Category: Science &Technology

{SINGAPORE—Pang Kin Keong is dreaming of a paradise city, where the grass is green and the people are — well, sitting in driverless cars.}

Pang is also Permanent Secretary at Singapore’s Transport Ministry, so this is more than a dream. The government wants a city with fewer surface streets, making room for more parks, and more commuters using self-driving cars. Singapore would build roads underground and use the pods to shuttle people from the subway to their final destination.

“You must dream, you must dream,” Pang said in an interview at his office. “I want to live in a place much like the holidays and resorts that I go to once or twice every year, where the living environment is dominated by greenery. It’s safe, there are no cars zooming past me, I can go anywhere I want.”

From Silicon Valley to South Australia, companies are tinkering with driverless cars. But what sets Singapore apart is that the government now funds this research and plans to use the cars for public transit.

A few subway stops from the transport ministry, engineers have retrofitted a Toyota Alphard Hybrid to drive, sans human. On a recent, cloudless morning, the minivan navigated a public, but unclogged road, its steering wheel spinning left and right without the touch of a human hand. Outside, a toy robot rolled in front of the vehicle, testing whether it could dodge an intrusion. The robot was unharmed.

If Singapore eventually brings driverless cars online, the rest of the world could ride on its technological coattails. The island nation is well-placed for the task; it has the money and brainpower to conduct trials, as well as a powerful central government known for getting results.

Competing with Google, Uber

Private companies have turned in proposals to work with the state, including nuTonomy, which makes software for vehicles. Chief operating officer Doug Parker said the collaboration would allow far more testing than most businesses could manage alone. Singapore wants to roll out unmanned trucks and buses, too, but if it succeeds, Parker also expects firms to adapt the technology for the consumer market.

“Expanded on-road testing allows us to develop our technology more quickly, as well as prove to the buyers of the technology that it works,” he said. “And so that’s going to help level the playing field, long run. It’ll help smaller companies like nuTonomy compete with big companies like Google or Uber.”

But safety concerns are the main hurdle to becoming a society of smart cars. No matter how many scenarios are programmed into the car’s computer, it’s likely to meet an unfamiliar situation. That’s when the machine has to make decisions, and convince the public that it can minimize crashes.

“Humans and human driving is very unpredictable,” said Han Boon Siew, head of the autonomous vehicle department at the state’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR). “This is where the autonomous vehicle needs to continuously learn the characteristics of the urban canyon and even complex situations like road works and construction.”

The other big obstacle, Han said, is weather. His team is working to ensure the technology can withstand adverse and fluctuating conditions. Tropical Singapore experiences heavy and frequent rainfall, as well as rancid haze wafting over from Indonesia’s forest fires.

For a peek at how far the science has advanced, one only has to go to the Gardens by the Bay. The park in downtown Singapore will let visitors hop in autonomous vehicles during test drives in December and integrate them into park services by the spring, Pang said. But he thinks self-driving cars will really hit the road as early as 2025.

“If all I’m thinking about for the 2030s is a town no different from today, then that can’t be exciting enough in terms of a future that Singaporeans aspire to,” Pang said. Instead, he imagines a city-state where more people give up private cars and choose to walk, cycle, or take public transit comprised in part of driverless buses and shuttles. “I don’t think it’s farfetched. It just takes will to get there.”

VOICE OF AMERICA

{ {{The deputy director of the US National Security Agency (NSA), Richard Ledgett, has warned of the increasing danger of destructive cyber attacks by states.}} }

He told the BBC: “If you are connected to the internet, you are vulnerable to determined nation-state attackers.”

He said nations would need to identify red lines that should not be crossed.

He also said agency targets, numbered in “the high hundreds”, had discussed leaks by contractor Edward Snowden, with some changing their behaviour.

Richard Ledgett’s office on the eighth floor of NSA headquarters at Fort Meade is filled with exhibits on the history of code-making and breaking, ranging from American Civil War systems through a German Enigma machine adapted for use with Japan.

There is even an encryption device recovered from the wreckage of the Challenger Space Shuttle.

But it is modern challenges in cyberspace which are now at the heart of the NSA’s dual mission of protecting sensitive government communications and collecting intelligence on America’s adversaries.
‘Case-by-case basis’

In cyberspace, Mr Ledgett said the agency was seeing a shift to more destructive attacks – such as those that hit Sony last year or Saudi Aramco in 2012 – as well as more aggressive postures by nation states.

“The barrier to entry is going down… and as everybody in the world becomes more connected with computers and information systems, the vulnerabilities are going up,” he told the BBC.

Improving defences and identifying the most sensitive data is one important way of dealing with threats. But nations also need to do more to identify clear red lines that, if crossed, will lead to consequences, he said.

Those consequences could take the form of actions within cyberspace itself, where the NSA’s number two said that the US military’s cyber-command was prepared to conduct offensive cyber operations in other peoples networks.

Or the consequences could be diplomatic or economic – for instance in the form of sanctions and the threat of sanctions.

The US, Mr Ledgett said, would look at how to respond to attacks on corporations by other states – as occurred with an alleged attack by Sony – on a case-by-case basis.
Chinese cyber-activity

The US has publicly criticised China for espionage against US companies and signed a deal to stop such activity during the recent summit between the two country’s leaders.

Some reports suggested this had already been breached but Mr Ledgett said it was too soon to tell.

“The jury is still out,” he said. “In any big organisation when guidance is sent down then sometimes it takes a while to… get to the working level.”

The UK government signed a similar deal but has been less vocal about Chinese cyber-espionage, something which the NSA Deputy Director said he was not “over-concerned by”.

“I think the UK needs to do what is in the UK’s best interest and if they are comfortable with a level of Chinese cyber-activity directly against them, then ok, they may be handling that a different way, they may be handling that privately,” he said.

“I think that we need to do what we need to do.”
Surveillance debate

The NSA was once so secret it was known as “No Such Agency” but its former contractor Edward Snowden changed all of that. He revealed the extent of intelligence collection – including America’s own cyber-espionage and controversial programmes that retained data on Americans.

Mr Ledgett led the team responding to the Snowden revelations, and he maintains that real damage was done. The NSA has kept track of what their “targets” have said about the disclosures, and he asserts that their behaviour has changed as a direct result.

“We’ve seen in the high hundreds of targets who have said, ‘hey we are vulnerable to these sorts of detection techniques and we need to change the way that we do that,’ and a number of them have.”

He said this included “several terrorist organisations and one in particular that had a mature operational plot directed against western Europe and the US”.

Supporters of Mr Snowden argue that he performed a valuable public service in beginning a much-needed public debate about the extent of the state’s surveillance powers.

“I think that’s a good discussion to have,” Mr Ledgett says. “I think that the way the discussion came about was wrong.”

BBC

{ {{Institute of Directors says police should make cybercrime an urgent priority while the government and companies must do more.}}
}

A leading business group has urged the government to take more action on cybercrime after hackers seized the personal information and bank details of up to 4 million TalkTalk customers.

Police are investigating a ransom demand sent to the telecoms company after its chief executive, Dido Harding, said a person claiming to be the hacker had contacted her directly and demanded money in exchange for the data.

Oliver Parry, the Institute of Directors’ senior corporate governance adviser, told the BBC that police should make cybercrime an urgent priority, but added that companies “are ultimately responsible for protecting their customers’ data”.

There have been questions about how well TalkTalk secured its customers’ data after Harding admitted that she did not know whether details including names, addresses and bank account numbers were encrypted. It was the company’s third major data breach in the past year.

Parry said: “The risks need to be reviewed regularly by the board of directors, who must ensure they know where the potential threats are coming from and are prepared in case the worst happens.

“The UK is a world leader in the digital economy, so we urge the government and companies to work together to make us the world leader in countering the scourge of cybercrime.”

Professor Mark Skilton, an IT consultant and academic at Warwick Business School, said: “Large-scale data theft is increasingly big business for professional cybercriminals.

“The value of personal identity data records and account details is increasingly high as it can be used in masquerading identity to commit theft of other data; or give direct access to personal bank account money and fraudulent transactions.”

Proof of adequate cyber security could be made a condition of government contracts, said Hazel Blears, the former MP who has been counter-terrorism minister and the parliamentary intelligence and security committee.

She said the UK had been “a little bit tardy” in waking up to the scale of the threat but must now seek tougher rules to ensure data was protected.

“The time is rapidly approaching when we have got to have a debate in this country about do we expect companies who are holding massive amounts of public data to be able to show that they are putting in place the necessary security precautions … about whether there needs to be a better regulatory framework,” Blears told BBC Radio 4’s Today.

“We could do it through a code, we could do it through government contracting. We have got our critical national infrastructure to protect – power, water, all of those things that are vital to the country. We could say to companies: we are not going to contract with you unless we are absolutely certain that you have taken the necessary measures.”

Claims by customers that TalkTalk had covered up the seriousness of the attack should be investigated, said Keith Vaz, chairman of the home affairs select committee.

He told the Daily Telegraph: “Suggestions that TalkTalk has covered up both the scale and duration of this attack are alarming and unacceptable and must be thoroughly investigated. When such sensitive data as bank details have been compromised, companies have a duty to warn customers immediately.”

The company said the allegation was unfair.

A spokesman said: “We haven’t been covering up anything. We went public with this within 36 hours. It’s not easy to go much quicker. We cannot be accused of trying to hide the scale of this. That is deeply unfair.”

Some TalkTalk customers have already complained that their bank accounts and credit cards have been targeted. The phone and broadband provider said it was assuming a worst-case scenario and investigating whether details of past as well as present customers were stolen.

“We have taken the precaution to assume the worst case, which is that all of our customers’ personal financial information has been accessed,” Harding said.

“We think that is the most prudent and sensible way to be, to tell all of our customers that now, so that they can protect themselves rather than wait to do the analysis and give a more precise number and cause more concern to people over the long term.”

Amid reports that TalkTalk had been previously been warned by experts about its security, a spokesman for the company said: “New techniques for attack develop all the time, so TalkTalk constantly updates and reviews our systems to try to stay one step ahead of cybercriminals.

“Since the previous attacks, we are working with world leading cybersecurity experts and investing a lot in making sure our system is as secure as possible.

“Unfortunately no system is ever totally invincible – there was clearly more that should have been done in this case, and I am very sorry for the worry and frustration this attack has caused our customers.”

Scotland Yard is investigating alongside the National Crime Agency but no arrests have been made.

The Information Commissioner’s Office said it has been informed of the cyber-attack on Thursday, with a spokesman saying: “We will be making inquiries and liaising with the police.”

TalkTalk’s share price plunged 11% on Friday morning, but recovered to close down just 4.4%. The company said it was working with credit reporting service Noddle to offer customers free credit monitoring alerts for 12 months.

The Guardian

{ {{Where do dogs come from?}}

Gray wolves are their ancestors. Scientists are pretty consistent about that. And researchers have suggested that dogs’ origins can be traced to Europe, the Near East, Siberia and South China. }

Central Asia is the newest and best candidate, according to a large study of dogs from around the world.

Laura M. Shannon and Adam R. Boyko at Cornell University, and an international group of other scientists, studied not only purebred dogs, but also street or village dogs — the free-ranging scavengers that make up about 75 percent of the planet’s one billion dogs.

Dr. Shannon analyzed three different kinds of DNA, Dr. Boyko said, the first time this has been done for such a large and diverse group of dogs, more than 4,500 dogs of 161 breeds and 549 village dogs from 38 countries. That allowed the researchers to determine which geographic groups of modern dogs were closest to ancestral populations genetically. And that led them to Central Asia as the place of origin for dogs in much the same way that genetic studies have located the origin of modern humans in East Africa.

The analysis, Dr. Boyko said, pointed to Central Asia, including Mongolia and Nepal, as the place where “all the dogs alive today” come from. The data did not allow precise dating of the origin, he said, but showed it occurred at least 15,000 years ago. They reported their findings Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Greger Larson of Oxford University, who is leading an international effort to analyze ancient DNA from fossilized bones, said he was impressed by the scope of the study. “It’s really great to see not just the sheer number of street dogs, but also the geographic breadth and the number of remote locations where the dogs were sampled,” he said. He also praised the sampling of different kinds of DNA and the analytic methods.

But in the world of dog studies, very little is definitive. The most recent common ancestor of today’s dogs lived in Central Asia, Dr. Boyko said, although he cannot rule out the possibility that some dogs could have been domesticated elsewhere and died out. Or dogs domesticated elsewhere could have gone to Central Asia from somewhere else and then diversified into all the canines alive today, he said.

Dr. Larson, who was not involved with the study, said he thought the Central Asia finding required further testing. He said he suspected that the origins of modern dogs were “extremely messy” and that no amount of sampling of living populations would be definitive. He said a combination of studies of modern and ancient DNA was necessary.

Dr. Boyko said the research for the first time studied three sources of DNA from purebred and village dogs worldwide. The team analyzed DNA from all the chromosomes in the cell nucleus, from the Y chromosome specifically, found only in males, and from mitochondria, cellular energy machines outside the nucleus that are inherited from the mother.

Dr. Boyko traveled to a number of the locations where blood was drawn from village dogs. He said: “The great thing about working with dogs is that if you show up with food you don’t usually have trouble recruiting subjects. Usually.”

He added: “We showed up in Puerto Rico at a fishing village and the dogs turned up their noses at roast beef sandwiches. They were used to eating fish entrails.”

The New York Times