The network of compromised Microsoft Windows computers under the thumb of the criminals who control the Storm Worm has grown so huge that it now has more raw distributed computing power than all of the world’s top supercomputers, security experts say. Estimates on the number of machines infected by Storm range from one million to 10 million, depending upon which security sources you believe. But hardly anyone would argue that many thousands of new PCs are being stricken by the worm each day, largely because the worm authors are continuously changing their tactics to trick people into installing it. Massive pools of virus or worm-infected PCs, known as ‘botnets,’ are principally used to blast out spam, host scam Web sites, or to flood targeted Web sites with so much junk traffic all at once that they simply crash and are rendered unreachable by legitimate visitors. But the criminals who control these infected machines could just as easily use them to do some serious number-crunching, the kind of computational analysis typically left to the world’s fastest supercomputers. In a posting today to a data security mailing list, Peter Gutmann, a computer science professor with the University of Auckland […]
WASHINGTON — The approval of a new vaccine against smallpox was announced Saturday by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which says the shots could be made quickly if the virtually extinct virus reappears. The vaccine, ACAM2000, is intended to inoculate people at high risk of exposure to smallpox, a highly contagious and deadly disease. The FDA said the vaccine also could be used to protect individuals and populations during a bioterrorist attack. ‘The licensure of ACAM2000 supplements our current supply of smallpox vaccine, meaning we are more prepared to protect the population should the virus ever be used as a weapon,’ said Dr. Jesse Goodman, director of FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. Goodman said the vaccine is made using modern cell culture technology that would allow for speedy manufacturing if large quantities were needed quickly. ACAM2000 is made by Acambis Inc. of Cambridge, England, and Cambridge, Mass.. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention already has stockpiled 192.5 million doses of the vaccine. The United States ended routine vaccination against smallpox in 1971, and world health authorities declared the disease eradicated from the wild in 1980. The last known case was […]
We are just a year away from the US presidential elections, and a question that keeps coming up during broadcast debates with the candidates is ‘are you experienced?’ Obviously, it’s a valid question to ask. After all, we expect candidates to have a long history of political involvement and the expertise required to make the right decisions in sticky situations. But a new study appearing in the journal Interfaces suggests that experience may be overrated anyway. It shows that people without any expertise in foreign policy can make snap predictions about the outcome of major conflicts almost as well as experts. Researchers from the University in Australia and the University of Pennsylvania asked policy experts and undergraduates to assess slightly disguised versions of real conflict situations. These included a 1970s border dispute between Iraq and Syria, a nurses’ strike, and an unfolding dispute between football players and their management. The researchers received 106 responses from policy experts and 169 from undergraduates. The experts accurately predicted the outcome of conflicts in 32% of the cases, only slightly better than the 29% score achieved by the students. Chance guesses would have given a score of 28% on the […]
BLACKSBURG, VA. — Poultry poop is a serious ecological problem in Virginia. So is the burning of fossil fuels. So it’s not surprising that environmentalists and farmers are so enthused by a Virginia Tech scientist who is developing technology to turn poultry waste into a safer fertilizer and a biofuel that resembles maple syrup. Staked with more than $1 million in grants, associate professor Foster A. Agblevor, a native of Ghana in west Africa, expects to test his mobile poop reactor this fall at a chicken farm in the Shenandoah Valley, the heartland of Virginia’s poultry industry. The $830 million-a-year industry, the state’s wealthiest agribusiness, has been searching for an environmentally friendly solution to its mountains of chicken and turkey wastes for years. The manure is laden with nutrients, mostly ammonia, nitrogen and phosphorus, as well as the potential for carrying pathogens and disease. The wastes, known as litter, are linked to water pollution and algae blooms as far away as the Chesapeake Bay and to fears of an avian flu outbreak. Agblevor says his alternative-energy innovation would do away with such biosecurity concerns in the valley and could go a long way toward neutralizing […]
Families now stuffing backpacks and greeting the children’s new teachers face a crisis that makes falling test scores and rising college costs dull by comparison. Ten years and billions of dollars into the fight against childhood fat, it’s clear that the campaign has been a losing battle. According to a report released last week by the research group Trust for America’s Health, one third of kids nationwide are overweight now; other stats show that the percentage of children who are obese has more than tripled since the 1970s. Now, experts are worrying about the collateral damage, too: A 2006 University of Minnesota study found that 57 percent of girls and 33 percent of boys used cigarettes, fasting, or skipping meals to control their weight and that diet-pill intake by teenage girls had nearly doubled in five years. Last year, nearly 5,000 teens opted for liposuction, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons-more than three times the number in 1998, when experts first warned of a ‘childhood obesity epidemic.’ ‘We’ve taken the approach that if we make children feel bad about being fat or scare them half to death, they’ll be motivated to lose excess weight,’ says Joanne Ikeda, […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
