Students learn 'ethical hacking'
Saturday, November 21, 2009 » 04:35am
Cyber attacks on businesses has led to a rapid increase in 'ethical hacking' courses at universities.
The threat of cyber attacks on businesses and governments has led to a rapid increase in the number of universities offering students the chance to learn how to hack computer networks.
The degrees have been set to feed the expanding industry of 'ethical hacking', in which companies pay hackers to infiltrate their systems and expose weaknesses.
The prospect of a lucrative career in the security services, police, defence and IT industries has fuelled the popularity in the courses, with hundreds of undergraduates and graduate students already enrolled.
The ethical hacking degree at Abertay University in Dundee was set up in 2006 and was the first of its kind in the UK.
Since then, other courses have been set up at Coventry, Northumbria and Sunderland, with more in the pipeline at Glasgow Caledonian, Edinburgh Napier and Leeds Metropolitan amongst others.
Colin McLean, the programme tutor in Ethical Hacking and Countermeasures at Abertay, told Sky News that teaching his students to hack networks means they will have the skills to protect banks, businesses and the critical national infrastructure against cyber attacks.
'The current people in those jobs are not protecting against hackers,' he said.
'There should be jobs for people who know exactly what hackers are doing and obviously how to stop the hackers as well.'
Critics have warned of the dangers of arming young people with knowledge that could so easily be turned to criminal endeavour.
But, according to Jennifer Higgins, a fourth year undergraduate on Abertay, the boundaries are clear.
'Take, for example, chemistry students,' she says.
'They might know all the chemicals to cause damage but that's not the sort of thing they're interested it, they're interested in putting their knowledge to the greater good.
'You're well educated on the laws and the way people detect things.'
'It's not made to seem glamorous to hack into anything, it's more about protecting the systems.'
The Government claims cyber crime costs the UK economy billions of pounds every year and recently set up its own Office for Cyber Security.
However, the increasing demand has also made ethical hacking one of the UK's fastest growing industries in the private sector.
NCC group, based in Manchester, is one of the largest firms in Europe to offer ethical hacking as one of its services, claiming to have 94 of the UK's top 100 companies amongs its clients.
Chief executive Rob Cotton said the importance of ethical hacking has yet to be fully realised.
'It's actually an arms race. It's the bad guys getting better and better and us, the good guys, trying to overcome them,' he said.
'Business is becoming more aware of it but more often than not organisations turn round and are shocked that they've been hacked.'
''Why would somebody hack us and steal our information', they say? Simple reason is information is valuable, and becoming more valuable as every day passes by.'
With both the private and public sectors increasingly dependent on networked technology, the promise of a lucrative career waging war against criminal hackers is likely to make the ethical option even more mainstream.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Robotics an interesting field
2009 space odyssey: Brisbane maps robotic futureSCOTT CASEY
November 18, 2009 - 3:10PM Be the first to comment
University of Queensland scientists are working on algorithms to help robots rapidly 'learn' about their environment.
Scientists in Brisbane are blurring the line between biology and technology and creating a new generation of robot "helpers" more in tune with human needs.
The University of Queensland is hosting the the Australian Research Council's Thinking Systems symposium this week, which brings together UQ's robotic navigation project with the University of New South Wales' robotic hands project and a speech and cognition project out of the University of Western Sydney.
Scientists are working towards a range of robotic innovations, from the development of navigation and learning robots to the construction of artificial joints and limbs and the creation of a conversational computer program, a la 2001: A Space Odyssey's HAL.
UQ's School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering head, Professor Janet Wiles, said the symposium paired "some very clever engineers...with very clever scientists" to map the future of robotics - and it was going to be a very different world.
"You're bringing together neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, behaviour and robotics information system to look at the cross disciplinary projects we can do in this space," Professor Wiles said.
"We're doing a combination of the fundamental science and the translation into the technology and that's one of the great benefits of our project."
The group aims to advance robotic technology by decoding the way human and animal brains work to equip machines with the ability to operate in the real world.
"There's a strong connection to cognition - the way the brain works as a whole - and navigation, so what we've been doing is studying the fundamental of navigation in animals and taking the algorithms we've learnt from those and putting them into robots," Professor Wiles said.
Over the next two decades, she sees robots becoming more and more important, expanding from their current roles as cleaners, assemblers and drones and into smarter machines more closely integrated with human beings in the form of replacement limbs and joints.
"It's not going to be the robots and us. Already a lot of people are incorporating robot components; people who have had a leg amputated who now have a knee and in the knee. It is effectively a fully-articulated robotic knee [with] a lot of the spring in the step that a natural knee has," Professor Wiles said.
"The ability of robots to replace component parts is an area which is going to be growing.
"This is where you're going to blur the line between technology and biology when you start to interface these two fields."
At UQ, the team is working on developing computer codes or algorithms that would enable a robot to "learn" rapidly about its near environment and navigate within it.
"Navigation is quite an intriguing skill because it is so intrinsic to what we do and we are really not aware of it unless we have a poor sense of navigation," Professor Wiles said.
"The kind of navigation we are dealing with is how you get from one place to another, right across town or from one room in a building to another you can't see."
With about four million robots in households right now, performing menial chores such as vacuuming the carpet, improvements in navigation has the potential to widen the scope of these creations to take a larger place in everyday life.
According to Professor Wiles, the ability to rapidly process information and apply it to the area they are working in will give robots the edge into the future.
"Robots need to learn new environments very rapidly and that's what a lot of our work focuses on.
"When you take a robot out of the box you don't want to program into it with the architecture of your house, you want the robot to explore the house and learn it very quickly," Professor Wiles said.
"Household robotics is going to be really big in the next 15 years or so and this is one of the things you need is for robots to be able to look after themselves in space."
But as Australian universities and international research institutes look into replicating the individual parts of biological creatures and mimic them in machines, the question of intelligence inevitably become more important.
While the sometimes frightening scenarios played out in science fiction novels and films - where so often robots lay waste to humanity - remains securely in the realm of fantasy, Professor Wiles believes that some day machines will think like us.
"There's strong AI [artificial intelligence] and weak AI. Strong AI says there will be artificially intelligent creatures which are not biological. Weak AI says they will have a lot of the algorithms and they do already have a lot of those algorithms," she said.
"The bee, whose brain is a tiny as a sesame seed, already has better navigation abilities than even our best robots.
"So we have a little way to go before robots reach biological intelligence let alone human intelligence but I don't see why we shouldn't take steps towards it."
The ARC Thinking Systems symposium continues at the University of Queensland in St Lucia today.
brisbanetimes.com.au
Source: brisbanetimes.com.au
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Thats powerful can u believe it?
Japan eyes solar station in space as new energy source
November 9, 2009 - 8:26PM
It may sound like a sci-fi vision, but Japan's space agency is dead serious: by 2030 it wants to collect solar power in space and zap it down to Earth, using laser beams or microwaves.
The government has just picked a group of companies and a team of researchers tasked with turning the ambitious, multi-billion-dollar dream of unlimited clean energy into reality in coming decades.
With few energy resources of its own and heavily reliant on oil imports, Japan has long been a leader in solar and other renewable energies and this year set ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets.
But Japan's boldest plan to date is the Space Solar Power System (SSPS), in which arrays of photovoltaic dishes several square kilometres (square miles) in size would hover in geostationary orbit outside the Earth's atmosphere.
"Since solar power is a clean and inexhaustible energy source, we believe that this system will be able to help solve the problems of energy shortage and global warming," researchers at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, one of the project participants, wrote in a report.
"The sun's rays abound in space."
The solar cells would capture the solar energy, which is at least five times stronger in space than on Earth, and beam it down to the ground through clusters of lasers or microwaves.
These would be collected by gigantic parabolic antennae, likely to be located in restricted areas at sea or on dam reservoirs, said Tadashige Takiya, a spokesman at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).
The researchers are targeting a one gigawatt system, equivalent to a medium-sized atomic power plant, that would produce electricity at eight yen (cents) per kilowatt-hour, six times cheaper than its current cost in Japan.
The challenge - including transporting the components to space - may appear gigantic, but Japan has been pursuing the project since 1998, with some 130 researchers studying it under JAXA's oversight.
Last month Japan's Economy and Trade Ministry and the Science Ministry took another step toward making the project a reality, by selecting several Japanese high-tech giants as participants in the project.
The consortium, named the Institute for Unmanned Space Experiment Free Flyer, also includes Mitsubishi Electric, NEC, Fujitsu and Sharp.
The project's roadmap outlined several steps that would need to be taken before a full-blown launch in 2030.
Within several years, "a satellite designed to test the transmission by microwave should be put into low orbit with a Japanese rocket," said Tatsuhito Fujita, one of the JAXA researchers heading the project.
The next step, expected around 2020, would be to launch and test a large flexible photovoltaic structure with 10 megawatt power capacity, to be followed by a 250 megawatt prototype.
This would help evaluate the project's financial viability, say officials. The final aim is to produce electricity cheap enough to compete with other alternative energy sources.
JAXA says the transmission technology would be safe but concedes it would have to convince the public, which may harbour images of laser beams shooting down from the sky, roasting birds or slicing up aircraft in mid-air.
According to a 2004 study by JAXA, the words 'laser' and 'microwave' caused the most concern among the 1000 people questioned.
November 9, 2009 - 8:26PM
It may sound like a sci-fi vision, but Japan's space agency is dead serious: by 2030 it wants to collect solar power in space and zap it down to Earth, using laser beams or microwaves.
The government has just picked a group of companies and a team of researchers tasked with turning the ambitious, multi-billion-dollar dream of unlimited clean energy into reality in coming decades.
With few energy resources of its own and heavily reliant on oil imports, Japan has long been a leader in solar and other renewable energies and this year set ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets.
But Japan's boldest plan to date is the Space Solar Power System (SSPS), in which arrays of photovoltaic dishes several square kilometres (square miles) in size would hover in geostationary orbit outside the Earth's atmosphere.
"Since solar power is a clean and inexhaustible energy source, we believe that this system will be able to help solve the problems of energy shortage and global warming," researchers at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, one of the project participants, wrote in a report.
"The sun's rays abound in space."
The solar cells would capture the solar energy, which is at least five times stronger in space than on Earth, and beam it down to the ground through clusters of lasers or microwaves.
These would be collected by gigantic parabolic antennae, likely to be located in restricted areas at sea or on dam reservoirs, said Tadashige Takiya, a spokesman at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).
The researchers are targeting a one gigawatt system, equivalent to a medium-sized atomic power plant, that would produce electricity at eight yen (cents) per kilowatt-hour, six times cheaper than its current cost in Japan.
The challenge - including transporting the components to space - may appear gigantic, but Japan has been pursuing the project since 1998, with some 130 researchers studying it under JAXA's oversight.
Last month Japan's Economy and Trade Ministry and the Science Ministry took another step toward making the project a reality, by selecting several Japanese high-tech giants as participants in the project.
The consortium, named the Institute for Unmanned Space Experiment Free Flyer, also includes Mitsubishi Electric, NEC, Fujitsu and Sharp.
The project's roadmap outlined several steps that would need to be taken before a full-blown launch in 2030.
Within several years, "a satellite designed to test the transmission by microwave should be put into low orbit with a Japanese rocket," said Tatsuhito Fujita, one of the JAXA researchers heading the project.
The next step, expected around 2020, would be to launch and test a large flexible photovoltaic structure with 10 megawatt power capacity, to be followed by a 250 megawatt prototype.
This would help evaluate the project's financial viability, say officials. The final aim is to produce electricity cheap enough to compete with other alternative energy sources.
JAXA says the transmission technology would be safe but concedes it would have to convince the public, which may harbour images of laser beams shooting down from the sky, roasting birds or slicing up aircraft in mid-air.
According to a 2004 study by JAXA, the words 'laser' and 'microwave' caused the most concern among the 1000 people questioned.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Internet radio
Crowd-sourced radio show ditches the DJ
ASHER MOSES
October 26, 2009 - 12:39PM
A mock-up of what Austereo's online voting system will look like.
A mock-up of what Austereo's online voting system will look like.
Austereo listeners will be able to control what is being played on air in real time and even nix bad song choices as they are playing in a radical new radio experiment that blends online and traditional broadcasts.
The radio network, in partnership with US internet radio station Jelli, will unveil a new 24-hour national digital radio station, Hot30 Jelli, next month. It will let listeners go online and vote on the music they want to hear on the terrestrial station in real time.
Those without a newfangled digital radio can also take part in the crowd-sourced radio show as Hot30 Jelli will be simulcast on 2Day FM in Sydney from 10pm to midnight four nights a week.
"The next song that is played is decided half a second before the last song finishes," Jaime Chaux, Austereo's digital content director, said.
On the Hot 30 website, listeners will see the live queue of songs to be played on the station and can vote whether each song "rocks" or "sucks". Users also have a limited number of "rockets" and "bombs" they can use to send a song to the top or bottom of the queue, although the songs played will always be the ones with the most votes.
"The order of the songs that get played and what's on the playlist is being constantly decided on by listeners," said Chaux, adding the initiative played on young people's desire for "instant gratification".
"The Hot 30 currently is a show that's built on votes but once that countdown is built you can't change it and if you vote for a particular song at 7pm you might not hear it until 9.30pm."
Jelli began as an internet-only radio station but it is now spreading into traditional media, with the company recently inking a similar deal with Triton Digital Media to provide a user-controlled radio show for 4500 terrestrial FM radio stations across the US.
The show is expected to begin broadcasting early next year.
Since June, Jelli's technology has powered a two-hour Sunday night alternative rock show on a San Francisco radio station, Live 105 KITS.
Parent company CBS told the San Francisco Chronicle that Jelli's system had more than doubled ratings in the 18-49 demographic for the first hour, and increased ratings by 50 per cent over the second hour.
The ability for users to pull a song before it even finishes is particularly radical but Chaux said he expected this would not be common in practice as songs are not played in the first place unless they have a high number of votes.
The list of songs on offer includes anything played on Hot 30 in the past five years, which is far broader than the selection offered on today's music countdown shows.
"There's a window on screen where players can talk to each other and they end up supporting each other on song choices ... so it ends up being an online community," Chaux said.
Source: smh.com.au
ASHER MOSES
October 26, 2009 - 12:39PM
A mock-up of what Austereo's online voting system will look like.
A mock-up of what Austereo's online voting system will look like.
Austereo listeners will be able to control what is being played on air in real time and even nix bad song choices as they are playing in a radical new radio experiment that blends online and traditional broadcasts.
The radio network, in partnership with US internet radio station Jelli, will unveil a new 24-hour national digital radio station, Hot30 Jelli, next month. It will let listeners go online and vote on the music they want to hear on the terrestrial station in real time.
Those without a newfangled digital radio can also take part in the crowd-sourced radio show as Hot30 Jelli will be simulcast on 2Day FM in Sydney from 10pm to midnight four nights a week.
"The next song that is played is decided half a second before the last song finishes," Jaime Chaux, Austereo's digital content director, said.
On the Hot 30 website, listeners will see the live queue of songs to be played on the station and can vote whether each song "rocks" or "sucks". Users also have a limited number of "rockets" and "bombs" they can use to send a song to the top or bottom of the queue, although the songs played will always be the ones with the most votes.
"The order of the songs that get played and what's on the playlist is being constantly decided on by listeners," said Chaux, adding the initiative played on young people's desire for "instant gratification".
"The Hot 30 currently is a show that's built on votes but once that countdown is built you can't change it and if you vote for a particular song at 7pm you might not hear it until 9.30pm."
Jelli began as an internet-only radio station but it is now spreading into traditional media, with the company recently inking a similar deal with Triton Digital Media to provide a user-controlled radio show for 4500 terrestrial FM radio stations across the US.
The show is expected to begin broadcasting early next year.
Since June, Jelli's technology has powered a two-hour Sunday night alternative rock show on a San Francisco radio station, Live 105 KITS.
Parent company CBS told the San Francisco Chronicle that Jelli's system had more than doubled ratings in the 18-49 demographic for the first hour, and increased ratings by 50 per cent over the second hour.
The ability for users to pull a song before it even finishes is particularly radical but Chaux said he expected this would not be common in practice as songs are not played in the first place unless they have a high number of votes.
The list of songs on offer includes anything played on Hot 30 in the past five years, which is far broader than the selection offered on today's music countdown shows.
"There's a window on screen where players can talk to each other and they end up supporting each other on song choices ... so it ends up being an online community," Chaux said.
Source: smh.com.au
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Hobsons Bay Libraries now using Eventbrite for Library Bookings
Check out the link to Eventbrite under WebWillys hit list for all the events @ HBL libraries and book online YAY
Monday, October 19, 2009
Around the bay in a day
Thousands up bright and early for charity ride
DANIEL ZIFFER
October 19, 2009
More than 15,000 people participated in yesterday's Around the Bay in a Day.
More than 15,000 people participated in yesterday's Around the Bay in a Day. Photo: Penny Stephens
In a blaze of Lycra, Victoria's 17th annual Around the Bay in a Day cycling event put 15,000 people in the saddle, reports Daniel Ziffer.
ENJOYABLE punishment on a glorious scale led thousands of cyclists to saddle up to go Around the Bay in a Day yesterday.
More than 15,000 riders - we counted wheels and divided by two - pedalled around Port Phillip Bay. From 5.30am, riders took off from Alexandra Gardens pursuing goals ranging from 50 kilometres to a punishing 250-kilometre option, circumnavigating the bay.
In its 17th year, Around the Bay burns calories, packs the Sorrento-Queenscliff ferry and raises money for the Smith Family.
Geoff Moore cheered on his business partner Mark Duncan. Their company raised $5000 for charity and their team was called Frosty's Wheels after Mark's father who died last year.
''I completely winged it,'' American student Amanda Devilliers said, laughing. ''Just the 50-kilometre option. I didn't want to hurt myself.''
Melbourne Life has never seen so much Lycra en masse, as riders rolled back into the city. Among the wearers, Naji Aoukar said conditions were ideal for his 100-kilometre jaunt.
''A good day. Not too hot and not too windy,'' he said. ''Headed down to Sorrento and cruised back.''
Oarsome Foursome rower Drew Ginn wasn't weighed down by his three Olympic gold medals, joining V8 driver Cameron McConville and Sydney Swans player Ryan O'Keefe on the 250-kilometre ride, while newsreader Helen Kapalos did the 100-kilometre option.
Blackburn's Georgie Christopher went for the century, praising the organisation of the event. ''No major stacks that I saw. I'll do it again,'' she said, as she prepared to ride home.
Monday, October 12, 2009
The future of books
One of my favourite whizz-bang gadgets is a thing called the Book. No, not iBook, e-book, m-book or anything like that. Just a handy-sized collection of bound pages and type. It looks and feels good, it responds to touch. I can take it anywhere and be transported in an instant to an astounding virtual world.
Of course the Book has been with us ever since Johannes Gutenberg dreamed up his own revolutionary piece of high tech, the printing press, around 1440. It is not going to disappear – at least, not for a while yet. But if you believe the prophets, it’s going to expand and diversify to a point where it won’t be a book as we know it. And not only the Book, but our fundamental ways of communicating are going to change.
Already we can download and read books, stories and other texts on devices such as laptops, e-readers, mobile phones, iPods and iPhones. Millions of young Japanese women are hooked on romances which they consume on their mobiles. The Age is introducing an m-phone serial story written by Melbourne author Marieke Hardy. But this is only the beginning.
According to Jeff Gomez, US author of Print is Dead, there are two schools of thought on the future of publishing, much like the Big Bang and Steady State theories about the universe. Either nothing much will change, or everything will expand so far that the industry will cease to exist – “except for, probably, Oprah”.
Bob Stein, co-director of the New York-based Institute for the Future of the Book, believes the changes the book is undergoing are much more radical than we think. "We are changing the way that humans communicate with each other," he says. "This profound shift is more significant than the invention of the printing press… A thousand years from now, humanity will look back at the late part of the twentieth century as the time when something big started."
I can’t begin to get my head around what might happen in a thousand years, but I know one thing about now. We human beings are devices wired for story. We love a good narrative and we will take it in whatever form is the most reasonably-priced and reader-friendly. The electronic screen has come to stay, but for the long-haul read, it’s still true that nothing beats the old-fashioned book.
Jane Sullivan is a Melbourne writer and regular contributor to The Age.
Of course the Book has been with us ever since Johannes Gutenberg dreamed up his own revolutionary piece of high tech, the printing press, around 1440. It is not going to disappear – at least, not for a while yet. But if you believe the prophets, it’s going to expand and diversify to a point where it won’t be a book as we know it. And not only the Book, but our fundamental ways of communicating are going to change.
Already we can download and read books, stories and other texts on devices such as laptops, e-readers, mobile phones, iPods and iPhones. Millions of young Japanese women are hooked on romances which they consume on their mobiles. The Age is introducing an m-phone serial story written by Melbourne author Marieke Hardy. But this is only the beginning.
According to Jeff Gomez, US author of Print is Dead, there are two schools of thought on the future of publishing, much like the Big Bang and Steady State theories about the universe. Either nothing much will change, or everything will expand so far that the industry will cease to exist – “except for, probably, Oprah”.
Bob Stein, co-director of the New York-based Institute for the Future of the Book, believes the changes the book is undergoing are much more radical than we think. "We are changing the way that humans communicate with each other," he says. "This profound shift is more significant than the invention of the printing press… A thousand years from now, humanity will look back at the late part of the twentieth century as the time when something big started."
I can’t begin to get my head around what might happen in a thousand years, but I know one thing about now. We human beings are devices wired for story. We love a good narrative and we will take it in whatever form is the most reasonably-priced and reader-friendly. The electronic screen has come to stay, but for the long-haul read, it’s still true that nothing beats the old-fashioned book.
Jane Sullivan is a Melbourne writer and regular contributor to The Age.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
