Tag Archives: computer

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Royal Navy gets PWNZ0R3D by virus

HMAS Adelaide auxiliary warshipRemember when I mentioned that the UK’s Royal Navy has been installing a Windows derivative on its warship and submarine control computers? [image by Serendigity]

Well, it’s a different set of hardware, but apparently a bunch of RN computers have been knocked out of action my an email-borne virus in recent weeks. There’s got to be a great opening for an open-source contractor with a clean security history over there right now… [via SlashDot]

More seriously, though, this highlights a very real risk to ‘traditional’ military forces. After all, if small territorial conflicts like the Gaza situation can go worldwide on the web, that suggests that any opponent worth deploying your navy against is at least going to try futzing with your computer systems… and if the combination of your installed operating systems and a lack of basic email security savvy means you can have warship systems out of action for a few days, there’s some opportunities for a really nasty David and Goliath scenario somewhere down the line.

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Royal Navy submarines now running on Windows; destroyers next

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As someone who has opportunity to observe the hapless and Byzantine bureaucracy of the Royal Navy in action at fairly close range, I’m both unsurprised and vaguely terrified to find that their latest batch of nuclear submarines have been fully kitted out with a specially developed version of the Windows XP operating system, and that the RN is so pleased with the speedy installation that they’ll be using the same software in a forthcoming class of destroyers. [via SlashDot]

The potential punchlines to this news pretty much write themselves.

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Computing the Cocoa Genome

chocolateroyThe Mars candy company, the U.S. Agricultural Research Service, and the world’s second-fastest supercomputer, IBM’s Blue Gene, are working to sequence the genome of the cocoa tree. The project will identify cocoa plants that are better able to withstand the effects of global warming, including fungal strains and insects. The same tools might be applied to other food staples. There’s no genomic cure for political unrest, which also threatens the world’s cocoa supply.

[Story tip: fark.com. Chocolate portrait inspired by Roy Lichtenstein by emilywjones]

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Web wars – white hats versus black in botnet battles

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CPU chip pinsThey may be off the news radar at the moment, but botnets are still a serious bugbear for computer security professionals – it’s hard work trying to defeat something that fights back, after all. [image by Rodrigo Senna]

So here’s a new idea from the University of Washington – why not fight fire with fire, and build a white hat botnet to defend against the DDoS attacks af the black hat botnets?

“Their system, called Phalanx, uses its own large network of computers to shield the protected server. Instead of the server being accessed directly, all information must pass through the swarm of “mailbox” computers.

The many mailboxes do not simply relay information to the server like a funnel – they only pass on information when the server requests it. That allows the server to work at its own pace, without being swamped.”

Sounds like a good plan. It’s beyond my knowledge levels, but the guys at Techdirt seem to think it’s a creative approach.

As a recent convert to Linux, this is the part where I smugly remind everyone that if certain commercially ubiquitous operating systems weren’t so riddled with security flaws, botnets wouldn’t be a problem anyway …