Tech Brief
On Tech Brief today: Power, privacy, and what cosmic rays can do for you.
• The controversy over US plans to fit the net with a "kill switch" that can be thrown in the event of a cyber attack are overblown, say American politicians. Why? Because the president can already do that thanks to...
"a little-known clause in the Communications Act passed one month after the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese."
The revelation came when a US Senate committee debated the cybersecurity bill that wants to beef up POTUS powers to shut down bits of the net. Said powers were muzzled thanks to the debate.
"The original bill gave the president indefinite emergency authority to shut down private sector or government networks in the event of a cyber attack capable of causing massive damage or loss of life. An amendment passed Thursday limits that authority further, requiring the president to get Congressional approval after controlling a network for 120 days."
• Speaking of power and beef, the European Commission wants the UK's Information Commissioner to be able to take more concrete action in the event of privacy breaches. So far, says Europe, the ICO's powers are a bit puny.
"I urge the UK to change its rules swiftly so that the data protection authority is able to perform its duties with absolute clarity about the rules. Having a watchdog with insufficient powers is like keeping your guard dog tied up in the basement.""
• Continuing the privacy theme, the US Federal Trade Commission has rapped Twitter's virtual knuckles over security failings by the micro-blogging service.
"The FTC had originally accused the social media service of making private tweets and the login credentials of users easily available to "hackers" between January and May of 2009. During that time, someone was able to gain administrative access to Twitter's system (and therefore access to thousands of user accounts, passwords, direct messages, and more) simply by using password-guessing software. That user reset numerous user passwords, allowing others to access those accounts."
So far, Twitter has escaped fines but the FTC is ready to pounce if more problems occur.
"The FTC is not seeking any monetary damages as part of the settlement. Instead, it plans to keep a tight leash on Twitter, with the ability to impose $16,000 penalties per incident if future security breaches occur."
• There are computers, super-computers and now the folk behind the internet want to create super-duper-computers.
" Not known for taking the demure route, researchers at DARPA this week announced a program aimed at building computers that exceed current peta-scale computers to achieve the mind-altering speed of one quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second."
• Finally, geek of the week is Nelson Elhage who found that the Universe was ranging its awesome might against his desktop computer. Armed with only his brain, Mr Elhage took on that power and came out triumphant.
"For me, bitflips due to cosmic rays are one of those problems I always assumed happen to "other people". I also assumed that even if I saw random cosmic-ray bitflips, my computer would probably just crash, and I'd never really be able to tell the difference from some random kernel bug."
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Links in full
• Jacqui Cheng | Ars Technica | Twitter gets government warning over 2009 security breaches
• Markj | ISP Review | EU Demand Tougher UK Rules over Phorm and Internet Data Protection
• Michael Cooney
| Network World | Beyond the petaflop: DARPA wants quintillion-speed computers
