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Dear Friends,

Happy Reading for today.

<Karen>

1)
Exaflop
One million trillion ‘flops’ per second targeted by new institute
Preparing groundwork for an exascale computer is the mission of the
new Institute for Advanced Architectures, launched jointly at Sandia
and Oak Ridge national laboratories.
An exaflop is a thousand times faster than a petaflop, itself a
thousand times faster than a teraflop. Teraflop computers —the first
was developed 10 years ago at Sandia — currently are the state of the
art.   They do trillions of calculations a second. Exaflop computers
would perform a million trillion calculations per second.
The idea behind the institute —under consideration for a year and a
half prior to its opening — is “to close critical gaps between
theoretical peak performance and actual performance on current
supercomputers,” says Sandia project lead Sudip Dosanjh. “We believe
this can be done by developing novel and innovative computer
architectures.”
Ultrafast supercomputers improve detection of real-world conditions
by helping researchers more closely examine the interactions of
larger numbers of particles over time periods divided into smaller
segments.

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MUSIC And COPYRIGHT LAW
How much do you understand about what you can download
and use in the classroom. Do you know what fair use is?
Find out the issues, ethics and procedures
File Sharing is Not Theft
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2)
Cold Boot Attacks on Disk Encryption
FileVault turned on, powered up, encrypted swap enabled, and the 
screen saver locked.
They were in fact able to extract the 128-bit AES key; I've put screen 
snapshots of their FileVault bypass process here:
http://www.news.com/2300-1029_3-6230933-1.html
And my article with responses from Microsoft, Apple, and PGP is here:
http://www.news.com/8301-13578_3-9876060-38.html
Bottom line? This is a very nicely done attack. It's going to make us 
rethink how we handle laptops in sleep mode and servers that use 
encrypted filesystems (a mail server, for instance).

2a.
BitLocker offers operating modes that mitigate the risk of these attacks;
for more details, check out the Microsoft Data Encryption Toolkit for Mobile PCs.
It details the various BitLocker operating modes and the specific threats that they do, and do not, protect against.

2b.
Dorothy Denning Writes:
There was a case with some similary several years ago. This is exerpted
from my 1999 paper "Hiding Crimes in Cyberspace" (full paper at
http://www.nps.edu/faculty/dorothydenning/
In People v. Price in Yolo County, California Superior Court prosecutors
successfully compelled production of the passphrase protecting the
defendant's PGP key. In this case, however, the key was not sought for
the purpose of acquiring evidence for conviction, but rather to
determine whether the defendant's computer should be released from
police custody. He had already been convicted of annoying children and
wanted his computer back. The police argued it should not be released as
there was reason to believe it contained contraband, specifically
PGP-encrypted files containing child pornography. This determination was
based on the existence of a pair of files named "Boys.gif" and
"Boys.pgp" (when PGP encrypts a plaintext file, it automatically gives
the ciphertext file the same name but with the extension ".pgp").[7]
The defendant was unsuccessful in arguing a 5th Amendment privilege. The
prosecution argued that the contents of the file had already been
uttered and, therefore, were not protected under the 5th Amendment. As
long as prosecutors did not try to tie the defendant to the file by
virtue of his knowing the passphrase, no incrimination was implied by
disclosing the passphrase.
To handle the passphrase, a court clerk was sworn in as a special
master. An investigator activated the PGP program to the point where it
prompted for the passphrase. He left the room while the defendant
disclosed the passphrase to the special master, who typed it into the
computer. The investigator was then brought back into the room to hit
the Enter key and complete the decryption process. As expected, child
pornography fell out. The judge then ordered the computer, its
peripherals, and all diskettes destroyed. The defendant argued that the
computer contained research material, but the judge admonished him for
commingling it with the contraband.
[7] Information on this case was provided by Fred B. Cotton of SEARCH
Group, Inc. Cotton was the investigator who activated the PGP program on
the defendant's computer.


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Women's History Month - Women In Science Special Edition
http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Teachers/womenspecialedition.html

Changing Girls' Attitudes About Computers
Computer Wonder Women (Dorothy Denning)
National Women's History Month
What you can do to help GRRLS get into technology!
Best Online Resources For Women and Minorities in Science and Technology
Educating Girls in the New Computer Age
HERSTORIES Classroom Project
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3)
A consortium of ISPs and P2P companies are focusing on traffic engineering techniques that
enhance the users P2P experience by establishing BitTorrent supernodes  etc.

4)
A Method for Critical Data Theft - New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/22/technology/22chip.html?hp

5)
Metcalfe Pitches Terabit Ethernet
Bob Metcalfe thinks 1 Tbit/s Ethernet is inevitable, and he also believes the industry will have to tear down some standards to get there.
The "Father of Ethernet," as he's often called, will be delivering one of the keynotes at next week's OFC/NFOEC show in San Diego, sketching what he believes will be the path to get to 1 Tbit/s speeds.
And in an exclusive LRTV interview, Metcalfe points out that the path might leave behind the equipment and even the fiber that's been in the network for years.
"There comes a time when standards have to be overthrown," he says. "We're going down into sort of a dead end. I think that dead end is deep enough that we'll get to 100 Gbit/s. The evidence is, to get to terabit Ethernet, we'll have to break out of that dead end."
Metcalfe, of course, has no problem with that kind of thinking.
"There's now room to break loose of the stranglehold of standards and now move into some really fun new technologies," he says.