energy into work is bounded by the second law of thermodynamics. In the past decade, however, experiments have shown that an engine’s efficiency can surpass the second law if the engine can gain information from its surroundings, since it can then convert that information into work. These information engines (or “Maxwell’s demons,” named after the first conception of such a device) are made possible due to a fundamental connection between information and thermodynamics that scientists are still trying to fully understand.Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-01-efficiency.html#jCp
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-01-efficiency.html#jCp
Source: Information engine operates with nearly perfect efficiency
You could soon be manufacturing your own drugs—thanks to 3D printing
Forget those long lines at the pharmacy: Someday soon, you might be making your own medicines at home. That’s because researchers have tailored a 3D printer to synthesize pharmaceuticals and other chemicals from simple, widely available starting compounds fed into a series of water bottle–size reactors. The work, they say, could digitize chemistry, allowing users to synthesize almost any compound anywhere in the world.
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In today’s issue of Science, Cronin and his colleagues report printing a series of interconnected reaction vessels that carry out four different chemical reactions involving 12 separate steps, from filtering to evaporating different solutions. By adding different reagents and solvents at the right times and in a precise order, they were able to convert simple, widely available starting compounds into a muscle relaxant called baclofen. And by designing reactionware to carry out different chemical reactions with different reagents, they produced other medicines, including an anticonvulsant and a drug to fight ulcers and acid reflux.
Source: You could soon be manufacturing your own drugs—thanks to 3D printing | Science | AAAS
Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders
Intelligence makes for better leaders—from undergraduates to executives to presidents—according to multiple studies. It certainly makes sense that handling a market shift or legislative logjam requires cognitive oomph. But new research on leadership suggests that, at a certain point, having a higher IQ stops helping and starts hurting.
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The researchers looked at 379 male and female business leaders in 30 countries, across fields that included banking, retail and technology. The managers took IQ tests (an imperfect but robust predictor of performance in many areas), and each was rated on leadership style and effectiveness by an average of eight co-workers. IQ positively correlated with ratings of leader effectiveness, strategy formation, vision and several other characteristics—up to a point. The ratings peaked at an IQ of around 120, which is higher than roughly 80 percent of office workers. Beyond that, the ratings declined. The researchers suggest the “ideal” IQ could be higher or lower in various fields, depending on whether technical versus social skills are more valued in a given work culture.“It’s an interesting and thoughtful paper,” says Paul Sackett, a management professor at University of Minnesota, who was not involved in the research. “To me, the right interpretation of the work would be that it highlights a need to understand what high-IQ leaders do that leads to lower perceptions by followers,” he says. “The wrong interpretation would be, ‘Don’t hire high-IQ leaders.’ ”
Source: Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders – Scientific American
Someone is touting a mobile, PC spyware platform called Dark Caracal to governments
Dark Caracal [PDF] appears to be controlled from the Lebanon General Directorate of General Security in Beirut – an intelligence agency – and has slurped hundreds of gigabytes of information from devices. It shares its backend infrastructure with another state-sponsored surveillance campaign, Operation Manul, which the EFF claims was operated by the Kazakhstan government last year.
Crucially, it appears someone is renting out the Dark Caracal spyware platform to nation-state snoops.
“This is definitely one group using the same infrastructure,” Eva Galperin, the EFF’s director of cybersecurity, told The Register on Wednesday. “We think there’s a third party selling this to governments.”
Dark Caracal has, we’re told, been used to siphon off information from thousands of targets in over 21 countries – from private documents, call records, audio recordings, and text messages to contact information, and photos from military, government, and business targets, as well as activists and journalists.
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The primary way to pick up Pallas on your gadget is by installing infected applications – such as WhatsApp and Signal ripoffs – from non-official software souks. Pallas doesn’t exploit zero-days to take over a device, but instead relies on users being tricked into installing booby-trapped apps, and granting the malicious software a large variety of permissions. Once in place, it can thus surreptitiously record audio from the phone’s microphone, reveal the gizmo’s location to snoops, and leak all the data the handset contains to its masters.In addition, the Dark Caracal platform offers another surveillance tool: a previously unseen sample of FinFisher, the spyware package sold to governments to surveil citizens. It’s not known if this was legitimately purchased, or a demo version that was adapted.
On the desktop side, Dark Caracal provides a Delphi-coded Bandook trojan, previously identified in Operation Manul, that commandeers Windows systems. Essentially, marks are tricked into installing and running infected programs signed with a legitimate security certificate. Once up and running, the software nasty downloads more malware from command-and-control servers. The code pest can also be stashed in Microsoft Word documents, and executed using macros – so beware, Office admins.
Source: Someone is touting a mobile, PC spyware platform called Dark Caracal to governments • The Register
New AI System Predicts How Long Patients Will Live With Startling Accuracy
By using an artificially intelligent algorithm to predict patient mortality, a research team from Stanford University is hoping to improve the timing of end-of-life care for critically ill patients.
After parsing through 2 million records, the researchers identified 200,000 patients suitable for the project. The researchers were “agnostic” to disease type, disease stage, severity of admission (ICU versus non-ICU), and so on. All of these patients had associated case reports, including a diagnosis, the number of scans ordered, the types of procedures performed, the number of days spent in the hospital, medicines used, and other factors.
The deep learning algorithm studied the case reports from 160,000 of these patients, and was given the directive: “Given a patient and a date, predict the mortality of that patient within 12 months from that date, using EHR data of that patient from the prior year.” The system was trained to predict patient mortality within the next three to 12 months. Patients with less than three months of lifespan weren’t considered, as that would leave insufficient time for palliative care preparations.
Armed with its new skills, the algorithm was tasked with assessing the remaining 40,000 patients. It did quite well, successfully predicting patient mortality within the 3 to 12 month timespan in nine out of 10 cases. Around 95 percent of patients who were assessed with a low probability of dying within that period lived beyond 12 months. The pilot study proved successful, and the researchers are now hoping their system will be applied more broadly.
Source: New AI System Predicts How Long Patients Will Live With Startling Accuracy