Sources in Washington have indicated that the cyber attack last June which targeted the office of US Defence Secretary Robert Gates was conducted by the Chinese military.
According to a report in the London Financial Times, "senior US officials" and "persons familiar with the event" have briefed that there is a “very high level of confidence...trending towards total certainty” within the Pentagon that the People's Liberation Army (PLA) carried out the June attack. That was seen as a particularly significant event, apparently, as it involved disruption of networks as well as passive snooping.
The FT quoted a former official as saying that:
“The PLA has demonstrated the ability to conduct attacks that disable our system...and the ability in a conflict situation to re-enter and disrupt on a very large scale.”
The US military has long warned of a rising cyber-warfare capability in the PLA, releasing a report earlier this year that China "is expanding from the traditional land, air, and sea dimensions of the modern battlefield to include space and cyber-space".
The document said that the inscrutable commies are also developing an "information warfare" force capable of "computer network attack," to achieve "electromagnetic dominance".
America has been far from idle in rising to meet this challenge; indeed there has been something of a scramble among the US military to gets its cyber boots on. The US Air Force has been particularly active, forming up a Cyber Command that may, in the future, be manned up at least in part by career net-combat specialists.
Quite apart from cyberspace, confrontation with China is one of the few justifications for much of America's huge panoply of ultra-high-tech air, maritime and perhaps space weaponry. This is stuff that many in the Pentagon love and believe in passionately, but which is occasionally threatened by the basic counter-insurgency wars the US is currently fighting. Huge amounts of money are being spent on things including armoured trucks, which could have gone on satellite-busters or energy weapons or something.
So leaks out of the Pentagon that big up China as a threat always need to be taken with a pinch of salt. It's a certainty that the PLA probes US networks, just as the US does Chinese ones. It's very likely that China is prepping some naughty network tricks for use in the event of a serious scuffle with America - and again, this will not be a one-sided effort.
But China doesn't want to fight the US - who would pay for all the iPods? And America doesn't really want to fight China - where would they get all the damn iPods made?
If the PLA really did shut down Robert Gates's unclassified email, it was a schoolboy error to show their hands so early. All they have achieved - if it was them - is give their adversaries ammo to use in demanding more resources to fight them with. And it seems exceptionally sloppy to get traced back, when it would be simplicity itself for government hats* to operate out of third countries.
But nobody's saying the PLA are all that clever, so it may well have been them. If it was, though, they evidently aren't as fiendishly cunning as all that.
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
Cellphone No 1 culprit for Sleep disorders..
A good night's sleep is becoming ever more elusive for the average American — and it's a problem that plagues us at all ages, from infancy to adulthood. Now three new papers in the Sept. 1 issue of the journal Sleep tackle the question of sleeplessness: two studies illuminate the reasons why teens and adults don't sleep enough. With teens, a major culprit is cellphone use; with adults, it's work. Meanwhile, a third study of young children reveals that sleep deprivation in early life may lead to future behavioral and cognitive problems.
The study in children was conducted at the Sleep Disorders Center at Sacre-Coeur Hospital in Montreal, where researchers analyzed the sleep patterns of close to 1,500 children aged 2.5 to 6 years — the first detailed study on the effects of sleep in developing children. The youngsters� mothers were asked to record the amount of time the children slept each night and fill out questionnaires about their child's hyperactivity and impulsivity, inattention and daytime sleepiness. Half of the kids slept 10 hours a night on average — the recommended amount for preschool-aged children — while 6% slumbered for less than 10 hours each night. Those short-sleeping children, says lead author Dr. Jacques Montplaisir, performed poorly on vocabulary and cognitive development tests at age 5, compared with the more rested group. In fact, the study found that getting one fewer hour of sleep a night during early development can triple a child's chance of scoring low on such tests, underlining sleep's long-lasting effects on proper language and cognitive development.
Not surprisingly, the short-sleepers were also more likely to score higher on tests of hyperactivity and impulsivity at age six, highlighting the importance of consistent and sufficient sleep in promoting concentration and attention skills. Montplaisir's group found more hyperactivity even among youngsters who started out as short-sleepers but had normalized their sleeping patterns by preschool age, to 10 hours a night. That suggests that early childhood — before about 3.5 years of age — is a critical period during which parents should establish proper sleeping patterns, says Montplaisir, since lack of sleep during that stage can lead to detrimental effects on behavior and development later in life.
These results are the only the latest in a growing body of evidence that links good sleep habits to better cognitive development in children. But they don't necessarily mean that light-sleeping children are doomed to wearing the dunce cap. Jodi Mindell, professor of psychology at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia, and an expert with the National Sleep Foundation, notes that Montplaisir's study doesn't establish a firm cause and effect between sleep and test performance. She notes that other factors can affect both how long children sleep and how they score on tests; youngsters with ADHD, for example, typically sleep less than other children and tend to score poorly on neuropsychological tests. "It could be that there are other variables here that could be impacting on both sleep and test performance," she says.
Unfortunately, sleep remains elusive for many adolescents and adults as well, and two other studies in Sleep reveal that cell phones and our jobs may be to blame. In one study of more than 1,600 13-to-15-year-olds in Belgium, scientists at Katholieke University Leuven found that almost 60% of students used their cell phones either to talk or text message after turning their lights out at bedtime. After following the kids for one year, the researchers report that teens who used their cell phone more than once a week after lights-out were five times more likely than kids who never used cell phones at bedtime to say they felt tired one year later. The later the teens stayed awake with their phones, the more tired they were. Most teens concentrated their phone use around midnight, but some continued communicating well past 3 a.m.
Among adults, sleep patterns aren't any better. Dr. Mathias Basner of the University of Pennsylvania plumbed a publicly available database of nearly 50,000 people questioned by the U.S. Census to find out exactly what short-sleepers — those who get four to five hours of sleep a night — did during waking hours. Since earlier surveys had linked less sleep with greater risk of disease and death, Basner was eager to tease apart whether it was the lack of sleep itself, or something else that the short-sleepers were doing while they were awake that was making them so unhealthy. He and his team were surprised to find that the main reason a person lost sleep at night was work. The more a person worked, the less he or she slept: compared with normal sleepers, people who slept 4.5 hours or less per night worked about 1.5 hours more per weekday and nearly two hours more on weekends. "The fact that work influences sleep time was not surprising, but we were amazed by the dominance of the work time effect," says Basner. "For every hour of sleep you lose, you work 30 minutes more." Previous surveys conducted over the past decade had found that for every hour of sleep lost, the average person worked seven to eight additional minutes, so these new results suggest a disturbing trend toward increased work-related sleeplessness.
Basner notes that his findings in no way suggest a causal relationship between work and the amount of sleep a person gets (or, for that matter, between work and the higher risk of health problems associated with less sleep), but they do suggest that in future sleep studies, researchers should ask about how much time their subjects spend at work, and control for the influence that work may have on sleep. Understanding why we don't sleep could lead to better ways of helping us get more z's — anything but counting sheep.
The study in children was conducted at the Sleep Disorders Center at Sacre-Coeur Hospital in Montreal, where researchers analyzed the sleep patterns of close to 1,500 children aged 2.5 to 6 years — the first detailed study on the effects of sleep in developing children. The youngsters� mothers were asked to record the amount of time the children slept each night and fill out questionnaires about their child's hyperactivity and impulsivity, inattention and daytime sleepiness. Half of the kids slept 10 hours a night on average — the recommended amount for preschool-aged children — while 6% slumbered for less than 10 hours each night. Those short-sleeping children, says lead author Dr. Jacques Montplaisir, performed poorly on vocabulary and cognitive development tests at age 5, compared with the more rested group. In fact, the study found that getting one fewer hour of sleep a night during early development can triple a child's chance of scoring low on such tests, underlining sleep's long-lasting effects on proper language and cognitive development.
Not surprisingly, the short-sleepers were also more likely to score higher on tests of hyperactivity and impulsivity at age six, highlighting the importance of consistent and sufficient sleep in promoting concentration and attention skills. Montplaisir's group found more hyperactivity even among youngsters who started out as short-sleepers but had normalized their sleeping patterns by preschool age, to 10 hours a night. That suggests that early childhood — before about 3.5 years of age — is a critical period during which parents should establish proper sleeping patterns, says Montplaisir, since lack of sleep during that stage can lead to detrimental effects on behavior and development later in life.
These results are the only the latest in a growing body of evidence that links good sleep habits to better cognitive development in children. But they don't necessarily mean that light-sleeping children are doomed to wearing the dunce cap. Jodi Mindell, professor of psychology at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia, and an expert with the National Sleep Foundation, notes that Montplaisir's study doesn't establish a firm cause and effect between sleep and test performance. She notes that other factors can affect both how long children sleep and how they score on tests; youngsters with ADHD, for example, typically sleep less than other children and tend to score poorly on neuropsychological tests. "It could be that there are other variables here that could be impacting on both sleep and test performance," she says.
Unfortunately, sleep remains elusive for many adolescents and adults as well, and two other studies in Sleep reveal that cell phones and our jobs may be to blame. In one study of more than 1,600 13-to-15-year-olds in Belgium, scientists at Katholieke University Leuven found that almost 60% of students used their cell phones either to talk or text message after turning their lights out at bedtime. After following the kids for one year, the researchers report that teens who used their cell phone more than once a week after lights-out were five times more likely than kids who never used cell phones at bedtime to say they felt tired one year later. The later the teens stayed awake with their phones, the more tired they were. Most teens concentrated their phone use around midnight, but some continued communicating well past 3 a.m.
Among adults, sleep patterns aren't any better. Dr. Mathias Basner of the University of Pennsylvania plumbed a publicly available database of nearly 50,000 people questioned by the U.S. Census to find out exactly what short-sleepers — those who get four to five hours of sleep a night — did during waking hours. Since earlier surveys had linked less sleep with greater risk of disease and death, Basner was eager to tease apart whether it was the lack of sleep itself, or something else that the short-sleepers were doing while they were awake that was making them so unhealthy. He and his team were surprised to find that the main reason a person lost sleep at night was work. The more a person worked, the less he or she slept: compared with normal sleepers, people who slept 4.5 hours or less per night worked about 1.5 hours more per weekday and nearly two hours more on weekends. "The fact that work influences sleep time was not surprising, but we were amazed by the dominance of the work time effect," says Basner. "For every hour of sleep you lose, you work 30 minutes more." Previous surveys conducted over the past decade had found that for every hour of sleep lost, the average person worked seven to eight additional minutes, so these new results suggest a disturbing trend toward increased work-related sleeplessness.
Basner notes that his findings in no way suggest a causal relationship between work and the amount of sleep a person gets (or, for that matter, between work and the higher risk of health problems associated with less sleep), but they do suggest that in future sleep studies, researchers should ask about how much time their subjects spend at work, and control for the influence that work may have on sleep. Understanding why we don't sleep could lead to better ways of helping us get more z's — anything but counting sheep.
Scientists discover height gene
The first gene which helps determine height has been foundScientists have discovered the first gene that influences a person's height.
People who carry two copies of the "tall" version of the HMGA2 gene are up to 1cm taller than those who carry two copies of the "short" version.
The international team of researchers say the discovery could aid a greater understanding of the link between height and disease.
They predict in the journal Nature Genetics many other genes will now be uncovered that control height.
Although it has long been clear that genetics plays a key role in determining a person's height, the genes involved have remained a mystery.
The latest study is a collaboration between Harvard University, the Children's Hospital Boston, Oxford University and the Peninsula Medical School in Exeter.
They analysed the genomes of 5,000 white European patients, who gave DNA samples and details of their height and weight for medical studies into diabetes and heart disease.
They found just one tiny change in the HMGA2 gene had an impact on a person's height.
The finding was confirmed by searching for the same two key versions of the gene in a further 30,000 patients.
Cancer link
Around 25% of white Europeans carry two copies of the "tall" version of the gene, while a similar proportion have two copies of the "short" version.
Carrying one copy of the "tall" version of the gene adds around 0.5cm to a person's height, while two copies adds nearly a full centimetre.
Previous research has suggested that HMGA2 plays an important role in human growth.
Rare, severe mutations in the gene cause dramatic alterations of body size in mice and humans.
Researcher Dr Tim Frayling, of the Peninsula Medical School, said: "Height is a typical 'polygenic' trait, in other words many genes contribute towards making us taller or shorter.
"Clearly, our results do not explain why one person will be 6ft 5in (195.6cm) and another only 4ft 10in (147.3cm).
"This is just the first of many that will be found, possibly as many as several hundred."
A greater understanding of the genes behind height could also provide clues about risk of disease.
Taller people are statistically more likely to be at risk from prostate, bladder and lung cancer.
This suggests that the genes that regulate cell growth and division may also play a role in the uncontrolled cell proliferation characteristic of cancer.
Conversely, shorter people are known to have a higher risk of heart disease.
Professor Joel Hirschhorn, an expert in genetics at Harvard, said "This is the first convincing result that explains how DNA can affect normal variation in human height.
"Because height is a complex trait, involving a variety of genetic and non-genetic factors, it can teach us valuable lessons about the genetic framework of other complex traits, such as diabetes, cancer and other common human diseases."
He added: "By defining the genes that normally affect stature, we might someday be able to better reassure parents that their child's height is within the range predicted by their genes, rather than a consequence of disease."
Monday, September 3, 2007
Windows VISTA SP1 coming...
Microsoft might release Windows vista SP1 Beta in a few weeks and targets the final release of SP1 in April- May 2008.
In the offering will be huge tinkering with driver support and some code cleanup to increase Boot up time and pesky Bugs showing up in a everyday users life with VISTA.
Microsoft has been forced to bring SP1 sooner mostly because of Business customers firm belief that any Microsoft OS becomes stable only after its SP1. We can expect more widespread adaptation of VISTA once the SP1 is out.
In the offering will be huge tinkering with driver support and some code cleanup to increase Boot up time and pesky Bugs showing up in a everyday users life with VISTA.
Microsoft has been forced to bring SP1 sooner mostly because of Business customers firm belief that any Microsoft OS becomes stable only after its SP1. We can expect more widespread adaptation of VISTA once the SP1 is out.
Youtube may ban your video..
Youtube has promised British legislators that it will start systematically scan videos for any copyrighted material including songs,TV shows,movies. So all the videos already posted may be scanned and thrown out if found guilty.Though youtube has its policy not to allow copy righted material, everyday thousands of users upload copyrighted material without any restriction as there is no way to filter the content.The scenario may change soon youtube may appoint more reviwers oroutsource the same for each language. But this will be one hell of a cleanup.
India plans five satellites a year
India aims to launch five satellites a year in an apparent bid to compete for the 2.5-billion-dollar heavy satellite launch business, a news report said Monday.
"We want to capture five to 10 percent of the market (mid-range satellite segment of 2,000 kg and plus) in the next five years," the Hindu quoted Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) chairman G Madhavan Nair as saying.
His comments came as India sent into orbit a 49-meter rocket carrying the Insat-4CR satellite from the Sriharikota space station in its south.
Two Polar Satellite Launch Vehicles (PSLVs) will blast off this year, and another Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) next year, he said.
"We are getting enquiries from foreign customers," he said.
Indian satellites have been used for years for weather forecast, especially for the country's farmers, but the South Asian nation has recently moved toward commercial exploitation of space technology.
"We want to capture five to 10 percent of the market (mid-range satellite segment of 2,000 kg and plus) in the next five years," the Hindu quoted Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) chairman G Madhavan Nair as saying.
His comments came as India sent into orbit a 49-meter rocket carrying the Insat-4CR satellite from the Sriharikota space station in its south.
Two Polar Satellite Launch Vehicles (PSLVs) will blast off this year, and another Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) next year, he said.
"We are getting enquiries from foreign customers," he said.
Indian satellites have been used for years for weather forecast, especially for the country's farmers, but the South Asian nation has recently moved toward commercial exploitation of space technology.
Hectares of Spider web found in TEXAS
TEXANS like to say everything in their state is bigger. They can now add spider webs to that list.
A monstrous network of sheet-like webs covering several hectares has been spun over trees in Lake Tawakoni State Park, 80 kilometres east of Dallas, baffling scientists, who say it is an almost unheard of occurrence in the region.
"The dominant spiders here seem to be long-jawed spiders, but this is unusual," said Mike Quinn, a Texas state biologist.
"Social spiders build communal nests in the tropics, but the long-jaws are not social. We still don't have a clear answer for what is going on here," he said as he stood beneath the ghostly canopy of webbing that shrouded a patch of oak and juniper trees.
The eerie scene evoked a B-grade horror movie. Thunder rumbled in the distance as spiders skittered across Mr Quinn's wide-brimmed hat.
He was collecting samples by using a metal rod to thrash branches over a "beat sheet" — a sheet nailed to criss-crossed pieces of wood into which bugs would fall.
A startling number of creepy-crawlies fell from a single branch, including several long-jawed spiders, also known as orb weavers.
"You would not want to be the prey item on the end of that," Mr Quinn said as he held one up. It was a spindly but sinister-looking thing with fangs jutting out from its raptor-like jaws.
There are 10 species of long-jaw in Texas and Mr Quinn said he needed to take the specimens to other experts to determine which they were. There were several other species of spider in the webs, including large garden spiders.
A monstrous network of sheet-like webs covering several hectares has been spun over trees in Lake Tawakoni State Park, 80 kilometres east of Dallas, baffling scientists, who say it is an almost unheard of occurrence in the region.
"The dominant spiders here seem to be long-jawed spiders, but this is unusual," said Mike Quinn, a Texas state biologist.
"Social spiders build communal nests in the tropics, but the long-jaws are not social. We still don't have a clear answer for what is going on here," he said as he stood beneath the ghostly canopy of webbing that shrouded a patch of oak and juniper trees.
The eerie scene evoked a B-grade horror movie. Thunder rumbled in the distance as spiders skittered across Mr Quinn's wide-brimmed hat.
He was collecting samples by using a metal rod to thrash branches over a "beat sheet" — a sheet nailed to criss-crossed pieces of wood into which bugs would fall.
A startling number of creepy-crawlies fell from a single branch, including several long-jawed spiders, also known as orb weavers.
"You would not want to be the prey item on the end of that," Mr Quinn said as he held one up. It was a spindly but sinister-looking thing with fangs jutting out from its raptor-like jaws.
There are 10 species of long-jaw in Texas and Mr Quinn said he needed to take the specimens to other experts to determine which they were. There were several other species of spider in the webs, including large garden spiders.
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