Category: Science &Technology

{{South Korea accused North Korea on Tuesday of mounting cyber attacks on the websites of its presidential office and other government agencies, saying it had identified signature malicious computer codes and an internet address.}}

The cyber attacks took place last month, on the anniversary of the beginning of the 1950-53 Korean War which left the peninsula divided between the rival countries.

North Korea has been suspected of masterminding previous cyber attacks on South Korea, including one in March that paralyzed tens of thousands of computers and servers at major broadcasters and banks.

North Korea has repeatedly denied responsibility for such attacks saying it has also been a victim of hacking.

South Korean officials said they had detected North Korean involvement in the latest cyber assault that shut down several sites including those of the presidential office and the conservative ruling party.

“An IP address within North Korea’s bandwidth was found,” Chun Kilsoo, an official at the state-run Korea Internet and Security Agency, told a briefing, referring to a computer’s internet protocol address.

The malicious computer codes and technique of the attack were similar to those detected in previous hacking attacks traced to the North, officials added.

The accusation comes as the two Koreas wrangle over the reopening of a joint factory park just inside North Korea that North Korea closed during a period of tension that began when it conducted its third nuclear test in February.

They failed to reach agreement on Monday on the reopening of the complex.

South Korea has not confirmed findings by U.S. online security company McAfee that a group of hackers was behind a string of cyber attacks on South Korea dating back to 2009 aimed at spying on its military.

South Korea’s defense minister said at a recent conference that North Korea had about 3,000 highly trained cyber warfare personnel, according to media reports.

In March, the North suggested the United States was behind cyber attacks on its internet servers after reports of disruptions to its main news services.

A hacker collective known as Anonymous said it had attacked North Korean websites on the anniversary of the Korean War.

The group denied through Twitter posts any involvement in attacks on South Korea.

{agencies}

{{A leading French newspaper says France’s intelligence services have put in place a giant electronic surveillance gathering network.}}

Citing no sources, the Le Monde daily says France’s Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure, the country’s foreign intelligence agency, systematically collects information about all electronic data sent by computers and telephones in France, as well as communications between France and abroad.

According to Le Monde, data on “all emails, SMSs, telephone calls, Facebook and Twitter posts” are collected and stored in a massive three-floor underground bunker at the DGSE’s headquarters in Paris.

The paper specified that it is the communications’ metadata – such as when was call was made and where an author was when she sent an email – that is being archived, not their content.

Officials at the DGSE did not answer phone calls or emails seeking comment Thursday.

The vast archive, which Le Monde says amounts to tens of millions of gigabytes, is accessible to France’s other spy agencies, including military intelligence, domestic intelligence, Paris police and a special financial crimes task force.

Le Monde compared the French digital dragnet to PRISM, the U.S. National Security Agency program which has most caught the imagination of Internet users.

But PRISM appears aimed at allowing U.S. spies to peel data off the servers of Silicon Valley firms – whereas the program described in Le Monde appears to be fed through the mass interception of electronic data bouncing across the world.

Also, PRISM can apparently be used to collect content, not just metadata.

Le Monde said the French surveillance program relies on spy satellites, listening stations in French overseas territories or former colonies such as Mayotte or Djibouti, and information harvested from undersea cables – all three of which are methods long familiar to the NSA.

A French lawmaker played down the report, saying France’s surveillance gathering system is not comparable with the NSA’s.

Patricia Adam, a lawmaker who until last year headed parliament’s intelligence committee, said French spies “are line fishing, not trawling” the vast oceans of data thrown up by mobile phones, emails and Internet communication.

AP

{{Douglas Engelbart, a technologist who conceived of the computer mouse and laid out a vision of an Internet decades before others brought those ideas to the mass market, died on Tuesday night. He was 88.}}

His eldest daughter, Gerda, said by telephone that her father died of kidney failure.

Engelbart arrived at his crowning moment relatively early in his career, on a winter afternoon in 1968, when he delivered an hour-long presentation containing so many far-reaching ideas that it would be referred to decades later as the “mother of all demos”.

Speaking before an audience of 1,000 leading technologists in San Francisco, Engelbart, a computer scientist at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), showed off a cubic device with two rolling discs called an “X-Y position indicator for a display system”. It was the mouse’s public debut.

Engelbart then summoned, in real-time, the image and voice of a colleague 48 km away. That was the first videoconference. And he explained a theory of how pages of information could be tied together using text-based links, an idea that would later form the bedrock of the Web’s architecture.

At a time when computing was largely pursued by government researchers or hobbyists with a countercultural bent, Engelbart never sought or enjoyed the explosive wealth that would later become synonymous with Silicon Valley success. For instance, he never received any royalties for the mouse, which SRI patented and later licensed to Apple.

He was intensely driven instead by a belief that computers could be used to augment human intellect. In talks and papers, he described with zeal and bravado a vision of a society in which groups of highly productive workers would spend many hours a day collectively manipulating information on shared computers.

“The possibilities we are pursuing involve an integrated man-machine working relationship, where close, continuous interaction with a computer avails the human of radically changed information-handling and -portrayal skills,” he wrote in a 1961 research proposal at SRI.

His work, he argued with typical conviction, “competes in social significance with research toward harnessing
thermonuclear power, exploring outer space, or conquering cancer.”

He is survived by Karen O’Leary Engelbart, his second wife, and four children: Gerda, Diana, Christina and Norman. His first wife, Ballard, died in 1997.

aljazeera

{{A Russian rocket carrying three navigation satellites worth around $200 million crashed shortly after lift-off from the Russian-leased Baikonur launch facility in Kazakhstan on Tuesday after its engines suddenly switched off.}}

The accident led to a large spill of heptyl, a highly toxic rocket propellant, but there were no reports of casualties or of any immediate threat to nearby settlements.

State-run Rossiya-24 television showed footage of the Proton-M booster rocket veering off course seconds after lift-off. It fell apart in flames in the air and crashed in a ball of fire near the launch pad.

Interfax news agency quoted an unnamed source as saying launch-pad personnel were in bunkers when the rocket lifted off.

Russia’s space agency Roscosmos said the accident had been caused by the emergency switch-off of the rocket’s engines 17 seconds into the flight.

Russia’s state-run RIA news agency said the switch-off could have been caused by a problem with the engine or the guidance system.

The rocket contained 172 metric tons (1 metric ton = 1.1023 tons) of highly toxic heptyl propellant, Kazakh Emergencies Minister Vladimir Bozhko told an emergency government meeting.

Talgat Musabayev, head of Kazakhstan’s space agency Kazcosmos, said nitric oxide – a product of burning heptyl – was much less toxic for humans. He said it was raining in the area, so toxic clouds would probably not reach the town of Baikonur some 60 km (38 miles) away.

However, the authorities instructed locals to stay at home and not to open windows, and ordered to close shops and public catering, said Kazakh Interior Minister Kalmukhambet Kasymov.

The estimated loss from the three satellites, meant for Russia’s troubled Glonass satellite navigation system, was about $200 million, Rossiya-24 reported.

Russia plans to spend more than 300 billion roubles ($9.1 billion) by 2020 on Glonass, its answer to the U.S. GPS system.

The system, first conceived by the Soviet Union more than 40 years ago, has been plagued by failed launches, including one in 2010 in which three satellites were also lost, and by suspicions of corruption and embezzlement. Its chief designer was dismissed last year during a fraud investigation.

The Proton rocket, known at the time under its UR-500 code, made its first test flights in the mid-1960s.

It was originally designed as an intercontinental ballistic missile to carry a nuclear warhead targeting the Soviet Union’s Cold War foe the United States. But it was never deployed as a nuclear weapon.

Several crashes of Proton rockets accompanied by spills of heptyl have led to temporary strains in relations between Russia and Kazakhstan.

Russia is increasing spending on space and plans to send a probe to the moon in 2015, but the pioneering program that put the first man in space in 1961 has been plagued in recent years by setbacks, including botched satellite launches and a failed attempt to send a probe to a moon of Mars.

{wirestory}

{{The United States has bugged European Union offices and gained access to EU internal computer networks, according to secret documents cited in a German magazine on Saturday, the latest in a series of exposures of alleged U.S. spy programs.}}

Der Spiegel quoted from a September 2010 “top secret” U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) document that it said fugitive former NSA contractor Edward Snowden had taken with him and the weekly’s journalists had seen in part.

The document outlines how the NSA bugged offices and spied on EU internal computer networks in Washington and at the United Nations, not only listening to conversations and phone calls but also gaining access to documents and emails.

The document explicitly called the EU a “target.”

A spokesman for the Office of the U.S. Director of National Intelligence had no comment on the Der Spiegel story.

Martin Schulz, the president of the European Parliament, said that if the report was correct, it would have a “severe impact” on relations between the EU and the United States.

“On behalf of the European Parliament, I demand full clarification and require further information speedily from the U.S. authorities with regard to these allegations,” he said in an emailed statement.

Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn told Der Spiegel: “If these reports are true, it’s disgusting.”

“The United States would be better off monitoring its secret services rather than its allies. We must get a guarantee from the very highest level now that this stops immediately.”

Snowden’s disclosures in foreign media about U.S. surveillance programs have ignited a political furor in the United States and abroad over the balance between privacy rights and national security.

According to Der Spiegel, the NSA also targeted telecommunications at the Justus Lipsius building in Brussels, home to the European Council, the collective of EU national governments.

Without citing sources, the magazine reported that more than five years ago security officers at the EU had noticed several missed calls and traced them to NSA offices within the NATO compound in Brussels.

Each EU member state has rooms in Justus Lipsius with phone and internet connections, which ministers can use.

Snowden, a U.S. citizen, fled the United States to Hong Kong in May, a few weeks before the publication in the Guardian and the Washington Post of details he provided about secret U.S. government surveillance of internet and phone traffic.

Snowden, 30, has been holed up in a Moscow airport transit area since last weekend. The leftist government of Ecuador is reviewing his request for asylum.

{The Moscow Times }

{{A small NASA telescope was launched into orbit on Thursday on a mission to determine how the sun heats its atmosphere to millions of degrees, sending off rivers of particles that define the boundaries of the solar system.}}

The study is far from academic. Solar activity directly impacts Earth’s climate and the space environment beyond the planet’s atmosphere. Solar storms can knock out power grids, disrupt radio signals and interfere with communications, navigation and other satellites in orbit.

“We live in a very complex society and the sun has a role to play in it,” said physicist Alan Title, with Lockheed Martin Space Systems Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto, California, which designed and built the telescope.

Scientists have been trying to unravel the mechanisms that drive the sun for decades but one fundamental mystery endures: How it manages to release energy from its relatively cool, 10,000 degree Fahrenheit (5,500 degree Celsius) surface into an atmosphere that can reach up to 5 million degrees Fahrenheit (2.8 million Celsius).

At its core, the sun is essentially a giant fusion engine that melds hydrogen atoms into helium. As expected, temperatures cool as energy travels outward through the layers. But then in the lower atmosphere, known as the chromosphere, temperatures heat up again.

Pictures and data relayed by the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, telescope may finally provide some answers about how that happens.

The 4-foot (1.2-meter) long, 450-pound (204-kg) observatory will be watching the sun from a vantage point about 400 miles above Earth. It is designed to capture detailed images of light moving from the sun’s surface, known as the photosphere, into the chromosphere. Temperatures peak in the sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona.

All that energy fuels a continuous release of charged particles from the sun into what is known as the solar wind, a pressure bubble that fills and defines the boundaries of the solar system.

“Every time we look at the sun in more detail, it opens up a new window for us,” said Jeffrey Newmark, IRIS program scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C.

The telescope was launched aboard an Orbital Sciences Corp Pegasus rocket at 10:27 p.m. EDT Thursday (0227 GMT Friday). Pegasus is an air-launched system that is carried aloft by a modified L-1011 aircraft that took off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California about 57 minutes before launch.

The rocket was released from beneath the belly of the plane at an altitude of about 39,000 feet before it ignited to carry the telescope into orbit.

IRIS, which cost about $145 million including the launch service, is designed to last for two years.

{wirestory}

{{The long awaited Yo-mobil — the first Russian-made hybrid vehicle, produced jointly by Yarovit Motors and Mikhail Prokhorov’s Onexim Group — will be presented next month at the Central Automotive Research Institute’s testing center outside Moscow, a news report said Friday.}}

“The presentation will take place on July 4, probably, at the Dmitrov proving ground,” said Andrei Biryukov, chief executive of the car’s manufacturer Yo-Avto, at the St. Petersburg economic forum.

He did not comment on when the manufacturing plant in St. Petersburg would be complete, nor did he say when production would begin. Biryukov said this will be announced during the presentation, Interfax reported.

But he said that the project was in its advanced stage, with the buildings and infrastructure “Eighty-five percent ready.”

Onexim founder Mikhail Prokhorov is using a Yo-Mobil prototype car to get around town during the forum, Biryukov said.

The production model will use 80 to 85 percent of the technologies and components found in the current prototype, he added.

The cornerstone for the manufacturing plant was laid in the middle of 2011. Investment in the plant’s two phases will total 260 million euros ($360 million). The plant will produce 90,000 cars per year.

Earlier, Prokhorov said production of Yo-Mobils will begin in the second half of 2014.

Onexim and Yarovit own Yo-Auto via Luxemburg-registered City Car Investments.

{The Moscow Times}