An Unprecedented Look at Stuxnet the World’s First Digital Weapon

My recent book, The Universal Machine, opens its chapter on hacking with the deployment of the Stuxnet computer virus. Allegedly created by Israel and US intelligence services to target Irans nuclear bomb programme it was the worlds first state against state digital weapon. With North Korea now being accused of hacking Sony perhaps its time to revisit this story. Wired has recently published an excerpt from a new book on Stuxnet - recommended reading.



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System Development Corporation the worlds first software company

My colleague, Bob Doran, brought this video to my attention about System Development Corporation - arguably the worlds first software company.

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How the Worlds First Computer Was Rescued From the Scrap Heap

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An ENIAC technician changes a valve

Wired recently published an article on how Ross Perot decided to rescue ENIAC "one" of the worlds first computers (theyre not strictly speaking correct to call ENIAC "the first" computer). Read about this fascinating story here.

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Stuxnet the first digital weapon

Radio New Zealand National had a great interview with Kim Zetter who has written a book about Stuxnet, the worlds first digital weapon. You can listen to the interview here or read about Stuxnet in chapter 12 of my book The Universal Machine. Its certainly true that quietly over the last few years we have crossed into a new age where cyberwar is now a reality.

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This day in history the first tweet

On March 21 2006 Jack Dorsey sent the very first tweet. Like many tweets not especially informative and presumable Jack didnt have many, if any, followers. Twitter was opened to the public that July and had its first major success at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in 2007, shortly after it had been made into a company. And the rest< as they say, is history. You can follow me and this blog @driwatson

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Celebrating the First Set of Google Geo Education Awardees and Announcing Round Two

Posted by Dave Thau, Senior Developer Advocate

Googles GeoEDU Outreach program is excited to announce the opening of the second round of our Geo Education Awards, aimed at supporting qualifying educational institutions who are creating content and curricula for their mapping, remote sensing, or GIS initiatives.

If you are an educator in these areas, we encourage you to apply for an award. To celebrate the first round of awardees, and give a sense of the kind of work we have supported in the past, here are brief descriptions of some of our previous awards.

Nicholas Clinton, Tsinghua University
Development of online remote sensing course content using Google Earth Engine
Nick is building 10 labs for an introductory remote sensing class. Topics include studying electromagnetic radiation, image processing, time series analysis, and change detection. The labs are being taught currently, and materials will be made available when the course has been completed. From Lab 6:

Lets look at some imagery in Earth Engine.  Search for the place Mountain View, CA, USA.  What the heck is all that stuff!?  We are looking at this scene because of the diverse mix of things on the Earth surface.

Add the Landsat 8 32-day EVI composite.  What do you observe?  Recall that the more vegetative cover the higher the index.  It looks like the "greenest" targets in this scene are golf courses.

Lets say we dont really care about vegetation (not true, of course!), but we do care about water.  Lets see if the water indices can help us decipher our Mountain View mystery scene.

Dana Tomlin, University of Pennsylvania
Geospatial Programming: Childs Play
Dana is creating documentation, lesson plans, sample scripts, and homework assignments for each week in a 13-week, university-level course on geospatial programming. The course uses the Python computer programming language to utilize, customize, and extend the capabilities of three geographic information systems: Google’s Earth Engine, ESRI’s ArcGIS, and the open-source QGIS.

Declan G. De Paor, Old Dominion University
A Modular Approach to Introducing Google Mapping Technologies into Geoscience Curricula Worldwide
Declans award supports senior student Chloe Constants who is helping design Google Maps Engine and Google Earth Engine modules for existing geoscience coursework, primarily focused on volcanic and tectonic hazards, and digital mapping. Declan and Chloe will present the modules at faculty development workshops in person and online. They see GME/GEE as a terrific way to offer authentic undergraduate research experiences to non-traditional geoscience students.

Mary Elizabeth Killilea, New York University
Google Geospatial Tools in a Global Classroom: “Where the City Meets the Sea: Studies in Coastal Urban Environments"
Mary and the Global Technology Services team at NYU are developing a land­ cover change lab using Google Earth Engine. NYU has campuses around the world, so their labs are written to be used globally. In fact, students in four campuses around the globe are currently collecting and sharing data for the lab. Students at their sites analyze their local cities, but do so in a global context.

One group of students used Android mobile devices to collect land use data in New Yorks Battery Park.

While others in the same course collected these points in Abu Dhabi. Upon collection, the observations were automatically uploaded, mapped, and shared.

Scott Nowicki and Chris Edwards, University of Nevada at Las Vegas
Advanced Manipulation and Visualization of Remote Sensing Datasets with Google Earth Engine
Scott and Chris are taking biology, geoscience, and social science students on a field trip to collect geological data, and are generating screencast tutorials to show how these data can be queried, downloaded, calibrated, manipulated and interpreted using free tools including Google Earth Engine. These tutorials may be freely incorporated into any geospatial course, and all the field site data and analyses will be publicly released and published, giving a full description of what features are available to investigate, and how best to interpret both the remote sensing datasets and ground truth activities.

Steven Whitmeyer and Shelley Whitmeyer, James Madison University
Using Google Earth to Model Geologic Change Through Time
Steven and Shelley are building exercises for introductory geoscience courses focusing on coastal change, and glacial landform change. These exercises incorporate targets and goals of the Next Generation Science Standards. They are also developing tools to create new tectonic reconstructions of how continents and tectonic plates have moved since Pangaea breakup. Some of the current animations are available here and here.

We hope this overview of previous award recipients gives you a sense for the range of educational activities our GeoEDU awards are supporting. If you are working on innovative geospatial education projects, we invite you to apply for a GeoEDU award.

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First Aid American Red Cross 1 2

First Aid - American Red Cross APK 1.2
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Requirements: Android 2.2+
Overview: Accidents happen. First Aid - American Red Cross APK 1.2 is free The official American Red Cross First Aid app puts expert advice for everyday emergencies in your hand. Get the app and be prepared for what life brings. With videos, interactive quizzes and simple step-by-step advice it’s never been easier to know first aid.

Features: Download
· HEAT STROKE AND RELATED CONTENT NOW INCLUDED IN LEARN AND EMERGENCY TABS
· Simple step-by-step instructions guide you through everyday full first aid scenarios.
· Fully integrated with 9-1-1 so you can call EMS from the app at any time.
· Videos and animations make learning first aid fun and easy.
· Safety tips for everything, from severe winter weather to hurricanes, earthquakes and tornadoes help you prepare for emergencies.
· Preloaded content means you have instant access to all safety information at anytime, even without reception or an link to Internet connection.
Interactive quizzes allow you to earn badges that you can share with your friends and show off your lifesaving knowledge.

The app is ad-free and spam free.

System requirements
This app requires an SD card with 40MB of free space, and it’ll work on Android 2.2 or upwards.

First Aid - American Red Cross APK 1.2

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First Africa meets Latam Tech Meetup takes place in NY

First Africa meets Latam Tech Meetup takes place in NY

An Event organized by TechStem.org which is brought about to facilitate the exchange of Innovative Ideas between thinkers who have developed interest in the two tech start-up ecosystems, the event was scheduled for January 28 in New York.

TechStem.org,was founded by Adrian Avendano with the purpose of promoting Technological and Business Innovation across both the Latin American and African tech ecosystems.

“Africa and Latin America share a lot in common. For example Latin America is one of the fastest growing markets in the world in terms of digital take up and usage. The median age for the 409 million person population of South America is just 26.1 years old. Africa shares similar opportunities and challenges, regarding the growing tech ecosystem and growing tech entrepreneurship culture,” the company said.

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Where were the worlds first computer animations produced

With the final instalment of the Hobbit about to be released, and Frozen still charming the littlies, computer animation has never been more prominent. Youll be surprised though to discover where computer animation started. This blog post by Brian Clegg (whos blog I recommend) will inform you of the start of computer animation in a science lab.

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The first detailed maps of global forest change

Posted by Matt Hansen and Peter Potapov, University of Maryland; Rebecca Moore and Matt Hancher, Google

Most people are familiar with exploring images of the Earth’s surface in Google Maps and Earth, but of course there’s more to satellite data than just pretty pictures. By applying algorithms to time-series data it is possible to quantify global land dynamics, such as forest extent and change. Mapping global forests over time not only enables many science applications, such as climate change and biodiversity modeling efforts, but also informs policy initiatives by providing objective data on forests that are ready for use by governments, civil society and private industry in improving forest management.

In a collaboration led by researchers at the University of Maryland, we built a new map product that quantifies global forest extent and change from 2000 to 2012. This product is the first of its kind, a global 30 meter resolution thematic map of the Earth’s land surface that offers a consistent characterization of forest change at a resolution that is high enough to be locally relevant as well. It captures myriad forest dynamics, including fires, tornadoes, disease and logging.

Global 30 meter resolution thematic maps of the Earth’s land surface: Landsat composite reference image (2000), summary map of forest loss, extent and gain (2000-2012), individual maps of forest extent, gain, loss, and loss color-coded by year. Click to enlarge

The satellite data came from the Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) sensor onboard the NASA/USGS Landsat 7 satellite. The expertise of NASA and USGS, from satellite design to operations to data management and delivery, is critical to any earth system study using Landsat data. For this analysis, we processed over 650,000 ETM+ images in order to characterize global forest change.

Key to the study’s success was the collaboration between remote sensing scientists at the University of Maryland, who developed and tested models for processing and characterizing the Landsat data, and computer scientists at Google, who oversaw the implementation of the final models using Google’s Earth Engine computation platform. Google Earth Engine is a massively parallel technology for high-performance processing of geospatial data, and houses a copy of the entire Landsat image catalog. For this study, a total of 20 terapixels of Landsat data were processed using one million CPU-core hours on 10,000 computers in parallel, in order to characterize year 2000 percent tree cover and subsequent tree cover loss and gain through 2012. What would have taken a single computer 15 years to perform was completed in a matter of days using Google Earth Engine computing.

Global forest loss totaled 2.3 million square kilometers and gain 0.8 million square kilometers from 2000 to 2012. Among the many results is the finding that tropical forest loss is increasing with an average of 2,101 additional square kilometers of forest loss per year over the study period. Despite the reduction in Brazilian deforestation over the study period, increasing rates of forest loss in countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Tanzania, Angola, Peru and Paraguay resulted in a statistically significant trend in increasing tropical forest loss. The maps and statistics from this study fill an information void for many parts of the world. The results can be used as an initial reference for countries lacking such information, as a spur to capacity building in such countries, and as a basis of comparison in evolving national forest monitoring methods. Additionally, we hope it will enable further science investigations ranging from the evaluation of the integrity of protected areas to the economic drivers of deforestation to carbon cycle modeling.

The Chaco woodlands of Bolivia, Paraguay and Argentina are under intensive pressure from agroindustrial development. Paraguay’s Chaco woodlands within the western half of the country are experiencing rapid deforestation in the development of cattle ranches. The result is the highest rate of deforestation in the world. Click to enlarge

Global map of forest change: http://earthenginepartners.appspot.com/science-2013-global-forest

If you are curious to learn more, tune in next Monday, November 18 to a live-streamed, online presentation and demonstration by Matt Hansen and colleagues from UMD, Google, USGS, NASA and the Moore Foundation:

Live-stream Presentation: Mapping Global Forest Change

Live online presentation and demonstration, followed by Q&A

Monday, November 18, 2013 at 1pm EST, 10am PST

Link to live-streamed event: http://goo.gl/JbWWTk

Please submit questions here: http://goo.gl/rhxK5X

For further results and details of this study, see High-Resolution Global Maps of 21st-Century Forest Cover Change in the November 15th issue of the journal Science.

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Revolution The First 2000 Years of Computing Exhibit Opens at the Computer History Museum

Whether it be art museums, history museums, museums that focus on a specific event in history or some other kind, people love going to museums. However, the majority of museums are generally more fun for the elderly, buffs of the certain genre or elementary school field trips. But there is one museum that caters to a different type of visitor, a more technological visitor, the Computer History Museum, and this week they have something new for all the tech junkies out there.

This week the Computer History Museum opened a $19 million, 25,000-square-foot expansion with a new signature exhibition known as "Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing." This new exhibit, after being in development for over six years, represents the most comprehensive physical and online exploration of computing history in the world. It spans everything from the abacus and slide rules all the way to robots, Pong and the Internet.

According to John Hollar, CEO of the museum located in Mountain View, California, "Many times, people coming to the museum have very basic questions: How did that computer on my desk get there? How did that phone Ive used for so long get smart? Its an exhibition thats primarily aimed at a non-technical audience, though theres a ton of great history and information for the technical audience as well."

The exhibition has been specifically designed to be accessible to visitors in a multitude of ways. This includes documents, video presentations, over 5,000 images and 1,100 artifacts in 19 galleries. The exhibit also features hands-on interactive stations that will demonstrate the principles of computing like being able to pick up a 24lb Osbourne computer or playing a game of Pong, Pacman or Spacewar.

There are many key artifacts in the exhibit including a 1956 IBM 305 computer as well as its 350 hard drive, the first commercially available machine of its type which practically took up an entire room and only held 5MB of data. Guests will also get to see the console of a 1950 Univac 1, the first household computer, a complete installation of the original IBM System/360, the dominate technology in mainframe computing for nearly 20 years and a Cray-1 supercomputer which was the worlds fastest from 1976 to 1982.

Guests will even get the opportunity to see "The Utah Teapot", the device graphics designer pioneer Martin Newell used as his 3D computer model at the University of Utah. The teapot became the standard reference for computer graphics and the more realistic the designers could make the teapot, the better their graphics engine was considered. The ENIAC, which was built during World War II and was the worlds first large-scale computer to run at electronic speed, is also on display.

"This is one of the greatest electronic computers ever invented," stated Holler. "Weve made this a very human story. Weve tried to talk about not just what happened, but what mattered in history. What mattered often boils down to the people who were the great innovators and the problems they were trying to solve, and so much of the exhibit is devoted to those important stories."

The ceremonial opening, which took place yesterday, contained a number of technological legends like Apple co-founder and engineer Steve Wozniak, computer programming pioneer Donald Knuth, video game inventors Al Alcorn and Steve Russell and IBMs first female fellow Fran Allen. The galleries of the exhibit will have many legends of the computing world speak as part of a series entitled "Revolutionaries".

Guest can also partake of an oral history program with over 40 interactive stations featuring the legends of computing. The stations will contain archived interviews with pioneers like Chuck Thacker from Xeroxs Palo Alto Research Center and John Atanasoff who built the first digital computer in 1939. Holler added, "We often say, wouldnt it have been great to have been able to talk to Michelangelo as he painted the Sistine Chapel? We can do that."

The exhibit is open now and is sure to be the highlight of any computer or tech lovers trip to the museum. If you love technology, history, computers or all of the above, then this is one place you have to visit before you die. Put it on your bucket list or tattoo it to the inside of your eyelids. Do whatever it takes to remember to go and see this exhibit.

Source: PC World

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