Hunt for the "Kill" switch in microchips

The Department of Defense is freaked out that the commercially-manufactured microchips in their tech might contain "kill switches" that bad people could use to remotely knock the devices out of operation. So at the end of last year, DARPA launched its Trust In Integrated Circuits program to develop methods for sussing out chips with "malicious" circuitry hidden inside. IEEE Spectrum writer Sally Adee looked at the technicalities of the controversy. She told me, "I think interviewed every electrical engineer in the country so I could wrap my head around 1) why that's a big deal and 2) how it would affect me (I'm selfish that way.) From IEEE Spectrum:

Feeding those (fever) dreams is the Pentagon's realization that it no longer controls who manufactures the components that go into its increasingly complex systems. A single plane like the DOD's next generation F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, can contain an “insane number” of chips, says one semiconductor expert familiar with that aircraft's design. Estimates from other sources put the total at several hundred to more than a thousand. And tracing a part back to its source is not always straightforward. The dwindling of domestic chip and electronics manufacturing in the United States, combined with the phenomenal growth of suppliers in countries like China, has only deepened the U.S. military's concern.

Recognizing this enormous vulnerability, the DOD recently launched its most ambitious program yet to verify the integrity of the electronics that will underpin future additions to its arsenal. In December, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon's R&D wing, released details about a three-year initiative it calls the Trust in Integrated Circuits program. The findings from the program could give the military—and defense contractors who make sensitive microelectronics like the weapons systems for the F‑35—a guaranteed method of determining whether their chips have been compromised. In January, the Trust program started its prequalifying rounds by sending to three contractors four identical versions of a chip that contained unspecified malicious circuitry. The teams have until the end of this month to ferret out as many of the devious insertions as they can.

Vetting a chip with a hidden agenda can't be all that tough, right? Wrong. Although commercial chip makers routinely and exhaustively test chips with hundreds of millions of logic gates, they can't afford to inspect everything. So instead they focus on how well the chip performs specific functions. For a microprocessor destined for use in a cellphone, for instance, the chip maker will check to see whether all the phone's various functions work. Any extraneous circuitry that doesn't interfere with the chip's normal functions won't show up in these tests.

“You don't check for the infinite possible things that are not specified,” says electrical engineering professor Ruby Lee, a cryptography expert at Princeton. “You could check the obvious possibilities, but can you test for every unspecified function?”

*****

Can you say Paranoia?

Ok, there can be legitimate concerns here, but come on - the solution is obvious ... manufacture your own microchips, DUH!

Wind in Your Face

Residential wind power is the too often forgotten little brother of the wind power industry that builds turbines on the scale of jumbo jets. But it's starting to grow up and come out of the shadow of its bigger sibling. "improved generator technology [lighter magnets in the generators, blades that adjust to wind conditions, and units that wirelessly report how much power they're making], more financial incentives, rising electric rates, and energy-security concerns have opened the way for small-wind power to bloom in unlikely places."

That's right, they aren't just for the farm anymore. You should see more and more small wind turbines in suburbs and urban settings as time goes on. Of course, we're still talking small potatoes compared to big wind power, on the order of only 3 megawatts in 2007 according to the American Wind En ergy Association (AWEA), but that's triple the generating capacity of 2006. A few more years of tripling and doubling, and the power of exponential growth will be felt.

*****

This wind thing could be very interesting, very interesting. I will keep a watch on this and see where it goes.

U.S. Consumers: "Get the cheap stuff"

So much for healthier eating ...

Lambert, Getty Images

I had a faint hope that the rise in food prices might lead people to buy more carefully, perhaps cook more from scratch instead of buying prepared food, or even cut back on meat and eat more vegetables. No such luck; according to the IHT, Americans are just buying more crap, because the cheap calories come from the most processed, corn-based foods. My favourite quote:

"In Ohio, Holly Levitsky is replacing the Lucky Charms cereal in her kitchen with Millville Marshmallows and Stars, a less expensive store brand." Pizza sales at Domino's are down, while Wal-Mart says that sales of peanut butter and spaghetti are up. On the other hand, so are the sales of packaged food.

Donna Dunaway, a homemaker, used to splurge on the ingredients for homemade lasagna, her husband's favorite, before food prices began to surge this year."Now he's lucky to get a 99-cent lasagna TV dinner, or maybe some Manwich out of a can," she said. "I just can't afford to be buying all that good meat and cheese like I used to."

So much for hoping ...

We don't forget.

Concentration camp doctor tops list of 10 most-wanted Nazis

Former SS doctor Aribert Heim tops a list released Wednesday of most-wanted suspected Nazi war criminals. He is a man so brutal that witnesses remember him as the worst they saw, though he was only at Mauthausen concentration camp for two months.

Heim would be 93 today, but "we have good reason to believe he is still alive," said Efraim Zuroff by telephone from Jerusalem. Zuroff is the top Nazi hunter for Simon Wiesenthal Center, which published the list.

Still, despite a $485,000 reward for Heim's arrest posted by the center along with Germany and Austria, he has managed to avoid capture for decades.

He is only one of hundreds of suspected Nazi war criminals that the center estimates are still at large.

After Heim on the center's most wanted list are: John Demjanjuk, fighting deportation from the U.S., which says he was a guard at several death and forced labor camps; Sandor Kepiro, a Hungarian accused of involvement in the wartime killings of than 1,000 civilians in Serbia; Milivoj Asner, a wartime Croatian police chief now living in Austria and suspected of an active role in deporting hundreds of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies to their death; and Soeren Kam, a former member of the SS wanted by Denmark for the assassination of a journalist in 1943. His extradition from Germany was blocked in 2007 by a Bavarian court that found insufficient evidence for murder charges.

But the nature of Heim's alleged crimes are what catapulted him to the top of the list.

Karl Lotter, a prisoner who worked in the hospital at Mauthausen concentration camp, had no trouble remembering the first time he watched Heim kill a man.

It was 1941, and an 18-year-old Jew had been sent to the clinic with a foot inflammation. Heim asked him about himself and why he was so fit. The young man said he had been a soccer player and swimmer.

Then, instead of treating the prisoner's foot, Heim anesthetized him, cut him open, castrated him, took apart one kidney and removed the second, Lotter said. The victim's head was removed and the flesh boiled off so that Heim could keep it on display.

"He needed the head because of its perfect teeth," Lotter, a non-Jewish political prisoner, recalled in testimony eight years later that was included in a 1950 Austrian warrant for Heim's arrest uncovered by The Associated Press. "Of all the camp doctors in Mauthausen, Dr. Heim was the most horrible."

But Heim managed to avoid prosecution, his American-held file in Germany mysteriously omitting his time at Mauthausen.

The hunt for Heim has taken investigators from the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg all around the world. Besides his home country of Austria and neighboring Germany where he settled after the war, tips have come from Uruguay in 1998, Spain, Switzerland and Chile in 2005, and Brazil in 2006, said Heinz Heister, presiding judge of the Baden-Baden state court, where Heim was indicted in absentia on hundreds of counts of murder in 1979.

Born June 28, 1914 in Radkersburg, Austria, Heim joined the local Nazi party in 1935, three years before Austria was bloodlessly annexed by Germany.

He later joined the Waffen SS and was assigned to Mauthausen, a concentration camp near Linz, Austria, as a camp doctor in October and November 1941.

While there, witnesses told investigators, he worked closely with SS pharmacist Erich Wasicky on such gruesome experiments as injecting various solutions into Jewish prisoners' hearts to see which killed them the fastest.

But while Wasicky was brought to trial by an American Military Tribunal in 1946 and sentenced to death, along with other camp medical personnel and commanders, Heim, who was a POW in American custody, was not among them.

Heim's file in the Berlin Document Center, the then-U.S.-run depot for Nazi-era papers, was apparently altered to obliterate any mention of Mauthausen, according to his 1979 German indictment, obtained by the AP. Instead, for the period he was known to be at the concentration camp, he was listed as having a different SS assignment.

This "cannot be correct," the indictment says. "It is possible that through data manipulation the short assignment at the same time to the (concentration camp) was concealed."

There is no indication who might have been responsible.

The U.S. Army Intelligence file on Heim could shed light on his wartime and postwar activities, and is among hundreds of thousands transferred to the U.S. National Archives. But the Army's electronic format is such that staff have so far only been able to access about half of them, and these don't include the file requested by the AP.

Eli Rosenbaum, director of the Justice Department's Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations, declined to comment through a spokeswoman.

"I don't believe there is anything appropriate for Mr. Rosenbaum to add," said Justice Department spokeswoman Laura Sweeney in an e-mail.

Heim was relatively well-known, however, having been a national hockey player in Austria before the war, and there were plenty of witnesses from his time at Mauthausen.

Austrian authorities sent the 1950 arrest warrant to American authorities in Germany who initially agreed to turn him over, then told the Austrians, in a Dec. 21, 1950, letter obtained by the AP, that they couldn't trace him.

What happened next is unclear, but in 1958 Heim apparently felt comfortable enough to buy a 42-unit apartment block in Berlin, listing it in his own name with a home address in Mannheim, according to purchase documents obtained by the AP. He then moved to the nearby resort town of Baden-Baden and opened a gynecological clinic - also under his own name, Heister said.

In 1961, German authorities were alerted and began an investigation, but when they finally went to arrest him in September 1962, they just missed him - he apparently had been tipped off.

Heim continued to live off the rents collected from the Berlin apartments until 1979 when the building was confiscated by German authorities.

Proof that he is alive may lie in the fact that no one has claimed his estate. Heim has two sons in Germany and a daughter who lived in Chile but whose current whereabouts are unknown.

Ruediger Heim, one of the sons, would not comment when telephoned at his Baden-Baden villa.

"All I can say is that it has been implied that I am in contact with my father, and that is absolutely false," he said. "The rest is speculation, and I can't enter into that.

*****

Although I am not jewish and I believe some of the 'wanted' are wanted just out of nothing more than petty spite (yes, even jews can be petty and spiteful just like any other human), there are some who should be boiled in oil for their crimes.
The neo-cons in this country would do well to remember the fact that we do not forget.

Mystery Solved

• World News

DNA confirms IDs of czar's children

DNA tests carried out by a U.S. laboratory prove that bone fragments exhumed last year belong to two children of Czar Nicholas II, putting to rest questions about what happened to Russia's last royal family, a regional governor said Wednesday.

Bone fragments dug up near the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg are indeed those of Crown Prince Alexei and his sister, Maria, whose remains had been missing since the family was murdered in 1918 as Russia descended into civil war, said Eduard Rossel, governor of the Sverdlovsk region.

"We have now found the entire family," he told reporters in Yekaterinburg, 900 miles east of Moscow.

The confirmation could bring the tortured history of the Russian imperial family closer to closure and end royal supporters' persistent hopes that members of the czar's immediate family survived the massacre.

Nicholas II abdicated in 1917 as revolutionary fervor swept Russia, and he and his family were detained. The czar; his wife, Alexandra, and their son and four daughters were fatally shot on July 17, 1918, in a basement room of the merchant's house where they were being held in Yekaterinburg

The remains of Nicholas, Alexandra and three of their daughters were unearthed in Yekaterinburg in 1991 as the Soviet Union was collapsing. After genetic tests convinced forensics experts of their authenticity, they were buried in 1998 in a cathedral in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg.

The Russian Orthodox Church canonized Nicholas and his family in 2000, even as it expressed doubts that the remains were indeed those of the czar's family.

The remains of Alexei and Maria, however, had never been located, leading to decades of speculation that perhaps one or both had survived.

Last summer, researchers dug up the bone shards near Yekaterinburg and enlisted Russian and U.S. laboratories to conduct DNA tests.

"The main genetic laboratory in the United States has concluded its work with a full confirmation of our own laboratories' work," Rossel told reporters. "This has confirmed that indeed it is the children.

It was unclear which laboratory Rossel was referring to but a genetic research team working at the University of Massachusetts Medical School has been involved in the process.

The press service for Russian Orthodox Church said no one could comment on the discovery.

As hippies mourn world wide ...

Albert Hofmann, who first synthesized Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), has passed away. He was 102 years-old.

"I believe that if people would learn to use LSD's vision-inducing capability more wisely, under suitable conditions, in medical practice and in conjunction with meditation, then in the future this problem child could become a wonderchild." -- Albert Hofmann (1906-2008)

Hard Lemonade Debacle

7-year-old boy removed from father and placed in state custody over mistaken order of hard lemondade

Christopher Ratte took his 7-year-old son to a baseball game at Comerica Park. He ordered a lemonade from a vendor and gave it to his boy. Unbeknownst to Ratte (a professor of classical archaeology at the University of Michigan) it was "hard" lemonade, meaning it contained alcohol. When a guard spotted the boy sipping from the bottle, the police were called in, the boy was taken from his father, driven by ambulance to the hospital, and put into foster care.

The 47-year-old academic says he wasn't even aware alcoholic lemonade existed when he and Leo stopped at a concession stand on the way to their seats in Section 114.

"I'd never drunk it, never purchased it, never heard of it," Ratte of Ann Arbor told me sheepishly last week. "And it's certainly not what I expected when I ordered a lemonade for my 7-year-old."

But it wasn't until the top of the ninth inning that a Comerica Park security guard noticed the bottle in young Leo's hand.

"You know this is an alcoholic beverage?" the guard asked the professor.

"You've got to be kidding," Ratte replied. He asked for the bottle, but the security guard snatched it before Ratte could examine the label.

... it would be two days before the state of Michigan allowed Ratte's wife, U-M architecture professor Claire Zimmerman, to take their son home, and nearly a week before Ratte was permitted to move back into his own house.

*****

Ok, the vendor should be hung for not specifying that the "lemonade" contained alcohol in the first place. Secondly, the over reaction on the part of the officialdom was not warranted if the prof was truly unaware of the very existence of hard lemonade - something I doubt, given the bombardment of advertising for it (I am an Archeaologist as well and even I know it exists), but I can believe he had no clue that the lemonade he was getting for his son was just such a lemonade ... the thought of an alcohol laced lemonade would not have crossed his mind when getting a 'soda' for his child.

However, if he deliberately got a alcoholic drink for his 7-year-old son ... let me know where the you want the hole dug to bury him in - alive!