Warp speed may actually be possible + Star Trek: Into Darkness Review + The Captains Close Up by Shatner

.. Decades after the original “Star Trek” show had gone off the air, pioneering physicist and avowed Trek fan Miguel Alcubierre argued that maybe a warp drive is possible after all. It just wouldn’t work quite the way “Star Trek” thought it did.

Things with mass can’t move faster than the speed of light. But what if, instead of the ship moving through space, the space was moving around the ship?

Space doesn’t have mass. And we know that it’s flexible: space has been expanding at a measurable rate ever since the Big Bang. We know this from observing the light of distant stars — over time, the wavelength of the stars’ light as it reaches Earth is lengthened in a process called “redshifting.” According to the Doppler effect, this means that the source of the wavelength is moving farther away from the observer — i.e. Earth.

So we know from observing redshifted light that the fabric of space is movable. [See also: What to Wear on a 100-Year Starship Voyage]

Alcubierre used this knowledge to exploit a loophole in the “universal speed limit.” In his theory, the ship never goes faster than the speed of light — instead, space in front of the ship is contracted while space behind it is expanded, allowing the ship to travel distances in less time than light would take. The ship itself remains in what Alcubierre termed a “warp bubble” and, within that bubble, never goes faster than the speed of light.

Since Alcubierre published his paper “The Warp Drive: Hyper-fast travel within general relativity” in 1994, many physicists and science fiction writers have played with his theory —including “Star Trek” itself. [See also: Top 10 Star Trek Technologies]

Alcubierre’s warp drive theory was retroactively incorporated into the “Star Trek” mythos by the 1990s TV series “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

In a way, then, “Star Trek” created its own little grandfather paradox: Though ultimately its theory of faster-than-light travel was heavily flawed, the series established a vocabulary of light-speed travel that Alcubierre eventually formalized in his own warp drive theories.

The Alcubierre warp drive is still theoretical for now. “The truth is that the best ideas sound crazy at first. And then there comes a time when we can’t imagine a world without them.” That’s a statement from the 100 Year Starship organization, a think tank devoted to making Earth what “Star Trek” would call a “warp-capable civilization” within a century.

The first step toward a functional warp drive is to prove that a “warp bubble” is even possible, and that it can be artificially created.

That’s exactly what physicist Harold “Sonny” White and a team of researchers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas are doing right now.

According to Alcubierre’s theory, one could create a warp bubble by applying negative energy, or energy created in a vacuum. This process relies on the Casimir effect, which states that a vacuum is not actually a void; instead, a vacuum is actually full of fluctuating electromagnetic waves. Distorting these waves creates negative energy, which possibly distorts space-time, creating a warp bubble.

To see if space-time distortion has occurred in a lab experiment, the researchers shine two highly targeted lasers: one through the site of the vacuum and one through regular space. The researchers will then compare the two beams, and if the wavelength of the one going through the vacuum is lengthened, i.e. redshifted, in any way, they’ll know that it passed through a warp bubble. …

via Warp speed, Scotty? It may actually be possible… – Science.

I did recently see Star Trek: Into Darkness (or as I call it, the Different Wrath of a Different Khan) the day it came out, but I’ve been holding off on writing my review. As a long time fan of the series, I’m a bit embarrassed to say that, well, truth be told, I enjoyed Iron Man 3 more.

After plenty of thought, I’ve boiled it down to three things. First, a major element missing from this latest Star Trek was a Captain with a wry sense of humor.  This Kirk still seemed like a too serious boy to me, plenty of the bravado but missing the sense of ease and humor that made Bill Shatner the best Kirk so far. There were some great and moments like Sulu’s bluff, great stunts, great CG and an interesting villain. Second, the rewrites of events from the original series just didn’t seem right. They were at times out of character for the characters. Spock yelling “Khaaaaaaan,” for example, was totally illogical.  This was fun and funny for long time fans, but was something you’d expect from a Saturday Night Live spoof rather than an addition to the Trek Legacy. It was playful fun, sure, but it took me out of the story and made me focus on the producers/writers rather than keeping me engaged in an enjoyable story. Third, the pace was off somehow. I can’t put my finger on it, but the ride from wild action to peaceful relief was just not enjoyable.

Anyway, speaking of different Trek captains, check this out:

EPIX has announced the premiere of William Shatner’s new Star Trek themed mini-series, The Captains Close Up on May 16^th.  The premiere is part of EPIX’ “Trekkie Fest,” an entire night of programming related to Paramount’s latest Star Trek Into Darkness, opening on May 16^th.  Also screening on EPIX will be Shatner’s feature documentary on the world of Star Trek fandom; William Shatner’s Get a Life.

The Captains Close Up is a five-episode miniseries, directed by and featuring William Shatner.  Each episode focuses on one of the Captains of Star Trek:Sir Patrick Stewart, Scott Bakula, Kate Mulgrew, Avery Brooks and of course, William Shatner, himself.  Chris Pine, the newest Enterprise Captain, turns the tables to interview the original Captain of the Enterprise, William Shatner, and the two “Captain James T. Kirks” compare notes about love, life and family.

William Shatner speaks with each of the Captains of the Starship USS Enterprise for an up close interview of their life after Star Trek.  Each half-hour is an intimate portrayal of these talented actors and includes interviews from the biggest names in the world of Star Trek including; Jonathan Frakes, Walter Koenig, Michael Dorn, Rene Auberjonois, Rick Berman, Brannon Braga, Robert Beltran, Ron Moore, Terry Farrell, Nana Visitor and Ira Steven Behr, to name a few.

The Captains Close Up miniseries is the 9^th production with William Shatner from 455 Films and Love Lake Productions in association with Le Big Boss Productions. Shatner also serves as producer, along with Kevin Layne and David Zappone.  Joseph Kornbrodt and Helene Layne serve as associate producers.  Premium network EPIX is owned by Paramount, Lionsgate and MGM.

CogCubed: Games to Improve Your Mental Health

CogCubed, founded by Kurt Roots and his wife Dr. Monika Heller, is a Minneapolis-based game and data company engaged in creating games that produce data to improve health and education outcomes. Dr. Heller is a practicing Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist.

I spoke to Kurt Root who shared with me CogCubed’s plan to change the lives of millions across the world through their games leveraging technology and psychiatry. …

I met the entrepreneur couple at a dinner event hosted by Google in Silicon Valley and was amazed by the passion they displayed toward bringing a great product to the global market. Now over to the conversation with Kurt. …

Our team is a cross between computer science, neuroscience, and psychiatry. We started this company after I showed some new and innovative technology from the MIT Media Lab to my wife, Monika Heller, MD, who is a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist. I was interested because there was an SDK for this new manipulative gaming system, which means I could program games for it. She was immediately interested because it meant that we could use data collected from sensors and games to understand behavior. The Sifteo Cubes are wireless blocks or cubes, which have been described as a cross between Legos and Nintendo. They contain a variety of sensors, can be touched and moved spatially, and have an LCD screen for high-resolution graphics. As medicine, Monika’s domain, is very subjective, we thought it might be a great opportunity to see what objective data we could collect from game play and then analyze it to both identify and improve cognitive health. …

I spent roughly five years at Oracle as a programmer and have graduate degrees in Software Engineering and Information Systems. I also have an MBA. Prior to working on CogCubed full-time, I was a management consultant focused on data and analysis-driven results in health care and retail verticals. What drew me to this though was that computationally it is not very different than what I had been doing. Also, I have a brother with special needs and so the problems we are trying to solve mean a great deal personally.

Monika was completing her Fellowship in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Minnesota. Prior to CogCubed, she had already practiced in a variety of settings including schools, community outreach programs, and medical/physical rehabilitation units. She is still actively involved as a clinician, in addition to being Adjunct Faculty at the University of Minnesota. …

We recently completed a clinical trial, with analysis done at the University of Minnesota. Further, in health care, proving out an idea can typically take longer time, thus more money. Lastly, because we are based in Minnesota, we have to be creative with how we raise funds and find talent. …

We have done a lot of work analyzing the market and need for our product. For example, neurological illnesses affect more than 50 million Americans annually and cost more than $500 billion to treat. It’s estimated that 830,000 children/adolescents have Autism, with a treatment cost of $29 billion annually. ADHD impacts 5.4 million children/adolescents and costs $3.2 billion annually to diagnose and $79 billion annually to treat. These are two disorders we care deeply about.

To apply our solution to the marketplace we are currently working with schools and clinics in our local area to build additional evidence to prove both the technology and the business model. We are also going to be running controlled business experiments where we test price points, delivery mechanisms, and overall solutions over the next few months.

We are creating a suite of fun and engaging games, based on neurological correlates, which span a spectrum of behavior behavioral disorders. We are also fundamentally a data company, where we collect large amounts of data in a new way, and then utilize sophisticated and novel algorithms to extract value from it. …

We are proving out our solution in the United States first, but definitely have international plans. Without being too specific in regards to our strategy, we will be focusing on Asia and will be coming to India.

http://yourstory.in/2013/05/cogcubed-games-to-improve-your-mental-health-2/

Stacking 2-D materials produces surprising results

Graphene has dazzled scientists, ever since its discovery more than a decade ago, with its unequalled electronic properties, its strength and its light weight. But one long-sought goal has proved elusive: how to engineer into graphene a property called a band gap, which would be necessary to use the material to make transistors and other electronic devices.

Now, new findings by researchers at MIT are a major step toward making graphene with this coveted property. The work could also lead to revisions in some theoretical predictions in graphene physics.

The new technique involves placing a sheet of graphene — a carbon-based material whose structure is just one atom thick — on top of hexagonal boron nitride, another one-atom-thick material with similar properties. The resulting material shares graphene’s amazing ability to conduct electrons, while adding the band gap necessary to form transistors and other semiconductor devices.

The work is described in a paper in the journal Science co-authored by Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, the Mitsui Career Development Assistant Professor of Physics at MIT, Professor of Physics Ray Ashoori, and 10 others.

“By combining two materials,” Jarillo-Herrero says, “we created a hybrid material that has different properties than either of the two.”

Graphene is an extremely good conductor of electrons, while boron nitride is a good insulator, blocking the passage of electrons. “We made a high-quality semiconductor by putting them together,” Jarillo-Herrero explains. Semiconductors, which can switch between conducting and insulating states, are the basis for all modern electronics.

To make the hybrid material work, the researchers had to align, with near perfection, the atomic lattices of the two materials, which both consist of a series of hexagons. The size of the hexagons (known as the lattice constant) in the two materials is almost the same, but not quite: Those in boron nitride are 1.8 percent larger. So while it is possible to line the hexagons up almost perfectly in one place, over a larger area the pattern goes in and out of register.

At this point, the researchers say they must rely on chance to get the angular alignment for the desired electronic properties in the resulting stack. However, the alignment turns out to be correct about one time out of 15, they say.

“The qualities of the boron nitride bleed over into the graphene,” Ashoori says. But what’s most “spectacular,” he adds, is that the properties of the resulting semiconductor can be “tuned” by just slightly rotating one sheet relative to the other, allowing for a spectrum of materials with varied electronic characteristics.

Others have made graphene into a semiconductor by etching the sheets into narrow ribbons, Ashoori says, but such an approach substantially degrades graphene’s electrical properties. By contrast, the new method appears to produce no such degradation.

via Stacking 2-D materials produces surprising results.

Related:

Researchers from the University of Manchester discovered that sandwiching graphene between boron nitride layers can produce highly-accurate capacitors. Such capacitors could be cheaper and easier to fabricate compared to traditional transistors.

The researchers used quantum capacitance spectroscopy to investigate the exceptional properties of graphene …

via http://www.graphene-info.com/highly-accurate-capacitors-graphene-and-boron-nitride-layers

Quantum camera snaps objects it cannot “see”

A normal digital camera can take snaps of objects not directly visible to its lens, US researchers have shown. The “ghost imaging” technique could help satellites take snapshots through clouds or smoke.

Physicists have known for more than a decade that ghost imaging is possible. But, until now, experiments had only imaged the holes in stencil-like masks, which limited its potential applications.

Now Yanhua Shih of the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and colleagues at the US Army Research Laboratory, also in Maryland, have now taken the first ghost images of an opaque object – a toy soldier …

Ghost imaging works a bit like taking a flash-lit photo of an object using a normal camera. There the image forms from photons that come out of the flash, bounce off an object and into the lens.

The new technique also uses a light source to illuminate an object. However, the image is not formed from light that hits the object and bounces back. Instead, the camera collects photons that do not hit the object, but are paired through a quantum effect with others that did.

In Shih’s experiments a toy soldier was placed 45 centimetres away from a light source, which was split into two beams. One was pointed at the toy and the other at a digital camera. A photon detector was placed near the soldier, able only to record when a photon bounced off.

Photons from the light source constantly travel down both paths made by the splitter, either towards the soldier and the photon detector, or towards the camera. The detector and camera record a constant stream of those photons, and occasionally record a photon at exactly the same time.

When this happens, there is a direct relationship between where one of the photons hit the soldier, and where the other one hits the camera’s sensor, says Shih, because of a quantum effect called “two-photon interference”.

“If the first photon stops at one point on the object plane, the second photon can only be observed at the corresponding point on the image plane,” he says.

So when the camera records only pixels from photons that hit simultaneously with one reaching the detector, a “ghost image” of the object builds up. The soldier’s image appeared after around 1000 coincidental photons were recorded.

“It is clear that the experimental set-up can be directly applied to sensing applications,” Shih told New Scientist .

The same method could one day be employed to produce satellite images of objects hidden behind clouds or smoke, using the sun’s radiation as the photon source, says Shih. Doing that may require a photon counter beneath the clouds, but could allow a top-down view not possible using conventional methods.

Not everyone agrees that quantum effects are at work in ghost imaging, though. Baris Erkmen and Jeffrey Shapiro of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, US, point out in a recent paper that classical physics says light sources produce numbers of uncoordinated photons that are not correlated as Shih suggests.

They suspect ghost images might be produced without a quantum link between photon pairs, purely because some photons are just similar. …

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13825-quantum-camera-snaps-objects-it-cannot-see.html

“Buycott” App Lets You Boycott Monsanto And More By Scanning Items in Your Shopping Cart

In her keynote speech at last year’s annual Netroots Nation gathering, Darcy Burner pitched a seemingly simple idea to the thousands of bloggers and web developers in the audience. The former Microsoft MSFT +0.94% programmer and congressional candidate proposed a smartphone app allowing shoppers to swipe barcodes to check whether conservative billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch were behind a product on the shelves.

Burner figured the average supermarket shopper had no idea that buying Brawny paper towels, Angel Soft toilet paper or Dixie cups meant contributing cash to Koch Industries through its subsidiary Georgia-Pacific. Similarly, purchasing a pair of yoga pants containing Lycra or a Stainmaster carpet meant indirectly handing the Kochs your money (Koch Industries bought Invista, one of the world’s largest fiber and textiles companies, in 2004 from DuPont).

At the time, Burner created a mock interface for her app, but that’s as far as she got. She was waiting to find the right team to build out the back end, which could be complicated given often murky corporate ownership structures.

She wasn’t aware that as she delivered her Netroots speech, a group of developers was hard at work on Buycott, an even more sophisticated version of the app she proposed.

“I remember reading Forbes’ story on the proposed app to help boycott Koch Industries and wishing that we were ready to launch our product,” said Buycott’s marketing director Maceo Martinez.

The app itself is the work of one Los Angeles-based 26-year-old freelance programmer, Ivan Pardo, who has devoted the last 16 months to Buycott. “It’s been completely bootstrapped up to this point,” he said. Martinez and another friend have pitched in to promote the app.Pardo’s handiwork is available for download on iPhone or Android, making its debut in iTunes and Google GOOG +3.26% Play in early May. You can scan the barcode on any product and the free app will trace its ownership all the way to its top corporate parent company, including conglomerates like Koch Industries.

Once you’ve scanned an item, Buycott will show you its corporate family tree on your phone screen. Scan a box of Splenda sweetener, for instance, and you’ll see its parent, McNeil Nutritionals, is a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson JNJ +0.77%.

Even more impressively, you can join user-created campaigns to boycott business practices that violate your principles rather than single companies. One of these campaigns, Demand GMO Labeling, will scan your box of cereal and tell you if it was made by one of the 36 corporations that donated more than $150,000 to oppose the mandatory labeling of genetically modified food.

Deciding to add that campaign to your Buycott app might make buying your breakfast nearly impossible, as that list includes not just headline grabbers like agricultural giant Monsanto but just about every big consumer company with a presence in the supermarket aisle: Coca-Cola, Nestle, Kraft, Heinz, Kellogg’s, Unilever and more.

Buycott is still working on adding new data to its back end and fine-tuning its information on corporate ownership structures. Most companies in the current database actually own more brands than Buycott has on record. The developers are asking shoppers to help improve their technology by inputting names of products they scan that the app doesn’t already recognize. …

via New App Lets You Boycott Koch Brothers, Monsanto And More By Scanning Your Shopping Cart – Forbes.

Cool, I got the app and looked at the campaigns. With a click I’m now one of the 20,641 people who demand GMO labeling.

It has only 2 stars in the Apple App Store, seemingly due to it not working for barcode scans seemingly due to server problems. Could it be bad planning for the amount of interest, or are they under a denial of service attack from one of those super rich companies they want to financially impact?

Scientists report first success in cloning human stem cells

Ever since Ian Wilmut, an unassuming embryologist working at the Roslin Institute just outside of Edinburgh stunned the world by cloning the first mammal, Dolly, scientists have been asking – could humans be cloned in the same way?
Putting aside the ethical challenges the question raised, the query turned out to involve more wishful thinking than scientific success. Despite the fact that dozens of other species have been cloned using the technique, called nuclear transfer, human cells have remained stubbornly resistant to the process.

Until now. Shoukhrat Mitalipov, a professor at Oregon Health & Science University, and his colleagues report in the journal Cell that they have successfully reprogrammed human skin cells back to their embryonic state.

The purpose of the study, however, was not to generate human clones but to produce lines of embryonic stem cells. These can develop into muscle, nerve, or other cells that make up the body’s tissues. The process, he says, took only a few months, a surprisingly short period to reach such an important milestone.

Nuclear transfer involves inserting a fully developed cell – in Mitalipov’s study, the cells came from the skin of fetuses – into the nucleus of an egg, and then manipulating the egg to start dividing, a process that normally only occurs after it has been fertilized by a sperm.

After several days, the ball of cells that results contains a blanket of embryonic stem cells endowed with the genetic material of the donor skin cell, which have the ability to generate every cell type from that donor.

In Dolly’s case, those cells were allowed to continue developing into an embryo that was then transferred to a ewe to produce a cloned sheep. But Mitalipov says his process with the human cells isn’t designed to generate a human clone, but rather just to create the embryonic stem cells. These could then be manipulated to create heart, nerve or other cells that can repair or treat disease.

“I think this is a really important advance,” says Dieter Egli, an investigator at the New York Stem Cell Foundation and Columbia University. “I have a very high confidence that versions of this technique will work very well; it’s something that the field has been waiting for.”…

http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/15/health/time-cloning-stem-cells/index.html

You could be cloned right now and you would not know it.

Astronaut sings Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ in zero gravity

Chris Hadfield has conquered space. Now he’s conquering the Internet, too.

A video of the Canadian astronaut singing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” from the International Space Station has been zipping around the Web at light speed since it was posted Sunday. The five-minute clip features Hadfield singing a modified version of the tune and strumming an acoustic guitar while floating through a space module, more than 200 miles above the Earth.

By Monday morning, it had more than 1 million views on YouTube, 3,000 comments on Reddit and was being widely shared across social networks.

Hadfield already was something of a social media star, with 260,000 fans on Facebook and more than 825,000 followers on Twitter. During his five months aboard the International Space Station, he has posted numerous photos and videos of himself preparing meals, brushing his teeth and explaining how to vomit in space.

But the elegant “Space Oddity” video, reportedly months in the making, may rocket him into a higher orbit. Hadfield’s earnest voice and unique perch in space brings a moving immediacy to Bowie’s verses, and when he sings, “I’m floating in a most peculiar way” while actually floating, it’s a powerful moment.

Because Hadfield’s vocals and guitar were recorded on the space station (and mixed with supporting tracks by Emm Gryner, a Canadian musician who once sang backup for Bowie), some observers are calling it the first music video made in space.

Commenters on Reddit praised the video’s simplicity and genuineness.

“The floating guitar is really floating, it’s not some computer animation or trickery. The Earth turning behind him in the windows is the real deal. That’s us, that’s our blue dot, not some stock image, or animation …,” wrote one Redditor. “The video has none of the Hollywood fakery we are used to. Its power comes from this authenticity.”

Hadfield took a few liberties with the lyrics of the 1969 Bowie song, which became a hit upon its 1973 rerelease. In the original song, Ground Control loses radio contact with the astronaut, Major Tom, implying that the mission has failed. But Hadfield omits that part.

Bowie himself acknowledged the video, tweeting, “CHRIS HADFIELD SINGS SPACE ODDITY IN SPACE!”

The 53-year-old Hadfield launched aboard the Russian Soyuz spacecraft in December and in March became the first Canadian to lead a spaceship as commander of the International Space Station. The video clip is a farewell of sorts: He is due to depart the space station Monday night and return to Earth.

via Astronaut sings Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ in zero gravity – CNN.com.

Apple deluged by police demands to decrypt iPhones

Apple receives so many police demands to decrypt seized iPhones that it has created a “waiting list” to handle the deluge of requests, CNET has learned.

Court documents show that federal agents were so stymied by the encrypted iPhone 4S of a Kentucky man accused of distributing crack cocaine that they turned to Apple for decryption help last year.

An agent at the ATF, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, “contacted Apple to obtain assistance in unlocking the device,” U.S. District Judge Karen Caldwell wrote in a recent opinion. But, she wrote, the ATF was “placed on a waiting list by the company.”

A search warrant affidavit prepared by ATF agent Rob Maynard says that, for nearly three months last summer, he “attempted to locate a local, state, or federal law enforcement agency with the forensic capabilities to unlock” an iPhone 4S. But after each police agency responded by saying they “did not have the forensic capability,” Maynard resorted to asking Cupertino.

Because the waiting list had grown so long, there would be at least a 7-week delay, Maynard says he was told by Joann Chang, a legal specialist in Apple’s litigation group. It’s unclear how long the process took, but it appears to have been at least four months.

The documents shed new light on the increasingly popular law enforcement practice of performing a forensic analysis on encrypted mobile devices — a practice that can, when done without a warrant, raise Fourth Amendment concerns.

Last year, leaked training materials prepared by the Sacramento sheriff’s office included a form that would require Apple to “assist law enforcement agents” with “bypassing the cell phone user’s passcode so that the agents may search the iPhone.” Google takes a more privacy-protective approach: it “resets the password and further provides the reset password to law enforcement,” the materials say, which has the side effect of notifying the user that his or her cell phone has been compromised.

Ginger Colbrun, ATF’s public affairs chief, told CNET that “ATF cannot discuss specifics of ongoing investigations or litigation. ATF follows federal law and DOJ/department-wide policy on access to all communication devices.”

In a separate case in Nevada last year, federal agents acknowledged to a judge that they were having trouble examining a seized iPhone and iPad because of password and encryption issues. And the Drug Enforcement Administration has been stymied by encryption used in Apple’s iMessage chat service, according to an internal document obtained by CNET last month.

The ATF’s Maynard said in an affidavit for the Kentucky case that Apple “has the capabilities to bypass the security software” and “download the contents of the phone to an external memory device.” Chang, the Apple legal specialist, told him that “once the Apple analyst bypasses the passcode, the data will be downloaded onto a USB external drive” and delivered to the ATF.

It’s not clear whether that means Apple has created a backdoor for police — which has been the topic of speculation in the past — whether the company has custom hardware that’s faster at decryption, or whether it simply is more skilled at using the same procedures available to the government. Apple declined to discuss its law enforcement policies when contacted this week by CNET.

Mobile device users should take this as a warning that Google and Apple can provide access to data stored on an encrypted device at least in some circumstances, says Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.

“That is something that I don’t think most people realize,” Soghoian says. “Even if you turn on disk encryption with a password, these firms can and will provide the government with a way to get your data.”

An August 2012 article in MIT Technology Review by Simson Garfinkel, an associate professor at the U.S. military’s Naval Postgraduate School, says “Apple customers’ content” is so well-protected that often “it’s impossible for law enforcement to perform forensic examinations of devices seized from criminals.”

That depends largely, however, on the length of the passphrase or password that someone selects to protect a modern iOS device. (Because the original iPhone and iPhone 3G did not use hardware encryption, they were protected only by a passcode that could be easily bypassed.)

Elcomsoft claims its iOS Forensic Toolkit can perform a brute-force cryptographic attack on a four-digit iOS 4 or iOS 5 passcode in 20 to 40 minutes. “Complex passcodes can be recovered, but require more time,” the company’s marketing literature says. But the iPhone 5 doesn’t appear in Elcomsoft’s list of devices that can be targeted.

Garfinkel estimates that if a user chooses a six-digit passcode, the maximum time required to guess the number would be 22 hours, while a nine-digit PIN would require two and a half years. A 10-digit PIN would take 25 years. Average times, of course, cut those maximum brute-force durations in half, and that could be whittled down much further if it’s possible to guess PINs a suspect is more likely to use. …

via Apple deluged by police demands to decrypt iPhones | Politics and Law – CNET News.

Most people have 4 digit passcodes, but if Apple has a backdoor for the 4S then no length of password would make your device secure.  Do they? Everyone should switch to a random 12 digit PIN. Then we can watch the news and see if anyone reports Apple being able to get in. You might be tempted to use something like this to generate your password:

RANDOM.ORG offers true random numbers to anyone on the Internet. The randomness comes from atmospheric noise, which for many purposes is better than the pseudo-random number algorithms typically used in computer programs.

But of course, you must proceed as if ALL Internet traffic is recorded, which means any random numbers you downloaded over the Internet were intercepted.

Even if the random data is intended for a one-time download only, the random data can be compromised.  Never use downloaded random data if security or legal issues are of concern. – http://randomnumber.org/download.htm

Here’s a quick secure random number generator:

Chessex Dice Sets: Opaque Blue with White – Ten Sided Die d10 Set (10)

YouTube launches pay-to-watch subscription channels + 25 alternatives to YouTube

YouTube has launched a trial scheme for paid channels on its website.

Under the pilot programme, a small number of content makers will offer the channels for subscriptions starting at $0.99 (£0.64) a month.

Each channel will offer a free 14-day trial and many will have discounted annual rates.

Although the initial 53-channel line-up is fairly niche, one expert suggested the move might ultimately squeeze some smaller rivals out of the market.

YouTube, which is owned by Google, said the launch was part of an effort to enable “content creators to earn revenue for their creativity”.

For example, the children’s television favourite, Sesame Street will offer full episodes on its pay channel when it launches.

Subscribers can pay using either their credit cards or through Google’s own Wallet service.

The paid channels involved in the pilot are diverse.

They include National Geographic Kids, Acorn – which provides episodes from several British TV series -and Fix My Hog Premium, which is aimed at Harley Davidson motorcycle enthusiasts.

“This is just the beginning”, YouTube said on its blog.

“We’ll be rolling paid channels out more broadly in the coming weeks as a self-service feature for qualifying partners.

“And as new channels appear, we’ll be making sure you can discover them.” …

via BBC News – YouTube launches pay-to-watch subscription channels.

I stopped watching YouTube when they started putting ads up. This is a great opportunity for someone to start up a new free alternative to YouTube. Below are 25 YouTube  alternatives, one of which has a video of a really cool green bicycle:

 

If you’d like to set up your own video sharing site, here are my criteria for a good one:

#1: Your site must show thumbnails of your shared videos FIRST THING –no sign up or upload required first– otherwise you lose, I’m GONE. (There are a huge number of these loser sites.)

#2: If your video sharing site says anything about fees, you lose, I’m gone.

#3: If the first video I click on won’t load or worse, is a fake leading to an ad, you lose, I’m never coming back and now you aren’t in my list below visible seen by up to 5,000 visitors to this blog per day.

(Note: Sites come and go. I found many in my search tonight that are now defunct. If you are viewing this after May 2013, a few of these may be broken links or may have been sold to someone unsavory. Browse at your own risk.)

If you have any good addition not in the list below, leave it in a comment. No porn sites please. These are YouTube alternatives where you can post your own (generally Safe For Work) videos and see videos from other people like you.

1. http://blip.tv/
2. http://www.vimeo.com
3. http://www.dailymotion.com
4. http://www.ustream.tv/new
5. http://www.blinkx.com/
6. http://www.hulu.com/
7. http://www.metacafe.com/
8. http://www.flickr.com/
9. http://www.veoh.com/
10. http://www.viddler.com/
11. http://www.videojug.com/
12. http://teachertube.com/
13. http://www.academicearth.org/
14. http://www.howstuffworks.com/
15. http://www.liveleak.com/ 
16. http://www.clickplay.tv/
17. http://www.ebaumsworld.com/
18. http://www.myspace.com/video
19. http://www.myvideo.co.za/
20. http://www.rottentomatoes.com/
21. http://www.tubewatcher.tv
22. http://www.clipmoon.com/
23. http://www.viddy.com/
24. http://share.wpxi.com/
25. http://video.tagged.com/

Cybercriminals ‘drained ATMs’ in $45m world bank heist

A gang of cybercriminals stole $45m (£29m) by hacking into a database of prepaid debit cards and draining cash machines around the world, US prosecutors say.

Seven people have been charged in New York over the heist, which allegedly stretched across 26 countries.

An eighth suspect is thought to have been murdered in April.

The network used fake cards to target banks in the United Arab Emirates and Oman, court documents said.

Prosecutors said law enforcement agencies in Japan, Canada, the UK, Romania and 12 other countries were involved in the investigation.

Arrests had been made in other countries, they said, although details were not released.

‘Laptops not guns’

“The defendants and their co-conspirators participated in a massive 21st Century bank heist that reached across the internet and stretched around the globe,” Loretta Lynch, US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement.

“In the place of guns and masks, this cybercrime organisation used laptops and the internet.”

Members of the scheme allegedly hacked computer systems to steal data on prepaid debit cards. The cards are pre-loaded with funds rather than being linked to a bank account or a line of credit.

They cancelled withdrawal limits and distributed information to accomplices referred to as “cashers” around the world.

The cashers then loaded other magnetic stripe cards, such as gift cards or old hotel keys, with the stolen data and used them to withdraw huge sums. …

via BBC News – Cybercriminals ‘drained ATMs’ in $45m world bank heist.