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Gilbert student set to graduate high school at age 11

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Ria Cheruvu is on the precipice of completing a major milestone in life, as shes very, very close to receiving her high school diploma. What makes her story a little less common than the average high school graduate is the time of life when shes graduating; the Arizona Connections Academy student is at an age when many students are picking up the basics of algebra.

Cheruvu is a 10-year-old girl not an overly uncommon one but not quite the norm either who expects to receive her diploma right around the time she turns 11. What happens immediately after that, however, remains up in the air.

There are a few long-term plans either already in the works for Cheruvu. At some point, she plans to attend college at Arizona State University, more than likely the schools Polytechnic campus located in Mesa not too far from her home in Gilbert. After that, in theory, are a few years in Cambridge, Mass., to pursue her post-secondary degree from Harvard.

What shes pursuing a career in neural cryptography, a complicated field dependent on principles of data security. A quick Google search for neural cryptography results in the appearance of a number of mathematical equations and algorithms, as well as an indication that much of the work in this field is done for theoretical purposes. Its rife with potential, and Cheruvu said neural cryptography would offer her a career with an opportunity to help people.

Anything after graduation though remains in the plane of potential and possibility. Cheruvu doesnt plan to attend college shortly after receiving that diploma; rather, she and her family intend to give her a little break in between so she doesnt get too burned out by life in the advanced stage. Not that shell stop studying and picking up knowledge anytime soon.

Im going to keep learning. Thats my main goal; I want to learn more and more about neural cryptography, she said. Im just going to keep on learning.

Plus, a little time off provides ample opportunity for Cheruvu to indulge in a few of her hobbies as well.

Its here where her blend of common and uncommon for her age comes into play. On the one hand, shes still a preteen girl as reflected by her taste in books like the I Am Number Four, Hunger Games trilogy and the book series Legend, all of which fit in the young adult genre. She also plays piano, paints and draws, writes poetry, golfs a bit and enjoys singing, none of which, again, arent overly surprising for a 10-year-old girl.

What makes her uncommon though is the depth of her interest in these activities. Playing piano doesnt entail replaying a piece of classical music; instead, shell compose her own music to perform. Shell also use her skills at mathematics and incorporate them into her golf game; golf, at its essence, is the incorporation of geometry into physical activity.

Everything is connected; everything Im learning is contributing to something, she said.

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Gilbert student set to graduate high school at age 11

How social media is helping Islamic State to spread its poison

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Isil is the first terrorist group whose members have grown up using computers, and the group has demonstrated a high level of sophistication both in the way it produces its propaganda videos and in how it expertly exploits social media networks to ensure they attract a large following.

For example, the gruesome execution videos of Western hostages such as the US journalist James Foley are carefully stage-managed, in order to capture the full horror of the crime without explicitly showing the exact moment when the captive is decapitated thereby staying within the social media guidelines that ban the dissemination of acts of extreme violence.

Isil has also proved adept at making sure its cheap, home-made videos reach the widest possible audience. One successful tactic is to hijack popular Twitter hashtags, such as those relating to the recent referendum on Scottish independence or last summers World Cup in Brazil, which enables its hateful message to reach a far wider audience than its traditional following within the radicalised Islamist community.

Thanks to Edward Snowden, renegade groups are tech-savvy (REUTERS)

Preventing Isil, as well as other criminal organisations such as paedophile rings, from exploiting the internet in this manner would be perfectly feasible if the intelligence agencies still retained the ability to track the location where the material originated. But thanks to Snowden, renegade groups are now well-acquainted with the techniques that organisations such as the NSA and GCHQ have employed in the past to identify potential terrorist cells including accessing social media websites and private emails alongside the more traditional interception of phone calls.

In the post-Snowden world, this has become immeasurably more difficult not least because the whistle-blowers revelations prompted many of the worlds leading social media companies to tighten up their security arrangements, primarily to reassure customers that their private activities were safe from the activities of intelligence-seeking eavesdroppers.

Both Apple and Google have recently changed their default settings to make encryption an opt-out rather than an opt-in feature. Moreover, the cosy relationship that existed pre-Snowden between the service providers and the spooks, which meant the agencies were given details of the access codes, is now dead: it ended the moment Snowdens revelations provoked a public outcry on both sides of the Atlantic about the alleged mass surveillance this allowed.

Subsequent attempts to heal the rift have foundered over the internet firms erroneous belief that their interests are best served by putting a higher priority on protecting their customers than on preventing acts of terrorism.

But if, as Mr Hannigan contends, these companies have become the unwitting command and control networks for groups such as Isil, it is very much in their interests to cooperate. Otherwise, when the next bomb goes off in London or New York, they could have some difficult questions to answer.

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How social media is helping Islamic State to spread its poison

Why the Woman Who Found Snowden Doesn’t Want More Whistleblowers

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A few days ago, I found myself in a crowded Manhattan office watching Laura Poitras sign posters for her new documentary. Each signature appeared above the film's titleCitizenfourand below the film's subjectEdward Snowden. She didn't think she had time, but her handler insisted. It's taken me a while, but only now do I realize what a powerful metaphor that moment was. In a way, it revealed what Poitras thinks about the future of whistleblowers: We shouldn't need them any more.

I didn't know what to expect from my chat with Poitras, just like Poitras didn't know what to expect out of the stories that would come from what they learned in that hotel room. Here was a rogue intelligence analyst exposing some of the United States government's deepest darkest secrets. This could change everything! All of the evils of the Patriot Act could be cured! This could be our generation's Watergate!

Except it wasn't, and it isn't. Poitras introduced one of the world's greatest whistleblowers to the public, and it's hard to imagine the story that followed to get any bigger. Many expect more whistleblowers to step forward, but the whistle's already loud enough. Shy as he may seem, Snowden's the one who was supposed to change everything.

Immediately after we exited the office building a few minutes later, Poitras and I ducked into the backseat of a black Mercedes sedan. It smelled like new leather, and she looked tired. This was no surprise. Flanked by glowing reviews, Citizenfour opened in theaters that day, and everybody wanted to talk to the director. She also happened to be the woman who found Edward Snowden.

Well, the more accurate thing to say would be that Edward Snowden found her. In classic whistleblower fashion, he reached out to carefully selected journalists, including Glenn Greenwald, and offered up the leaked documents. Poitras followed up and within a few months was in a hotel room in Hong Kong, sitting with Snowden, Greenwald, and The Guardian's Ewan MacAskill.

"[My first impression] was shock because both Glenn and I both thought he was going to be much older," Poitras said of Snowden, as we headed uptown. "But then I was just completely blown away by the kind of resolve, the calm. He just sort of had made this decision and he was in this place of just like, 'I'm here what do you guys need.' And it was a sense of incredible trust."

Again, this sounds like a prototypical whistleblower: someone who quietly hides in the background, risking their own freedom in order to expose the truth. This doesn't really sound like the Edward Snowden we know, though. Whether he wanted to or not, the 31-year-old former NSA contractor is now an international celebrity who's living in exile, where he can trust no one. Meanwhile, just a couple of months ago, the Electronic Frontier Foundation hailed Snowden and proclaimed: "The World Needs More Whistleblowers."

I asked Poitras what she thought of this idea. At the end of Citizenfour (sorry for the spoiler) we learn that another whistleblower had stepped forward and offered more documents about the U.S. government's misbehavior. Did she hope Citizenfour would inspire even more?

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Why the Woman Who Found Snowden Doesn't Want More Whistleblowers

Improving Cryptography with New Research

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Category: Science & Technology Posted: November 4, 2014 11:04AM Author: Guest_Jim_*

Data security is of great importance in the modern world, with so much private information being transmitted every day. Many modern cryptographic schemes rely on such complex operations that massive computational resources would be needed to crack them. Researchers at MIT and Maynooth University have recently found that some of these schemes also allow for another kind of security, which could be used to better protect the data.

While computational complexity protects data by requiring prodigious amounts of time and resources to crack, information-theoretic security protects against extracting any useful information, even with unlimited computational power. Information-theoretic schemes are some complicated though, that they are not practical to use. However, the researchers have found that existing cryptographic schemes do have some information-theoretic guarantees. The researchers found this by examining the probability spaces that pieces of plaintext would become certain ciphertexts. By keeping the probability of the different ciphertexts near each other, it becomes much harder to infer what the original plaintext may be.

What this translates to is that while an entire message may not be information-theoretic secured, portions of it could be. Potentially one could design the scheme to make sure select portions are, such as social security numbers, ages, or other particularly important pieces of information.

Source: MIT

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Improving Cryptography with New Research

Online Drug Dealers Are Now Accepting Darkcoin, Bitcoin’s Stealthier Cousin

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When the cryptocurrency darkcoin launched earlier this year, it distinguished itself from dozens of bitcoin copycats by promising to keep users transactions far more anonymous than its predecessor. Now that promise is being tested in the Internets fastest-growing proving ground for privacy technologies: the online black market for drugs.

Over the last month, two of the dark web markets selling an anonymous, mail-order catalog of narcotics and other contraband have begun supporting darkcoin transactions. On a site called Nucleus, visitors can now use darkcoin to buy LSD, MDMA, and marijuana. On the competing market Diabolus, dealers accept it for cocaine, synthetic stimulants like ethylone and alpha-PVP, and even counterfeit Euros. Those two markets still represent only a tiny fraction of the growing dark web drug economymost of which uses bitcoin exclusively. But darkcoins entrance could signal a new means of transaction in that underground industry, and one thats far harder for law enforcement to trace.

Using [darkcoin] on Diabolus is no more difficult than using bitcoin, and we hope that this currency will receive more adoption because of its superior anonymity, a Diabolus administrator known as Accida wrote on the Reddit forum devoted to dark net markets two weeks ago. Ultimately, Diabolus cares about protecting your security and anonymity, and well consistently take action to maintain it as best we can.

PVP-alpha, marijuana, and ecstacy being sold for darkcoin on the drug site Nucleus. Screenshot: WIRED

Darkcoin is designed to scramble any attempts at blockchain tracing. Darkcoin users can, whenever they want, swap their coins with two other users, a process known as CoinJoin. That exchange is organized by a so-called Master Node, one of the servers that runs the darkcoin network in exchange for periodic payments in the currency. And since that coordination of CoinJoin transactions is protected by encryption, its nearly impossible for an outside observer to match up darkcoin payments with anyones identity.

Despite all of that, darkcoins creator Evan Duffield says hes never intended darkcoin to be used for dark web drug sales. But he cant stop drug vendors from being attracted to its privacy properties. Yes, it was accepted and implemented by these two markets. I cant really control that, he says. The goal has always been to make a currency thats privacy-centric and is more for mass consumer base types of things. Its not just for buying drugs online.

But he still sees Diabolus and Nucleus adoption of darkcoin as a positive sign for his budding currency system. Bitcoin, he points out, got an early boost from Silk Road, which accepted it long before more mainstream vendors like Dell and Overstock.com. Duffield points to dozens of websites that already accept darkcoin payments, many in exchange for private web hosting or VPN services to encrypt and anonymize internet traffic. Early on with bitcoin the only thing you could do with it was gamble and buy drugs. Then it got past that and was accepted on many sites all over the internet, says Duffield. The same thing is happening with darkcoin.

Adoption by the narcotics underground could give darkcoin a needed injection of demand: A speculative bubble brought darkcoins price to more than $13 in May, making it the second-most valuable cryptocurrency after bitcoin at the time. But since then, its exchange rate has plummeted back to less than $2; all existing darkcoins are now worth close to $8 million.

Booms and bust in value, however, have never mattered to the privacy-sensitive dark net economy as much as they do to cryptocurrency speculators. A currencys privacy properties, after all, have little to do with its dollar value, as the black market Silk Road administrator known as the Dread Pirate Roberts said after a bitcoin crash in 2013. Bitcoins foundation, its algorithms and network, dont change with the exchange rate, he wrote in a message at the time. It is just as important to the functioning of Silk Road at $1 as it is at $1,000. That may be even more true of darkcoin, which is specifically designed to allow anonymous transactions.

Since the FBI takedown of the Silk Road in October of last year, next-generation cryptomarkets have been evolving and experimenting, using features like multi-signature transactions and even peer-to-peer selling systems to better protect transactions from surveillance. But bitcoins fundamental privacy problems persist. Darkcoin, along with other anonymous money projects like Dark Wallet and the still-in-development cryptocurrency Zerocoin could change that.

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Online Drug Dealers Are Now Accepting Darkcoin, Bitcoin’s Stealthier Cousin

Cryptocurrency Round-Up: Treasury Seeks Advice on Bitcoin and Circle Launches App

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UK government asks bitcoin community for cryptocurrency advice and Circle releases platform as app(IBTimes UK)

Bitcoin has continued its recent downward trend by falling in price by a further 1.5% over the last 24 hours.

All other major cryptocurrencies have also seen negative movement since yesterday, with litecoin, dogecoin, peercoin, namecoin and darkcoin all falling by between 1% and 5%.

The biggest mover across all markets was pesetacoin, the unofficial national cryptocurrency of Spain. A 40% rise in value pushed its market capitalisation back up towards $50,000 for the first time since September.

The Treasury is requesting information and advice from those within the bitcoin community in order to understand how best to regulate cryptocurrencies.

Bitcoin advocates from fintech (financial technology) firms, together with law enforcement agencies and financial regulators, will be approached by the government in the hope that better regulation will improve the UK's fintech sector.

"Digital currencies and digital currency exchanges are currently unregulated in the UK," said a Treasury spokesman. "We're considering the potential benefits of digital currencies to customers and the technology that underpins them, and whether we should take action to support innovation in this area.

"We're also looking at the potential risks, and assessing whether action is required to address any concerns."

Bitcoin-to-fiat currency exchange Circle has launched its own mobile app for iOS and Android platforms.

The integration of credit card payments into the app will allow users to withdraw and deposit money into their bitcoin wallets, while Touch ID compatibility with iOS devices will add a level of biometric security.

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Cryptocurrency Round-Up: Treasury Seeks Advice on Bitcoin and Circle Launches App


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