Auto-pilots need a birds-eye view

 

Daisy Brickhill – New research on how birds can fly so quickly and accurately through dense forests may lead to new developments in robotics and auto-pilots.

Scientists from Harvard University trained pigeons to fly through an artificial forest with a tiny camera attached to their heads, literally giving a birds-eye view. “Attaching the camera to the bird as well as filming them from either side means we can reconstruct both what the bird sees and how it moves,” says Dr. Huai-Ti Lin, a lead researcher for this work who has special insight into flying as he is a remote control airplane pilot himself.

The methods pigeons use to navigate through difficult environments could be used as a model for auto-pilot technology. Pigeons, with >300 degree panoramic vision, are well suited to this task because this wrap-round vision allows them to assess obstacles on either side. They can also stabilise their vision and switch rapidly between views using what is called a “head saccade”, a small rapid movement of the head.

s, with >300 degree panoramic vision, are well suited to this task because this wrap-round vision allows them to assess obstacles on either side. They can also stabilise their vision and switch rapidly between views using what is called a “head saccade”, a small rapid movement of the head.

via Auto-pilots need a birds-eye view.

Security researchers discover ‘indestructible’ botnet

More than four million PCs have been enrolled in a botnet security experts say is almost “indestructible”.

The botnet, known as TDL, targets Windows PCs and is difficult to detect and shut down.

Code that hijacks a PC hides in places security software rarely looks and the botnet is controlled using custom-made encryption.

Security researchers said recent botnet shutdowns had made TDL’s controllers harden it against investigation.

The 4.5 million PCs have become victims over the last three months following the appearance of the fourth version of the TDL virus.

The changes introduced in TDL-4 made it the “most sophisticated threat today,” wrote Kaspersky Labs security researchers Sergey Golovanov and Igor Soumenkov in a detailed analysis of the virus.

“The owners of TDL are essentially trying to create an ‘indestructible’ botnet that is protected against attacks, competitors, and anti-virus companies,” wrote the researchers.

Recent successes by security companies and law enforcement against botnets have led to spam levels dropping to about 75% of all e-mail sent, shows analysis by Symantec. …

The virus installs itself in a Windows system file known as the master boot record. This file holds the list of instructions to get a computer started and is a good place to hide because it is rarely scanned by standard anti-virus programs.

The majority of victims, 28%, are in the US but significant numbers are in India (7%) and the UK (5%). Smaller numbers, 3%, are found in France, Germany and Canada.

However, wrote the researchers, it is the way the botnet operates that makes it so hard to tackle and shut down.

The makers of TDL-4 have cooked up their own encryption system to protect communication between those controlling the botnet. This makes it hard to do any significant analysis of traffic between hijacked PCs and the botnet’s controllers.

In addition, TDL-4 sends out instructions to infected machines using a public peer-to-peer network rather than centralised command systems. This foils analysis because it removes the need for command servers that regularly communicate with infected machines….

via BBC News – Security researchers discover ‘indestructible’ botnet.

The TDL-4 bootkit infects the master boot record on a computer so that it can launch before the operating system even starts, making it invisible to the operating system and antivirus software, Sergey Golovanov, a malware researcher at Kaspersky Lab, wrote June 27 on the SecureList blog. While MBR-malware is nothing new, TDL-4 has a number of unique capabilities, including an encryption algorithm that hides the botnet’s communications from network traffic analysis tools.

A variant of TDSS, which has been around since 2008, TDL-4 appears to be an upgrade of the previous version TDL-3. The botnet’s command-and-control servers can communicate with its army using an encrypted method to hide what it’s doing from network monitors. The customized encryption algorithm appears to use the domain names of the C&C servers as the encryption keys, according to Golovanov’s analysis.

TDL-4 “is one of the most technologically sophisticated and most complex to analyze malware,” Golovanov wrote.

Unlike Rustock, Coreflood or a number of other botnets, TDL-4 doesn’t rely overmuch on centralized C&C servers to pass instructions to its zombie army. The zombies can also pass along instructions to other machines using a public Kad peer-to-peer network if the servers are for some reason unavailable, creating a “decentralized server-less botnet,” said Golovanov.

TDL is often found on adult content sites, bootleg Websites, and video and file storage services, according to Golovanov. Once a computer is infected with TLD-4, the malware downloads and installs other malicious software such as adware and spambots and hides those from security software as well.

Since TDL-4 loads when the computer is booting, before the operating system launches and lives in the master boot record on the hard drive, it’s difficult for antivirus software to detect the malware. In the first three months of 2011, it infected 4,524,488 computers around the world. Approximately a third of them are based in the United States.

via Eweek

How do you get rid of it? Here’s how: Use the System Recovery Console to run the fixmbr command to remove the malware.

A new variant of the Trojan Popureb burrows deep enough into the Windows operating system that users are recommended to reinstall the OS in order to remove it. …

A new rootkit targeting Windows systems currently making the rounds can be removed only by fixing the master boot record, Microsoft said.

The “Popureb” Trojan corrupts the hard drive’s master boot record to such an extent that the only way to remove it is to run Windows Recovery Console to rewrite the sectors to a clean state, Microsoft Malware Protection Center engineer Chun Feng wrote in an advisory posted on the Threat Research and Reponse blog June 22.

The Trojan was updated recently with the driver component that makes sure the malware can never be modified by an external process, according to Feng. The component accesses the DriverStartIO routine in the device driver to execute itself.

“The driver component protects the data in an unusual way,” wrote Feng.

Trojan:Win32/Popureb.E overwrites the first sector on the hard drive so that it triggers at boot time. MBR is generally invisible to both the operating system and security software. To ensure it can’t easily be removed, Popureb can intercept all commands to overwrite the MBR or any other part of the hard drive where the malware is installed and replace those commands with a read command. The operation appears to succeed and no errors are thrown, but no new data is actually written to the disk. This means that if a security software attempts to remove the malware, it fails automatically because it can’t overwrite the MBR or the infected sector.

Despite Microsoft’s stance, Symantec researchers downplayed the threat on its blog. “The Popureb family is nothing new and we have seen variants of this family for months,” a Symantec employee with the name “kochc” wrote June 28 in a post titled “Win32/Popureb.E Symantec Response.”

Most members of this particular malware family are fake antivirus software, but this variant “might be a little more severe, Symantec said, but pointed out that this Trojan doesn’t do anything that “Trojan.Tidserv doesn’t already do.” The company has asked Microsoft for the sample to analyze further, according to the statement.

Users should use the System Recovery Console to run the fixmbr command to remove the malware, Feng said as he posted detailed instructions for fixing XP, Vista and Windows 7 after being infected by Popureb online.

Rootkits are increasingly becoming common because they are often hard to detect or remove because of the way they bury inside the operating system.

Organizations without a comprehensive backup strategy in place will lose a lot …

via eweek

I wonder if this explains some of the strange slowness and network problems with my computer.

Robot armpit

Kevin Grennan created this Robot Armpit prototype. There’s more good stuff about his work with robots that smell scary in this We Make Money Not Art interview and profile, in honor of The Smell of Control: Fear, Focus, Trust, which deals with smell and robotics.

It was important to me that the odours and chemicals came from within the robots and that they were an integrated means for them to communicate with the humans who would surround them. Each robot that I have augmented with a ‘sweat gland’ emits a particular chemical that has a specific effect on humans and the chemical has been chosen to further enable the robot’s primary function.

In the case of the bomb disposal robot the ‘sweat gland’ releases the smell of human fear. It has been proven that humans can identify this specific smell and it tends to enhance cognitive performance …

via Robot armpit – Boing Boing.

Atmospheric flare from a minuteman III ICBM missile‬‏

Footage from a webcam on the Canada-France-Hawaii-Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii presumed to have been caused by a test launch of a Minuteman III missile from California on June 22, 2011. The event was also captured by a camera on the Subaru telescope and witnessed by an observer with night-vision goggles. Discussion thread:

asterisk.apod.com/​ viewtopic.php?f=29&t=24251

Note: this clip plays back in real-time but the playback is not perfectly smooth due to the way the frames were captured and stored

via YouTube – ‪Atmospheric flare from a minuteman III ICBM missile‬‏.

Ingenious ‘Flat Earth’ Theory Revealed In Old Map

In 1893, Orlando Ferguson, a real estate developer based in South Dakota, drew a map of the Earth that combined biblical and scientific knowledge in a unique way. The map accompanied a 92-page lecture that Ferguson — referring to himself as a “professor” — delivered in town after town, traveling far and wide to share his theory of geography, highlighted by his belief that the Earth was flat.

Ferguson’s map represents the Earth as a giant, rectangular slab with a dimpled upper surface. Don Homuth of Salem, Ore., just donated one of two intact copies of the map to the Library of Congress. [See the map]

“It’s very fragile. It’s printed on tissue paper and hand-colored with watercolors,” Homuth said. He got the map from his eighth grade history teacher in Fargo, N.D., who got it from his grandfather, who lived in Hot Springs, S.D. — Ferguson’s hometown.

“Now, I’m 67. I don’t want it to fall into the hands of relatives, for God’s sake! And I don’t particularly want to sell it. So we thought we’d send it to the Library of Congress,” Homuth told Life’s Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience.

The only other copy is housed in the Pioneer Historical Museum in Hot Springs. James Bingham, chairman of the museum’s board of directors, told us what he knows about it.

“Ferguson was trying to make an updated version of the flat Earth theory to fit the biblical description of the Earth with known facts,” Bingham said. Typical of flat Earths, Ferguson’s Earth is a rectangular slab, the four corners of which are each guarded by an angel. “What makes his flat Earth different from other theories is his theory holds that the Earth is imprinted with an ‘inverse toroid.’” If you were to take a donut and press it into wet cement and then remove the donut, Bingham explained, the rounded impression it left in the cement would be what is known in mathematics as an inverse toroid.

“It’s pretty clever because it explains the Columbus phenomenon, where you see ships coming in over the horizon and gradually the mast gets taller and taller until you can see the ship,” Bingham said. “By 1893, most people knew about horizons so he had to come up with some way to explain that.” …

via Ingenious ‘Flat Earth’ Theory Revealed In Old Map | LiveScience.

 

Leonardo Da Vinci Painting to Be Unveiled

A lost masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci has been discovered in a private American collection and will be unveiled publicly for the first time by the National Gallery in London later this year, according to people close to the institution. “Salvator Mundi”—a depiction of Christ with his right hand raised in blessing —has been authenticated by experts as the Leonardo painting that disappeared after being owned by Charles I and Charles II of England, according to these people. The last time an important Leonardo was discovered was a century ago. The National Gallery, which plans a major exhibition on the Renaissance master this fall, declined to comment. Salvator Mundi—an oil on wood panel measuring 26 inches by 18.5 inches—is a devotional work comparable in size and subject to Leonardo’s St. John the Baptist in the Louvre in Paris. According to a person familiar with the painting’s history, restorers began work on Salvator Mundi in the hope that it might be by someone closely associated with Leonardo because of stylistic evidence. Leonardo’s hand was confirmed after the removal of layers of discolored varnish and overpaint applied by earlier restoration attempts. This person said that the idea of finding a lost Leonardo was “not something a rational person would really believe.” The composition was known from a 1650s engraving by Wenceslaus Hollar. The owner’s identity could not be learned. ARTnews magazine, which reported the discovery earlier this week, suggested a figure of $200 million for the value of the painting.
via Leonardo Da Vinci Painting to Be Unveiled – WSJ.com.

Really? I thought this was a joke at first. Looks like the Jesus Lisa.