SECURITY - Ransomware Hunting League Hero

"The Ransomware Superhero of Normal, Illinois" by Renee Dudley, ProPublica 10/28/2019

Thanks to Michael Gillespie, an obscure programmer at a Nerds on Call repair store, hundreds of thousands of ransomware victims have recovered their files for free.

This story was co-published with the Chicago Sun-Times and The Pantagraph.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.  Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.

About 10 years ago, Michael Gillespie and several classmates at Pekin Community High School in central Illinois were clicking on links on the school’s website when they discovered a weakness that exposed sensitive information such as students’ Social Security numbers.  They quickly alerted their computer repair and networking teacher, Eric McCann.

“It was a vulnerability that nobody even knew about,” McCann said.  “They did a quick search on passwords and student accounts, and lo and behold, that file is sitting out there.”

A shy, skinny teenager whose hand-me-down clothes didn’t fit him, and who was often ridiculed by schoolmates, Gillespie was already working after school as a computer technician.  “He was full of information all the time,” McCann said.  “We’d bounce ideas off each other.  You could tell his passion for technology, for computers, for figuring out things.  That definitely made him stand out.”

Without crediting the students, school administrators closed the breach and changed everyone’s passwords.  Gillespie’s anonymous protection of the school’s cyberdefenses was a harbinger of his future.  Like a real-life version of Clark Kent or Peter Parker, the self-effacing Gillespie morphs in his spare time into a crime-foiling superhero.  A cancer survivor who works at a Nerds on Call computer repair shop and has been overwhelmed by debt — he and his wife had a car repossessed and their home nearly foreclosed on — the 27-year-old Gillespie has become, with little fanfare or reward, one of the world’s leading conquerors of an especially common and virulent cybercrime: ransomware.  Asked what motivates him, he replied, “I guess it’s just the affinity for challenge and feeling like I am contributing to beating the bad guys.”

Each year, millions of ransomware attacks paralyze computer systems of individuals, businesses, hospitals and medical offices, government agencies, and even police departments.  Often, files cannot be decrypted without paying a ransom, and victims who haven’t saved backup copies and want to retrieve the information have little choice but to pony up.  But those who have recovered their data without enriching criminals frequently owe their escapes to Gillespie.

The FBI and local law enforcement agencies have had little success in curbing ransomware.  Local departments lack the resources to solve cybercrime, and the ransoms demanded have often been below the threshold that triggers federal investigations.  Security researchers like Gillespie have done their best to fill the gap.  There are almost 800 known types of ransomware, and Gillespie, mostly by himself but sometimes collaborating with other ransomware hunters, has cracked more than 100 of them.  Hundreds of thousands of victims have downloaded his decryption tools for free, potentially saving them from paying hundreds of millions of dollars in ransom.

“He took that deep dive into the technical stuff, and he just thrives on it,” said Lawrence Abrams, founder of a ransomware assistance website called BleepingComputer.com.  “Every time a new ransomware comes out, he checks it out.  ‘Can it be decrypted?  Yes, it can be decrypted.  OK, I’ll make the decryptor.’  And it’s just nonstop.  He just keeps pumping them out.”

Gillespie downplays his accomplishments.  “IT [Internet Technology] moves so fast, there’s always something to learn, and there’s always someone better than you,” he said.

Gillespie’s tools are available on BleepingComputer.com, and they can be accessed through a site he created and operates, called ID Ransomware.  There, victims submit about 2,000 ransomware-stricken files every day to find out which strain has hit them and to obtain an antidote, if one exists.

As hackers and their corporate enablers, including cyber insurance providers and data recovery firms whose business models are based on paying ransoms, profit directly or indirectly from cybercrime, one of ransomware’s greatest foes lives paycheck-to-paycheck.  Under his internet alias, demonslay335, Gillespie tackles ransomware either in his downtime at Nerds on Call or at night in the two-story bungalow he shares with his wife, Morgan, and their dog, rabbit and eight cats.  Surrounded by pets, he lies on his living room couch, decoding ransomware on his laptop and corresponding with victims desperate for his help.

Although the FBI honored him in 2017 with an award for his website, it doesn’t systematically recommend ID Ransomware — meaning that some victims may never learn of a resource that could help them avoid paying a ransom.  Many of his friends, relatives and colleagues don’t know the extent of his war on ransomware.  “They do not have a clue because of Michael’s modesty,” said his wife’s grandmother, Rita Blanch.  “Honestly, I don’t think anyone in the family knows what he does for free.  I barely know.”  When he got the FBI award, she added, “I sent out a family text, and they’re like: ‘What?  What?  Our Michael?’”

McCann wasn’t aware of Gillespie’s accomplishments either.  “It kind of gives me goosebumps,” the teacher said.  “He’s sitting here doing all this for free.  That’s incredible.”

On a humid morning in July, Gillespie sat on his covered front porch.  His hair was pulled back into a low ponytail, and he sported scraggly facial hair and a V-neck striped shirt.  Brown leaves left over from the previous autumn and birdseed from a feeder were scattered on the ground.  Gillespie said hello to a cardinal — the Illinois state bird, he pointed out — and a squirrel with a “wonky eye.” He said a family of groundhogs resides under the porch and eats from the front-yard mulberry tree, but they didn’t make an appearance.

He opened his Twitter account.  “Like right now, I have 58 PMs and 120 notifications,” he said.  Most were pleas for help from victims of a ransomware strain, STOP Djvu, which he can sometimes decrypt.

Gillespie’s love of computers and electronics started early.  His paternal grandmother, a video gamer, introduced him to online role-playing games such as RuneScape.  He played Donkey Kong Country on a used Super Nintendo that his uncle gave him.  As emergency services volunteers, his parents communicated with tornado spotters via ham radios.  His father, a land surveyor, taught him how to repair electronics by soldering the radios.

Gillespie gleaned from his mother’s father, a police lieutenant in Florida, the importance of protecting the public.  Reinforcing the message, his parents went out of their way on family trips to pass through Metropolis, Illinois, which proclaims itself to be Superman’s hometown, and pay their respects at the Man of Steel’s bronze statue.  Gillespie was also fascinated by cryptography.  He liked the idea of having secret codes that no one else could figure out — and cracking other people’s.

Struggling financially, his family sometimes had to move in with friends or relatives.  When he was in high school, his parents filed for bankruptcy in the Central District of Illinois, court documents show.

At Pekin High, he helped protect not only the website but also his classmates’ belongings.  One day, noticing that other students were pre-setting codes to the combination locks on their lockers for convenience, he pulled down on every lock in his aisle.  About a quarter of the lockers opened.  He left a Post-it note in each one, admonishing the user to be more careful.

By then, he and Morgan Blanch were becoming close.  They lived down the street from each other but didn’t become friends until their freshman year at Pekin.  They began hanging out at each other’s houses and messaging on Myspace.  They were both in the school show choir and eventually sang in a national competition on the Grand Ole Opry stage in Nashville, Tennessee.

Both sometimes felt like outcasts.  She was overweight.  Gillespie, she said, was “that one kid at school that everybody knows who they are because they’re weird or they’re the butt of people’s jokes.”

But they could rely on each other.  “We’d get annoyed because our other friends were more flighty,” she said.  “They weren’t dependable, whereas if Michael and I made a plan, we stuck to it.  And we liked that about each other.” They started dating during Christmas break of their junior year.

When he graduated in 2010, Gillespie was named a Prairie State Scholar and an Illinois State Scholar, based on his standardized test scores and class rank.  Instead of going to college, he began working full time at the Nerds on Call store in Normal, Illinois.  Even with financial aid, he said, college would have been too expensive, and he already had everything he wanted.  “I got a job, got a car, got a girlfriend.  Boom.  Life together,” he said.

“He just felt that he could learn better on his own than in a classroom setting,” Morgan Gillespie said.  “He doesn’t really like to be restrained by protocol or by doing the ‘typical’ route of things.  He likes to get in there and figure it out and do whatever it is he feels like he wants to do.”

She enrolled at Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois, but missed Gillespie and dropped out after two months.  They moved into a new apartment close to his job and were married in October 2012, with Rita Blanch officiating.  For the bachelor party, Gillespie and his Nerds on Call friends went to a nearby farm and shot up old computers with his father’s firearms.  “Nobody who was too tipsy got to hold the rifles, but we put a few rounds through some old monitors,” said his best man, former co-worker David Jacobs, who organized the party.

The couple honeymooned in Peoria, Illinois.  The next year, with a Federal Housing Administration loan for lower-income borrowers, they purchased their $116,000 bungalow in a working-class neighborhood in Bloomington, Illinois.  There they could hear Amtrak’s Lincoln Service roar by on its way to Chicago.

At Nerds on Call, Gillespie was known as the Swiss Army Knife for his versatility.  So when a client was hit by TeslaCrypt ransomware in 2015, Gillespie was assigned to recover the files.

He embraced the task.  Not only was it an opportunity to expand his skills, but he also objected to the very idea of paying a ransom.  “I say hell no,” he said.  “There’s all the stuff about how it’s funding terrorism, funding bad stuff.  But more so, it’s just encouraging [criminals] to keep going.”

Gillespie “lives so heavily in the tech world, I think having bad actors involved just bothers him,” Jacobs said.  “Sometimes it’s also a little bit of competition.  ‘It’s me versus the bad guys and I want to win.  I want to be able to outdo their schemes.’”

Gillespie immediately consulted BleepingComputer.com.  Established in 2004 by Abrams to provide free advice for any computer problem through tutorials and forums, it had become the go-to site for ransomware assistance.

Sure enough, a BleepingComputer member known as BloodDolly had figured out how to crack TeslaCrypt.  But Gillespie still had to create a key for the client, which required running complex software for hours or days at a time.  “I wanted to post a success story for one of my customer’s systems that was hit this week,” he proudly announced on the forum in August 2015.  “I’ve just successfully decoded a few sample files at home.  … My customer is going to be thrilled we can get her photos back.”

Gillespie realized that Abrams, BloodDolly and other ransomware researchers were overwhelmed with requests for help.  He soaked up everything they could teach him.  Soon he was running software from both his home computer and computers under his desk at work, generating customized keys for scores of TeslaCrypt victims who had posted on BleepingComputer or on social media.

“It was huge, it was insane,” Abrams recalled.  “We were cracking keys left and right.  And Michael got the bug from that.  He came to the site, started cracking keys, starting helping.”

Gillespie also began exchanging private messages on BleepingComputer with U.K.-based ransomware expert Fabian Wosar.  Wosar, now the chief technology officer of antivirus provider Emsisoft, was working to break other strains of ransomware, and he referred TeslaCrypt victims to Gillespie.  Wosar, too, shared his knowledge with Gillespie.

“Sometimes, when people seem genuinely interested, I just ask them if they want to come along,” Wosar said.  “I just open a screen share, and they can watch what I’m doing.  And I explain to them what I am doing and why, and what all this different stuff means.”

Wosar, Gillespie, Abrams and a handful of other volunteers worldwide began communicating over the messaging platform Slack, forming a group they dubbed the Ransomware Hunting Team.  Abrams would hear about a new type of ransomware through users’ posts on his website and send a sample to his teammates.  If they could solve it, they would.

Gillespie creates 90% of the decryptors available on BleepingComputer, Abrams said.  Since May, when Abrams began tracking statistics, decryptors on the site have been downloaded more than 320,000 times.

While BleepingComputer makes money from advertisers, members of the hunting team from time to time have discussed charging for their services.  Each time, “it left a sour taste,” Abrams said.  He recalled a mother who contacted him to say she’d lost photos of her son, a fallen Army veteran, to ransomware.  Abrams helped to decrypt her files.  “I couldn’t charge for that,” he said.

Wosar and Gillespie have each created more free, public decryptors than anybody else in the world.  The two have much in common: neither went to college and both consider themselves autodidacts, learning mostly from internet research.  Both found a home and friendships on BleepingComputer.  And both, Wosar said, suffer from imposter syndrome — feelings of inadequacy that persist despite their success.

“I think we’re all kind of misfits,” Wosar said, referring to members of the team.  “We all have weird quirks that isolate us from the normal world but come in handy when it comes to tracking ransomware and helping people.  That’s why and how we work so well together.  You don’t need credentials, as long as you have the passion and the drive to teach yourself the skills required.  And Michael clearly has it, right?”

As ransomware became increasingly prevalent, the Ransomware Hunting Team had trouble staying abreast of new variants.  “It just got to the point where we just couldn’t keep track any more,” Abrams said.

Gillespie quietly began working on a solution.  “I’m a programmer,” he said.  “What do I do?  I automate.”

At night, on his couch, Gillespie developed a site where victims could upload a ransomware-encrypted file and automatically learn what type it was, whether a decryptor existed and, if so, how to get it.  In March 2016, he launched ID Ransomware with an announcement on Twitter and on BleepingComputer.  “All too often after a ransomware attack, the first question is, ‘what encrypted my files?’, followed by ‘can I decrypt my data?’” he wrote.  “This web service aims to help answer those questions, and guide a victim to the correct information relating to their infection.”

The site took off immediately.  Victims, ransomware recovery firms and other researchers sent encrypted files for analysis.  When they submitted files infected by an unidentified type of ransomware, Gillespie added it to his database.  As before, he and other members of the team worked to create decryptors for newly discovered strains.  ID Ransomware currently can detect more than 780 strains, of which almost 40% have free decryptors, most of them developed by Gillespie or Wosar, and others by cybersecurity firms such as Kaspersky, Avast and Bitdefender.

He’s developed other free applications for victims, which are available on BleepingComputer.  RansomNoteCleaner removes ransom notes left behind after an infection — eliminating the time-consuming task of removing them manually — and CryptoSearch locates encrypted files and makes it easier to back them up, in the hope that a solution may someday be discovered.  ID Ransomware also cross-references the submitter’s IP address with Shodan, a site that can show a computer’s vulnerabilities.  If it detects an open port, which could have allowed the hackers in, ID Ransomware flags the vulnerability — and, like the notes Gillespie stuck in the high school lockers, suggests fixing it.

Gillespie worked nonstop.  “I felt like I never saw him,” his wife said.  “We would be hanging out in the evening, and he would be like, ‘Oh my gosh, I have to go do this.’ And he would just disappear for hours.”

Volunteers around the world have translated ID Ransomware into two dozen languages, from Swedish to Nepali.  Only 26% of submissions to the site have come from the U.S.  “He collects amazing data because so many people use it,” Abrams said.  “He has tons of information.  You can see statistics, trends, what kinds of attacks are happening and when.  Everyone uses it.”

Those users include law enforcement, on both sides of the Atlantic.  Europol and Netherlands police flattered ID Ransomware by imitation, launching a similar but less comprehensive site.  An FBI agent from the Springfield, Illinois, field office asked to meet Gillespie, and they got together with another agent at a local Panera restaurant.

“The first meeting was nerve-wracking for me because, you know, why does the FBI want to talk to me?” Gillespie recalled.  “I was so awkward at that meeting.  I wasn’t thinking, ‘Am I gonna get arrested.’  But I did have in the back of my mind, ‘Am I gonna say something stupid?’”

The FBI needed help.  Victims often don’t report attacks to the bureau because they don’t want investors or the public to learn of their security lapses.  In 2018, the FBI received only 1,493 reports of ransomware — compared with the 2,000 queries daily to Gillespie’s site from about 750 different IP addresses worldwide.

At first, the agents sought information about the origins of a specific ransomware attack, something Gillespie does not investigate.  Then they began requesting lists of IP addresses that had uploaded files to ID Ransomware, which could help identify victims, as well as ransom notes and other material.  Gillespie, who discloses on the ID Ransomware homepage that email or bitcoin addresses uploaded to the site may be shared with “trusted third parties or law enforcement,” complied.

His assistance appears to have paid off.  Gillespie said agents indicated to him that his information may have been instrumental in last year’s indictment of two Iranian hackers wanted in connection with SamSam ransomware, which paralyzed computer networks across North America and the U.K. between 2015 and 2018.  Although the suspects have not been arrested, it was the U.S. government’s first indictment of cyberattackers for deploying a ransomware scheme.

Gillespie continues to meet regularly with FBI agents.  He tips them off, for instance, when a ransom note or extension on a file uploaded to the site identifies the targeted business.  Cooperation from such victims could help law enforcement learn more about the source of the ransomware, he said.

Some other ransomware hunters are warier of the FBI.  Abrams expressed concern that, despite the ID Ransomware acknowledgment, there could be “repercussions” from victims who might be upset that Gillespie identified them to the bureau.  Gillespie “is a little too trusting” of law enforcement, Abrams said.  “I do think that he’s not very worldly and that he sees things a little more black and white than with a lot of shades of gray.  And I think in that case he could be easily manipulated and taken advantage of.”

In 2017, the FBI awarded Gillespie a Community Leadership Award for his “public service, devotion and assistance to victims of ransomware in the United States and Internationally.”  Gillespie prominently displays the award in his home.  In April 2018, he and his wife flew to Washington for the award ceremony, accompanied by his boss at Nerds on Call.  The joke around the office was that the boss “went with him to try to nerf anybody trying to recruit him,” said Gillespie’s former co-worker, Jacobs.  “He would be very difficult to replace.”

Philosophically opposed to charging victims, Gillespie keeps ID Ransomware free.  He put up a link for donations to help cover the costs of running the site, but he didn’t bother to register it as a nonprofit, which would have enabled donors to deduct gifts from their taxes.  Contributions were scarce.  One $3,000 donation through PayPal proved to be a scam — Gillespie speculated that it may have been revenge by hackers whose ransomware he disabled — and PayPal demanded the money back.  He couldn’t repay it and switched to another service.

Gillespie “doesn’t chase money,” Jacobs said.  “If he were chasing money, he would have been living on the East or West Coast by now and doing something for some company that we’d all heard of instead of a little service provider in the Midwest.  But he’s one of those guys, he operates very heavily on principle.”

To make ends meet, Gillespie supplemented his Nerds on Call salary with a 2 a.m. paper route, delivering the local newspaper on his bike.  While he had enjoyed having a paper route in junior high, the job now depressed him.  But the family bills were mounting, especially for health care.  Morgan Gillespie struggled with diabetes and other medical issues.  Over the years, Michael Gillespie noticed blood in his urine, and in the fall of 2017, his wife finally made him see a doctor.  The physician removed a tumor and diagnosed bladder cancer, which rarely affects young adults.  Gillespie took one day off for surgery and one to recover before returning to work.  He underwent immunotherapy treatment weekly for two months, and the cancer has been in remission since.  Although he was insured through Nerds on Call, the costs for his care still added up.

The couple reached a financial breaking point.  They racked up credit card debt and fell behind on payments on Morgan Gillespie’s Nissan.  They rotated which utility bills they would pay; one month their electricity would be turned off, and the next month it would be gas.  They surrendered the car to the bank, which sold it at a loss at auction and forced them to make up the difference.  Last year, around the time his wife lost her job as a nanny, they missed four mortgage payments on their house and began to receive foreclosure notices, Michael Gillespie said.

Gillespie said he’s considering charging other security researchers for the statistics he gathers on the site, but he will always keep the tools free for victims.  Friends and family members nagged Gillespie to collect fees from ID Ransomware users.  Even his wife’s grandmother, whom Gillespie calls “grammy,” brought it up.  “I try to not interfere in that area,” Rita Blanch said.  “Unless, being silly at times, when I would say to him, ‘Babe, you need to charge, you could, like, be rich.’”

Other relatives “have been like: ‘Why isn’t he charging?  Why isn’t he making money off of this?’” said his wife, who recently found a part-time job as a babysitter.  “They think it’s almost dumb, the fact that he does what he does.  But that was just never what the deal was for us.  He just doesn’t want to take advantage of people who are already being taken advantage of.”

Instead, his fellow ransomware hunters stepped in.  Abrams covered the $400 cost of obtaining a certificate that lets users know they’re downloading from a trustworthy site.  Wosar began donating to ID Ransomware, and his employer, Emsisoft, hired Gillespie part-time this year to create Emsisoft-branded decryptors.  The money enabled the Gillespies to catch up on mortgage payments.

“He’s doing so much, how do you not support him if you can?” Abrams said.

After dinner one summer evening, Gillespie took a visitor to the Normal office of Nerds on Call, one of the company’s three locations in central Illinois, nestled in a strip mall between a check-cashing store and a Great Clips hair salon.  Gillespie, who has worked for Nerds on Call for 11 years, has keys, so he was able to open the office and disable the alarm system.  In the back, behind the retail area, is his desk, adorned with framed photos of his cats.

As his wife’s relatives often remind him, he could earn three times as much somewhere else.  But he’s happy at Nerds on Call, which gives him the freedom to work on ransomware in his downtime.  This year, he figured out fixes for the STOP Djvu ransomware, which was infecting files through pirated software.  Victims — who were unlikely to seek law enforcement assistance since they were committing a crime themselves — continue to press Michael for help unceasingly.  “It’s borderline harassment,” he said.

His frustration with the deluge of entreaties occasionally boiled over in his tweets.  “Everything you could possibly need to know is IN THE FUCKING FAQ, and its in BIG BOLD RED LETTERS,” he once responded.  “I’m losing sleep, losing time at my job, losing fucking sanity at this point.”

Some STOP Djvu victims thanked Gillespie.  Adam Hegedus of Szolnok, Hungary, was surfing the internet on his girlfriend's laptop in August when he disabled the anti-virus and firewall protections.  Ransomware crippled the computer, and a text file demanded $1,000 to restore access.  Hegedus' girlfriend is a teacher, and her lesson plans, thesis and other important documents were encrypted.  Hegedus felt so guilty that he couldn't sleep, and he sought assistance from several forums, including BleepingComputer.com.  This month, Gillespie replied with some good news; he had a decryption key.  Hegedus called his girlfriend, who rushed home and was delighted to be able to use her files again.

"You cannot imagine how grateful I am," Hegedus wrote to Gillespie.  "Everything has been decrypted and this is only because of your hard work." Hegedus offered a donation, but Gillespie declined.

Gillespie hopes that someday his services will no longer be needed, because businesses and people will have learned proper cybersecurity.  “If the world had backups, then we wouldn’t have ransomware,” he said.

In the meantime, he said, he plans to keep plugging away, even as hackers and their enablers pile up profits.  “There’s a time in every IT person’s career where they think, ‘I’m on the wrong side,’” he said.  “You start seeing the dollar amounts that are involved.  But nah, I can’t say that I ever have.  I just don’t care to go that way.”

ProPublica research reporter Doris Burke contributed to this article.

COMPUTERS - Before Apple or IBM

Osborne 1



My very first computer:

• Tandy (Radio Shack) TRS-80 Model 1 (aka 'Trash 80')
• 64k memory
• 80x25 Mono Monitor (no graphics)
• 2 x 8" 180kb Single-Sided Floppy Drives
• 1200 baud Modem
• Cassette Player for loading OS and software, and transferring to floppy
• TRSDOS, NewDos/80

UTILITIES - Hardware Monitor Update

I have posted about Hardware Monitor (HWMonitor) from CPUID before (a long while back), but it has been updated.

Reminder, HWMonitor works using the monitoring functions of your motherboard and BIOS, so the features you see in screenshot are dependent on your motherboard.

I am running HWMonitor Pro v1.23.0 now on my Win7 Pro 64bit rig:

The newest additions are the Clocks and Utilizations sections for the CPU, and note that my Smart-UPS (connected via USB) is also displayed.

This screenshot is scrolled down, the top sections contain the temp/voltages/fan-speed info for my motherboard.

The only difference between the free version HWMonitor and for-fee HWMonitor Pro is pro allows you to record graphs of the values while you monitor.

"Google artificial intelligence beats champion at world’s most complicated board game" by Nsikan Akpan, PBS NewsHour 1/27/2016

Excerpt

An artificial intelligence program developed by researchers at Google can beat a human at the board game GO, which some consider to be the most complicated board game in existence.  And this AI program — dubbed AlphaGo — didn’t defeat any ol’ human, but the European Go champion Fan Hui in a tournament last October by five games to nil.  The findings, published today in the journal Nature, represent a major coup for machine learning algorithms.

“In a nutshell, by publishing this work as peer-reviewed research, we at Nature want to stimulate the debate about transparency in artificial intelligence,” senior editor Tanguy Chouard said at a press briefing yesterday.  “And this paper seems like the best occasion for this, as it goes- should I say, right at the heart of the mystery of what intelligence is.”

Known as wéiqí in Chinese and baduk in Korean, GO originated in China over 2,500 years ago.  The board consist of a 19 by 19 grid of intersecting lines.  Two players take turns placing black and white marbles on individual intersection points.  Once place, the stones can’t be moved, but they can be captured by completely surrounding an opponent’s marble.  The ultimate objective is control more than 50 percent of the board, but since the board is so intricate, there are numerous possibilities for moves.

“So Go is probably the most complex game ever devised by man.  It has 10^170 (that's 10 followed by 170 zeros) possible board configurations, which is more than the numbers of atoms in the universe,” said study author and AlphaGo co-developer Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind.

SPYWARE - Lenovo Machines

"Lenovo in the News Again for Installing Spyware on Its Machines" by Manish Singh, Computer Help Forums 9/24/2015

Despite launching a number of interesting products this year, Lenovo has perhaps got more press time for the things it has done wrong.  The Chinese technology conglomerate is back in news, this time for allegedly installing a program on at least some of its refurbished notebook lineup that is programmed to send users' feedback data to Lenovo.  Upon further inspection, the program seems to have an association with a third-party marketing and Web analytics firm.

As per many users' report, the company ships its factory refurbished laptops with a program called "Lenovo Customer Feedback Program 64" that is scheduled to run every day.  According to its description, Lenovo Customer Feedback Program 64 "uploads Customer Feedback Program data to Lenovo."

Upon further digging, Michael Horowitz of Computerworld found these files in the folder of the aforementioned program: "Lenovo.TVT.CustomerFeedback.Agent.exe.config, Lenovo.TVT.CustomerFeedback.InnovApps.dll, and Lenovo.TVT.CustomerFeedback.OmnitureSiteCatalyst.dll."
As he further pointed out, Omniture, as mentioned in the suffix of one of the files, is an online marketing and Web analytics firm, which suggests that the laptops are tracking and monitoring users' activities.

On its support website, the largest PC vendor noted that it may include software components that communicate with servers on the Internet.  These applications could be on any and every ThinkCentre, ThinkStation, and ThinkPad lineups.  One of the applications listed on the website is Lenovo.TVT.CustomerFeedback.Agent.exe.config.

This isn't the first time Lenovo has been caught shipping what appears to be a spyware on its machines.  Earlier this year, Lenovo was found bundling a spyware called "Superfish" on its machines.  In August, the company was caught covertly downloading and installing software on its Windows PCs.  The program modified the BIOS to force the computer to download its programs upon each login.

TECHNOLOGY - Google's Gesture Control

"How Google's gesture control technology could revolutionize the way we use devices" by Conner Forrest, TechRepublic 6/3/2015

Soli, Google's new gesture technology, would allow users to interact with their devices without ever touching the device itself. Here's how it's poised to make an impact.

It seems like pop culture is obsessed with the idea of interacting with technology without actually touching a device to do so.  Movies such as Minority Report and Iron Man are the frontrunners in this -- the idea that the future of technology will be decidedly "hands-off."

That future could be coming sooner than we think.  Last week, at its annual I/O developer conference, Google announced Soli, a project that would allow users to interact with their devices using hand gestures performed near the device, without requiring contact with the device.

"Project Soli is the technical underpinning of human interactions with wearables, mobile devices as well as the Internet of Things," a Google ATAP (Advanced Technology and Projects) spokesperson said.

Soli was born out of Google's ATAP group.  It's a fingernail-sized chip that uses radar to read hand gestures and convert them to actions on the device.

So if a user was to touch his or her thumb to their forefinger, Soli would read that as a button being pressed.  Or, the user slides his or her forefinger back and forth on the pad of their thumb, that could operate a slider to adjust volume.

Unlike cameras, which are used in other motion sensing technologies, radar has a high positional accuracy, and thus works better in this context than cameras would.  It's able to pick up on slight movements better.

"Radar is a technology which transmits a radio wave towards a target, and then the receiver of the radar intercepts the reflected energy from that target," lead research engineer Jaime Lien said in a video about Soli. (below)

The radar waves bounce off of your hand and back to the receiver, allowing it to interpret changes in the shape or movement of your hand.  Radar is also important to the project, according to Soli team lead Ivan Poupyrev, because it can work through materials or be embedded into objects.

The technology is vaguely reminiscent of the theremin musical instrument developed in the 1920s by Léon Theremin, but much more intricate.  In the Soli video, Poupyrev mentioned that the technology could be used interact with "wearables, Internet of Things, and other computing devices."

The potential for Soli in wearables is perhaps the most obvious use case so far.  Small screens make it difficult to select certain apps or features, and being able to perform gestures next to the device might make navigation easier and intuitive.

According to 451 analyst Ryan Martin, it is important that a company like Google gets involved in this space because a project like Soli is important to the wearable and IoT ecosystems as a whole and it's important that it "be approached from a technology perspective, not a product perspective."

There are companies that focus solely on gesture-based interactions, but that can be risky and volatile as it will likely just be integrated as a feature.  Martin said that wrist-based wearables are actually less efficient if users actually have to touch them, and Soli could be a step forward in making them more efficient and usable.

Other potential use cases could be within connected cars or in the augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR) spaces.  Imagine your Oculus Rift or Gear VR could support virtualized "hands" as another input without a third-party accessory.  Although, Martin said, it would probably work better as a complement to another input such as voice or touch.

Using Soli as an input tool is the glaring use case for now, but the project could provide value as an output technology as well.

"I think the killer application, or use case, long-term is going to be how to take this technology and have it be scanning around to provide context and enable automation that might not even necessitate gesture-based interaction, it might just happen," Martin said.

Gillette is one of many companies whose factories utilize high-speed cameras to analyze manufacturing processes and equipment to better understand when maintenance or repair is needed.  Soli could provide a similar service to advanced manufacturing facilities by consistently reading the machines and documenting their performance.

Time to market will depend on user experience.  As a device feature, Soli needs to be reliable and consistent or it will be detrimental to the partner brand or OEM that integrates it.

"Once the technology is able to meet that end, I think that's when we'll start to see it baked into products, but right now it's definitely in its development phase," Martin said.

According to the Google ATAP spokesperson, the company will be releasing a hardware and software development kit to developers soon.  If you want more information about Project Soli, you can contact the team at projectsoli@google.com.

INTERNET - Ransomware

"The hack attack that takes your computer hostage till you pay" PBS NewsHour 4/18/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Ransomware, a type of software that computer hackers use to hold individuals' data hostage by blocking access to files unless they agree to pay a ransom, is on the rise.  And because anyone with an internet connection is vulnerable, the problem highlights a growing threat that consumers face on both their personal computers and mobile devices.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour):  Inna Simone is retired, a mother and grandmother from Russia who now lives outside of Boston.  Last November, her home computer started acting strangely.

INNA SIMONE:  My computer was working terribly.  It was not working, I mean, it was so slow.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM:  A few days later, while searching through her computer files, Inna saw dozens of these messages — they were all the same.   They read:  “Your files are encrypted.  To get the key to decrypt them, you have to pay $500 dollars.”  Her exact deadline — December 2nd at 12:48 pm – was just a few days away.

All her files were locked — tax returns, financial papers, letters — even the precious photos of her granddaughter Zoe.   Inna couldn’t open any of them.

INNA SIMONE:   It says, “If you won’t pay, within one week or whatever, your fine will double.  If you won’t pay by then, all your files will be deleted and you will lose them forever and never will get back."

"Teaching computers how to play Atari better than humans" PBS NewsHour 2/25/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Tom Clarke of Independent Television News reports on how an artificial intelligence business owned by Google has created software that can teaching itself to play classic Atari games better than a human.

GWEN IFILL (NewsHour):  Next, Playing video games might seem like child’s play.

But, as Tom Clarke of Independent Television News reports, it’s also at the frontier of artificial intelligence.

TOM CLARKE, Independent Television News:  It was the late 1970s, and for the first generation of video gamers, Atari was king.  By the standards of the day, the graphics were mind-blowing, the sound out of this world.

And the selection of games just went on and on and on.

Ah.

Compared to the video games of today, Atari looks pretty clunky, but the games are still quite difficult to play, especially if you haven’t picked one up for 30 years, like me.  But it’s that exact combination of simple graphics, but quite challenging game play, that has attracted the cutting edge of artificial intelligence researchers back to the 1970s.

This version of “Space Invaders” isn’t being played by a person, but a system of computer algorithms that is learning how to play it just by looking at the pixels on the screen.  It may not sound like it, but it’s something of a breakthrough, the work of one of the finest young minds in A.I. research, North Londoner Demis Hassabis.

WINXP - Updates to Continue for Big Business For a Fee

More proof that Microdunce does not care about peon customers.  They are just another greedy company who cares only about profits and not serving customers who bought their product.  I would be willing to pay $50/year for continued WinXP Updates.

This strategy is recently confirmed by several banks making the Updates For Fee deal with Microdunce to protect their ATMs running WinXP.

"Microsoft will still patch Windows XP for a select group" by Gregg Keizer, PCWorld 9/1/2013

Excerpt

Just because Microsoft doesn't plan on giving Windows XP patches to the public after April 8, 2014, doesn't mean it's going to stop making those patches.

In fact, Microsoft will be creating security updates for Windows XP for months—years, even—after it halts their delivery to the general public.

Some will pay big for support

Those patches will come from a program called "Custom Support," an after-retirement contract designed for very large customers who have not, for whatever reason, moved on from an older OS.

As part of Custom Support—which according to analysts, costs about $200 per PC for the first year and more each succeeding year—participants receive patches for vulnerabilities rated "critical" by Microsoft.  Bugs ranked as "important," the next step down in Microsoft's four-level threat scoring system, are not automatically patched.  Instead, Custom Support contract holders must pay extra for those.  Flaws pegged as "moderate" or "low" are not patched at all.

"Legacy products or out-of-support service packs covered under Custom Support will continue to receive security hotfixes for vulnerabilities labeled as 'Critical' by the MSRC [Microsoft Security Response Center]," Microsoft said in a Custom Support data sheet.  "Customers with Custom Support that need security patches defined as 'Important' by MSRC can purchase these for an additional fee.

"These security hotfixes will be issued through a secure process that makes the information available only to customers with Custom Support," the data sheet promised.

Because Microsoft sells Custom Support agreements, it's obligated to come up with patches for critical and important vulnerabilities.  And it may be required to do so for years: The company sells Custom Support for up to three years after it retires an operating system.

Custom Support and the XP security updates that result have been one reason why some experts have held out hope that Microsoft will backtrack from retiring XP next April.  Their reasoning is straightforward: Microsoft will have patches available—its engineers won't have to do any more work than they already committed to doing—so handing them out to all would be a simple matter.

Or not.  Most experts have said that the chance Microsoft will prolong Windows XP's life run between slim and none.  And giving away patches to everyone risks a revolt by those big customers who have paid millions for Custom Support.

But Microsoft does have options.  Here are our suggestions:

Continue patching for free

If Windows XP remains a major presence, as it appears likely, with projections as high as 33.5 percent of all personal computers at the end of April 2014, Microsoft could decide to continue patching the aged OS with free fixes for critical vulnerabilities, maybe even those rated important.

Such a move would be unpalatable to Custom Support customers, but Microsoft could renegotiate the fees—unlikely—or remind those companies of the program's other benefits, which include access to support representatives, as well as to prior patches and hotfixes.

Patch critical vulnerabilities under attack

Microsoft could selectively patch only the critical bugs that are being exploited by hackers.  Presumably, that would be a subset of the complete XP patch collection assembled each month.

Some analysts have picked this option as a possibility.  Last December, Michael Cherry of Directions on Microsoft posed just such a situation.

"Suppose ... a security problem with XP suddenly causes massive problems on the Internet, such as a massive [denial-of-service] problem?" asked Cherry at the time.  "It is not just harming Windows XP users, it is bringing the entire Internet to its knees.  At this time there are still significant numbers of Windows XP in use, and the problem is definitely due to a problem in Windows XP.  In this scenario, I believe Microsoft would have to do the right thing and issue a fix ... without regard to where it is in the support lifecycle."

Charge users for XP patches

Although Microsoft would much rather book revenue from the sale of a newer OS, it may realize that some will refuse to upgrade, and try to make money rather than give away fixes.

It's unlikely that Microsoft would be able to charge $200 annually for post-retirement patches, as it does with Custom Support customers, but it may be able to get away with $50 a year for individuals and small businesses, perhaps with a maximum machine cap at, say, five PCs per customer.

Traditionally, Microsoft's not charged for support, but it could cast this as a special situation caused by the longevity of XP, which was due to the delay of Vista and secondarily, that OS's subsequent flop.  In late 2007, when Microsoft extended XP availability to OEMs by several months, it cited Vista's delayed launch for the unusual move.  (It added another extension in 2008 that kept XP alive on new "netbook" PCs, the then-popular class of cheap laptops, until mid-2010.)

And Microsoft has talked up a transformation to a "devices-and-services" company; a pay-for-support plan would mesh nicely with the latter half of that strategy.

COMPUTER GAMING - Financing 'Oculus Rift' Gaming Goggles

"Tricking the brain with transformative virtual reality" PBS Newshour 12/18/2013

Excerpt

JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour):  Correspondent Paul Solman takes a look at a technology that allows adventurous users to explore the latest developments in the world of video gaming.

It's part of his ongoing coverage Making Sense of financial news.

PAUL SOLMAN (Newshour):  It was a 20-year-old named Palmer Luckey who would finally make science fiction dreams come true.

Working in his parents garage, he cobbled together a headset out of ski goggles, smartphone and tablet parts to create a just-like-real-life gaming experience.  Then, hoping to raise $250,000 to take his invention to market, he turned to the crowd-funding Web site Kickstarter.

PALMER LUCKEY, Oculus Rift:  So join the revolution.  Make a pledge.  And help up change gaming forever.

PAUL SOLMAN:  Within days, he had 10 times what he needed, as gamers went gaga over the goggles.

TECHNOLOGY - Make Using Touch Screen Feel Bumps

"New Disney technology can add texture to completely smooth touch screens" by News Desk, PBS Newshour 10/7/2013

By regulating a flow of voltage to the surface of smooth touch screen, Disney researchers in Pittsburgh discovered that they can create the sensation of texture and three-dimensional surfaces.  The technology can represent an artificial texture applied to an image, or elevation data extracted from topographical maps.  But how does a smooth surface simulate the feel of a 3D bump?

"Our brain perceives the 3D bump on a surface mostly from information that it receives via skin stretching," said Ivan Poupyrev, who directs Disney Research, Pittsburgh's Interaction Group.  "Therefore, if we can artificially stretch skin on a finger as it slides on the touch screen, the brain will be fooled into thinking an actual physical bump is on a touch screen even though the touch surface is completely smooth."

COMPUTERS - Robotics Challenge From DARPA

"The ultimate video game: teams compete in DARPA Robotics Challenge" by Elizabeth Barber, Christian Science Monitor 6/28/2013

Teams from eight countries competed in the first round of the challenge to develop a disaster response robot

Except in this game, turning on a garden hose is an enormously difficult task, requiring huge teams of scientists and decades of acquired technology.

About twenty-six teams from eight countries competed on June 17-21 in The Virtual Robotics Challenge, the first round of the DARPA Robotics Challenge, using complex software to direct virtual robots in a cloud-based simulator that looks like a 3-D video game.

The overall challenge for the teams is to develop software that can operate a DARPA-supplied humanoid robot across a low-bandwidth network, which is expected to be the only type of network available to first responders in a disaster scenario.

This first round was a software competition in which teams used software of their own design to have a simulated ATLAS robot navigate a simulated disaster zone that looked something like suburbia gone wrong.  For three days, competitors stared into computer screens in their respective far-flung labs and offices, instructing their virtual robots to complete a series of challenges, including driving a vehicle and walking over uneven ground.  Robots also had to pick up a hose, connect it to a spigot and turn it on.

“The disaster response scenario is technically very challenging,” said Russ Tedrake, a professor at MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.  “It requires the robot and human operator to simultaneously perceive and gain an understanding for a complex, new environment, and then use that information to perform difficult manipulation tasks and traverse complex terrains.”

That means that the virtual robot must feed its raw sensor data back to its operating team, which then, with the help of the robot, must interpret its surroundings and enter instructions about where to move or how to manipulate objects.  The team then continuously asks the robot to share its plan, adjusting their requests and their suggestions until the robot provides a correct answer, at which point the robot is allowed to go on autonomously.

The top nine teams received funding and an ATLAS robot to compete in the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials in December 2013.  The trials are the second of three DARPA challenge events and will be the first time that the physical robots will compete.

The overall winner of the first round was The Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a team of some 22 researchers.

“Getting in the car and driving was our biggest challenge,” said research scientist Jerry Pratt, the Florida Institute’s team leader.  “Walking — we had that nailed.”

Other winners included Worcester Polytechnic Institute, MIT, and TRACLabs.  The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which was also among the winning teams, donated its awarded funds to three runner-up teams that DARPA had not originally selected – it had chosen six teams – putting the total to nine teams that will compete in the second round.

SECURITY - NASA Security Breach

"Stolen NASA Laptop Had Unencrypted Employee Data" by Mathew J. Schwartz, Information Week 11/15/2012

NASA is warning all employees and contractors that their personal information may have been compromised after a thief stole a NASA laptop and documents from an agency employee's locked car.

"On October 31, 2012, a NASA laptop and official NASA documents issued to a headquarters employee were stolen from the employee's locked vehicle. The laptop contained records of sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) for a large number of NASA employees, contractors and others," said Richard J. Keegan Jr., associate deputy administrator of NASA, in a notice sent to all employees.

The data on the laptop wasn't encrypted. "Although the laptop was password protected, it did not have whole disk encryption software, which means the information on the laptop could be accessible to unauthorized individuals," he said.

NASA doesn't yet know the full extent of the breach, presumably because the agency is still attempting to reconstruct and study everything that was on the stolen laptop. "Because of the amount of information that must be reviewed and validated electronically and manually, it may take up to 60 days for all individuals impacted by this breach to be identified and contacted," said Keegan.

In addition to now implementing full-disk encryption software for NASA laptops, Keegan said NASA will pay ID Experts to notify people who've been affected by the breach, and to provide identity theft and credit monitoring services. Anyone affected will be notified about the breach via a written, mailed letter -- but not by email or phone, he said.

Given the continuing increase in the number of data breaches affecting organizations, and the accompanying costs of notifying affected people and cleaning up the mess, surely technology-savvy NASA would have already required that all agency laptops be secured using full-disk encryption software?

In fact, that hasn't been the case, apparently owing to user resistance. An IT executive at Goddard Space Flight Center, for example, said that the facility recently implemented data-at-rest encryption on PCs. But some users aren't fans of the software, which they said interfered with some of the tools on their PCs.

In the wake of this breach, however, NASA administrator Charles F. Bolden Jr. and CIO Linda Cureton have ordered that "no NASA-issued laptops containing sensitive information can be removed from a NASA facility unless whole disk encryption software is enabled or the sensitive files are individually encrypted," said Keegan. "This applies to laptops containing PII, international traffic in arms regulations (ITAR) and export administration regulations (EAR) data, procurement and human resources information, and other sensitive but unclassified (SBU) data."

NASA facility CIOs have been ordered to add or enable encryption capabilities for the maximum number of laptops by November 21, 2012. By December 21, 2012, all laptops that leave NASA facilities must have encryption capabilities. In the meantime, employees who are telecommunicating or traveling "should use loaner laptops if their NASA-issued laptop contains unencrypted sensitive information," according to Keegan's communication.

Cureton's office will also review whether any further agency security policies need to be revised to help prevent future data breaches stemming from lost or stolen laptops.

A NASA spokeswoman didn't immediately respond to an emailed request for comment about what type of full-disk or file encryption technology the agency would be using, whether it planned to train all employees to determine what qualifies as "sensitive information" that must be encrypted -- or whether employees' compliance with the new policies would be monitored and enforced.

COMPUTERS - Data Privacy and Cyber Security

"How Will FCC's Google Street View Fine Shape Data Privacy Rules?" (1 of 2) PBS Newshour 4/16/2012

Excerpt

RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): And to two stories about Internet privacy.

First: the latest on a government investigation of Google's collection of personal data that started with taking pictures and ended up gathering a lot more.

Google's Street View, launched in 2007, was part of the company's ambitious plan to photograph and map the entire world right down to street level. But it turned out that Street View vehicles were collecting more than just visual images. Their antennas also picked up personal information from local Wi-Fi networks, including Internet usage history and passwords.

In May 2010, Google publicly acknowledged it had done so, but insisted that any such data collection was accidental. The Federal Communications Commission began investigating. And, on Friday, it fined the company $25,000, the maximum penalty available, for obstructing the investigation.

In its report, the FCC said, "Although a world leader in digital search capability, Google took the position that searching its employees' e-mail would be a time-consuming and burdensome task." The FCC found Google did indeed collect personal data, but it cleared the company of charges that it had acted illegally.

The search engine giant challenged the finding that it failed to cooperate. Instead, it issued a statement that said, "We provided all the materials the regulators felt they needed." European regulators have also investigated the company for similar reasons. Last year, the French government fined Google about $140,000.

MAN: You're now exploring a neighborhood in our full-screen mode.

RAY SUAREZ: In the meantime, those who would rather not see their homes on Street View do have an alternative. The company provides users the option of graying out images to meet privacy concerns.

The FCC report generated plenty of questions over the past 48 hours about what Google did.

We ask some of those now with two people watching this case, Jeffrey Rosen, a professor of law at the George Washington University and legal affairs editor for The New Republic, and David Bennahum, the chief executive of Punch Media, a news and entertainment network for iPads.

"Preventing a 'Cyber-Pearl Harbor'" (2 of 2) PBS Newshour 4/16/2012

Excerpt

JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): And now to our second look at privacy online and a story about protecting computers from cyber-attacks.

NewsHour correspondent Tom Bearden reports.

MAN: Utahans' Social Security numbers, names, addresses, birth dates.

TOM BEARDEN: Nine hundred thousand people had their names, addresses, and Social Security numbers stolen when the Utah Health Department's server was hacked. This kind of thing happens more often than most people realize: Web sites taken down, high-tech secrets stolen, intellectual property rights violated, and individuals swindled.

But Douglas Maughan says there's much more at stake than just crime. He heads the Department of Homeland Security's Cyber Security Division.

COMPUTERS- Performance-Capture

"‘Heavy Rain’ video game creator David Cage innovates with high-tech ‘Kara’ performance" by Associated Press, Washington Post 3/8/2012

The future of performance-capture technology is right around the corner, and its name just might be “Kara.”

David Cage of video game developer Quantic Dream unveiled a new way to simultaneously capture and digitize an actor’s performance — including voice, face and body — during a presentation Wednesday at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The innovation came in the form of a 7-minute non-interactive demonstration titled “Kara.”

In the footage, which Cage said could be entirely run on a PlayStation 3, actress Valorie Curry portrays an android named Kara who gains self-awareness as she’s being assembled by a squad of robotic arms. The virtual Kara emotively speaks in English, French and German, as well as sings in Japanese, as she converses with an operator who is heard but never seen.

“I think the most interesting future feature in the next-gen platforms should be meaningful content,” said Cage. “Yes, technology is great and is going to be better and better, and we’ll have more power until you won’t be able to tell the difference between reality and virtual, but what are you going to use this technology for and what do you have to say?”

Cage, who wrote and directed the 2010 thriller game “Heavy Rain,” noted that “Kara” is a demo, not Quantic Dream’s next project. He said the new technology from the French studio could be used for full performance capture, a technique where all aspects of a portrayal are recorded at once, rather than the common practice of separately capturing them.

Unlike the methods used to capture actors’ performances in “Avatar,” Cage said the performance capture technology developed by Quantic Dream used about 90 sensors placed on an actor’s face instead of a small camera mounted in front of the actor’s noggin. It’s also faster, less expensive and requires quiet because the audio and movement are captured together.

OUTSTANDING!

TECHNOLOGY - Apple Without Steve Jobs?

"What Will Happen to Innovation at Apple With Jobs Out as CEO?" PBS Newshour 8/25/2011

Excerpts from transcript

RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): It was all a far cry from the days when Steve Jobs and co-founder Steve Wozniak began building their now ubiquitous brand, from scratch, in a California garage. They scored an early hit with the Apple II, the first consumer-grade computer to catch on. By the mid-1980s, the company was in a slump, and Jobs was forced out.

But he returned in 1996, and Apple began a turnaround. Still, in a rare interview in 2007, he said his work was never about creating the next big thing.

STEVE JOBS: We don't worry about stuff like that. We just try to build products that we think are really wonderful and that people might want. And sometimes we're right, and sometimes we're wrong.
----
RAY SUAREZ: Walt Mossberg, whether it's consumer electronics, entertainment, even computing, which is where it all started, this has been a big impact player, hasn't it?

WALTER MOSSBERG, The Wall Street Journal: Well, you know, Ray, I think Steve Jobs is a historic figure.

He's not only a historic figure in business, but really in America. He has not only disrupted and innovated in computers and consumer electronics for all those products we saw just now listed, but he has, in the process, shaken up and revolutionized the music industry, the movie industry, publishing industry. Even the retail industry, the Apple store chain that he built, is widely admired.

And on the side, while he was doing all that, he bought a little company called Pixar and turned it into the most successful studio in Hollywood and revolutionized animation.
----
WALTER MOSSBERG: But the devotion to product is -- goes beyond just those words. It's really a devotion to designing products for actual users. You know, a lot of computer companies -- Hewlett-Packard is a good example in what they are doing in spinning off P.C.s -- are really much more interested in selling to businesses, selling to intermediaries, like I.T. departments.

Steve Jobs calls those orifices. He's much more interested in designing something for the actual consumer, whether they're in a big company or just a family. And that -- and he's a perfectionist about it. And he's surrounded himself with other people who are just laser-focused on that.

The other thing, Ray, I think is incredibly important is, they don't just make little innovations based on market research. They take big risks and make big bets on what they think the next thing that people will want is, even if the people don't know it themselves at the time.

HARDWARE - New nVidia GeForce GTX 590

nVidia GeForce GTX 590

Page includes demo shows and videos.

Here's the YouTube video
(suggest let full download before viewing)


One caution, when viewing the video pay attention to the requirements to get top performance for this video card. It is NOT for your common desktop system. Also, note the spec for DirectX 11 = this is intended for a Win7 system, PCIe.

Also, you may want to look at EVGA Precision Utility.

It's free and took me just minutes to get working to display what I choose (screen shot below). Just remember to enable the EVGA Precision On-Screen Display Server which allows OSD during game-play AND add your game EXE to list in the server dialog.

(click for better view)

INTERNET - Broadband Access in U.S.

(click for better view)
NOTE: In the full article, this is an interactive map

"Broadband Access: Exploring Internet Connectivity by U.S. Community Type" by Dante Chinni, PBS Newshour 3/28/2011

The federal government wants you to have access to a broadband connection. Badly. The Federal Communications Commission has held dozens of workshops and filed away more than 23,000 comments on its National Broadband Plan.

"High-speed wireless service is the next train station, the next off-ramp," President Obama said in February. "It's how we'll spark new innovation, new investments and new jobs."

That's an important set of goals for an economy that is still trying to climb out of the last recession, and most experts would argue an accurate one. It's one reason why more than $7 billion of the 2009 stimulus plan was dedicated to broadband expansion.

If broadband is indeed key to all those elements, how close is the United States to achieving a goal of universal access to broadband? Well, in some of Patchwork Nation's 12 county types, availability seems to be very close to reality. In others, however, much work remains to be done, according to data collected by Connected Nation and analyzed by Patchwork Nation.

In the counties holding the nation's most-urban areas, the Industrial Metropolis, more than 99 percent of the population has access to a broadband connection - figured here at three megabytes per second. But in more sparsely populated areas, the numbers are much lower. In the Mormon Outposts, largely located in the Mountain West, the broadband connection rates average about 80 percent.

But the story of broadband coverage is complicated.

Who's Plugged In?

Looking county-by-county on the map you can see the communities that are well positioned for the Web-based economic/cultural/political future. Places like the New York City metro area are saturated with broadband, while places like rural Arkansas have much spottier coverage.

When you dig further into the numbers, however, you see they are about more than just income or population density. Education plays a role, as you might imagine. The counties with the second-best connectivity rate are the collegiate Campus and Career locales. Nearly 97 percent have access to broadband there even though in terms of population density and income levels the Monied Burbs would seem likely to have better connectivity. They about $10,000 richer per household on average. The Burbs have a broadband access score of about 95 percent.

And while the exurban Boom Towns have a higher median household income than the aging Emptying Nests by about $5,000, the places are roughly look similar in their access to broadband - 93.57 percent versus 93.30 percent respectively. That may because some of those more removed Boom Town communities, newly sprouted towns, are harder to wire.

There are even differences among the most far-flung of our county types - the Service Worker Centers and Tractor Country counties. Tractor Country, which is less-wealthy and less-populated than the Service Worker Centers, is slightly better connected.

Why? As we have noted previously, Tractor Country communities in particular seem to show a stronger streak of civic pride than other communities. People in those places may tend to dislike the federal government, but they seem believe strongly in doing things for the community itself. That certainly is something we have witnessed in Sioux Center, Iowa, a Tractor Country community we visit.

So if you were to sit down with a mathematician and try to figure out a formula for connectivity - admittedly a very difficult challenge - it might look something like population density, plus education, plus income, plus civic engagement equals better access to broadband.

More to the Picture

Wiring far-flung places will not be cheap. Getting an exact cost is difficult, but the Web is littered with stories of ridiculous expenditures aimed at bringing small, rural locales fully into the digital age.

And access is only one part of the issue, the other is the ability to afford an actual connection. Some of the least-wealthy counties we look at are among those listed above that have the least access - Tractor Country, the Service Worker Centers, the Evangelical Epicenters. And while the cost of wiring those places certainly plays an issue, it may be they are less wired precisely because they are less wealthy. There may be less interest in broadband there.

The costs of broadband service vary by community and service provider, of course, but, on average the cost is about $41 a month, according to a survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project done last August. That's about $11 a month higher than dial-up access the survey found - or over the course of the year an extra $150. That's not astronomical, of course, but it may feel like a lot in some communities that are struggling with the effect of the recession as well as long-term economic woes.

Patchwork Nation has not yet explored Internet usage by community type, but we have looked at issues like social media use in our book. And we looked at broadband access versus adoption in Ohio on our site, where we found sharp differences. The Emptying Nests were below 50 percent for adoption, even with their well-wired communities. And the Service Worker Centers and Evangelical Epicenters were at about 40 percent and 26 percent, respectively.

That means even if the broadband network is fully built out - not an inexpensive proposition - there will still be the challenge of helping those who cannot afford it and, along with that, there will be the challenge of convincing those who aren't as interested in life online that broadband is critical to their future - the key to that national transformation President Obama has outlined.

That may be the toughest sell in some communities where times are tight.

COMPUTERS - IBM's Light-Driven Computer

IBM's Light-Driven Processor Courtesy IBM
(click for better view)
"How It Works: The Light-Driven Computer" by Valerie Ross, PopSci 3/24/2011

The speed of light is as fast as it gets, and IBM researchers are exploiting that fact to give supercomputers a boost. They’ve made the smallest-yet silicon chips that use light to transmit information.

Most parts of the chip resemble those found on any other commercial chip. The parts that process or transform information—in other words, the parts that do the actual computing—still deploy electrons moving through semiconductor gates. But the interconnects, the lines that shuttle information between different areas within a chip, are drastically different. Instead of shuttling electrons, which can slow down significantly when the interconnects heat up, they shuttle light. That’s because light is easy to contain and loses less information as it travels. The researchers hope that this quick communication will make possible the first exascale computers—that is, computers that can perform a billion billion computations per second, 1,000 times as fast as today’s speediest systems.

One other benefit, says IBM engineer Will Green: The optical interconnects use significantly less power, making them cheaper to run. That’s particularly important given that supercomputers typically consume megawatts of power during operation. IBM, which has already made a working prototype, says a commercial version of the chip will debut in a supercomputer in around 2018.

Article includes interactive Light-Driven Computer demo.

COMPUTERS - Watson Who?

"A: This Computer Could Defeat You at 'Jeopardy!' Q: What is Watson?"
PBS Newshour 2/14/2011

Excerpt from transcript for techies:

MILES O'BRIEN, Newshour science correspondent: That's David Ferrucci, Watson's proud papa.

DAVID FERRUCCI, Watson Project, IBM: So, you're looking at 10 racks of power 750. So, there's 10 racks. There's 90 what they call power 750 servers.

MILES O'BRIEN: He introduced me to his silicon progeny.

DAVID FERRUCCI: So, overall, there's about 2,880 cores in that system, about 15 terabytes of RAM.

MILES O'BRIEN: For those of us who don't have a doctorate in computer science, Watson is equivalent to about 6,000 high-end home computers. But the secret sauce is the software that gives Watson the ability to understand language like no computer ever has.

NOVA - Smartest Machine on Earth (full show)