Sensor knows when you're lying through your teeth

A sensor embedded in a tooth could one day tell doctors when people have defied medical advice to give up smoking or eat less. Built into a tiny circuit board that fits in a tooth cavity, the sensor includes an accelerometer that sends data on mouth motion to a smartphone.

Machine learning software is taught to recognise each telltale jaw motion pattern, then works out how much of the time the patient is chewing, drinking, speaking, coughing or smoking.

The inventors – Hao-hua Chu and colleagues at National Taiwan University in Taipei – want to use the mouth as a window on a variety of health issues. The device can be fitted into dentures or a dental brace, and the team plan tominiaturise the device to fit in a cavity or crown.

The researchers say the sensor shows great promise: in tests on eight people with a prototype implant installed in their dentures, the system recognised oral activities correctly 94 per cent of the time.

The prototype was attached to a power source by an external wire, so the team still needs a way to include a microbattery.

Once they manage this, the researchers want to add a Bluetooth radio to the device. But as that is a microwave energy source – albeit a very low power one – Chu says medical experts are advising the team on how to ensure the implant would be safe.

If miniaturised and made wireless, the device has potential, says Trevor Johnson, vice-chair of research at the Faculty of General Dental Practice in the UK. "This could have a number of uses in dentistry, for example as a research tool, for monitoring patients who clench or grind their teeth, and for assessing the impact of various dental interventions," he says.

The work is due to be presented at the International Symposium on Wearable Computers in Zurich, Switzerland, in September.

Space-age architecture in the coldest place on earth

The Antarctic explorers of the heroic era will be turning in their graves: Scott, Amundsen and Shackleton had to make do with wooden huts. And they were the lucky ones. Others survived the brutal polar winter with only upturned boats for shelter. Now, a century later a touring exhibition opening in Glasgow, UK, this week shows just how different conditions are today.

Commissioned by the British Council and curated by The Arts Catalyst, Ice Lab: New Architecture and Science in Antarctica is at Architecture and Design Scotland at The Lighthouse until 2 October 2013 and then at the Museum of Science & Industry as part of the Manchester Science Festival between 21 October and 6 January before it tours internationally. 

Alison George – who spent an Antarctic winter in a far-from-space-age wooden hut – explores some of the futuristic designs.

Light completely stopped for a record-breaking minute

The fastest thing in the universe has come to a complete stop for a record-breaking minute. At full pelt, light would travel about 18 million kilometres in that time – that's more than 20 round trips to the moon.

"One minute is extremely, extremely long," says Thomas Krauss at the University of St Andrews, UK. "This is indeed a major milestone."

The feat could allow secure quantum communications to work over long distances.

While light normally travels at just under 300 million metres per second in a vacuum, physicists managed to slow it down to just 17 metres per second in 1999 and then halt it completely two years later, though only for a fraction of a second. Earlier this year, researchers kept it still for 16 seconds using cold atoms.

Stripy light

To break the minute barrier, George Heinze and colleagues at the University of Darmstadt, Germany, fired a control laser at an opaque crystal, sending its atoms into a quantum superposition of two states. This made it transparent to a narrow range of frequencies. Heinze's team then halted a second beam that entered the crystal by switching off the first laser and hence the transparency.

The storage time depends on the crystal's superposition. A magnetic field extends it but complicates the control laser configuration. Heinze's team used an algorithm to "breed" combinations of magnet and laser, leading them to one that trapped light for a minute.

They also used the trap to store and then retrieve an image consisting of three stripes. "We showed you can imprint complex information on your light beam," says Heinze.

Tens of seconds of light storage are needed for a device called a quantum repeater, which would stop and then re-emit photons used in secure communications, to preserve their quantum state over long distances.

It should even be possible to achieve longer light storage times with other crystals, says Heinze, as they have pushed their current material close to its physical limit.

Hackers Demand Ransom for Hijacked Androids

Ransomware has made the jump from personal computers to the Android world.

Android.FakeAV.C, a new breed of ransomware, has been spotted in Asia -- almost half (48 percent) in India and Indonesia -- according to an alert by Bitdefender security researcher Liviu Arsene.

Mobile ransomware works much like its PC kin. In a PC, a malware program seizes control of a computer and demands a ransom for its release.

Often the bad app will splash a warning on its victim's display claiming to represent law enforcement, say the FBI or Europol, and charging them with some kind of misconduct -- illegal downloads or such.

Frazzled targets often pay the ransom, although most of the time it doesn't do any good. The bandits take the money and don't bother to remove the malware from their victim's machine.

Growing Sophistication

Android ransomware also poses as a security app. "It even shares the same scanning engine as a legitimate Android security solution," Arsene reported.

That may have been why the malware was initially able to evade detection when members of its family were posted to Google Play, the official online Android app store.

"This demonstrates that Android malware has grown in complexity and attackers are diversifying," Arsene told TechNewsWorld.

"Last year, we found a very nasty Trojan that behaved as ransomware," he said. "It locked down your PC and demanded payment to get access to it again."

"What they did is copy the PC model and adapted it for Android," Arsene added.

The increased level of sophistication and its similarity with PC ransomware might suggest that Android malware coders are branching out, Arsene noted. "Emulating the behavior of PC malware on Android is no novelty, as we [have] seen in the past how adware gained traction and evolved on the mobile OS."

Dark Cloud Gathering

Fallout has spread overseas from revelations about U.S. spy agencies snooping on emails, phone calls and data stored on the servers of high-tech Goliaths like Amazon, Google, Apple and Microsoft.

Fifty-six percent of non-U.S. residents said they were less likely to use U.S.-based cloud providers in light of recent revelations about government access to customer information, found a survey released last week by the Cloud Security Alliance.

An overwhelming number of the nearly 500 CSA members from around the world participating in the survey (90 percent) also said that companies that have been subpoenaed through provisions of the Patriot Act should be able to publish summary information about the numbers of responses they have made.

Suspicions about cloud storage now may be a drag on the data rush to the cloud, but they won't be a doorstop, noted Bill Blake, president of Fasoo USA.

"It may slow it down, but it won't stop it," he told TechNewsWorld. "It's a train that's left the station, and it's going to continue."

Bite Out of Apple

Developers were shut off from their website at Apple last week after a security researcher, who said he was performing a proof of concept of a vulnerability at the site, removed 100,000 user records from the forum that serves some 275,000 code warriors.

The researcher, Ibrahim Balic, said he alerted Apple to the vulnerability but didn't hear anything from the company until it posted a notice at the developer website declaring it had been hacked.

Once news of the breach broke, a phishing campaign emerged attempting to social engineer online credentials from Apple users.

This particular event had two big attractions for phishers: a top-line news story and Apple.

"Any high-profile event that makes the news will always be subject to phishing scams," James Lyne, director of technology strategy at Sophos, told TechNewsWorld.

"The running joke in the security community." he added, "is if you want someone to click on something, use an Apple product as the tease."

5 Ways to Improve Your Privacy Online

1) Browser Settings

There are some easy things that can be done to configure a browser for better security and privacy. Among the basics, "go into your Web browser's preference settings and set the browser not to accept 'cookies' from sites you haven't visited, also known as third-party cookies," Simpson suggested. "Generally, you'll want to accept cookies from the sites you visit.

"Apple's Safari blocks third-party cookies by default; Mozilla intends to make this the default setting soon in Firefox, but for now you'll need to opt for the setting," he added. "You have to choose these settings in Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Google's Chrome."

Also, the newest versions of Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and several others offer settings for "Do Not Track," a proposed header field that requests that a Web application disable its site and/or cross-site tracking of user activity.

"Consider setting your browser preferences to automatically clear cookies when you close the browser," Simpson recommended.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation offers four suggestions for preventing online tracking, spokesperson Rebecca Jeschke told TechNewsWorld.

Installing Adblock Plus is one -- Adblock is a popular plug-in for Firefox and Chrome that strips out unwanted Javscript and HTML from Web pages on the fly to ensure that exploits and advertisements can't run in your browser. Selectively, the user can mark a website as whitelisted so that blocks aren't performed. The default behavior of Adblock is to block on any new site it encounters, and whitelisting is one click away.

Also recommended by the EFF are changing your cookie settings, as noted by Simpson, and turning off referers. Referer data may contain personally sensitive information from the preceding site you were on; installing plug-in Referer Control will strip this referer information out of the header.

The EFF's own HTTPS Everywhere plug-in, meanwhile, ensures maximal secure socket layer connectivity. If it detects that the site to which you connect using HTTP supports SSL, it will automatically try to establish a tunnel-encrypted SSL connection with it. With a tunnel-encrypted connection between your endpoint PC and the Web server, all traffic is shielded from view and privacy is assured.

2) Cloud Storage Encryption

Storage of anything private and personal in the cloud should use the strongest form of encryption possible. Strengths of encryption come in various standards. RSA 2048-bit key encryption provides the best possible strength when used with public key infrastructure. The chance of cracking an RSA 2048-bit private key is not nil, but it would take so long that attempting it is not practicable using today's raw computing power.

A strong cipher is the most important consideration. Close behind, however, are the questions of where you should use encryption and with what method.

If you have any data stored on the Internet that you would like to ensure never gets seen by anyone other than yourself, then this is a good candidate for encryption.

The strongest and safest method today for encryption of cloud data is Zero Knowledge. Zero knowledge means that your cloud ISP will have no knowledge of what is being stored on their site. The private key to unlock your data will be created by you on your local drive. Thus only you will have the ability to unlock the data -- not even the cloud ISP will be able to do so.

SpiderOak and Wuala are two examples of ISP Software as a Service sites that offer ZK data encryption.

There are now quite a few SaaS encryption vendors from which to choose, but those that support Zero Knowledge are the safest bet for those with privacy in mind.

3) Two-Factor Authentication

The use of hack-prone password-based access is being gradually replaced by technologies like fingerprint scan, keyfob-generated keys and two-factor authentication methods.

If your ISP uses password-based access, make sure you maintain strong passwords. A password's strength is measured by its ability to avoid being guessed. Many ISPs and portals will test the strength of your password as you create it. Pay attention and be sure that the test returns "strong."

"Do not use the same password for multiple accounts," Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy for the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, told TechNewsWorld.

Instead, use strong passwords that are unique to each account, Stephens urged -- and that's particularly important for your most sensitive online accounts, such as for banking, email and social networks, he added.

Two-factor authentication is another method that's growing in popularity. Google Gmail now offers a free two-step authentication service. The goal is to avoid having your login stream (which includes your password) from being intercepted by a "man-in-the-middle" attack. Criminals equipped with programs called packet analyzers (also known as "sniffers") can see your streaming data and steal your password.

With two-factor authentication, in addition to entering a password, the system will send to your phone a unique ID number that must be input for authentication as well. Using such a method means the "man-in-the-middle" cannot and will not know what is on your personal phone and so cannot intercept such information.

If your ISP offers two-step authentication, you'd be wise to use it.

At the same time, "it's a good idea to avoid using the same website for both your Web-based email and as your search engine," Stephens cautioned. " Web email accounts will always require some type of a login, so if you use the same site as your search engine, your searches can be connected to your email account.

"By using different websites, you can help limit the total amount of information retained by any one site," he explained.

4) Encryption for Chat and Email

With Google Talk and Google Hangouts, one can set the chat session to "off the record" to ensure that the chat session is never permanently stored on Google's chat servers.

Also, installing Pidgin for both Windows and Linux -- it's a popular multiprotocol messaging software application -- along with its "off the record" plugin will ensure that your chat session will remain encrypted and private. This ensures that an additional encryption layer is added to the stream using OTR, regardless of what the underlying protocol provides.

The same encrypted vs. nonencrypted concept applies to email. If you don't want your email read, then it is imperative that you encrypt it. The good news is that encrypting email is technically feasible using GnuPG, PGP or S/MIME standards, for example. The bad news is that few software applications are in circulation that make preparing and sending encrypted email "drop-dead" simple and foolproof in terms of usability by the general public.

5) Surf the Internet Anonymously

Finally, if you really feel strongly about keeping your Internet surfing habits anonymous, you may consider using a proxy for your Internet surfing -- though even that won't guarantee complete anonymity.

A more difficult-to-trace method for surfing the Web is called Tor. Essentially, when you install Tor software, you log onto a peer-to-peer (P2P) network representing millions of people, much in the way BitTorrent works. It is encrypted and fully decentralized, meaning not only that it is self-sustainable but also that there is no central server which, if shut down, will stop its Internet activities.

What happens in the Tor scenario is that your IP travels in a random path along the Tor encrypted tunnel and reaches a random endpoint, where your traffic then jumps on the Internet using one of the P2P computing devices as its proxy. That endpoint proxy could be a node anywhere in the world.

If you do try Tor, just go to Google and note which country shows. It will vary from minute to minute -- an indication of Tor's anonymity at work.

Nothing will happen to advance the cause for Internet privacy unless a federal mandate is established, and to the extent that the Internet operates as a borderless complex network, its global reach spans and ignores the laws and treaties of countries using it. In the meantime, however, the technology for achieving true privacy with applied encryption methods is technically feasible -- it's up to you to choose the approach you like best.