Month: March 2016

(credit: NASA)

For a long-term memory to form in our noggins, a complex chain of cellular events needs to kick into action. It starts with chemical cues set off by a behavior or experience that make their way to specific nerve cells in the brain. Upon arrival to those cells, the chemical signals are ferried from the outer waiting area of the cell to the nucleus—a cell’s command center where the genetic blueprints are kept. In the nucleus, the molecular messenger can persuade the cell to switch on or off genes—which can strengthen nerve connections and, ultimately, lock down a memory for long-term recall.

While those general steps are clear, the details are still a bit fuzzy. For instance, researchers don’t know how exactly the molecular signals get shuttled to the command center, which generally have tight security. But a new study may finally have that answer.

In the tiny minds of fruit flies, a protein called importin-7 acts to shuttle the memory-triggering signal into the nucleus with its top-level clearance to the restricted area, researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Because this step of long-term memory formation seems the same in everything from flies to humans, and humans have their own version of importin-7, the finding could help fill in the details of how our minds form memories, the authors suggest.

Video shot/edited by Nathan Fitch. (video link)

NEW YORK—DJI has just announced the Phantom 4, the latest in the company's line of camera-equipped quadcopters. Of course the newer version flies faster for longer and has a better camera, but the headline feature is the addition of new autonomous flight features that make the drone easier to fly, easier to film, and harder to crash.

Two optical sensors now sit just above the two front legs of the Phantom 4. Combined with a computer vision system, these sensors make a volumetric map of the environment in front of the drone. This allows it to "see" and react to objects in front of it, allowing the drone to take measures to avoid a crash while flying.

(credit: USPTO via EFF)

"Personalized content" is a phrase so vague that it could mean just about anything. That quality makes it just about perfect for use by a patent troll. This month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's patent lawyers have honed in on a patent describing a way of "presenting personalized content relating to offered products and services," owned by Phoenix Licensing LLC, a patent-holding company controlled by Richard Libman, an Arizona man who's sued more that 100 companies.

The main claim of US Patent No. 8,738,435 is little more than a description of sending a "communication" with "identifying content" to a "plurality of persons." The patent essentially describes any type of personalized marketing, as long as it involves a "computer-accessible storage medium."

In other words—personalized marketing, but on a computer.

Before Diffie-Hellman, symmetric cryptography—as exemplified by this Nazi-era Enigma machine—was the norm. (credit: Michele M. F.)

On Tuesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the nation’s leading organization for computer science, awarded its annual top prize of $1 million to two men whose name will forever be immortalized in cryptography: Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman.

The 2015 ACM Turing Award, which is sometimes referred to as the "Nobel Prize of Computing," was awarded to a former chief security officer at Sun Microsystems and a professor at Stanford University, respectively.

In their landmark 1976 paper, the Diffie-Hellman key exchange was the first to explore ideas of "public-key cryptography." That concept underpins much of modern cryptography, including PGP encrypted e-mail, TLS, and more. Public-key cryptography, also known as asymmetric cryptography, relies on two keys, one a freely shareable public key, the other a secret private key, thus eliminating the historic key management problem of the same key being kept by both the recipient and sender.

Former antivirus developer and presidential wannabe John McAfee claimed a couple of weeks ago to have the perfect solution to the FBI-Apple stand-off. He offered to crack the iPhone for the FBI for free. This would let the government agency gain access to the phone while freeing Apple from any demands to assist. So confident was McAfee of his ability to help out that he said he'd eat a shoe on TV if he couldn't get into the phone.

It will probably not come as much of a surprise to anyone to learn that the FBI has not been beating down McAfee's door.

Perhaps they were unconvinced by the strategy that the man outlined. He said that he and his team would primarily use "social engineering," which is to say, manipulating people into telling you what you want to know through gaining their trust. It can be a powerful technique, but it certainly isn't a panacea. It's often less effective when the victims are aware that you're trying to socially engineer them (for example, by announcing your intent to do so on the Internet). It's less effective still when the people holding the information are in fact dead. McAfee may be persuasive, but probably not so persuasive as to be able to coax a corpse to give up its PIN.

FBI Director James Comey in the hot seat Tuesday before the House Judiciary Committee. (credit: C-SPAN3)

James Comey, the FBI director, told a House panel on Tuesday that the so-called “Going Dark” problem is “grave, growing, and extremely complex.” (PDF)

His prepared testimony to the House Judiciary Committee is not surprising. There’s been a chorus of government actors singing that same song for years. But what we didn't hear was the bureau director ask Congress for legislation authorizing encryption backdoors. That’s because there’s no congressional support—which underscores why the President Obama administration is now invoking a 1789 obscure law in federal courthouses asking judges to do what Congress has declined to do.

"If I didn't do that, I oughta be fired," Comey told the panel during his live testimony. The panel's hearing, "Encryption Tightrope: Balancing Americans' Security and Privacy," was largely dedicated to the FBI's legal battle with Apple. He said if the bureau had the capability to bypass iPhone passcode locks in the dozens of pending cases where they've gone to court, "We wouldn't be litigating if we could."