Danger in the Internet Cafe? New Computer Security Threat for Wireless Networks: Typhoid Adware

John Aycock (left) and student Daniel Medeiros Nunes de Castro have predicted a new computer security threat: Typhoid adware.

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There's a potential threat lurking in your internet café, say University of Calgary computer science researchers. It's called Typhoid adware and works in similar fashion to Typhoid Mary, the first identified healthy carrier of typhoid fever who spread the disease to dozens of people in the New York area in the early 1900s.

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"Our research describes a potential computer security threat and offers some solutions," says associate professor John Aycock, who co-authored a paper with assistant professor Mea Wang and students Daniel Medeiros Nunes de Castro and Eric Lin. "We're looking at a different variant of adware -- Typhoid adware -which we haven't seen out there yet, but we believe could be a threat soon."

Adware is software that sneaks onto computers often when users download things, for example fancy tool bars or free screen savers, and it typically pops up lots and lots of ads. Typhoid adware needs a wireless internet café or other area where users share a non-encrypted wireless connection.

"Typhoid adware is designed for public places where people bring their laptops," says Aycock. "It's far more covert, displaying advertisements on computers that don't have the adware installed, not the ones that do."

The paper demonstrates how Typhoid adware works as well as presents solutions on how to defend against such attacks. De Castro recently presented it at the EICAR conference in Paris, a conference devoted to IT security.

Typically, adware authors install their software on as many machines as possible. But Typhoid adware comes from another person's computer and convinces other laptops to communicate with it and not the legitimate access point. Then the Typhoid adware automatically inserts advertisements in videos and web pages on the other computers. Meanwhile, the carrier sips her latté in peace -- she sees no advertisements and doesn't know she is infected ¬- just like symptomless Typhoid Mary.

U of C researchers have come up with a number of defenses against Typhoid adware. One is protecting the content of videos to ensure that what users see comes from the original source. Another is a way to "tell" laptops they are at an Internet café to make them more suspicious of contact from other computers.

"When you go to an Internet café, you tell your computer you are there and it can put up these defenses. Anti-virus companies can do the same thing through software that stops your computer from being misled and re-directed to someone else," says Aycock.

Why worry about ads? Aycock explains it this way: "Not only are ads annoying but they can also advertise rogue antivirus software that's harmful to your computer, so ads are in some sense the tip of the iceberg."

The paper Typhoid Adware can be found: http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~aycock/papers/eicar10.pdf

Action Video Games Improve Vision, New Research Shows

This is a photo illustrating 58 percent better contrast perception versus "regular" contrast perception.

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Video games that involve high levels of action, such as first-person-shooter games, increase a player's real-world vision, according to research in Nature Neuroscience March 29.

The ability to discern slight differences in shades of gray has long been thought to be an attribute of the human visual system that cannot be improved. But Daphne Bavelier, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, has discovered that very practiced action gamers become 58 percent better at perceiving fine differences in contrast.
"Normally, improving contrast sensitivity means getting glasses or eye surgery—somehow changing the optics of the eye," says Bavelier. "But we've found that action video games train the brain to process the existing visual information more efficiently, and the improvements last for months after game play stopped."
The finding builds on Bavelier's past work that has shown that action video games decrease visual crowding and increases visual attention. Contrast sensitivity, she says, is the primary limiting factor in how well a person can see. Bavelier says that the findings show that action video game training may be a useful complement to eye-correction techniques, since game training may teach the visual cortex to make better use of the information it receives.
To learn whether high-action games could affect contrast sensitivity, Bavelier, in collaboration with graduate student Renjie Li and colleagues Walt Makous, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, and Uri Polat, professor at the Eye Institute at Tel Aviv University, tested the contrast sensitivity function of 22 students, then divided them into two groups: One group played the action video games "Unreal Tournament 2004" and "Call of Duty 2." The second group played "The Sims 2," which is a richly visual game, but does not include the level of visual-motor coordination of the other group's games. The volunteers played 50 hours of their assigned games over the course of 9 weeks. At the end of the training, the students who played the action games showed an average 43% improvement in their ability to discern close shades of gray—close to the difference she had previously observed between game players and non-game players—whereas the Sims players showed none.
"To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration that contrast sensitivity can be improved by simple training," says Bavelier. "When people play action games, they're changing the brain's pathway responsible for visual processing. These games push the human visual system to the limits and the brain adapts to it, and we've seen the positive effect remains even two years after the training was over."
Bavelier says that the findings suggest that despite the many concerns about the effects of action video games and the time spent in front of a computer screen, that time may not necessarily be harmful, at least for vision.
Bavelier is now taking what she has learned with her video game research and collaborating with a consortium of researchers to look into treatments for amblyopia, a problem caused by poor transmission of the visual image to the brain.
This research was funded by the National Eye Institute and the Office of Naval Research.
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Adapted from materials provided by University of Rochester, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Mathematical 'Snowfakes' Mimic Nature, Advance Science

Four years in the making, the model that Griffeath built with University of California, Davis, mathematician Janko Gravner can generate all of nature's snowflake types in rich three-dimensional detail.

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Exquisitely detailed and beautifully symmetrical, the snowflakes that David Griffeath makes are icy jewels of art.
But don't be fooled; there is some serious science behind the University of Wisconsin-Madison mathematician's charming creations. Although they look as if they tumbled straight from the clouds, these "snowfakes" are actually the product of an elaborate computer model designed to replicate the wildly complex growth of snow crystals.
Four years in the making, the model that Griffeath built with University of California, Davis, mathematician Janko Gravner can generate all of nature's snowflake types in rich three-dimensional detail. In the January issue of Physical Review E, the pair published the model's underlying theory and computations, which are so intensive they are "right on the edge of feasibility," says Griffeath.

"Even though we've artfully stripped down the model over several years so that it's as simple and efficient as possible, it still takes us a day to grow one of these things," he says.
In nature, each snowflake begins as a bit of dust, a bacterium or a pollutant in the sky, around which water molecules start glomming together and freezing to form a tiny crystal of ice. Roughly a quintillion (one million million million) molecules make up every flake, with the shape dictated by temperature, humidity and other local conditions.
How such a seemingly random process produces crystals that are at once geometrically simple and incredibly intricate has captivated scientists since the 1600s, but no one has accurately simulated their growth until now. Griffeath and Gravner's model not only gets the basic shapes right, including fern-like stars, long needles and chunky prisms, but also fine elements such as tiny ridges that run along the arms and weird, circular surface markings.
Griffeath considers himself part of a long tradition of scientists, starting with famed mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, who have marveled at snowflakes and simply wanted to understand them. But on the practical side, the model could help researchers better predict how various snowflake types in the clouds affect the amount of water reaching earth. Griffeath is now exploring that possibility with a UW-Madison meteorologist.
In the meantime, the project has given him a newfound appreciation for water, whose one-of-a-kind properties are what make snowflakes possible.
"Water is the most amazing molecule in the universe, pure and simple," he says. "It's just three little atoms, but its physics and chemistry are unbelievable."
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Adapted from materials provided by University of Wisconsin-Madison.

When Texting, Eligible Women Express Themselves Better

Indiana researchers have found that when men and women text message each other in a public, interactive dating market, it is the women who use more non-standard, expressive language techniques.

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The book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus and its gender stereotypes on how the sexes communicate remains fodder for debate, but two Indiana University researchers have confirmed one thing: When men and women talk through technology, it's the women who are more expressive.
Indiana researchers have found that when men and women text message each other in a public, interactive dating market, it is the women who use more non-standard, expressive language techniques.
In an article in the latest edition of the quarterly journal Written Communication, IU researchers Susan Herring and Asta Zelenkauskaite show that while men historically talk more in public settings, when the exchanges occur via text messaging in a public venue -- in this case, Italy's real-time interactive music television channel Allmusic -- it is the women who push their messages closest to the character-count limit, who use more abbreviations and insertions, and who implement more emoticons (like smiling and frowning faces).

"The messages are very flirtatious and have nothing to do with the television show," said Herring, a professor in the IU School of Library and Information Science. "In the linguistic marketplace there have always been different values associated with standard and non-standard language, and here we have found results that are paradoxical, that are the opposite of the recognized socio-linguistic gender patterns."
Women use standard language more than men, in part because it is seen as a type of symbolic currency used to acquire upward mobility, the preponderance of research has shown.
"Women have historically used standard language when they are social aspirers, or want to be perceived as above their station," Herring said. "Men talk more; women are more polite."
But that historical footnote falls apart under the influence of computer-mediated communication such as short message services (SMS) and text messaging, the researchers found, after looking at 1,164 gender-defined messages posted on-screen during the real-time Italian music video program.
Expecting findings consistent with past research on gender-patterned public communication, Herring and Zelenkauskaite were predicting men would post more and longer text messages, and that men would also employ more non-standard techniques. Instead, the opposite was true when it came to communication within a new, convergent medium that mixes interactive television (iTV) with SMS or texting.
The study found women used more non-standard language such as abbreviations or expressive insertions that represented characteristics including enthusiasm, sadness, emphasis and individuality. And while women were both more economical and expressive, they also came closer to maxing out, or did max out, on the 160-character message limit more often than their male counterparts.
"Since iTV is based on texting, which was marketed extensively in Europe, it is extremely popular," said Zelenkauskaite, a doctoral student and native of Lithuania who has spent more than two years studying at Italian universities. "Since cell phones in Italy experience some of the highest levels of penetration in Europe, it is an ideal country to study iTV."
Now the researchers say they want to explore whether they could identify similar amounts and types of non-standard language in text-messaging when different topics available for interactive, public discussion -- like politics or news-oriented programming -- are studied.
"There are news shows in Europe where viewers can comment through iTV but we have not analyzed any of those yet," Herring said. "There are different linguistic marketplaces, and politics is one of them, just like dating is."
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Adapted from materials provided by Indiana University.

'Quantum Data Buffering' Scheme Demonstrated; Potentially Useful For Quantum Computers

Closeup of two "quantum images" created with the help of a "pump" laser beam. The two images are "entangled," so that if there is a change in the intensity in one region ("pixel") of the image, there would be an identical change in the intensity in the corresponding pixel in the second image. In this experiment, one of the images is delayed on its arrival to a detector, so that the correlations between the two images can be out of sync by up to 27 nanoseconds, something that is potentially useful for managing data to a future "quantum computer."

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Pushing the envelope of Albert Einstein's "spooky action at a distance," known as entanglement, researchers at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) of the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland have demonstrated a "quantum buffer," a technique that could be used to control the data flow inside a quantum computer. Quantum computers could potentially speed up or expand present capabilities in decrypting data, searching large databases, and other tasks.
The new research is published in the Feb. 12 issue of the journal Nature.
"If you want to set up some sort of communications system or a quantum information-processing system, you need to control the arrival time of one data stream relative to other data streams coming in," says JQI's Alberto Marino, lead author of the paper. "We can accomplish the delay in a compact setup, and we can rapidly change the delay if we want, something that would not be possible with usual laboratory apparatus such as beamsplitters and mirrors," he says.

This new work follows up on the researchers' landmark creation in 2008 of pairs of multi-pixel quantum images. A pair of quantum images is "entangled," which means that their properties are linked in such a way that they exist as a unit rather than individually. In the JQI work, each quantum image is carried by a light beam and consists of up to 100 "pixels." A pixel in one quantum image displays random and unpredictable changes say, in intensity, yet the corresponding pixel in the other image exhibits identical intensity fluctuations at the same time, and these fluctuations are independent from fluctuations in other pixels. This entanglement can persist even if the two images are physically disconnected from one another.
By using a gas cell to slow down one of the light beams to 500 times slower than the speed of light, the group has demonstrated that they could delay the arrival time of one of the entangled images at a detector by up to 27 nanoseconds. The correlations between the two entangled images still occur—but they are out of sync. A flicker in the first image would have a corresponding flicker in the slowed-down image up to 27 nanoseconds later.
While such "delayed entanglement" has been demonstrated before, it has never been accomplished in information-rich quantum images. Up to now, the "spooky action at a distance" has usually been delayed in single-photon systems.
"What gives our system the potential to store lots of data is the combination of having multiple-pixel images and the possibility of each pixel containing 'continuous' values for properties such as the intensity," says co-author Raphael Pooser.
To generate the entanglement, the researchers use a technique known as four-wave mixing, in which incoming light waves are mixed with a "pump" laser beam in a rubidium gas cell to generate a pair of entangled light beams. In their experiment, the researchers then send one of the entangled light beams through a second cell of rubidium gas where a similar four-wave mixing process is used to slow down the beam. The beam is slowed down as a result of the light being absorbed and re-emitted repeatedly in the gas. The amount of delay caused by the gas cell can be controlled by changing the temperature of the cell (by modifying the density of the gas atoms) and also by changing the intensity of the pump beam for the second cell.
This demonstration shows that this type of quantum buffer could be particularly useful for quantum computers, both in its information capacity and its potential to deliver data at precisely defined times.
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Adapted from materials provided by National Institute of Standards and Technology.