Lifeboat Foundation

In an email, the company said that targeted devices included security appliances that have remote management or SSL VPN enabled, namely in the USG/ZyWALL, USG FLEX, ATP, and VPN series running on-premise ZLD firmware. The language in the email is terse, but it appears to say that the attacks target devices that are exposed to the Internet. When the attackers succeed in accessing the device, the email further appears to say, they are then able to connect to previously unknown accounts hardwired into the devices.

Batten down the hatches

“We’re aware of the situation and have been working our best to investigate and resolve it,” the email, which was posted to Twitter, said. “The threat actor attempts to access a device through WAN; if successful, they then bypass authentication and establish SSL VPN tunnels with unknown user accounts, such as ‘zyxel_silvpn,’ ‘zyxel_ts,’ or ‘zyxel_vpn_test,’ to manipulate the device’s configuration.”

Continue reading “Hackers are using unknown user accounts to target Zyxel firewalls and VPNs” »

Circa 2015 In theory this big bang laser could eventually create complex matter but would need to be pocket-size as I want it on a smartphone to make a replicator so I can make fruit or food in space 😀

The Institute of Laser Engineering (ILE), Osaka University, has succeeded to reinforce the Petawatt laser “LFEX” to deliver up to 2000 trillion watts in the duration of one trillionth of one second (this corresponds to 1000 times the integrated electric power consumed in the world). By using this high-power laser, it is now possible to generate all of the high-energy quantum beams (electrons, ions, gamma ray, neutron, positron). Owing to such quantum beams with large current, we can make a big step forward not only for creating new fundamental technologies such as medical applications and non-destructive inspection of social infrastructures to contribute to our future life of longevity, safety, and security, but also for realization of laser fusion energy triggered by fast ignition.

Background and output of research

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Free-space optical communication, the communication between two devices at a distance using light to carry information, is a highly promising system for achieving high-speed communication. This system of communication is known to be immune to electromagnetic interference (EMI), a disturbance generated by external sources that affects electrical circuits and can disrupt radio signals.

While some studies have highlighted the possible advantages of free-space optical communication, this system of communication has so far come with certain limitations. Most notably, it is known to offer limited security against eavesdroppers. Researchers at Télécom Paris (member of Institut Polytechnique de Paris), mirSense, Technische Universität Darmstadt and University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) have recently introduced a unique system for more secure free-space optical communication based on a technology known as quantum cascade laser, a specific type of semiconductor laser that typically emits mid–infrared light.

“The core idea behind our research is that private free-space communication with quantum key distribution (i.e., based on quantum physics properties) is promising, but it is probably years away, or even further,” Olivier Spitz, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “Currently, the main limitations of this technology are the requirements for cryogenic systems, very slow data rates and costly equipment.”

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Live Eye Surveillance, a Seattle-based company, takes it to the next level and provides security systems to convenience stores like 7-Eleven; it employs “remote supervisors” who are real people sitting miles away behind the surveillance cameras, monitoring all activity captured by the tools.

Employers are using various surveillance technologies to track employee movement and interactions, and now 7-Eleven stores are involved in the game.

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Circa 2017

The future Internet is very likely the mixture of all-optical Internet with low power consumption and quantum Internet with absolute security. The optical regular Internet would be used by default, but switched over to quantum Internet when sensitive data need to be transmitted. PT and and its counterpart in the quantum limit SPT would be the core components for both OIP and QIP in future Internet. Compared with electronic transistors, PTs/SPTs potentially have higher speed, lower power consumption and compatibility with fibre-optic communication systems.

Several schemes for PT^6,7,8,9,10 and SPT^{11,12,13,14,15,16,17} have been proposed or even proof-of-principle demonstrated. All these prototypes exploit optical nonlinearities, i.e., photon-photon interactions¹⁸. However, photons do not interact with each other intrinsically, so indirect photon-photon interactions via electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT)¹⁹, photon blockade²⁰ and Rydberg blockade²¹ were intensively investigated in this context over last two decades in either natural atoms^22,23 or artificial atoms including superconducting boxes^24,25 and semiconductor quantum dots (QDs)^12,13. PT can seldom work in the quantum limit as SPT with the gain greater than 1 because of two big challenges, i.e., the difficulty to achieve the optical nonlinearities at single-photon levels and the distortion of single-photon pulse shape and inevitable noise produced by these nonlinearities²⁶. The QD-cavity QED system is a promising solid-state platform for information and communication technology (ICT) due to their inherent scalability and matured semiconductor technology. But the photon blockade resulting from the anharmonicity of Jaynes-Cummings energy ladder²⁷ is hard to achieve due to the small ratio of the QD-cavity coupling strength to the system dissipation rates^{12,13,28,29,30,31,32} and the strong QD saturation³³. Moreover, the gain of this type of SPT based on the photon blockade is quite limited and only 2.2 is expected for In(Ga)As QDs^12,13.

Continue reading “Photonic transistor and router using a single quantum-dot-confined spin in a single-sided optical microcavity” »

About five years ago, Areg Danagoulian, associate professor in the MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), became intrigued by a technique developed by researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory that uses a neutron beam to identify unknown materials.

“They could look into a black box containing uranium and say what kind and how much,” says Danagoulian, who directs MIT’s Laboratory of Applied Nuclear Physics (LANPh). “I was thinking about the problem of verifying nuclear material in warheads, and it just dawned on me, this amazing technology could be applied to what we’re working on.”

But there was a problem: This method, called neutron resonance transmission analysis (NRTA), requires an enormous, expensive apparatus, limiting its utility for the kind of on-site nuclear material applications Danagoulian and his research colleagues focus on. To leapfrog this obstacle, they determined to make NRTA technology portable.

Quantum computing began in the early 1980s. It operates on principles of quantum physics rather than the limitations of circuits and electricity which is why it is capable of processing highly complex mathematical problems so efficiently. Quantum computing could one day achieve things that classical computing simply cannot. The evolution of quantum computers has been slow, but things are accelerating, thanks to the efforts of academic institutions such as Oxford, MIT, and the University of Waterloo, as well as companies like IBM, Microsoft, Google, and Honeywell.

IBM has held a leadership role in this innovation push and has named optimization as the most likely application for consumers and organizations alike.

Honeywell expects to release what it calls the “world’s most powerful quantum computer” for applications like fraud detection, optimization for trading strategies, security, machine learning, and chemistry and materials science.

Typically abbreviated as TLS, Transport Layer Security uses strong encryption to prove that an end user is connected to an authentic server belonging to a specific service (such as Google or Bank of America) and not an impostor masquerading as that service. TLS also encrypts data as it travels between an end user and a server to ensure that people who can monitor the connection can’t read or tamper with the contents. With millions of servers relying on it, TLS is a cornerstone of online security.

In a research paper published on Wednesday, Brinkmann and seven other researchers investigated the feasibility of using what they call cross-protocol attacks to bypass TLS protections. The technique involves an MitM attacker redirecting cross-origin HTTP requests to servers that communicate over SMTP, IMAP, POP3, or FTP, or another communication protocol.

The main components of the attack are the client application used by the targeted end user, denoted as C; the server the target intended to visit, denoted as S_int; and the substitute server, a machine that connects using SMTP, FTP, or another protocol that’s different from the one server_int uses but with the same domain listed in its TLS certificate.

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