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A 'Spooks And Suits' Red Team Game Social media apps meet national security Jul 20, 2011 | 12:40 PM | 0 Comments By Kelly Jackson Higgins Dark Reading What if a former Navy SEAL petty officer were a member of Anonymous? Senior members of the U.S. intelligence agency, including Michael Chertoff, the former Secretary of Homeland Security, and a former SEAL officer, will participate in a red-team exercise in September where they'll play the role of Anonymous/LulzSec and APT attackers, as well as the defenders trying to fend off these adversaries. Sure, simulated cyberattack games are nothing new these days. But this one is part and parcel of the upcoming Spooks and Suits summit in Silicon Valley on Sept. 23 and 24, and it throws together intell officials and attendees. It's the brainchild of cybersecurity expert Jeffrey Carr, who wanted to bring together three-letter agencies, like the CIA, NSA, and DoD, with social media and Web 2.0 developers and start-ups to actually communicate one-on-one with each another and with general attendees. It works like this: Attendees will be randomly assigned to one of four teams of 25 to 30 people: Anarchist hackers (a la Anonymous and LulzSec), APT attackers, or one of two defending organizations. The teams then must observe all of the panel discussions -- which will cover threats against the intell community, as well as demonstrations of new and existing social media applications -- from the perspective of either adversary or defender, depending on which team they are assigned. "If one of the apps presented has to do with a game, the objective for the attendee is to say, 'How can I use that game as an adversary? Or how can I use it to uncover or defend against an adversary?'" says Carr, who is the founder and CEO of Taia Global, an executive cybersecurity firm, and author of "Inside Cyber Warfare." "During breaks, they can play with the apps with an eye to their mission." The teams will have a working lunch period for buildi

Google's fourth and most ambitious attempt at social networking has set Silicon Valley abuzz, with membership soaring past 10 million people in just three weeks. Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz, the two executives in charge of Google+, said in an extended interview that they closely studied Google's previous failures with Orkut, Wave and Buzz to find a better approach. They also found a close-knit team of engineers and designers willing to take a risk.

 Color lets you snap and share photos and videos. But instead of sharing them with people you specify, it shares them with people near you-and if those people are using the Color app to capture stuff, you can see it, too. It all happens in real time in one 

Using Correlate, you can upload your own data series and see a list of search terms whose popularity best corresponds with that real world trend.

In what is believed to be the first operation of its kind, a patient voluntarily agrees to amputation of his hand so it could be replaced with a bionic replacement.  "Patrick is already testing a new hand, which its makers say will give him much greater movement. The hand has six sensors fitted over nerves within the lower arm, rather than the two on his current prosthesis."  Embedded video shows him doing daily routines with his new hand.  

Samsung want to introduce smartphones, wrist watch with these flexible displays in 2012. To reach that goal Samsung Mobile Display sets up a joint venture with Ube Kosan.

"The relevant point here is not Schmidt's thought on behavior and choice but the fact that, no matter what you choose to do or not do, your life exists in the cloud, indexed by Google, in the background of a photo album on Facebook, and across thousands of spammy directories that somehow know where you live and where you went to high school. These little bits of information exist like digital detritus. With software like PittPatt that can glean vast amounts of cloud-based data when prompted with a single photo, your digital life is becoming inseparable from your analog one. You may be able to change your name or scrub your social networking profiles to throw off the trail of digital footprints you've inadvertently scattered across the Internet, but you can't change your face. And the cloud never forgets a face. "

Scientists have used animal cells to create an artificial form of meat without the need for the rearing and slaughtering of livestock. The product, known as "in vitro meat", is made from thousands of stem cells which multiply to produce strips of muscle tissue without ever leaving the lab. Dutch scientists experimenting with pig cells say it could be just six months before the first test tube sausage is produced, and within a year lab-grown burgers could be created using similar techniques with cows.

Update: @TwitterGlobalPR has tweeted some factoids this afternoon. Twitter saw its highest rate of tweets per second last night with the peak coming with 5,106 at 11:00 p.m. EST. Between 10:45 p.m. and 12:30 a.m. EST Twitter average 3440 tweets per second. It is notable that Twitter did not crash under the load. A year ago at this time Twitter was having problems surrounding people tweeting about the soccer World Cup. This year the most notorious man in the world is killed and the company can handle it fine.

At least it does if you live in one of the six cities Google has so far partnered with. Boston, Portland, San Diego, and San Francisco, as well as Madrid and Turin across the pond, have all worked with Google to include a real-time schedule of their public transit systems in the latest version of Google Maps. 

"Do you mind if Microsoft drops a little future on you like a ton of bricks? This HoloDesk uses a half-silvered mirror and a Kinect sensor to "see" your hands in 3D space then project visible objects on and around them, allowing you to juggle virtual spheres, play with phones, and generally get all Minority Report up in this piece."

Some good advice for community brand managers dealing with trolls.

An excellent documentary that addresses technology and design. Includes interviews with several design leaders from Twitter, Microsoft, and Arduino.

A cute way to "play spy" using self-destruct emails.

first-ever historical mapping and exploration of the full text contents of the English-language edition of Wikipedia, in time and space, with visualizations of modern history captured in under a day. Loading the entire English language edition of Wikipedia into SGI UV 2000, Mr. Leetaru was able to show how Wikipedia's view of the world unfolded over the past two centuries.

All third-party applications that you allow to access your Twitter account go through a permissions process. Today we're announcing an update to help you make more informed choices about the way third-party apps integrate with your Twitter account:

I guess this was inevitable.  Microsoft develops new technique to track where you move your mouse with less than 1KB of JavaScript

Google blog post about adding pivot tables to Google Docs.