Month: November 2018

(credit: Esther Vargas / Flickr)

If you talk to experts on election security (I studied with several of them in graduate school) they'll tell you that we're nowhere close to being ready for online voting. "Mobile voting is a horrific idea," said election security expert Joe Hall when I asked him about a West Virginia experiment with blockchain-based mobile voting back in August.

But on Tuesday, The New York Times published an opinion piece claiming the opposite.

"Building a workable, scalable, and inclusive online voting system is now possible, thanks to blockchain technologies," writes Alex Tapscott, whom the Times describes as co-founder of the Blockchain Research Institute.

Enlarge / An artist’s impression of the oddly shaped interstellar asteroid `Oumuamua. (credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser)

A few days ago, a pre-print of a research paper to be published in the Astrophysical Journal appeared online. The paper concerns the fascinating object known as 'Oumuamua, which was found in late in 2017 and is the first object of interstellar origin observed in our Solar System.

Scientists still aren't sure what the oddly cigar-shaped object is, and they were further intrigued when they observed it accelerating away from the Sun. An analysis based upon multiple telescopes aimed at the object late last year found that 'Oumuamua accelerated away from our Sun significantly faster than could be explained by gravity alone. Unfortunately, scientists had no great explanations for why this apparent acceleration occurred.

The new paper investigates the possibility of solar radiation pressure, or the momentum transfer of photons striking an object. This radiation pressure is the driving idea behind "solar sails" that may one day power spacecraft around our Solar System or beyond.

Enlarge (credit: Oracle)

China Telecom, the large international communications carrier with close ties to the Chinese government, misdirected big chunks of Internet traffic through a roundabout path that threatened the security and integrity of data passing between various providers’ backbones for two-and-a-half years, a security expert said Monday. It remained unclear if the highly circuitous paths were intentional hijackings of the Internet’s Border Gateway Protocol or were caused by accidental mishandlings.

For almost a week late last year, the improper routing caused some US domestic Internet communications to be diverted to mainland China before reaching their intended destination, Doug Madory, a researcher specializing in the security of the Internet’s global BGP routing system, told Ars. As the following traceroute from December 3, 2017 shows, traffic originating in Los Angeles first passed through a China Telecom facility in Hangzhou, China, before reaching its final stop in Washington DC. The problematic route, which is visualized in the graphic above, was the result of China Telecom inserting itself into the inbound path of Verizon Asian Pacific.

(credit: Oracle)

The routing snafu involving domestic US Internet traffic coincided with a larger misdirection that started in late 2015 and lasted for about two-and-a-half years, Madory said in a blog post published Monday. The misdirection was the result of AS4134, the autonomous system belonging to China Telecom, incorrectly handling the routing announcements of AS703, Verizon's Asia Pacific AS. The mishandled routing announcements caused several international carriers—including Telia’s AS1299, Tata’s AS6453, GTT’s AS3257, and Vodafone’s AS1273—to send data destined for Verizon Asia Pacific through China Telecom, rather than using the normal multinational telecoms.