FABRYSYS

mercoledì 10 luglio 2013

T H A N K S

ALCYON PLEIADI 7 - FINE DEL DOMINIO ILLUMINATI, CRISI NEL VATICANO, IL SUO INTERESSE PER GLI ALIENI...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=GiLJRNh6C64

T H A N K S

Enigmi Alieni - Le Prove della Nasa

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=fc2TicBZJQk

WATCH AND THINK....

T H A N K S

Documents Reveal How the NSA Cracked the Kryptos Sculpture Years Before the CIA

The Kryptos Sculpture. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

It took more than eight years for a CIA analyst and a California computer scientist to crack three of the four coded messages on the CIA’s famed Kryptos sculpture in the late ’90s.
Little did either of them know that a small group of cryptanalysts inside the NSA had beat them to it, and deciphered the same three sections of Kryptos years earlier — and they did it in less than a month, according to new documents obtained from the NSA.
These days the NSA is best known for its broad, indiscriminate spying on Americans and foreigners. But the Kryptos crack shows how some of the agency’s smartest geeks once blew off steam in the relatively quiet days between the end of the Cold War and the September 11 attacks.
The popular story of Kryptos has long held that CIA analyst David Stein was the first to crack three of the cryptographic sculpture’s four puzzles in 1998.
Stein decrypted the coded messages after spending some 400 hours’ worth of lunch hours working through the puzzles using only paper and pencil. Many people, on and off the CIA campus in Langley, Virginia, had tried to break the coded puzzle, but only Stein, a member of the agency’s Directorate of Intelligence, succeeded. Stein’s work on the code was kept secret, however. In 1999, he wrote a fascinating account of how he cracked three of the sculpture’s four coded messages, but it was only published in an internal CIA newsletter that remained classified until years later.
The secrecy over Stein’s achievement allowed California computer scientist Jim Gillogly to steal the spotlight a year later in 1999, when he announced that he’d also cracked the same three messages, only he used a Pentium II to do it.
But new documents released by the National Security Agency show how the Defense Department’s spy agency beat Stein and Gillogly to the punch years earlier.

An internal NSA memo discussing the agency’s success at cracking three of the sculpture’s four puzzles. Courtesy of Elonka Dunin

It’s a story that has largely remained buried in the NSA archives until Elonka Dunin unearthed it in a recent FOIA request. Dunin is the premier expert on Kryptos who oversees a Google Group dedicated to cracking the code and also maintains a website dedicated to the sculpture.
Although a Baltimore Sun story about Kryptos in 2000 disclosed that the NSA had cracked three sections of the puzzle, many of the details behind the efforts were not revealed.
It all began in 1988 when the CIA Fine Arts Commission commissioned local artist James Sanborn to create a cryptographic sculpture for a courtyard on the CIA campus. Sanborn completed the two-part sculpture in 1990, which included stones laid out in International Morse code near the front entrance of the CIA campus, and a 12-foot-high, verdigrised copper, granite and petrified wood sculpture. The latter, which is the more famous part of Kryptos, was inscribed with four encrypted messages composed from some 1,800 letters carved out of the copper plate.
One of the memos notes that the layout of the two-part sculpture was “a landscaping scheme designed to recall the natural stone out-cropping that existed on the site before the Agency, and that will endure as do mountains.” The placement of the sculpture “in a geologic context reinforces the text’s ‘hidden-ness’ as if it were a fossil or an image frozen in time.”
In 1991, while on a trip to the CIA, a group of NSA cryptanalysis “interns” diligently scribbled all the letters from the sculpture onto sheets of paper and brought them back to the NSA so curious analysts there could take a crack at it. In December 1991 a group of NSA analysts met in a conference room at the NSA to discuss the sculpture and what methods of decryption they might apply, including classified methods used internally by the NSA.
A memo about this meeting indicates that “any discussion of ‘in-house’ techniques or applications (being classified) are not mentioned in this text as it is to be unclassified.” The memo also included a note to participants not to discuss their efforts to crack the puzzle in public, as some of the methods they used might be classified, as well as a message at the bottom of the memo indicating that “these notes were prepared at NO expense to the US Government.”
After that initial NSA meeting, however, nothing further was done on the puzzle. Over the next year, the CIA tried to crack the sculpture on its own, but with no success.
The sculpture remained unsolved until 1992, when Adm. William O. Studeman, the CIA’s then-deputy director and a former NSA director, issued a formal challenge to his former colleagues at the NSA to solve the CIA’s new courtyard puzzle. The NSA’s director at the time, Vice Admiral Mike McConnell, announced the challenge during an internal ceremony at the NSA, and a small cadre of cryptanalysts from the agency’s Z Group — the internal name for the cryptanalysts division — “enthusiastically responded.”
Left on their own, NSA employees had shown little passion for cracking the ciphers, but once a formal challenge was on the table from the CIA, it was hard to resist. The group was so intent on cracking the code that they formed an informal task force in November 1992, according to the recently released documents, which include a number of internal NSA memos describing how they cracked the ciphers.
Working from the transcription obtained by interns a year earlier, they quickly determined, using computer diagnostic tools, that the sculpture consisted of four parts — using at least three different ciphers — and a cryptographic table based on an encryption method developed in the 16th century by a Frenchman named Blaise de Vigenere that was key to helping them solve parts of the puzzle.
They were sure to note that subsequent analysis and solutions of the code “did not require any computer power” but were done by hand.
They quickly discovered that the encrypted sections included intentional spelling errors made by artist James Sanborn, and misaligned characters set higher on a line of text than characters around them.
Then “within two days of receiving the information tasking from Chief, Z,” they had solved parts one through three of the puzzle. They spent another day on the fourth section, but very quickly “a decision was made to stop any further work” on it. “Given the suspected cryptography, the last section is too short to solve without diverting a great deal of effort from operational problems,” they wrote in the memo.

NSA memo discussing how the cryptanalysts achieved their first breakthrough in deciphering the sculpture. Courtesy of Elonka Dunin

In the end, it was just three analysts who solved the codes, one tackling each section of the puzzle. Although the names are redacted in the documents released by the NSA, Dennis McDaniels was identified as one of the crackers in the Baltimore Sun article. Ken Miller was also identified as another member of the group, though someone knowledgeable about the project told Wired that he didn’t decipher any of the sections but worked closely with the group to write up their notes.
In June 1993, after the three parts were cracked, an internal letter announcing the feat was sent to Admiral McConnell at the NSA, marked “For Official Use Only” and informing him that the deed was done. It was returned with a request to forward the note to Admiral Studeman at the CIA, no doubt with an air of glee and arrogance that the NSA had beat the CIA at cracking its own puzzle. Another scribbled note on the memo read, “Great Story!”
The documents describe their efforts through “many wrong turns” to arrive at the solutions.
The first part of the sculpture used a periodic polyalphabetic substitution cipher using 10 alphabets, and when decrypted was a poetic phrase that Sanborn had composed himself: “Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqlusion” (“iqlusion” was an intentional misspelling of illusion).
Part two used a periodic polyalphabetic substitution cipher using 8 alphabets. When decrypted, the passage hinted at something buried:

It was totally invisible. How’s that possible? They used the Earth’s magnetic field. x The information was gathered and transmitted underground to an unknown location. x Does Langley know about this? They should: It’s buried out there somewhere. x Who knows the exact location? Only WW. This was his last message. x Thirty-eight degrees fifty-seven minutes six point five seconds north, seventy-seven degrees eight minutes forty-four seconds west. ID by rows.

The cryptanalysts correctly guessed that WW referred to William Webster, which Wired confirmed in 2005 during an interview with artist Sanborn. “The coordinates,” the memo noted, “refer to the location of or a location within the Central Intelligence Agency.” But the significance of the I.D. by Rows? That remained “undetermined,” the NSA’s puzzle crackers wrote.
In fact, Sanborn had made an error in the puzzle and inadvertently introduced a typo in the section. The mistake involved an “x” that he intentionally deleted from the end of a line in section two for aesthetic reasons, to keep the sculpture visually balanced. The “x” was supposed to signify a period or section break at the end of a phrase, but Sanborn removed it thinking it wouldn’t affect the way the puzzle was deciphered. It turned out the “x” made all the difference, however.
Instead of “ID by rows” it actually should have been deciphered to read “layer two,” though code breakers wouldn’t discover this until years after the NSA cryptanalysts had their crack at the code.
Part three used a keyed columnar transposition cipher, which the cryptanalysts partly diagnosed solely by “eyeballing” the text.
“The most likely explanation for this is a transposition system,” they write, “perhaps a keyed columnar transposition. In such a system, the plain text is inscribed horizontally into a matrix, normally a rectangle, and then the latter are extracted vertically, according to a pre-determined sequence.”
When decrypted, it was a paraphrased page taken from the diary of archaeologist Howard Carter describing the opening of a door in King Tut’s tomb on Nov. 26, 1922.

Slowly, desperately slowly, the remains of passage debris that encumbered the lower part of the doorway was removed. With trembling hands I made a tiny breach in the upper left-hand corner. And then, widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and peered in. The hot air escaping from the chamber caused the flame to flicker, but presently details of the room within emerged from the mist. x Can you see anything? q

According to a former Defense Department cryptanalyst who spoke with Wired, McDaniels was responsible for cracking section three and did it in just six hours lying on his living room couch with paper and pencil after coming home exhausted one day from playing volleyball. McDaniels is now retired from the NSA and declined to speak with Wired about his work on the sculpture. But the source told Wired that McDaniels had been out all day playing volleyball and came home around 10pm.
“He plopped down on the couch in the living room, picked up his draft notes for K3,” the source said. “He had tinkered with it before but could never get into it. He knew it was just basic transposition, so he started with the letter Q and [the letter U after it] and found there were five instances of the letter U, and he just tried all five of those. Then he had to try every other vowel that came after and he finally found something that broke it. By then it was about 4am and he was done.”
Unfortunately the fourth section stymied the NSA code breakers, as it has continued to do other cryptanalysts for 23 years. The documents noted that “although ideas abound” for deciphering it, the final 97 characters of the sculpture “continue to elude solution.”

OBKR
UOXOGHULBSOLIFBBWFLRVQQPRNGKSSO
TWTQSJQSSEKZZWATJKLUDIAWINFBNYP
VTTMZFPKWGDKZXTJCDIGKUHUAUEKCAR

They speculated that this section might employ a combination of the techniques used in other sections. “First the message is encrypted using some set of alphabets,” they write, “as was done in the first and third breakthroughs, and then the cipher is put through a transposition, such as that used in the second breakthrough.” But even with that they were never able to solve it.
In 2010, Sanborn, surprised that the final section had remained unsolved for so long, and perhaps feeling guilty about an error he had made in the sculpture that misled puzzle-solvers for years, decided to disclose six of the 97 letters in the last section. The six letters — NYPVTT — are the 64th through 69th letters of the final section and when deciphered spell out the word “BERLIN.”
The clue has yet to be the breakthrough that code crackers had hoped it would be, however, and the last section still remains unsolved.
Even when that final section is solved, however, sleuths still won’t know what the sculpture means. The deciphered text contains a riddle, which will require them to be on the CIA grounds in order to solve it.
“In part of the code that’s been deciphered, I refer to an act that took place when I was at the agency and a location that’s on the ground of the agency,” Sanborn told Wired in 2005. He may be referring to something he buried on the CIA grounds, though he won’t say for sure. The decrypted text gives latitude and longitude coordinates (38 57 6.5 N, 77 8 44 W), which Sanborn has said refer to “locations of the agency.” So sleuths will have to first decipher the code then find their way onto the CIA grounds and locate that place in order to finally discover what it all means.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/07/nsa-cracked-kryptos-before-cia/?cid=9651674

T H A N K S

Predicting earthquakes and saving lives - with smartphones

Technology of business reporter, BBC News

Effects of the 1989 San Francisco earthquake

In 1989, the strongest quake since 1906 hit San Francisco, killing 63 and injuring more than 3,500

Living in an earthquake zone adds a certain spice to life.

To the normal catastrophes of day-to-day existence, you can add the possibility that the earth will open up underneath you and swallow you whole.

The first earthquake is scary - but unless a massive shaker comes along you quickly become accustomed, even complacent.
This is when being prepared becomes even more important; your survival kit with plenty of bottled water, knowing where - and where not - to shelter.
And actually scrambling into these areas at 5am when a quake hits, instead of rolling over, going back to sleep and assuming it's not the "big one" because you had a late night and don't want to crawl out of bed.
This is where being alerted to the fact this this isn't just a tummy trembler, it's actually a potentially devastating magnitude 7.5 would be useful - because it could save your life.
Unfortunately, early warning systems are hugely expensive pieces of infrastructure to build from scratch.
So a team from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has created an app that uses the accelerometer in your smartphone, and turns it into a simple seismometer (device that detects the vibrations from earthquakes).
Group dynamics

Richard Guy has managed the Community Seismic Network for the last two and a half years

Richard Guy is part of the team that put together CrowdShake, with graduate computer science student Matt Faulkner.
He manages Caltech's Community Seismic Network, which has been running an earthquake monitoring project for the past three and a half years, to complement the more formal seismic monitoring services.
"In the Pasadena area, which is a relatively small community - it's hardly 10km across - we have hundreds and hundreds of volunteers that we give a very small low-cost accelerometer to, it's actually a seismometer," he says.
The devices either plug into a PC or router, and pick up the vibrations caused by tremors.
Earthquake early warning systems rely on lots of sensors spread over a region. So when an earthquake begins, the closest stations pick up the tremors.

Be prepared: As a coastal state, tsunamis are also a danger in California, as this sign on Venice Beach points out

The data they gather is then sent to processing centres, where the intensity is calculated, and the time it will take for the quake to reach other areas. Then alerts are sent out. This system, although more basic, works on the same principles.
The project has hit a few bumps in the road - there's the cost of the the devices, and the fact that some are simply never installed.
So the next logical step was a smartphone app called CrowdShake - meaning no hardware to buy or maintain.
"The attractiveness of smartphones is that they have many things already built in," says Mr Guy.
"The accelerometer is already in the phone, the location is something the phone knows, it's not something that a person has to tell it.
"And of course your smartphone knows exactly what time it is."

This seismometer plugs into your home router. The lid is removed to reveal the hardware

They are also easy to use, says Mr Guy.
"From that point of view smartphones are an extraordinarily attractive device for monitoring earthquakes.
"Now on the other hand, they come with very interesting challenges - the sensor, the accelerometer in a smartphone is certainly not of the quality of any sort of a device you would add to your PC or some other setting. So that's a basic challenge."
Distinguishing normal movement from the vibrations from an earthquake is also tricky.
"If there are just enough [phones] that are stationary, which could be a very small percentage, from that we can determine, 'OK, an earthquake is under way and this is how intense it was at a certain point'," he says.
The data is analysed and then pushed back to the community of users.
"Then the receiving phone says, 'Well, I know where I am, I know where it started, I know the time difference between when the event began, I know what time it is now, my little phone app can calculate very, very simply in just a few milliseconds, this is how bad I think it's going to be where I am right now.'
"It can then provide... an alert to this user saying: 'You have so many seconds before a damaging wave will arrive'."
At the moment the app is still a prototype. Implementation across California is unlikely unless it is done by government agencies, as the risk of litigation is so high - for example, should someone be injured during a false alarm, says Mr Guy.
So the target is the developing world - countries with a high risk of earthquake, but without an early warning infrastructure in place - where mobile ownership is common.

Woman cries in front of her destroyed home in Bhuj, western India

Bhuj, in western India, suffered a devastating earthquake in 2001. The region is being considered as a testbed for CrowdShake

Early bird The big brother to the Community Seismic Network project is the California Integrated Seismic Network's Earthquake Early Warning System.
"The network of seismometers is really a computer network," says the director of Caltech's Earthquake Engineering Research Laboratory, Tom Heaton.
"We basically monitor all of the shaking that happens at roughly about 400 stations in the western United States, and we have access to that information within about a second of when the shaking occurs at the station."
When a quake is detected members of the network are alerted.
"We've been writing software that does the kind of analysis a human being would do if they had time to do it," he says.
"The one that I work on is called the virtual seismologist, we're trying to teach a computer to be like a seismologist, but unlike a seismologist, computers can stay awake all the time and they don't get bored."
The early warning system has already been proven to work. At Caltech they're working on ways to send alerts to smart devices, which inevitably includes a smartphone app.

California Integrated Seismic Network's Earthquake early warning demonstration system

Sim city: The early warning system was used during an earthquake drill held in Los Angeles in March

"The app gets notification that an earthquake has occurred .... it can project when the shaking will get to the phone and how big it will be. And then the phone can start to countdown and say, shaking in 10, 9, 8,… and even give some idea - strong shaking or weak shaking depending on what we anticipate."
One of the big hold-ups is financing. The project has received funding from the US Geological Survey (USGS) and more recently the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, while waiting to find out whether a bill currently in front of the state legislature will implement the system.
Proof that this type of technology works can be found in Japan.
The country has an effective early warning system administered by the Japan Meteorological Agency. Thanks to apps like Yurekuru Call, earthquake alerts can be pushed to smartphones, while the iPhone 5 can do it automatically.
No matter how sophisticated these systems are, there's only so much a warning can do.
In March 2011, the north-east of Japan experienced the most powerful earthquake to hit the country, a magnitude of 9.0. This was followed by a tsunami that inundated the Pacific coast.
In Japan it is called the Great East Japan Earthquake. It is thought that close to 20,000 people were killed.

370 blue carp streamers hung to mourn children who died in Higashimatsushima, Miyagi prefecture

Carp streamers - or koinoburi - are hung outside Japanese homes with sons on Children's Day on 5 May. But this school of 370 blue carp mourn the children who died in Higashimatsushima, Miyagi prefecture

The early warning system certainly saved lives. But the scale of the disaster was just too big. And the tsunami alert, which takes longer to compute and generate, gave some only 15 minutes to get to higher ground.
The American Red Cross has launched a suite of apps created by UK-based developers 3 Sided Cube for use in natural disasters, one of which is for earthquakes.
It uses the USGS feed giving information on quakes as they happen, and sends alerts to people who have set the app to watch certain areas. It then sends them to a page with more information.

The American Red Cross app gives details of shelters

"[We] developed this app to give instant access to information on what to do before, during and after earthquakes with preparedness information developed by trusted Red Cross experts," says the American Red Cross's Matt Goldfeder.
"The app also includes preparedness information for events that may happen after earthquakes, such as fires and tsunamis."
An "I'm safe" button lets you send an alert to family, friends and social networks, where you can also share information. It includes a toolkit that has a torch setting, strobe light and an alarm.
"A recent Red Cross survey shows that nearly one-fifth of Americans say they've received some kind of emergency information from an app they've downloaded. It's important that people can access this information right on their mobile device," says Mr Goldfeder.
Other apps that claim to help in the aftermath include Earthquake Buddy, which will send an alert to four contacts if a phone detects an earthquake, with your GPS co-ordinates attached. For Californians, MyFault shows areas likely to be subject to landslide or liquifaction.
And apps like QuakeFeed and QuakeWatch let you track earthquakes around the world as they happen.
Technology might not be able to save the world. But it might be able give you and your loved ones the edge when it comes to surviving the worst of natural disasters.

Databoard for Research Insights

the rundown

Need some stats for a presentation? You shouldn’t have to go data mining. We’ve created this interactive tool to help you quickly find what you need from our vast archives of industry-leading research. It’ll even help you tell a story from the stats, turning selected charts and data points into infographics that you can share.

To get started, try it now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=NkoCRckNZhI

And it, http://think.withgoogle.com/databoard/#

THANKS.

Pirate Bay Co-Founder Wants to Build NSA-Proof Messaging App

Peter Sunde, co-founder of BitTorrent search engine The Pirate Bay, needs your help to create a private messaging app.
Heml.is (Swedish word for "secret") is an elegant messaging app for iOS and Android that uses end-to-end encryption to make sure no third party — governments and ISPs included — can intercept the users' communication.
"We love the Internet, social networks and the power it gives for sharing and social connections. What we don't love though is that private communication has more or less turned into an open stream for companies and governments to listen into," the Heml.is team explains on the app's official page.
In a video explaining the app's purpose, Sunde references the recent PRISM scandal, a secret NSA program that taps into major Internet companies' data and accesses user emails, photographs and other documents.
"We've decided to build a messaging platform where no one can spy on you, not even us," explains Sunde in the video (above).
The app is crowdfunded with a goal of $100,000, with the donation counter currently standing at $27,000. Users who donate $5 or more get unlock codes for the app and other perks, depending on the size of the donation.
Once finished, the app's basic functionality will be free. Some features, such as sending image messages, will be charged for.

Visually, the app borrows heavily from the recently introduced iOS 7's aesthetics, with pastel colors and an overall light, simple design.
However, private messaging apps aren't new. Apps like Wickr or iCrypt already enable users to send encrypted messages to one another. It'll be interesting to see how Heml.is fares against the competition, and whether it'll stay a niche product or get a large following.
http://mashable.com/2013/07/10/hemlis/#

mercoledì 10 luglio 2013

More on This Story

Key stories

Viewpoint

Related Internet links