NASA has smashed its record for transmitting data to and from the moon. Now, it boasts a frankly amazing 622Mbps transfer speed to the rock that circles our little planet.
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Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/0HvVuV27EAY/nasa-has-a-622-mbps-data-connection-to-the-moon-1450623457TrueCrypt is one of the most widely used disk-encryption applications in the world. But though it's open source, it's never had its security or features -- or its precompiled binaries -- audited thoroughly.
But now cryptography researchers Kenneth White and Matthew Green have decided to raise the money to have TrueCrypt's source code thoroughly audited by disinterested third parties. The results of the audit will be tracked on the website IsTrueCryptAuditedYet.com. (The answer thus far: No.)
Kicking off with a fundraiser on Indiegogo and a complementary one on FundFill, the two have thus far raised some $46,000 -- with 53 days left to go in the Indiegogo campaign.
Of all the encryption or security software out there with source code available, why audit TrueCrypt? Green puts it this way: "There's a shortage of high-quality and usable encryption software out there. TrueCrypt is an enormous deviation from this trend. It's nice, it's pretty, it's remarkably usable."
But the problems with TrueCrypt, especially in the post-Snowden age, are many and unnerving. For one, while some folks have looked at the source code, there's never been a really systematic, rigorous analysis of the program by professional cryptographers.
The Ubuntu Privacy Group did conduct its own analysis of the program's behavior, and while it didn't find anything that looked like an obvious backdoor, the group did find strange discrepancies in the way TrueCrypt works on different platforms, along with a possible attack on the way keyfiles are used. (They didn't find anything that looked like a backdoor, though.)
Second, since most people use the precompiled binaries of the program rather than generating the program from source code, there's speculation about whether the binaries offered at TrueCrypt's site are trustworthy. The program is also not easy to compile from its source code, as a number of people have discovered.
Finally, and maybe most important, no one knows who actually wrote the program.
The creators might well be taking pains to hide their identities to avoid being harassed, which makes sense. There might well be people foolish enough to think that threatening the creators of the program would be a way to get them to disclose a weakness in the software and thus compromise every TrueCrypt volume on the planet. (Unlikely.)
Still, as Green puts it, "I would feel better if I knew who the TrueCrypt authors were."
The audit proposed by Green and White covers four points: Have the source code audited by a professional outfit qualified to do such work; have a lawyer analyze the terms of the source code license used by TrueCrypt, which is not considered to be a true open source license due to some of its terms; pay out bounties for any bugs found in the code; and create binaries that can be verified against the source code.
Open source code is generally considered easier to secure than closed source code, but that doesn't mean open source code is automatically more secure -- it just means the auditing process is easier to conduct. Expertise is still needed -- and in the real world, expertise worth having is worth buying.
This story, "Is TrueCrypt truly secure? Let's have a fundraiser to find out," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.
Catalina Sandino Moreno will star opposite Aaron Eckhart in Incarnate, the new franchise hopeful from Jason Blum's Blumhouse Productions.
The role was initially to be played by Rosario Dawson, but the Sin City and Seven Pounds actress left the project due to scheduling reasons. The movie is due to begin production in November in Los Angeles.
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Brad Peyton is directing the micro-bugdet pic, which tells of "an unconventional exorcist -- with the ability to tap into the subconscious of the possessed -- who meets his match when a 9-year-old boy is possessed by a demon from his past," according to Blumhouse.
Blumhouse and IM Global are co-financing, while Blumhouse International is handling international sales.
Blum is producing. Exec producing are Blumhouse's Couper Samuelson, Stuart Ford, Charles Layton, Michael Seitzman, Trevor Engelson and Peyton.
Moreno broke into the industry with her acclaimed performance in 2004’s Maria Full of Grace, a role for which she earned an Oscar nomination. She most recently was one of the stars of FX’s crime show The Bridge and counts, among her feature credits, Steven Soderbergh’s two-part Che films.
She is repped UTA and Estelle Lasher at Principal Entertainment.
By Kathryn Doyle
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - After a heart attack, patients are often given four or more medicines and directed to take them for life. Those medicines only work to prevent another attack if the patient takes them all consistently and correctly, a new study shows.
"You really have to take your medications all the time to derive any benefit," said Dr. Niteesh K. Choudhry. He led the study at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
That may seem obvious. But drugs that appear to work in clinical trials aren't always as effective in the real world, where nobody is making sure you take your meds on time, he said.
Heart attack survivors are often prescribed beta-blockers to slow heart rate, statins to lower cholesterol and other drugs to keep blood pressure down.
In an earlier trial, Choudhry and his coauthors compared a group of heart attack survivors given free prescriptions to people who had to pay for their medicines as most real-world patients do.
In that trial, people in the free prescription group were about five percent more likely to take their medications at least 80 percent of the time, compared to people with copays. But there was no difference between the groups when it came to later hospital admissions for heart problems.
For the new study, the researchers divided people who got free prescriptions into three smaller groups based on how often they took all their medicines: at least 80 percent of the time, 60 to 79 percent of the time or less than 60 percent of the time.
Study participants who took their free medicines most often were 24 percent more likely to never be readmitted to the hospital for another heart attack or a stroke, chest pain or heart failure than those in the comparison group with copays. Those people varied widely in how often they took their medications.
Taking some, but not all, of the medications regularly was not linked to any benefit, according to results published in the American Heart Journal.
"It's difficult to determine which medications are most important," Choudhry said.
"They all appear to be important," he told Reuters Health. "It's not like patients can take one and not another."
That's too bad, because being saddled with so many prescriptions can be a drain on patients, he said. That's why some may not take their medications consistently, even though they help protect the heart.
"If anyone is going to be motivated to take their blood pressure and cholesterol medications, it will be patients who have just had a heart attack," Dr. Walid Gellad said.
Gellad is a physician at the Pittsburgh VA Medical Center and Co-Director of the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Pharmaceutical Policy and Prescribing. He was not involved in the new study.
There are lots of reasons people may skip doses, including cost, forgetfulness, side effects, attitudes and beliefs, the experts agreed.
Text messages or electronic pill bottles may help remind patients to take their medications, but that too is unlikely to completely solve the problem.
People who have serious side effects should talk to their doctors and look into alternative treatments, Choudhry said.
He said doctors and researchers can improve health by getting people to correctly take current drugs, not just by developing new drugs.
"For patients, providers and policymakers this is a really critical message," Dr. Nihar Desai, a cardiologist at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, told Reuters Health. He also didn't participate in the new research.
"Perhaps, we should be investing more in interventions aimed at improving adherence to currently available therapies rather than finding additional therapies that may be of only marginal benefit," Desai said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/GYtWqM American Heart Journal, online October 17, 2013.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — A year after Superstorm Sandy tore through New York and New Jersey, displacing tens of thousands of people and racking up billions in property damage, the Red Cross is still facing criticism for its relief efforts.
Many storm victims and their elected officials slammed the nation’s leading relief agency just after Sandy’s landfall last Oct. 29 for being too slow to get volunteers and supplies out to the hardest-hit areas. Now, nearly 200 Sandy survivors say the Red Cross is denying funds they were promised last year to help them fix their homes.
The 132-year-old agency had raised $308 million for Sandy relief as of last month, and a spokeswoman says it has spent 90 percent of it so far, most in direct donations to victims and community organizations. While that figure pales in comparison to the more than $60 billion in federal funds approved for Sandy relief, the Red Cross is by far the biggest nongovernment player in relief efforts and is where most people go to donate if they want to help after any disaster. Even President Barack Obama urged people to contribute to the Red Cross to help with Sandy recovery efforts, calling it the "best" option for those who want to help storm victims. Click image above for: Portraits of Hurricane Sandy slideshow. (Photos by Gordon Donovan/Yahoo News)
But many of those affected by the storm said the Red Cross took too long to get volunteers, staff and supplies to the hardest hit areas. James Molinaro, president of the Staten Island borough of New York City, flatly said people shouldn’t donate to the agency if they wanted to help survivors . The agency countered that it hadn’t been able to pre-position supplies and other assistance before the storm made landfall since that would have put staff in danger, and Molinaro later praised the Red Cross for their relief work on the island.
Last summer, a different set of complaints surfaced from a watchdog organization called the Disaster Accountability Project. The group filed a complaint in July signed by more than 150 Sandy survivors with the New York attorney general’s office over the Red Cross’s Move-In Assistance Program. The group claims victims were told by Red Cross caseworkers that they had qualified to receive up to $10,000 to repair their homes, only to find out later they no longer qualified. The mix-up led to crushing disappointment and added financial hardship for those attempting to put their lives back together, the complaint argues.
A total of 185 people had signed onto the petition as of mid-October, and Disaster Accountability Project founder Ben Smilowitz says he believes hundreds more were also denied the help after initially being told they qualified. Some who signed the petition, told by Red Cross representatives that a check was in the mail, hired contractors or made other financial decisions before the funding was revoked, Smilowitz said.
A spokeswoman for the attorney general, Melissa Grace, said the office would not comment on the Red Cross complaint, which is still pending. Meanwhile, the Red Cross says that it never changed its requirements for the program, but last summer said that some caseworkers had been misinformed and may have given out the wrong information to applicants.
One such applicant is Denise Rinzivillo, 44, who is currently living in her car after she lost a court case against her landlord, who evicted her from her Staten Island home last month. Rinzivillo was told in April by a Red Cross caseworker that she qualified for up to $10,000 in assistance because the house she was renting appeared infested with mold. Rinzivillo said she needed money for a deposit and first month’s rent to move into a new apartment.
Rinzivillo and her family had stayed in the rented house during Sandy, watching the water rise up to the stairs as if they were in a fishbowl. They continued to live in a few rooms upstairs for months after that, unable to leave and find a new place to rent because Rinzivillo’s husband, a butcher, had lost his job. Rental prices also went up on the island after the storm, making things more difficult still.
“The Red Cross came to my house and interviewed me, and wouldn’t come into the house because they smelled the mold from outside,” Rinzivillo said. “They handed me the paperwork right there and then. They told me I’m entitled to it.”
She filled out the paperwork, but learned later the criteria had changed for the rental assistance. She was told that she had to have stayed at a hotel funded by FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to qualify. Rinzivillo said she felt punished for choosing to stay at her house rather than relying on government assistance.
“I mean it’s ridiculous that they make me go through all this paperwork, running around and getting all this stuff, just to deny me,” she said. “I can’t keep doing it.”
Rinzivillo stayed at a city-funded hotel after she was evicted, and then spent her remaining savings on the hotel room before she ran out of money and moved into her car. She had to send her three dogs to a shelter in Brooklyn, where she’s worried they will be euthanized.
“Thanks to the Red Cross, I’m homeless,” she said.
The agency says it reviewed Rinzivillo's case and let her and her case manager know that she was eligible for assistance if she provided documentation. "To our knowledge, to date, she has not provided that documentation," spokeswoman Anne Marie Borrego said.
The Red Cross also insists the agency’s eligibility requirements for the Move-In Assistance Program have always been the same: that a person’s primary home had to have been destroyed, and that they had to have been living in a government-provided hotel or received the FEMA maximum grant for their home after the storm.
Borrego said that the program provided $16 million to 3,000 households affected by Sandy. They expect to give out another $5 million in move-in assistance before the program is over.
“We are reviewing the names of those who signed the petition,” Borrego said. “If there were errors made, we’re going to correct them.”
Borrego said that the program’s guidelines are important to prevent people who don’t actually need help from getting aid.
“When folks were texting $10 to Hurricane Sandy victims, they wanted to be sure we were going to spend those dollars wisely,” she said. “A vast majority of those who are applying to us are well-meaning, but we do occasionally find examples of fraud.”
Out of $308 million the Red Cross raised from donations, $280 million has been committed or spent already.
The organization says it learned important lessons from Sandy that it hopes to use to improve next time.
“Responding to disasters in large urban areas provides really unique challenges,” Borrego said. “We need to pre-position more supplies inside urban areas like New York City to ensure they’re more mobile.”
The group is now putting dozens of mobile trailers around the city with bulk relief supplies like blankets, chargers and flashlights so that if another huge storm strikes, those necessities will already be there.
Sandy also drove home to the Red Cross just how extreme certain weather events can be. “We can have a hurricane followed by a snowstorm in a week,” Borrego said. “This is actually something that can happen.”
Update: This story has been updated to reflect the fact that the Red Cross has informed Rinzivillo that she is eligible for assistance and that James Molinaro praised the agency for its relief efforts a year after his initial criticism.
Cellist Yo-Yo Ma, left, rehearses with Holocaust survivor George Horner at Symphony Hall Tuesday afternoon, Oct. 22, 2013, in Boston. The 90-year-old pianist will make his orchestral debut with Ma Tuesday night, where they will play music composed 70 years ago at the Nazi prison camp where Horner was imprisoned. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)
Cellist Yo-Yo Ma, left, rehearses with Holocaust survivor George Horner at Symphony Hall Tuesday afternoon, Oct. 22, 2013, in Boston. The 90-year-old pianist will make his orchestral debut with Ma Tuesday night, where they will play music composed 70 years ago at the Nazi prison camp where Horner was imprisoned. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)
Cellist Yo-Yo Ma, right, greets Holocaust survivor George Horner in a rehearsal room at Symphony Hall Tuesday afternoon, Oct. 22, 2013, in Boston. The 90-year-old pianist will make his orchestral debut with Ma Tuesday night, where they will play music composed 70 years ago at the Nazi prison camp where Horner was imprisoned. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)
Cellist Yo-Yo Ma, right, greets Holocaust survivor George Horner in a rehearsal room at Symphony Hall Tuesday afternoon, Oct. 22, 2013, in Boston. The 90-year-old pianist will make his orchestral debut with Ma Tuesday night, where they will play music composed 70 years ago at the Nazi prison camp where Horner was imprisoned. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)
Cellist Yo-Yo Ma, left, rehearses with Holocaust survivor George Horner on stage at Symphony Hall Tuesday afternoon, Oct. 22, 2013, in Boston. The 90-year-old pianist will make his orchestral debut with Ma Tuesday night, where they will play music composed 70 years ago at the Nazi prison camp where Horner was imprisoned. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)
Cellist Yo-Yo Ma, right, follows Holocaust survivor George Horner for a rehearsal at Symphony Hall Tuesday afternoon, Oct. 22, 2013, in Boston. The 90-year-old pianist will make his orchestral debut with Ma Tuesday night, where they will play music composed 70 years ago at the Nazi prison camp where Horner was imprisoned. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)
BOSTON (AP) — A 90-year-old Holocaust survivor will make his orchestral debut with renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma on Tuesday to benefit a foundation dedicated to preserving the work of artists and musicians killed by the Nazis.
Ma and George Horner, a retired doctor who lives near Philadelphia, embraced warmly in a small room at Boston's Symphony Hall on Tuesday afternoon before a brief rehearsal.
Ma thanked Horner for helping the Terezin Music Foundation, named for the town of Terezin, site of an unusual Jewish ghetto in what was then German-occupied Czechoslovakia. Even amid death and hard labor, Nazi soldiers there allowed prisoners to stage performances.
On Tuesday night, they will play music composed 70 years ago when Horner was incarcerated.
"It's an extraordinary link to the past," said concert organizer Mark Ludwig, who leads the foundation.
Horner played piano and accordion in the Terezin cabarets, including tunes written by fellow inmate Karel Svenk. On Tuesday, Horner will play two of Svenk's works solo — a march and a lullaby — and then team up with Ma for a third piece called "How Come the Black Man Sits in the Back of the Bus?"
Svenk did not survive the genocide. But his musical legacy has, due in part to a chance meeting of Ludwig, a scholar of Terezin composers, and Horner, who never forgot the songs that were written and played in captivity.
Still, Ludwig found it hard to ask Horner to perform pieces laden with such difficult memories.
"To ask somebody who ... played this in the camps, that's asking a lot," said Ludwig.
Yet Horner readily agreed to what he described as a "noble" mission. It didn't hurt that he would be sharing the stage with Ma — even if he thought Ludwig was joking at first.
"I told him, 'Do you want me to swallow that one?'" Horner recalled with a laugh. "I couldn't believe it because it's a fantastic thing for me."
Ma said before the performance that he hoped it will inspire people to a better future.
"I grew up with the words, 'never again,'" said Ma, who was born 10 years after the end of World War II revealed the scope of the Holocaust. "It is kind of inconceivable that there are people who say the Holocaust didn't exist. George Horner is a living contradiction of what those people are saying."
He said Horner was able to survive "because he had music, because he had friends, because the power of music could fill in the empty spaces."
"To me George Horner is a huge hero, and is a huge inspiration," Ma said. "He is a witness to a window, and to a slice of history, that we never want to see again, and yet we keep seeing versions of that all over the world. I hope we are inspired by that and we keep that memory forever."
The program features additional performances by Ma and the Hawthorne String Quartet. In a statement, Ma said he's glad the foundation is "giving voice through music to those whose voices have been tragically silenced."
Horner was 21 when he was freed by Allied soldiers in 1945 after serving time at Terezin, Auschwitz and Buchenwald. His parents and sister perished in the camps.
And though his back still bears the scars of a Nazi beating, he remains spry and seems much younger than his 90 years.
When Horner found out about the duet with Ma, Ludwig said, "He was so excited, to me he sounded like a teenager."
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Matheson reported from Newtown Square, Pa. AP photographer Senne reported from Boston.
Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/4e67281c3f754d0696fbfdee0f3f1469/Article_2013-10-22-Holocaust%20Survivor-Concert/id-3ac2e974df48458185fa34933ee07852
