Nextgov/FCW - Authors - Adam Clark Estes

The Space Station is Leaking Vital Fluid

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Fri, 10 May 2013 14:13:46 -0400

If there's any phrase an astronaut never wants to mutter, it's "Houston, we have a problem." Calling from the International Space Station on Thursday evening, Commander Chris Hadfield did just that. Well, he didn't actually quote that excellent Tom Hanks movie, but he did make a distressing call down to mission control. The astronauts on board the ISS had noticed what they believe to be ammonium cooling fluid leaking from the hull. The fluid is used to cool the power systems that control the space station's eight solar array panels, meaning that a total failure would cripple the floating habitat's ability to generate power.

But don't worry. Everything's going to be okay. NASA and Hadfield both say that the leak isn't putting the astronauts on the ISS in any immediate danger. The minor leak is actually not a new problem but an old headache that dates back to 2007. The ISS limped along for five years before astronauts fixed the problem on a space walk — or at least they thought they'd fixed it. Over the radio, Hadfield described the leak as "a very steady stream of flakes or bits" coming from the hull. (You can listen to the audio here.) "It is a serious situation, but between crew and experts on the ground, it appears to have been stabilized," Hadfield tweeted (from space!). "Tomorrow we find out for certain."

So chill out, Earth. Commander Hadfield really doesn't want you to worry about him. About an hour after the scary radio call and subsequent scary tweets, Hadfield offered this, "A view to put the mind at ease."

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Are You Ready to Pay for YouTube?

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Mon, 06 May 2013 11:05:01 -0400

The Financial Times reports that the long-rumored paid subscription model is coming to YouTube as early as this week. The strategy will help YouTube compete not only with other online outlets like Netflix and Hulu but also with major networks like CBS. However, it's also a sea change in the site's approach to content, since YouTube has always been a destination for endless amounts of free user-generated content. Don't worry, though. Most of it will still be free — for now anyways.

According to the FT's Matthew Garrahan and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, the new paid subscription platform is in the final stages of development and "will apply to as many as 50 YouTube channels." The paid subscriptions will likely affect the same batch of professional quality channels that YouTube's already investing heavily in promoting. With YouTube having spent over $200 million promoting this strategy in the past 18 months, these include channels hosted by major media companies, everyone from The Onion to WWE. Now it's time for the users to start shelling out some cash for premium content

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.

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Twitter Tells News Organizations to Expect Even More Hacks in the Future

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 10:24:48 -0400

A little less than a week after a hacked Associated Press account reported a non-existent bombing at the White House, Twitter decided it was time to comfort journalists by warning them that they should expect to get hacked. "We believe that these attacks will continue, and that news and media organizations will continue to be high value targets to hackers," the company said in a memo sent to several news organzations on Monday evening and published by BuzzFeed. In the memo, Twitter offered up a whole host of anti-hacking techniques, including but not limited to not restricting access to the account, changing the password and designating a no-Internet, no-email computer as the go-to Twitter machine, so that employees don't unwittingly fall for a phishing attack. Because that makes sense.

The dedicated computer trick actually does make sense — it just doesn't make good sense. Twitter's suggesting every news organization on the planet set up a special Twitter computer is a little bit bonkers. The rest of the suggestions are pretty standard things that all Internet users should be doing to protect their account, and even the somewhat salacious-sounding warning that hacks will happen is common sense for anybody who knows anything about cybersecurity. What it is not, however, is a display of confidence on Twitter's part that it has its ducks in a row when it comes to security.

Read more at TheAtlanticWire.com.

(Image via Steve Byland/Shutterstock.com)

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CISPA Is Dead, Long Live CISPA

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 15:37:58 -0400

After stirring up trouble for months, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act died a quiet death in the Senate on Thursday. Despite the bill's passage in the House, Senators decided to pigeonhole the legislation. It was not necessarily a surprising move for the upper chamber, especially given the fact that the Obama administration made a veto threat. However, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation is not completely forgetting about CISPA. "We're not taking [CISPA] up," a committee representative told the press on Thursday. "Staff and senators are divvying up the issues and the key provisions everyone agrees would need to be handled if we're going to strengthen cybersecurity. They'll be drafting separate bills."

Read the rest at TheAtlanticWire.com.

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Good Timing: Twitter Will Soon Release a Two-Step Security Solution

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 10:09:19 -0400

Some Twitter employee — probably several employees, actually — had a pretty rough day on Tuesday, after a hack led to the AP sending a fake tweet to its 2 million followers. If only the hacker had waited, Twitter could've stopped them! Minutes before appearing on the Rachel Maddow Show to talk about the hack Wired's Mat Honan reported, "Twitter has a working two-step security solution undergoing internal testing before incrementally rolling it out to users, something it hopes to begin doing shortly." It is not quite the edit button Honan had asked for in a piece published not long after the AP incident, but it's a big step forward for Twitter security. (Plus, as The Atlantic Wire's Rebecca Greenfield reports, an edit button would never work.)

Twitter security breaches, we've all learned, can be problematic. The AP hack on Tuesday reported to the world that the White House had been bombed and President Obama injured. It only took a few seconds to discredit the report, but that time frame was long enough to send the Dow plummeting. And then of course, seemingly everybody with access to the Internet had to write a blog post about how dangerous Twitter's its shaky security is.

This is not a new problem. Nearly two years ago, we pointed out how Twitter was content to remain hands off in hacking incidents, even those at news organizations that stand tos end fear into the hearts of millions of followers. After hacked NBC News account with hundreds of thousands of followers reported a terrorist attack in downtown Manhattan, Twitter declined to comment on the situation and directed disgruntled users to an FAQ about keeping your account safe. However, it now seems apparent that Twitter's own tools aren't enough to keep accounts safe, so Twitter's finally doing something.

Of course, it'll be a little while before the feature rolls out to regular users. In the meantime, you have to applaud both Honan and Twitter for the timing of the update. Even though it's journalism and the two-step verification has been in the works for a long time, it feels like good customer service to hear that Twitter's taking action so soon after the AP boondoggle.

(Image via Flickr user thecampbells)

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An Internet Sales Tax Suddenly Seems Imminent

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 10:28:05 -0400

An overwhelming majority of Senators just voted to cut the debate short and get a final vote on a controversial bill that will impose sales tax on purchases made on the Internet. Though support to move the so-called Marketplace Fairness Act forward jumped from less than 60 senators to 74 who voted to limit debate on Monday, the pro-Internet crew has a tough row to hoe. But based on the industry Goliaths at their back, companies like Wal-Mart and Amazon, and the recent change of heart by so many lawmakers, the bill looks like it stands a pretty good chance of making it to the president's desk. It helps that the Obama administration announced not long before the vote on Monday that it supports the curent version of the bill.

But just because the bill suddenly has a lot of support from very powerful people, doesn't mean it's without opposition. Opponents of the bill have been around for years — though some, like Amazon, have switched sides over time. The resilient opponets include everyone from eBay, the Internet auction giant that's been mobilizing its millions of users against the bill, to Grover Norquists Americans for Tax Reform, a powerful anti-tax lobby with obvious libertarian leanings. After Monday's change of heart in the Senate, those groups turned their gaze to the House, where there's still some hope if not to stop the bill than to amend it so that's not so sweeping.

Read more at Atlantic Wire.

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The Question of Whether We Can Patent Genes Heads to the Supreme Court

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 12:03:59 -0400

While tech types have been crowing over how broken the software patent system has become, the medical community is dealing with a much more serious question: Should we be able to patent genes? That is, does the centuries' old method for protecting intellectual property and rewarding research still apply when the invention comes straight out of the human body? The scientific community is rather divided over this one, but with oral arguments on a case filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and Public Patent Foundation kicking off on Monday, we'll have an answer to this tough conundrum soon enough.

The case calls into question seven patents held by Myriad Genetics, a company started by the geneticist who located and isolated the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes in the early 1990s. These are the two genes that indicate whether a woman is more susceptible to breast cancer, and the discovery stood to save a lot of lives. However, because of Myriad's patents on the decoded snippets of DNA — they literally own the rights to that piece of the human genome — other companies were barred from making the tests that women would use to see if they carried the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. This gave Myriad a complete monopoly over the market. Geneticists weren't even allowed to do researcher the gene without Myriad's permission.

Obviously, a lot of people in the medical community don't like Myriad's approach. Lori Andrews, a law professor who wrote a dissenting brief to the Supreme Court for the American Medical Association, told Reuters that "Myriad's exclusive control has led to the misdiagnosis of patients and has precluded the deployment of improved genetic tests." It's not just Myriad any more either. Since those early patents, thousands of more companies have staked out their own claims to piece of the human genome. Genetic researcher Christopher Mason of Weill Cornell Medical College estimates that about 40 percent of the human genome has now been patented and says this sets a really bad precedent. "The overabundance of gene patents is a large and looming threat to personalized medicine," Mason argues. "Individuals have an innate right to their own genome, or to allow their doctor to look at that genome, just like the lungs or kidneys."

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.

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No, That German Hacker Probably Can't Hijack an Airplane with Software

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 09:22:05 -0400

An alarming dispatch from the Hack In The Box security conference in Amsterdam arrived on Wednesday: a hacker says he's found a way to take over airplane controls. That's probably not true. At least according to the Federal Aviation Administration, the European Aviation Safety Administration and Honeywell, the maker of the cockpit software, it's not. The FAA, for one, says, "The described technique cannot engage or control the aircraft's autopilot system using the FMS or prevent a pilot from overriding the autopilot." The agency assures America that this hack "does not pose a flight safety concern because it does not work on certified flight hardware."

So why did Hugo Teso, the German hacker in question, tell everybody at the conference as well as countless journalists who've latched on to the story that he could take over the software? Well, Teso says he's successfully taken over a plane's controls — in a flight simulator on his desktop computer at home. Hoping to expose some of the security flaws in planes' flight management system, Teso bought some FMS hardware on eBay as well as some FMS software that, according to Forbes "was advertised as containing some or all of the same code as the systems in real planes" and gave it a go. And he did it! Teso said that his technique would send radio signals to the plane and hijack its controls. "You can use this system to modify approximately everything related to the navigation of the plane," Teso told Forbes. "That includes a lot of nasty things."

To recap that order of events: Hacker buys equipment from eBay, loads up software that may contain "some or all of the same code" that's on commercial jets and -- in a flight simulator -- hijacks a plane. Come to think of it, that does sound a little reach-y doesn't it? The whole thing seems even less believable if you check out the slides that he used during the presentation, complete with images from The Matrix and Japanese Manga cartoons. One reason why the story felt like it could be feasible is the fact that there have been warnings from all sides of the cybersecurity industry about vulnerabilities in air traffic control software. This has been happening for years, and the FAA has actually admitted to risks in that arena.

We're not trying to say that Teso's making all this up. But hacking into your desktop computer's flight simulator is something that middle school kids do in technology class. It's not reason to strike fear into the hearts of millions. But hey, at least Teso seems well intentioned. You certainly can't say that about all hacker-types these days.

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PC Sales Drop by Greatest Margin Ever

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 09:50:26 -0400

When Microsoft released Windows 8 last fall, a lot of people thought it could be the PC's savior, a hip-looking new thing that made those clunky IBM-compatibles cool again. In fact, it's quite the opposite. New research from IDC shows that PC sales just dropped by the greatest margin ever — or at least in the past two decades that the firm's been keeping records. In the first quarter of 2013, the number of PCs sold dropped by 13.9 percent, the fourth consecutive quarterly decline. This sort of drop would be bad for any industry, but for one as young as computers, it's historic. The Associated Press says that "this is clearly the worst shape that the PC market has been in since IBM Corp. released a desktop machine in 1981."

Who's to blame? All signs point to Windows 8. The new operating system was supposed to be a lifeline for Microsoft's once almost monopolistic grip on the sector, but it was immediately confusing to people who tried to use it soon after launch. Even usability experts were having a hard time with the thing. (Yes, there is such a thing as a "usability expert.") Poor sales followed poor reviews, and within a few weeks, Windows 8 was pretty much considered a flop. Meanwhile, Microsoft fired the mastermind behind it. IDC vice president Bob O'Donnell sounds almost sympathetic when he said in a statement, "At this point, unfortunately, it seems clear that the Windows 8 launch not only failed to provide a positive boost to the PC market, but appears to have slowed the market."

Read the rest of this article at TheAtlanticWire.com.

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Anonymous Hits Israel with a Massive Cyber Attack, Israel Attacks Back

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 08:20:23 -0400

To ring in this year's Holocaust Memorial Day, the hackers at Anonymous took down a bunch of Israeli government websites on Sunday and say they caused over $3 billion in damage. But they didn't totally get away with it. Within a few hours of the attack which Anonymous says affected 100,000 websites, 40,000 Facebook pages, 5,000 Twitter accounts and 30,000 bank accounts, an Israeli hacker broke into the website that Anonymous had set up for the attack, dubbed Operation Israel. Instead of the original anti-Israel messages that were originally on the site to protest Israel's treatment of Palestine, the Israeli hacker rejiggered the site to play "Hatikvah," Israel's national anthem.

Israel's playing this one super cool. Despite Anonymous's claims of massive damage, the country's cyber security officials say that the attack caused minimal damage. "So far it is as was expected, there is hardly any real damage," Yitzhak Ben Yisrael from the government's National Cyber Bureau told the press. "Anonymous doesn't have the skills to damage the country's vital infrastructure. And if that was its intention, then it wouldn't have announced the attack ahead of time. It wants to create noise in the media about issues that are close to its heart." This is more or less what Anonymous always does, often with varying levels of success.

Bitcoin Is Now a Billion Dollar Industry

Adam Clark Estes — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 12:57:26 -0400

A tremendous thing happened in the weird world of bitcoin on Thursday. For the first time in the currency's history, the total value of all bitcoins in circulation topped $1 billion.

That's right: A billion bucks, right out of thin air. That's oversimplifying things a bit, but we'll get back to that. (By the way, if you still don't understand how bitcoin works, read this.) For now, let your jaw drop — watch the drool — and start wishing you'd bought a bunch of the cybercurrency way back when the exchange rate was less than $5, because on Thursday it zoomed past $95 per bitcoin.

In a way, this is just a microcosm of our financial system as a whole. Haters love to point out how bitcoin just appeared out of thin air on January 3, 2009. It was a pet project of Japanese mathematician Satoshi Nakamoto. Or rather, bitcoin was created by some talented coder slash economist slash enigma using what's probably a made up name. Nakamoto had an axe to grind, too. The basic idea was to create a currency that exists independent of any state government.

Read the rest at TheAtlanticWire.com.

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Facebook Will Finally Resolve Rumors of the Fabled Facebook Phone in One Week

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 09:31:24 -0400

Cross your fingers, cross your legs. Cross your arms and bow your head. The seemingly never-ending rumor mill spinning around the idea of a Facebook phone may finally come to a stop next week. Or it may not.

The social network just sent out press invitations to an event at its 1 Hacker Way headquarters in exactly one week. "Come See Our New Home on Android," the invitation read. Based on that line and the most reliable details floating around the blogosphere, Zuck and company will finally give us a peek into the future of its mobile strategy. Whether that's an actual Facebook phone, a Facebook-built mobile operating system or just a new app, we won't know until April 4. That said, we've been waiting to find out for a solid 18 months.

Despite the company's consistent denial of the rather durable rumors of a Facebook phone, everyone seems to agree that this April 4 Android event will be a big deal. As TechCrunch points out, the event is a full hour longer than the last one! The blog's Josh Constine reports that "it will be a modified version of the Android operating system with deep native Facebook functionality that may live on an HTC handset." Constine adds, "It's said not to be a full-on rewrite of Android, but rather a 'flavor' that will have all sorts of extra Facebook functionality built in." The rest of the blog post reports that this detail or that detail "could" be true no less than seven times.

IBM Invention Mimics Human Brains at Atomic Level

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 10:25:22 -0400

Here's a headline you've probably seen before: "IBM creates brain-like computer chip." Here's a more exciting one: "New IBM circuit works in three dimensions, flips switches with atoms." Heck, both are exciting. The latter's just, for lack of a more appropriate cliché, a bit more mind-boggling.

IBM scientists described a new kind of circuit in a paper published in Science on Thursday. There is no chip involved, per se. It's being described accurately as a "post-silicon transistor" and potentially paves the way for the most powerful and efficient computers the world has ever seen. This is possible largely because it mimics the behavior of another hyper-efficient computational marvel: the human brain.

Read the rest at TheAtlanticWire.com.

(Image via VLADGRIN/Shutterstock.com)

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Like a Dagger to Bloggers' Hearts, Google Just Killed Google Reader

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 11:43:21 -0400

Journalists and geeks united in exasperation on Wednesday evening when Google made a very sad announcement: The company is shuttering Google Reader. We should've seen this coming. And those that didn't see the inevitable death of Google's RSS feed organizer and reader might've easily missed the news, since Google buried it halfway down an official blog post about a bunch of other stuff. But it is true. The search giant will pronounce Reader dead on July 1, 2013. Based on the somewhat storied history of Google killing Reader features, though, we're pretty sure someone will start working on an alternative within the next few hours.

Again, this shouldn't be a surprise. Google Reader's been staring death in the face at least since the fall of 2011, when the company shut down the products social features. People were pissed. A few days later, a community of Google Reader devotees called Sharebros that used the service like a social network started their protest in earnest and actually showed up outside of Google's offices at one point. It took Google a few days to respond to the outrage, and when it explained that neutering Reader of its social features would help the company's engineers "build an even better experience across all of Google." (They also really want people to use Google+ which inherited some of Reader's old sharing capabilities.) The Sharebros took things into their own hands at that point, and one Sharebro named Francis Cleary actually started to build his own Reader replacement. Last we heard, it was still in development with Cleary as the sole developer.

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.

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Hackers Attack Bank Minutes After NSA Chief Warns Senate About Hackers Attacking Banks

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 13:25:34 -0400

Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, took the stand in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday and an ambitious expansion of the Pentagon's Cyber Command. "We've seen the attacks on Wall Street over the last six months grow significantly," Alexander told the senators, explaining that denial of service (DOS) attacks are the most common assault on banks' websites. "And if you look at industry, especially the anti-virus community and others, they believe it's going to grow more in 2013. And there's a lot that we need to do to prepare for this."

The general wasn't kidding. Within an hour or so of Alexander's testimony reports that Chase Bank's website had been hacked started to bubble up. Shortly before 7 p.m. Chase confirmed to CNBC that they had indeed been targeted. Hackers hit Chase with — you guessed it — a DOS attack, bringing down the company's website. It's unclear if any customer data was compromised. It's also absolutely unclear if the hack has anything to do with the series of hearings in the Senate on Tuesday that mention cyber security and the threat of a cyber attack. Hacking into a bank's website right after the head of the NSA warns the Senate about hackers hacking into banks' websites is certainly a clever way to win attention.

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.

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The Obama Administration Hasn't Ruled Out Drone Attacks on US Soil

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 11:23:08 -0500

A strange thing happened on Tuesday. Just a few hours after an airline pilot spotted an unidentified "drone" hovering a few miles from JFK airport, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that drones strikes on United States soil were not out of the question. Coincidence? We think so.

Let's cut through the sensationalism straight away. The Obama administration is not in favor of drone strikes on U.S. soil. In fact, it's downright opposed to the idea except in the event of "an extraordinary circumstance" like Pearl Harbor or September 11. Read Holder's letter to Senator Rand Paul explaining the administration's stance in full if you don't believe us. Sen. Paul responded accordingly and said that the administration's position on the matter was "more than frightening." From a sober point of view, though, can you imagine what the government wouldn't do to avoid the next 9/11? That contingency is just as frightening as the idea of another catastrophic attack.

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.

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Newborn Baby Cured of HIV, No One's Really Sure How

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 11:24:52 -0500

Medical researchers dropped their microscopes on Sunday when a team of doctors from Mississippi revealed that an infant in their care was born with HIV and cured two years later. Dr. Hannah Gay, who treated the baby, dropped the mic. (Not literally.) Within minutes of the announcement, some were calling the case of the Mississippi patient "a game-changer." Like the story of Timothy Brown, "the Berlin patient" who was effectively cured in 2008 after levels of the virus dropped to undetectable levels following bone marrow transplants for his leukemia treatments. While doctors considered Brown's case somewhat of an anomaly, they're calling the Mississippi patient's treatment a "functional cure." They're just not exactly sure how to replicate it.

The story of the Mississippi starts out like so many HIV cases do. A woman became pregnant not realizing that she was HIV positive, and after the mother failed to get proper care during pregnancy, the baby contracted the disease. Gay spotted the virus 30 hours after birth and believe that the baby was infected just before delivery. An hour later, she gave the baby an extra-high dose of three different drugs used to treat HIV — usually babies born with the virus are given only one — and continued the treatment in the coming days and weeks. A month later, the virus was undetectable, though the baby kept receiving treatment until 18-months later when the mother stopped taking the baby to the doctor. When they returned five months later, the mother told Gay that she'd stopped treatment. But when Gay tested the baby for the virus, they came up negative. Gay tested the baby again and again — all negative. Gay even let a team of researchers from the University of Massachusetts conduct a series of tests. They found just a tiny trace of the virus, and it was unable to replicate. In Gay's words, the baby was "functionally cured."

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.

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Google Sent Cash in the FTC's Direction During Its Antitrust Investigation

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 12:10:49 -0500

Nobody's calling it a bribe, but Google donated $25,000 to honor the Federal Trade Commission chairman while the agency was embroiled in an investigation into the company's alleged anti-competitive practices. Last year, Google, along with companies like AOL and Comcast, gave the money to Common Sense Media for an award that recently went to the FTC's Jon Leibowitz for his work helping children. A few months later, the FTC closed its investigation and concluded that Google had not violated any antitrust laws. It was a big victory for the search giant and likely helped the company financially. In the words ofThe New York Times, "By allowing Google to continue to present search results that highlight its own services, the FTC decision could enable Google to further strengthen its already dominant position on the Internet."

This is just one of those things. Again, it would be disingenuous to read causation into the correlation between Google giving the FTC money and the FTC letting Google off the hook. But either way, it doesn't look good. "It's a little bit odd that they're donating to Common Sense Media at the exact same time they're trying to influence Jon Leibowitz," Melanie Sloan, executive director of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told Bloomberg News. "It really looks terrible."

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.

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Facebook Now Has an Entire Team Devoted to Sandy Hook Scams

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 12:02:20 -0500

When three Connecticut lawmakers asked Mark Zuckerberg in a letter on Monday to do something about the flood of fake Sandy Hook memorial pages, he got back to them quickly. Democratic Senators Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy and Rep. Elizabeth Esty, also a Democrat, pointed out that Facebook is filled with countless pages that "have become vehicles for harassment, intimidation and possibly financial fraud." The lawmakers added that such pages enable fraudsters "to violate the privacy of families as they grieve, or seek financial gain through soliciting donations under false pretenses, or generating Facebook 'likes' for marketing purposes, should not be given quarter in the Facebook community." One teacher named Victoria Soto who was killed in the attack had over 100 pages dedicated to her, and the victim's mother went to the lawmakers for help pulling them down.

Facebook called Sen. Blumenthal's office within hours of the letter being sent to ensure him that the company had a dedicated team to deal with Sandy Hook-related requests. In a statement, the company said, "For the past few months, our rapid response team has acted swiftly to remove inappropriate materials flagged by the foundation and the families."

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.

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Recent Cyberattacks Herald a New Kind of Cold War

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 11:35:15 -0500

The New York Times is the latest media outlet to liken the quiet standoff between the United States and China over cyber security to "a new Cold War." In a Sunday evening piece of news analysis, the paper's David E. Sanger wrote about "how different the worsening cyber-cold war between the world's two largest economies is from the more familiar superpower conflicts of past decades — in some ways less dangerous, in others more complex and pernicious." The article's peg is clearly the recent spate of cyber attacks on U.S. companies, including The Times itself, that have come from Chinese origins. In fact, a lot of them can be traced back to a single neighborhood in the suburbs of Shanghai where the People's Liberation Army has its cyber command. The Chinese deny any involvement in the attacks. In fact, they blame us.

The "cyber Cold War" metaphor's been made before, but this time it seems serious — and not just because it's the Grey Lady that's making it. The entire nation got a wake up call when Obama called out cybersecurity in his State of the Union address and issued an executive order on the matter the following day. The order came after an Obama-backed cybersecurity bill failed to make it through the Senate last year. Within a couple of weeks, the cybersecurity firm Mandiant released a massive report revealing the origin of a large number of cyber attacks again U.S. companies, government agencies and critical infrastructure were indeed coming from a single facility on the outskirts of Shanghai. It's become frightfully apparent, frightfully quickly that there is indeed a war happening in cyberspace, one that stands to affect the average citizen rather seriously if it escalates.

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.

(Image via ruskpp/Shutterstock.com)

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North Korea's Nuclear Site Is Getting Busy Again

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 10:59:15 -0500

New satellite images of the nuclear test site in North Korea shows an uptick in activity for the first time since the country's third nuclear test on February 12, stirring fears that a fourth test is imminent. The US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University spotted the renewed activity on February 15 and just told the world about it on Wednesday. According to the AFP, however, the think tank "cautioned that there was not enough evidence to assert that a new test was in the works." It's certainly not evidence that a fourth test isn't in the works, either. In fact, it seems sort of imminent based on what we know about the North Korea's ambitions and the country's recent conversations with China. Three days ago, Pyongyang reportedly told Beijing that it's prepared for a fourth and even fifth nuclear test.

Who knows what the North Koreans are doing at that nuclear site. Maybe they're just cleaning up after the last test. Five kiloton nuclear bombs do make a heck of a mess, after all. Or maybe they're just stoking the fires of fear that the last test lit. Or maybe they are preparing for a fourth test. Wait, are we even sure that they did a third nuclear test? It's really hard to tell, because North Korea's gotten really really good at keeping its nuclear activities under a tight lid.

Google Will Finally Release a Device Apple Doesn't Make: A Touchscreen Laptop

Adam Clark Estes — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 10:56:23 -0500

Faced with sluggish Chromebook sales and challenged by surprisingly innovative Windows machines, Google will reportedly release a touchscreen laptop later this year. A Wall Street Journalscoop says that the search giant will double down on its commitment to manufacturing hardware with a touchscreen laptop powered by the Chrome operating system. And based on the rest of Google's hardware lineup — both the Chromebook and the Nexus 7 tablet start at $199 — it'll probably be frighteningly affordable. It will also be one thing that Google has that Apple does not.

Touchscreen laptops are not a new invention. They've been on the market for a while now, after Lenovo unveiled the world's first "flip-and-fold design" laptop at CES 2012. The idea is somewhat controversial, but in the words of Sean Hollister at The Verge, "Surprisingly, touchscreen laptops don't suck." That "surprisingly" is in there pretty specifically because Apple's been resisting the touchscreen laptop and even touchscreen computer idea for years.

The FDA Just Approved a Bionic Eye that Lets Blind People See

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 12:25:14 -0500

Imagine telling your grandma in 2003 that within a decade we'd invent a wearable video camera that wirelessly transmits images to your eyeball, effectively allowing the blind to see. She would've laughed you out the door! And then she would've asked you to read the TV Guide listings with your young eyes.

Grandma's not laughing now. On Thursday, the Food and Drug Administration approved a device that does indeed use a video camera attached to a pair of Oakley-esque glasses that communicate with electrodes implanted in the retina. Very clumsily named the Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System — we would've called them Jesus Glasses — these spectacles are specifically designed for people with retinitis pigmentosa, a rare, hereditary disease that causes cells in the retina to breakdown over time, eventually causing blindness. "It's like looking down a tunnel that gradually narrows until it disappears entirely,"says Dr. Robert Greenberg, CEO and founder of Second Sight, the company that makes the device. "What we're doing is reopening the window that had closed on them." Those patients won't be able to fly a fighter jet, but they will be able to distinguish light from dark.

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.

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What We Know About North Korea's Nuclear Test

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 10:58:54 -0500

Just hours after reports suggested that North Korea had abandoned its plan to detonate a nuclear device, the U.S. Geological Survey reported a 4.9-magnitude earthquake north of the 38th parallel on Tuesday. The Korean peninsula, by the way, is not prone to earthquakes. Not natural ones, anyways. The United Nations called it an "unusual seismic event" — at first.

Within minutes, a United Nations Security Council diplomat said that there had been a nuclear test in North Korea. And within an hour of that, the AP reported that South Korea "suspects" a nuclear test as well, while Reuters reported that South Korea was "on alert" for additional tests or missile launches. (Analysts focusing on Northeast Asia and North Korea watchers on social media immediately began suspecting a second underground tunnel could mean that a follow-up test might be forthcoming.) South Korea called an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council for 9 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday morning, an hour ahead of a scheduled meeting. U.S. officials told CNN they were working to confirm the reports. Japan's Kyodo news service saidthe Japanese defense ministry was scrambling aircraft to look at radiation effects, though a spokesperson for the government said they were unlikely to spread, and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe threatened new sanctions. Not that sanctions have stopped the acceleration of the reclusive but provocative state's nuclear and missile programs.

Click to read the latest updates and more information on The Atlantic Wire.

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Though It Might Take Out a Couple Satellites, This Asteroid Will Not Destroy Earth Next Week

Adam Clark Estes, The Wire — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 15:10:45 -0500

Good news, Earthlings! The day after Valentine's Day a 150-foot-wide asteroid will fly so close to our planet that it will pass through the orbit of several satellites, but experts said on Thursday that it will not hit us. In fact, the so-called DA14 asteroid will be such a close call that the force of Earth's gravity will actually cause the asteroid to ricochet off those orbits, creating more distance between the asteroid and our planet so that the next fly-by won't be so nerve-wracking. At 17,100 miles away, the DA14 will become the largest object ever (on record) to fly so close to Earth and not hit it. Which is really good news since it's traveling eight times faster than a speeding bullet. Scientists say that it could take out a satellite or two, however.

It's hard not to hear the theme song to Armageddon in your head when thinking about this sort of thing. Although 17,100 miles is a lot of miles in terms of space distance, for an asteroid half the size of the International Space Station to zip by so closely is a little breath-taking. It also leads us to wonder: At what point do we start talking about sending Bruce Willis and his persnickety pack of oil drillers into space to stop the dang thing? DA14's projected path brings it just one-thirteenth the distance to the moon from Earth, less than seven roundtrip flights from New York to Los Angeles. If it hit us, the resultant explosion would have the force of a 2.5-megaton atomic bomb.

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.

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