Wild Music in the News

This summer in Philadelphia, weird science isn't limited to the Mütter Museum: the Wood Street Gallery's exhibit "Out of This World" currently showcases artists who tinker with strange new ways to experience the cosmos. Vera-Maria Glahn and Marcus Wendt's soothing interactive installation Orbiter lets viewers lie down on the ground and look up at a video approximation of the night sky, limned with faint concentric rings. By pointing their fingers at the ceiling, participants create new "stars" that circulate and generate looping tones. Jean-Pierre Aubé's Titan and beyond the infinite (2007) uses data recorded in 2005 by the Huygens probe from one of Saturn's moons to create 2001-inspired slit-scan video trip-outs; the show also includes a video version of his VLF.Natural Radio (2000-Ongoing) project, which uses the sounds of naturally-produced electromagnetic signals, a phenomenon increasingly blotted out by human-made telecommunications. Geekier frequencies can be heard in Maria Antelman's taH pagh taHbe (2006), a video composed of still images of NASA hanger interiors set to a Klingon translation of Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy (no doubt using the preferred Klingon Language Institute version as her source.) Rounding out the astronomical theme, Gail Wight's Blow Out (2006) consists of forty-four photos of different smashed test tubes, white constellations of glass shards against black backgrounds, each looking like unique, exploding galaxies. - Ed Halter

http://www.woodstreetgalleries.org/home.html#currentshow

Dear EarthTalk: Should we expect to see “plug-in” hybrid cars anytime soon? I’ve been hearing they are on the horizon but I wonder if that means in one year or 10.-- Bill A., Stratford, CT

A friend of mine lives in a middle-class neighborhood of New Delhi, one of the richest cities in India. Although the area gets a fair amount of rain every year, he wakes in the morning to the blare of a megaphone announcing that freshwater will be available only for the next hour. He rushes to fill the bathtub and other receptacles to last the day. New Delhi’s endemic shortfalls occur largely because water managers decided some years back to divert large amounts from upstream rivers and reservoirs to irrigate crops.

My son, who lives in arid Phoenix, arises to the low, schussing sounds of sprinklers watering verdant suburban lawns and golf courses. Although Phoenix sits amid the Sonoran Desert, he enjoys a virtually unlimited water supply. Politicians there have allowed irrigation water to be shifted away from farming operations to cities and suburbs, while permitting recycled wastewater to be employed for landscaping and other nonpotable applications.

The digital revolution has forced law enforcement and intelligence agencies to monitor threats such as cyber attacks and stolen computer data using technology that makes most Cold War–era equipment look like it was made from spare parts in someone's garage. But lest these once-innovative tools be forgotten, the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Diplomatic Security's Countermeasures Directorate today unveiled a public exhibit, entitled "Listening In: Electronic Eavesdropping in the Cold War Era," honoring spy gear used by (and against) the U.S. from the dawn to the end of the Cold War. [More]

[Update: Terry Childs hands over the codes. Full story at the Horizons blog.]

It sounds like a plot from Hollywood: A team of techies is busily trying to crack passwords to get access to parts of San Francisco’s computer network. They are doing so at the direction of city officials, who have discovered that they are locked out of parts of their new multimillion-dollar system.

But for the City by the Bay, it’s a story line they didn’t see coming.

Local officials charge that one of their own employees, a network administrator named Terry Childs, gave himself exclusive access to key switches on the network. After they discovered the problem, Mr. Childs was interrogated by the police, but unlike the disgruntled programmers in the movie “Office Space,” he apparently hasn’t been fazed by the threat of prison. Authorities say he first gave police bogus passwords and now sits in jail refusing to divulge his abracadabras.

Childs pleaded not guilty last Thursday to four felony counts of computer network tampering. His lawyer declared it all a big misunderstanding and called the $5 million bail inappropriate. But San Francisco officials aren’t sure what Childs has done behind password locks, and they worry he might have created back channels into city data.

So-called “malicious insiders” are surprisingly common, and they tend to be more harmful – and difficult to thwart – than outside hackers, say experts. Despite the threat, one recent study found that organizations are growing more lax in guarding against them.

“Most of the security solutions [deployed] are outward facing, focusing on the moat and the turrets, not determining if the threat can come from inside” the castle walls, says Tom Kellermann, a computer security expert formerly with the World Bank Treasury and now with Core Security Technologies in Boston.

Roughly a quarter of computer system attacks are inside jobs, according to the past two years of the E-Crime Watch Survey from CSO Magazine and the US Secret Service. Their most recent report in 2007 found steep drops over the previous year in the percentage of organizations taking common protective measures:

•Background checks on employees and contractors dropped from 73 to 57 percent.
•Employee monitoring went from 59 to 42 percent.
•Employee security training plummeted from 68 to 38 percent.

The report defines an insider as a current or former employee, services provider, or contractor. Outside technology vendors and partners who are given insider access constitute a fast-growing source of attacks, according to a new four-year study conducted by Verizon.

Ironically, San Francisco began building its network three years ago out of a desire to be less reliant on outside systems, says Ron Vinson, chief administrative officer for the city’s Department of Telecommunications and Information Services. Childs was a key developer on the project.

The network, called FiberWAN, currently encompasses 60 percent of the city’s internal and external business sprawling over 60 departments.

The lockout hasn’t disrupted city services, yet: Officials can still send e-mails across departments, and residents can still pay taxes and parking tickets online. But it has created no-go areas on the system where officials aren’t sure if sensitive data – such as e-mails and payroll records – have been compromised.

“We had control of the house,” Mr. Vinson says by way of analogy, “but there were certain rooms inside the house where we didn’t know what was going on and did not have access.” His team is trying to identify and access all the locked “rooms.”

The exclusive privileges that officials say Childs gave himself were discovered, Vinson says, after the city hired a security chief and she began upgrading security protocols. Prosecutors have said Childs locked out other administrators after a confrontation with the security head.

Vinson estimates the costs of the restoration work will be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Nearly half of computer security breaches take weeks to mitigate, according to the Verizon report, with 14 percent taking months. Detection times are worse, with 63 percent of attacks going unnoticed for months. In 70 percent of cases, it’s a third party who notices first.

There’s no simple way to profile malicious insiders, says Mark Maybury, executive director of the IT division at the MITRE Corp., a nonprofit research-and-development group outside Boston. He has researched hundreds of insider cases with the aim of developing computerized sensors to detect them.

“Just as insiders are highly heterogeneous in their demographics, so too are they highly heterogeneous in their behaviors. Therefore, you can’t detect all insiders with one sensor,” Dr. Maybury says.

At this point, however, not much sensor software is commercially available, he says. Still, basic security protocols and simple attentiveness are crucial preventative measures, say experts.

Vinson’s department does conduct backups, he says. And there are fail-safe systems and disaster recovery plans – but they were designed with natural disasters in mind. “If an earthquake happened, we all have instructions about what to do. But we don’t have instructions for what to do when it’s one of your own employees,” says Vinson.

[Update: Terry Childs hands over the codes. Full story at the Horizons blog.]

[Update: Terry Childs hands over the codes. Full story at the Horizons blog.]

It sounds like a plot from Hollywood: A team of techies is busily trying to crack passwords to get access to parts of San Francisco’s computer network. They are doing so at the direction of city officials, who have discovered that they are locked out of parts of their new multimillion-dollar system.

But for the City by the Bay, it’s a story line they didn’t see coming.

Local officials charge that one of their own employees, a network administrator named Terry Childs, gave himself exclusive access to key switches on the network. After they discovered the problem, Mr. Childs was interrogated by the police, but unlike the disgruntled programmers in the movie “Office Space,” he apparently hasn’t been fazed by the threat of prison. Authorities say he first gave police bogus passwords and now sits in jail refusing to divulge his abracadabras.

Childs pleaded not guilty last Thursday to four felony counts of computer network tampering. His lawyer declared it all a big misunderstanding and called the $5 million bail inappropriate. But San Francisco officials aren’t sure what Childs has done behind password locks, and they worry he might have created back channels into city data.

So-called “malicious insiders” are surprisingly common, and they tend to be more harmful – and difficult to thwart – than outside hackers, say experts. Despite the threat, one recent study found that organizations are growing more lax in guarding against them.

“Most of the security solutions [deployed] are outward facing, focusing on the moat and the turrets, not determining if the threat can come from inside” the castle walls, says Tom Kellermann, a computer security expert formerly with the World Bank Treasury and now with Core Security Technologies in Boston.

Roughly a quarter of computer system attacks are inside jobs, according to the past two years of the E-Crime Watch Survey from CSO Magazine and the US Secret Service. Their most recent report in 2007 found steep drops over the previous year in the percentage of organizations taking common protective measures:

•Background checks on employees and contractors dropped from 73 to 57 percent.
•Employee monitoring went from 59 to 42 percent.
•Employee security training plummeted from 68 to 38 percent.

The report defines an insider as a current or former employee, services provider, or contractor. Outside technology vendors and partners who are given insider access constitute a fast-growing source of attacks, according to a new four-year study conducted by Verizon.

Ironically, San Francisco began building its network three years ago out of a desire to be less reliant on outside systems, says Ron Vinson, chief administrative officer for the city’s Department of Telecommunications and Information Services. Childs was a key developer on the project.

The network, called FiberWAN, currently encompasses 60 percent of the city’s internal and external business sprawling over 60 departments.

The lockout hasn’t disrupted city services, yet: Officials can still send e-mails across departments, and residents can still pay taxes and parking tickets online. But it has created no-go areas on the system where officials aren’t sure if sensitive data – such as e-mails and payroll records – have been compromised.

“We had control of the house,” Mr. Vinson says by way of analogy, “but there were certain rooms inside the house where we didn’t know what was going on and did not have access.” His team is trying to identify and access all the locked “rooms.”

The exclusive privileges that officials say Childs gave himself were discovered, Vinson says, after the city hired a security chief and she began upgrading security protocols. Prosecutors have said Childs locked out other administrators after a confrontation with the security head.

Vinson estimates the costs of the restoration work will be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Nearly half of computer security breaches take weeks to mitigate, according to the Verizon report, with 14 percent taking months. Detection times are worse, with 63 percent of attacks going unnoticed for months. In 70 percent of cases, it’s a third party who notices first.

There’s no simple way to profile malicious insiders, says Mark Maybury, executive director of the IT division at the MITRE Corp., a nonprofit research-and-development group outside Boston. He has researched hundreds of insider cases with the aim of developing computerized sensors to detect them.

“Just as insiders are highly heterogeneous in their demographics, so too are they highly heterogeneous in their behaviors. Therefore, you can’t detect all insiders with one sensor,” Dr. Maybury says.

At this point, however, not much sensor software is commercially available, he says. Still, basic security protocols and simple attentiveness are crucial preventative measures, say experts.

Vinson’s department does conduct backups, he says. And there are fail-safe systems and disaster recovery plans – but they were designed with natural disasters in mind. “If an earthquake happened, we all have instructions about what to do. But we don’t have instructions for what to do when it’s one of your own employees,” says Vinson.

[Update: Terry Childs hands over the codes. Full story at the Horizons blog.]

Next time you're at a loud singles bar, thank a fish for inspiration. Here's why: When a male midshipman fish [above] eyes a competitor swimming too close, he chases off the interloper with an audible grunt. To attract a mate, he hums loudly for hours on end [see video below]. Now these cries have attracted researchers seeking to figure out whether noisy animals, from fish to mammals, have a common ancestor that gave them the ability to vocalize. Researchers studied the larvae of three closely related species of bony fish--the midshipman fish, Gulf toadfish and oyster toadfish--that make sounds by squeezing their swim bladders up to 200 times per second. They report in Science that the parts of the brain and spinal cord that control the rhythm of those muscles develop in a pattern similar to that of other vocalizing animals, which suggests a common origin. Of course, the instruments being played by these brain cells--swim bladders in fish; the larynx in mammals--probably evolved independently. Think of that next time you're listening to a tall fishing story.

Despite its title, P.S.1's current survey of Finnish art Arctic Hysteria leans towards the cool and calculated, with moments of dotty humor. In keeping with a culture known for both outdoor saunas and Linus Torvalds, much of the work deals with nature, technology or both; the two themes come together with another Finnish national icon in Tea Mäkipää's video My Life as a Reindeer, created from antler-mounted footage obtained in a manner reminiscent of Sam Easterson. Even more heroically silly are two pieces by electronic music and media art pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi, resurrected in conjunction with a documentary on the artist: Master Chaynjis, a meandering mechanical head billed as a "swearing robot," and DIMI-S, a.k.a. the Sexophone, an early electronic instrument that generates sounds through interpersonal body contact. Another historic visionary revived in this largely contemporary show is architect Matti Suuronen, whose UFO-style Futuro House provides the inspiration for a site-specific "Futuro Lounge," which serves as an unfortunately impractical screening pod and reading room. Elsewhere, the exhibit is video-heavy, with two notable standouts. Dancer Reijo Kela provides a very rare object -- a dance video that doesn't suck -- with 365 Days-Reijo Kela's Video Diary of 1999, in which the artist propels himself by various, often comical means from one side of the frame to another: skiing, skipping, crawling, running nude. Audio-visual band Pink Twins present four of their neo-image-processing videos in one room, creating an overwhelming environment of digital rainbow cascades, melting satellite maps, and looping explosions. Atypical of the rest of Arctic Hysteria's relatively detached sensibility, Markus Copper's Kursk feels like walking into the set of a truly scary horror film: a room stuffed with sporadically clanking, mechanized black deep-sea diving suits, it elicits claustrophobic unease and a far more directly emotional response than the rest of this otherwise fore-brainy selection. - Ed Halter

http://www.ps1.org/ps1_site/content/view/324/102/