Month: June 2019

Enlarge / Roscosmos Head Dmitry Rogozin before Russian-Chinese talks at the Moscow Kremlin in June. (credit: Mikhail Metzel/TASS via Getty Images)

One of the key themes of HBO's new Chernobyl miniseries is the Soviet Union's control of information. As the television series shows, the state's warping of reality had very real consequences in terms of lives lost.

The control of information has continued into the modern Russian era, as the nation's state television network is now planning its own series to recount the Chernobyl incident. Reportedly, a central theme of the series to be shown to Russian viewers is that American operatives infiltrated the nuclear facility and orchestrated the disaster. (There appears to be no credible evidence that this actually happened.)

This predisposition to avoid or obfuscate information that could be embarrassing to the Russian state also evidently applies to the aerospace industry, with fresh reports from the country saying the leader of Russia's space corporation, Roscosmos, is limiting the flow of news about spaceflight activities.

Enlarge / Robots making things! (credit: Getty / Ekkasit Keatsirikul / EyeEm)

Big data, analytics, and machine learning are starting to feel like anonymous business words, but they're not just overused abstract concepts—those buzzwords represent huge changes in much of the technology we deal with in our daily lives. Some of those changes have been for the better, making our interaction with machines and information more natural and more powerful. Others have helped companies tap into consumers' relationships, behaviors, locations and innermost thoughts in powerful and often disturbing ways. And the technologies have left a mark on everything from our highways to our homes.

It's no surprise that the concept of "information about everything" is being aggressively applied to manufacturing contexts. Just as they transformed consumer goods, smart, cheap, sensor-laden devices paired with powerful analytics and algorithms have been changing the industrial world as well over the past decade. The "Internet of Things" has arrived on the factory floor with all the force of a giant electronic Kool-Aid Man exploding through a cinderblock wall.

Tagged as "Industry 4.0," (hey, at least it's better than "Internet of Things"), this fourth industrial revolution has been unfolding over the past decade with fits and starts—largely because of the massive cultural and structural differences between the information technology that fuels the change and the "operational technology" that has been at the heart of industrial automation for decades.

Enlarge (credit: nternet1.jpg by Rock1997 modified.)

Content delivery network Cloudflare is introducing a free service designed to make it harder for browser-trusted HTTPS certificates to fall into the hands of bad guys who exploit Internet weaknesses at the time the certificates are issued.

The attacks were described in a paper published last year titled Bamboozling Certificate Authorities with BGP. In it, researchers from Princeton University warned that attackers could manipulate the Internet’s border gateway protocol to obtain certificates for domains the attackers had no control over.

Browser-trusted certificate authorities are required to use a process known as domain control validation to verify that a person requesting a certificate for a given domain is the legitimate owner. It requires the requesting party to do one of three things: