ANN ARBOR, Mich.— Popular firewall technology designed to boost security on cellular networks can backfire, unwittingly revealing data that could help a hacker break into Facebook and Twitter accounts, a new study from the University of Michigan shows.
The researchers also developed an Android app that tells phone users when they’re on a vulnerable network. They will present their work May 22 at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in San Francisco. (more…)
*N.Y., L.A., Miami, San Francisco, D.C. Top List; Maricopa, Ariz. Rising*
COLLEGE PARK, Md. – Nearly a third of all terrorist attacks from 1970 to 2008 occurred in just five metropolitan U.S. counties, but events continue to occur in rural areas, spurred on by domestic actors, according to a report published today by researchers in the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Center of Excellence based at the University of Maryland.
The research was conducted at Maryland and the University of Massachusetts-Boston. (more…)
More Asian Pacific Americans hold public office in the United States than at any other time in U.S. history, a sign of the community’s growing engagement with the political process, according to a newly released political almanac published by UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center.
The 14th edition of the National Asian Pacific American Political Almanac, first published in 1976, contains information on all 3,000 current elected and appointed officials. It also analyzes political trends and makes electoral projections of the nation’s 17 million Asian Pacific Americans. (more…)
PASADENA, Calif. — The existence of a world with a double sunset, as portrayed in the film Star Wars more than 30 years ago, is now scientific fact. NASA’s Kepler mission has made the first unambiguous detection of a circumbinary planet — a planet orbiting two stars — 200 light-years from Earth.
Unlike Star Wars’ Tatooine, the planet is cold, gaseous and not thought to harbor life, but its discovery demonstrates the diversity of planets in our galaxy. Previous research has hinted at the existence of circumbinary planets, but clear confirmation proved elusive. Kepler detected such a planet, known as Kepler-16b, by observing transits, where the brightness of a parent star dims from the planet crossing in front of it. (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.— A radical new approach to thwarting Internet censorship would essentially turn the whole web into a proxy server, making it virtually impossible for a censoring government to block individual sites.
The system is called Telex, and it is the brainchild of computer science researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of Waterloo in Canada. They will present it Aug. 12 at the USENIX Security Symposium in San Francisco. (more…)
SANTA CRUZ, Calif. – Knowing that the U.S. west coast was battered during the winter before last by a climatic pattern expected more often in the future, scientists have now pieced together a San Diego-to-Seattle assessment of the damage wrought by that winter’s extreme waves and higher-than-usual water levels. Getting a better understanding of how the 2009-10 conditions tore away and reshaped shorelines will help coastal experts better predict future changes that may be in store for the Pacific coast, the researchers say.
“The stormy conditions of the 2009-10 El Niño winter eroded the beaches to often unprecedented levels at sites throughout California and vulnerable sites in the Pacific Northwest,” said Patrick Barnard, USGS coastal geologist. In California, for example, winter wave energy was 20 percent above average for the years dating back to 1997, resulting in shoreline erosion that exceeded the average by 36 percent, he and his colleagues found. (more…)
*Some of the brightest young technologists in the nation visited San Francisco on Wednesday to share their ideas with venture capitalists, academics and media.*
SAN FRANCISCO – June 23, 2011 – A collection of students who want to change the world with technology pitched their ideas to Silicon Valley industry experts, academics, and media on Wednesday.
Several teams of students who will participate in the July Imagine Cup 2011 Worldwide Finals in New York City got to first showcase their projects to people who could help them refine their concepts, find markets for their ideas, and eventually find investors to provide the money they will need to turn their ideas turn into viable businesses. (more…)
*Shanna Tellerman is on her game as CEO of BizSpark One startup Wild Pockets.*
REDMOND, Wash. — Wild Pockets, a BizSpark One startup, is building the future of open source gaming.
Shanna Tellerman had no intention of becoming the CEO of a high-tech company. In college, she was intent on pursuing a career in art. It wasn’t until she took a course that combined art and technology at Carnegie Mellon University that she had the idea that she could marry the two fields. While at Carnegie Mellon, Tellerman worked on a project that used video game technology as a training method for first responders in emergency situations. The result was a drag-and-drop user interface that let people set up almost any kind of firefighting scenario. Her solution was so easy to use that it quickly became popular with fire departments across the U.S. (more…)
