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Monday, January 23, 2012

The Northernmost Dish In The World: Tracking Satellites and Dodging Polar Bears


Cold Dish Greg White
Sten-Christian Pedersen oversees the northernmost antenna array on Earth, 25 dishes tracking about 100 satellites on the small archipelago of Svalbard, 500 miles south of the North Pole. Even when the winds are –76°F and visibility is 10 feet, Pedersen drives to the satellite station. When there is a risk of avalanche, he takes a helicopter. When there are polar bears, he carries a firearm.
Pedersen says the antennas are protected by “radomes: close to a drum skin, but made out of plastic.” Under the radome is the dish, a lattice of supports with four motors in its base; when the dishes move, it is barely discernable. Svalbard Satellite Station tracks polar orbits—satellites make a complete lengthwise circuit of the globe every 100 minutes, 14 times a day. In 25 days, a polar-orbiting satellite will have seen the whole surface of the Earth.
As a satellite passes overhead, SvalSat’s technicians have 12 to 15 minutes to download its data at 300 megabytes a second. The data (images, mostly) is then sent through fiber-optic cables in concrete tubes aboveground (permafrost prevents burial), before it reaches an undersea cable connecting to northern Norway. A new satellite named NNP, a weather satellite, just launched. Pedersen says that the station is in “freeze, to minimize any risk of a problem.” His week has been an easy one. The sun recently set for the last time until mid-February. “Then,” he says, “you will start to see small light from the south. The blue season, we call it.”

Cloud-Based Quantum Computing Will Allow Secure Calculation on Encrypted Bits


Entangled Qubits Clusters of entangled qubits allow remote quantum computing to be performed on a remote server, while keeping the contents and results hidden. EQUINOX GRAPHICS
When quantum computers eventually reach larger scales, they’ll probably remain pretty precious resources, locked away in research institutions just like our classical supercomputers. So anyone who wants to perform quantum calculations will likely have to do it in the cloud, remotely accessing a quantum server somewhere else. A new double-blind cryptography method would ensure that these calculations remain secret. It uses the uncertain, unusual nature of quantum mechanics as a double advantage.
Imagine you’re a developer and you have some code you’d like to run on a quantum computer. And imagine there’s a quantum computer maker who says you can run your code. But you can’t trust each other — you, the developer, don’t want the computer maker to rip off your great code, and the computer builder doesn’t want you to peep its breakthrough machine. This new system can satisfy both of you.
Stefanie Barz and colleagues at the University of Vienna’s Center for Quantum Science and Technology prepared an experimental demonstration of a blind computing technique, and tested it with two well-known quantum computing algorithms.
Here’s how it would work: You, the developer, prepare some quantum bits, in this case photons that have a polarity (vertical or horizontal) known only to you. Then you would send these to the remote quantum server. The computer would entangle the qubits with even more qubits, using a quantum entangling gate — but the computer wouldn’t know the nature of the entangled states, just that they are in fact entangled. The server is “blind” to the entanglement state, and anyone tapping into the server would be blind, too.
Imagine the computer tries to snoop on the qubits and see their entanglement, which could then be used to extract the information they carry. You’d be able to tell, because of the laws of quantum mechanics. The cat is both dead and alive until you check whether it’s dead or alive, and then it’s one or the other. If your photon has a specific state, you’d be able to tell that it was spied upon.
Back to the entangled bits. The actual information processing takes place via a sequence of measurements on your qubits. These measurements would be directed by you, based on the particular states of each qubit (which, again, only you know). The quantum server would run the measurements and report the results to you. This is called measurement-based quantum computation. Then you’d be able to interpret the results, based on your knowledge of the qubits’ initial states. To the computer — or any interceptor — the whole thing would look utterly random.
Since you know the entangled state on which the measurements were made, you can be certain whether the server really was a quantum computer. And you wouldn’t have to disclose your algorithm, the input or even the output — it’s perfectly secure, the researchers write in their paper, published online today in Science.
Blind quantum computation is more secure than classical blind computation, which relies on tactics like the backward factoring of prime numbers, said Vlatko Vedral, a researcher at the University of Oxford who wrote a Perspective piece explaining this finding.
“The double blindness is guaranteed by the laws of quantum physics, instead of the assumed difficulty of of computational tasks as in classical physics,” Vedral writes.
The Vienna team argues their simulation is a potentially useful technique for future cloud-based quantum computing networks.
“Our experiment is a step toward unconditionally secure quantum computing in a client-server environment where the client’s entire computation remains hidden, a functionality not known to be achievable in the classical world,” they write.

For the First Time, Predator Drones Participate in Civilian Arrests on U.S. Soil


A Customs and Border Protection Predator B (or MQ-9 Reaper)
A somewhat strange story emerged yesterday involving an extremist antigovernment group, a North Dakota sheriff’s office, and six missing cows, but there’s a much larger story behind this brief legal tangle between local law enforcement and the Brossart family of Nelson Country. When Alex, Thomas and Jacob Brossart were arrested on their farm back in June after allegedly chasing the local Sheriff off their property with rifles, they became the first known U.S. citizens to be arrested on American soil with the help of a Predator drone, Stars and Stripes reports.
They will not, however, be the last. Most U.S. citizens are aware that US. Customs and Border Protection owns and operates a handful of aerial drones along the nation’s northern and southern borders (eight Predators to be exact), but when Congress authorized the use of drones along the borders in 2005 it was thought that they would be used strictly to curb illegal immigration and to detect smuggling routes.

But a provision allowing for “interior law enforcement support” is being given fairly liberal interpretation by both the Customs and Border Protection crews that operate the drones and local law enforcement that sometimes wants to borrow CBP’s aerial assets. Local police in North Dakota say they’ve called upon the two Predators operating out of Grand Forks Air Force Base at least two dozen times since June.
These drones are unarmed Predator B drones (known as MQ-9 Reapers elsewhere in the operational lingo), the same “hunter/killer” model employed across the globe in the War on Terror (but without the Hellfire missiles). They are being used for surveillance and situational awareness only, law enforcement officials say. But the fact that they’re being used at all--and especially without anyone higher up the chain of command acknowledging that local police have access to and are using Predator drones routinely--stirs up all kinds of privacy issues. As Stripes notes, it also skirts the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the U.S. military from taking on a police role within the United States.
In the case of the Brossart boys, apparently the sheriff showed up on their place with search warrant in hand seeking access to the family’s land to search for six missing cows thought to be on the premises. The Brossarts--who reportedly are not huge fans of the federal government in general and belong to an antigovernment group that the FBI considers extremist--brandished rifles and allegedly ordered the sheriff off the property. The sheriff complied, but then asked for support from the nearby drone unit, which happened to have a Predator in the air returning from a routine recon of the U.S.-Canada border.
Local law used the drone to keep an eye on the Brossart place overnight and the next day were able to determine via the drone footage that the three Brossarts in question were out on the property and unarmed (there’s a more thorough account of this if you click through to the Stripes piece). All said, the local police were able to sweep in and arrest the Brossarts without firing a shot or ending up in some kind of armed standoff.
To local law enforcement, it’s a good story about technology working to avoid violent confrontations and assist cops in their day-to-day serving and protecting. But it’s also troubling. From a privacy standpoint, the use of military surveillance drones over American cities is fraught with issues. Then there’s the fact that--up until now--very few people seem to have any idea this is going on. The government peering into your backyard, Big Brother is watching, etc. etc.--it’s the kind of thing that’s going to have to be talked about as technologies like drone aircraft become more ubiquitous, both abroad and at home.
Oh, and the six cows were located by police. No word on whether the Predators were scrambled for that part of the operation.

Transformer Prime TF700T Vs Galaxy Tab 7.7


CEOs of BlackBerry maker Research In Motion resign


Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, the co-chief executives ofResearch In Motion, have resigned following months of investor pressure for a change at the helm of the struggling BlackBerry maker.
Chief operating officer Thorsten Heins was named president and CEO of the Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM, which has been steadily losing market share to Apple's iPhone and handsets powered by Google's Android software.
Heins, 54, joined RIM from German industrial giant Siemens in December 2007 and served as senior vice president for hardware engineering before becoming chief operating officer for product and sales in August 2011.
"There comes a time in the growth of every successful company when the founders recognize the need to pass the baton to new leadership," Lazaridis said in a statement Sunday.
He said RIM was "entering a new phase, and we felt it was time for a new leader to take it through that phase and beyond."
Barbara Stymiest, 55, was named chairman of the board, a post previously also held jointly by Balsillie and Lazaridis, who founded RIM in 1984.
Stymiest, who has been on the RIM board since 2007, has held senior positions at the Royal Bank of Canada and was chief executive of TSX Group Inc., operator of the Toronto Stock Exchange.
The management shakeup follows a series of setbacks for RIM including a costly delay in the launch of the BlackBerry 10, the commercial failure of the PlayBook tablet computer and an embarrassing email outage.
RIM shares have lost nearly three-quarters of their value over the past year and the company has been the subject of persistent takeover speculation. Several large investors have been clamoring for a change at the top.
While Lazaridis and Balsillie are handing over day-to-day control they are not stepping away entirely.
Lazaridis, 50, was named vice chairman of its board and chairman of a new innovation committee, offering "strategic counsel" and promoting the BlackBerry brand worldwide.
Balsillie, also 50, will remain a member of the board of directors. "I agree this is the right time to pass the baton to new leadership, and I have complete confidence in Thorsten, the management team and the company," he said.
Lazaridis said Heins, a native of Germany who served as chief technology officer at Siemens, has "demonstrated throughout his tenure at RIM that he has the right mix of leadership, relevant industry experience and skills to take the company forward.
"I am so confident in RIM's future that I intend to purchase an additional $50 million of the company's shares, as permitted, in the open market," he said.
In a statement, Heins said he was confident that RIM was on the right path.
"We have a strong balance sheet with approximately $1.5 billion in cash at the end of the last quarter and negligible debt," he said.
"We reported revenue of $5.2 billion in our last quarter, up 24 percent from the prior quarter, and a 35-percent year-to-year increase in the BlackBerry subscriber base, which is now over 75 million."
According to industry tracker comScore, however, RIM's share of the US smartphone market declined during the three months ending in November, while Apple and Android both made gains.
RIM saw its share of US smartphone subscribers fall to 16.6 percent at the end of November from 19.7 percent at the end of August, according to comScore.
Android was the top smartphone platform with a 46.9 percent share of the US market at the end of November, up from 43.8 percent. Apple's market share also rose during the period -- by 1.4 percentage points to 28.7 percent.