Futurismic

Photolithography is running up against its limitations, as logic circuits become so small that the wavelength of light itself is too large to mask the patterns accurately. MIT boffins reckon they have a solution, though: self-assembling semiconductor circuits [via NextBigFuture].

Berggren and Ross’ approach is to use electron-beam lithography sparingly, to create patterns of tiny posts on a silicon chip. They then deposit specially designed polymers — molecules in which smaller, repeating molecular units are linked into long chains — on the chip. The polymers spontaneously hitch up to the posts and arrange themselves into useful patterns.

The trick is that the polymers are “copolymers,” meaning they’re made of two different types of polymer. Berggren compares a copolymer molecule to the characters played by Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin in the movie Midnight Run, a bounty hunter and a white-collar criminal who are handcuffed together but can’t stand each other. Ross prefers a homelier analogy: “You can think of it like a piece of spaghetti joined to a piece of tagliatelle,” she says. “These two chains don’t like to mix. So given the choice, all the spaghetti ends would go here, and all the tagliatelle ends would go there, but they can’t, because they’re joined together.” In their attempts to segregate themselves, the different types of polymer chain arrange themselves into predictable patterns.

Clever stuff, though still very much in the developmental stages. Maybe another new lease of life for Moore’s Law?

If a piece of very-well-written computer software can produce classical music compositions that the experts can’t distinguish from ones created by people, does that mean that music is essentially meaningless? [via MetaFilter]

And doesn’t it also mean that the program in question essentially passed a version of the Turing Test?

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“The Antiques Roadshow” – For an entire generation of people who grew up [in the UK - Ed.] in the 1980s, those three little words herald a wave of unease and bitterness.  Like a Renaissance magus, they conjure forth memories of Sunday evenings dominated by the looming return of school and the perversity of one’s parents’ taste in television.  You see, younglings… prior to the internet, cable TV and the explosion of cheap consumer electronics, most young British people were trapped not only in a four channel world, but in a world where only one TV channel was ever really accessible to them : the one that their parents wanted to watch.  Continue reading “Redefining friendship: Facebook, MMORPGs and Dragon Age Origins”

A nice and accurate replica of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine was built in California last year and is now on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.

Not newsworthy, but if you’ve never seen this machine in action, the short video is well worth a look. It’s fun to listen to it clatter, and to watch the helical patterns it makes.

National Public Radio did a story this morning:

The Difference Engine fills half a gallery and stands taller than most men. It’s 5 tons of cast iron, steel and bronze woven together from 8,000 distinct parts. Though it looks like it could be a sculpture, the machine is essentially a giant calculator. Tim Robinson, a docent at the museum, says it’s “the first automatic calculating machine.”

This engine — made from 162-year-old designs — doesn’t have a power pack; it has a hand crank. Robinson works up a sweat as he turns it. “As long as you keep turning that crank, it will produce entirely new results,” he says.

Most importantly, the machine produces accurate results. In Babbage’s time, England reigned over a vast global empire. To navigate the seas, captains used books filled with calculations — but these equations were all done by fallible human minds.

What if, indeed.

[Image: kalleboo]

Did you hear about the recent exploit of jailbroken jesusPhones? Yeah, the Rick-rolling one (though that wasn’t strictly the original exploit, rather some Australian script-kiddie’s repurposing of a Dutch exploit from earlier in the month); to sum it all up in a sentence, bad things can happen to your hardware if you install software without changing the default password. As a sensible and experienced web denizen, you knew that already, of course.

But when you set or change a password, you’d better make the effort to think up a good one. Countless studies have shown how easy it is for black-hat types to guess the most common passwords (or alternatively social-engineer them out of you), but the ease of guessing is going to increase rapidly very soon, thanks to something one free software geek from Norway is calling the Hail Mary Cloud. [image by Anna Gay]

Yeah, I know, the pop-culture reference is a bit obscure, so I’ll sum it up for you: the Hail Mary Cloud is essentially a brute-force password-guessing botnet that has been scraping away at SSH daemons in recent months. A Mechanical Turk method of botnet expansion, in other words; why wait for someone to click on a spam email link when you can prise open a back-door on a webserver somewhere? [via SlashDot]

Each attempt in theory has monumental odds against succeeding, but occasionally the guess will be right and they have scored a login. As far as we know, this is at least the third round of password guessing from the Hail Mary Cloud, but there could have been earlier rounds that escaped our attention.

The fact that we see the Hail Mary Cloud keeping up the guessing is a strong indicator that there are a lot of guessable passwords and possibly badly maintained systems out there, and that even against the very long odds they are succeeding often enough in their attempts to gain a foothold somewhere that it is worth keeping up the efforts. For one thing, the cost of using other people’s equipment is likely to be quite low.

There are a lot of things about the Hail Mary Cloud and its overseers that we do not know. People who responded to the earlier articles with reports of similar activity also reported pretty consistently something like a sixty to seventy percent match in hosts making the attempts.

With 1767 hosts in the current sample it is likely that we have a cloud of at least several thousand, and most likely no single guessing host in the cloud ever gets around to contacting every host in the target list. The busier your SSH deamon is with normal traffic, the harder it will be to detect the footprint of Hail Mary activity, and likely a lot of this goes undetected.

If you’re worried, you’re thinking right – even the most complex of passwords can be guessed if you’ve got enough processor cycles (and available attempts) to spare. If the Hail Mary Cloud grows big enough, the era of the password as an even partially effective security method may be over… so start genning up on public key encryption now and avoid the rush.