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Category: internet – Page 240

Some 70% of Earth’s surface is covered by water, and yet nearly all earthquake detectors are on land. Aside from some expensive battery-powered sensors dropped to the sea floor and later retrieved, and a few arrays of near-shore detectors connected to land, seismologists have no way of monitoring the quakes that ripple through the sea floor and sometimes create tsunamis. Now, a technique described online in Science this week promises to take advantage of more than 1 million kilometers of fiber optic cables that crisscross the ocean floors and carry the world’s internet and telecom traffic. By looking for tiny changes in an optical signal running along the cable, scientists can detect and potentially locate earthquakes. The technique requires little more than lasers at each end of the cable and access to a small portion of the cable’s bandwidth. Crucially, it requires no modification to the cable itself and does not interfere with its everyday use.

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Smart watches. Pacemakers. Internet-connected glasses. These are devices designed to make life easier. And yet, all this wearable technology can be hacked. The devices send personal health information to your smartphone over the airways, so anyone with the know-how could scoop it up and steal it. But now, researchers at Northeastern have a better, more secure idea: Send data through your body.

Associate professor Kaushik Chowdhury worked with a team of researchers from the Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Federal University of Paraná in Brazil to develop a safe, hacker-proof method to transmit sensitive data.

“The truth is, no matter what I do when it comes to wireless devices, I’m radiating the signal through the air,” Chowdhury says. “There is the danger that the signal can be jammed, or analyzed by someone else. Our method secures this so it can’t be leaked.”

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The recent clinical trial was only conducted on patients with lymphoma, but the researchers suggested their approach could be potentially used to treat other types of cancer — and that it could improve the efficacy of other immunotherapies, including checkpoint blockade.

“The in situ vaccine approach has broad implications for multiple types of cancer,” said Brody, the study’s lead author and the director of the Lymphoma Immunotherapy Program at The Tisch Cancer Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “This method could also increase the success of other immunotherapies such as checkpoint blockade.”

Related Articles Around the Web.

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Researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of Texas at Austin have developed a technique for detecting types of malware that use a system’s architecture to thwart traditional security measures. The new detection approach works by tracking power fluctuations in embedded systems.

“Embedded systems are basically any computer that doesn’t have a physical keyboard – from smartphones to Internet of Things devices,” says Aydin Aysu, co-author of a paper on the work and an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State. “Embedded systems are used in everything from the voice-activated virtual assistants in our homes to industrial control systems like those used in . And that targets those systems can be used to seize control of these systems or to steal information.”

At issue are so-called micro-architectural attacks. This form of malware makes use of a system’s , effectively hijacking the hardware in a way that gives outside users control of the system and access to its data. Spectre and Meltdown are high-profile examples of micro-architectural malware.

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You’ve never heard Dean Martin like this.

Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences transmitted a recording of Martin’s classic “Volare” wirelessly via a semiconductor laser—the first time a laser has been used as a radio transmitter.

In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers demonstrated a laser that can emit microwaves wirelessly, modulate them, and receive external radio frequency signals.

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Chinese technology companies are increasingly important and dynamic international actors. They are making critical contributions in a range of areas, from cutting edge research to enabling connectivity for developing countries. Yet, their rapid expansion and growing influence also bring a range of strategic and policy challenges. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s International Cyber Policy Centre has created a public database to map the global expansion of 12 key Chinese tech companies working across the telecommunications, internet & biotech sectors. It’s a tool for journalists, researchers, NGOs, policymakers and the interested public to better understand the enormous scale, complexity and increasing reach of some of China’s tech giants. On this website you’ll find:

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