Reverse-Engineering of Human Brain Likely by 2030, Expert Predicts

Reverse-engineering the human brain so we can simulate it using computers may be just two decades away, says Ray Kurzweil, artificial intelligence expert and author of the best-selling book The Singularity is Near.

It would be the first step toward creating machines that are more powerful than the human brain. These supercomputers could be networked into a cloud computing architecture to amplify their processing capabilities. Meanwhile, algorithms that power them could get more intelligent. Together these could create the ultimate machine that can help us handle the challenges of the future, says Kurzweil.

This point where machines surpass human intelligence has been called the “singularity.” It’s a term that Kurzweil helped popularize through his book.

“The singular criticism of the singularity is that brain is too complicated, too magical and there’s something about its properties we can’t emulate,” Kurzweil told attendees at the Singularity Summit over the weekend. “But the exponential growth in technology is being applied to reverse-engineer the brain, arguably the most important project in history.”

For nearly a decade, neuroscientists, computer engineers and psychologists have been working to simulate the human brain so they can ultimately create a computing architecture based on how the mind works.

Reverse-engineering some aspects of hearing and speech has helped stimulate the development of artificial hearing and speech recognition, says Kurzweil. Being able to do that for the human brain could change our world significantly, he says.

The key to reverse-engineering the human brain lies in decoding and simulating the cerebral cortex — the seat of cognition. The human cortex has about 22 billion neurons and 220 trillion synapses.

A supercomputer capable of running a software simulation of the human brain doesn’t exist yet. Researchers would require a machine with a computational capacity of at least 36.8 petaflops and a memory capacity of 3.2 petabytes — a scale that supercomputer technology isn’t expected to hit for at least three years, according to IBM researcher Dharmendra Modha. Modha leads the cognitive computing project at IBM’s Almaden Research Center.

By next year, IBM’s ‘Sequoia’ supercomputer should be able to offer 20 petaflops per second peak performance, and an even more powerful machine will be likely in two to three years.

“Reverse-engineering the brain is being pursued in different ways,” says Kurzweil. “The objective is not necessarily to build a grand simulation — the real objective is to understand the principle of operation of the brain.”

Reverse engineering the human brain is within reach, agrees Terry Sejnowski, head of the computational neurobiology lab at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

Sejnowski says he agrees with Kurzweil’s assessment that about a million lines of code may be enough to simulate the human brain.

Here’s how that math works, Kurzweil explains: The design of the brain is in the genome. The human genome has three billion base pairs or six billion bits, which is about 800 million bytes before compression, he says. Eliminating redundancies and applying loss-less compression, that information can be compressed into about 50 million bytes, according to Kurzweil.

About half of that is the brain, which comes down to 25 million bytes, or a million lines of code.

But even a perfect simulation of the human brain or cortex won’t do anything unless it is infused with knowledge and trained, says Kurzweil.

“Our work on the brain and understanding the mind is at the cutting edge of the singularity,” he says.

Courtesy : www.wired.com

10 Things You Can Do To Make Your Linux Hosted Website More Secure

10. Get cooperation from your Linux host.
Make sure your host is updating their software at the server and network levels. This includes any available kernel updates, as well as updates for packages such as Apache and PHP. Your host should also have a server administrator reviewing the server security logs on a daily basis. These are security steps which, in most cases, can only be executed by your host's server administrator, so it is vital to ensure that your host is doing their part to secure your website.

9. Use a file integrity checker available for the Linux OS, such as AIDE (Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment).
File Integrity Checkers will notify you of any changes made to your site files and provide an audit trail of what exactly was added, removed or changed, as well as when the changes were made. A skilled hacker can break into a site and make minor changes to your code without adding new files or changing anything about the outward appearance of your site. For example, it's possible to make a few modifications to a billing script to cause it to silently email all of your customers' billing information to the hacker before running a charge as normal. Without a file integrity checker to alert you of this change, it's possible that the added code would go unnoticed for weeks or months, if it's ever noticed at all, and during that time all of your customers' personal information is being gathered by an unknown 3rd party.

8. Use the Unix/Linux command SCP or SFTP instead of FTP.
Avoid using FTP as much as possible, especially your primary FTP account with full access to your hosting account. FTP is an unencrypted protocol, which means that all data sent through FTP, including your username and password, are sent across the internet in plain text. This means that if anyone is monitoring your connection with a packet sniffer such as Wireshark, they can view all of your data as well as capture your account login information, which then gives them free access to your site and all of your files. Instead, use an encrypted protocol, such as SCP or SFTP to transfer your files; they work in exactly the same way, but all of your data is encrypted with public key encryption making it impossible to capture your login information.

7. Review the logs regularly
Review all available server logs, including access logs, traffic logs, and the file integrity checker logs as mentioned above (file integrity checkers are useless if nobody is reviewing the logs they create). One a lot of Linux servers these are in /var/log, among other places. Look for files using a lot of bandwidth or a lot of hits from a certain IP range, as this could indicate a script with modified code or an attempted intrusion. If your host uses a layer 7 firewall such as mod_security, you should also ask them for the entries in the modsec_audit.log for your domain. This will allow you to monitor any hacking attempts and take the necessary steps to permanently block the attacker before they get in.

6. Keep your domains seperate
The idea of hosting multiple domains on one account through add-on domains sounds convenient: you can buy one hosting account and then host and manage multiple domains using one primary username and password! Easy! However, it's easy to forget that this works the other way as well: a hacker can break into one hosting account and then attack multiple domains using one primary username and password. Easy. Aside from that, hosting multiple domains through the same account really complicates the process of cleaning up after an attack. Not only do you have to check every connected domain for malware or modified files, you also have to try to identify which domain the attacker broke in through and then take steps to secure each domain. On the other hand, when using separate accounts for each domain you can quickly and easily tell which domain was broken into, and you can generally assume that the rest of your unlinked accounts are still secure. If you're planning to host multiple domains through one host look for a host offering a reseller plan, where you can create separate accounts for each of your domains for a flat monthly or yearly rate. This is much easier to secure and keep secure, provided you keep your reseller password private.

5. Do some spring cleaning on your account
If you haven't gone in and cleaned out your account in a month or so, you're probably overdue for some site maintenance. It's a very good idea to go into your account and clean it out periodically. This includes deleting pages, scripts, databases, mail boxes, email addresses and FTP accounts you no longer use, as well as uninstalling software that you no longer need. Not only does this have the potential to free up some disk space, it's also a useful security measure. Removing custom scripts, software and pages that you no longer use helps to limit possible entry points for a hacker and leaves you with fewer pages and scripts to secure. Furthermore, in most cases when the owner of a site stops using a 3rd party script, be it Wordpress, phpbb, drupal or any others, they stop updating it, which is a serious security risk for reasons we will get into later. Suffice to say it's best to get rid of any unused files

4. Change your passwords regularly
We could easily write an entire article just on good password practices, but for the sake of brevity we'll focus on this one guideline that so few people follow. Even if you don't think your password has been compromised, the longer you use the same password the greater the chance that it has been captured by a hacker. Ideally you should change your FTP/SSH passwords, control panel passwords, software admin passwords, email passwords, and any other passwords once every month or so, but even changing your passwords once every few months is better than not changing them at all. On that note, when changing your passwords you should never use the same password for multiple items, which is another common mistake people make. If you use different passwords for each username or email address, someone getting their hands on your email password can be an inconvenience. If you use the same password for everything and someone gets your email password, you suddenly have a much greater security issue. it's especially good to never use your account password for 3rd party software, as many 3rd party programs store their admin passwords in clear text in a config file and a skilled hacker can pull up these config files with relative ease if they manage to get server access. Perhaps most importantly, remember that writing passwords down on a piece of paper is never a good idea. Instead, if you're having trouble remembering your passwords, consider downloading a free password manager (I recommend Keepass for Linux: http://www.keepassx.org/).

3. Create an ACL for non-public sections of your site
There are some section of your site that the general public simply doesn't need access to. For example, your Wordpress admin directory, your private photo galleries, or maybe parts of your FTP directory. In these cases, it's often a good idea to create an Access Control List, if you have a Linux host with Apache web server, this can be done using a .htaccess file. An ACL is relatively quick and easy to set up (some hosts may be willing to set it up for you, but some may ask you to create your own through the command line), and allows you to block specific IP addresses or only allow access to specific IP addresses (such as your home IP, your office IP, etc.). This allows only the IP addresses you've approved of to access those directories, so even if the password fell into the wrong hands, the site would still be locked to all but a few specific IP addresses.

2. Keep Permissions Locked Down
Setting the wrong permissions on files can be disasterous: anyone with user level access can access a file with 777 permissions, for example. It's generally good practice to make sure all permissions are set to 555 (all read and execute) for directories and 444 (all read) for files unless a specific program requires them to be set to something different. Avoid using very open permissions such as 777, 755, 666 or 644, as these give a lot of access rights to outside users. Ask your host if you need help changing your file permissions or have questions about Linux file permissions, or see the man page for chmod.

1. Keep current with updates from 3rd party vendors.
We've already touched on this a couple of times, but it bears repeating: it is absolutely critical that all 3rd party scripts be kept up to date. When asked what he considers to be the greatest security risk in web hosting Wayne C., a support technician at PenguinWebHosting.com, told us "definitely outdated scripts. In my experience they're the number one reason sites get hacked." The reason? "When a company updates their web software, things like Wordpress and Joomla, they do it for one of a few reasons. It could be that they want to add new features or to add support for newer versions of PHP or something like that, but a lot of times patches are reactive rather than proactive: they patch the software to seal off a security hole. Then in the patch notes, they list all the security updates that were added in that version, essentially highlighting the vulnerabalities in the previous version. With the knowledge of all the security weaknesses in the older version, all a potential hacker has to do is find someone still running the outdated software; they already know what vulnerabilities they can exploit to break in."


Courtesy : http://securehostingdirectory.com

Chilled genes are hot hope for new vaccines

Genes borrowed from Arctic bacteria could generate safer vaccines against diseases like tuberculosis. The genes enable researchers to make temperature-sensitive bacteria that prime the immune system before dying back.

So say Francis Nano and colleagues at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. They replaced genes in Francisella tularensi bacteria with versions from different species of bacteria found in the Arctic. The Arctic genes evolved in freezing temperatures and stop functioning at the higher temperatures inside animals.

The team chose genes indispensable for survival, such as those that repair DNA, so that their engineered bacteria would die when the genes stopped working. They successfully vaccinated mice against normally fatal doses of F. tularensis by first injecting their tails with the temperature-sensitive version.

The bacteria managed to survive within the lower temperatures of the skin, allowing it to prime the immune system, but was not present in internal organs, so posed no threat of disease. "TB is our big target now," says Nano.

Courtesy : http://newscientist.com

Journal reference : Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1004119107

Link: http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1004119107

Google Releases Chrome 6 Beta 1

Mozilla, Google and Microsoft are going head over heels to create the ultimate browser that takes the world into the second decade of the 21st century. Today, Google released the first beta version of its Chrome 6 Web browser. It has some much needed improvements. Along with the typical speed improvements, it includes improved syncing, an Autofill tool for forms and an improved user interface.

Syncing has always been the best part of Chrome. What it now includes is support for Autofill data and extensions. You can still use Chrome’s existing ability to sync bookmarks, preferences and themes. Your Google account is the source of all synchronised data, which makes reinstalling Chrome, or accessing your bookmarks when away from your computer very simple. Firefox and Internet Explorer won’t be able to implement syncing as easily, since users would have to sign up for new accounts to store their data. Chrome has an advantage here as users already have Google accounts.

The Autofill feature allows you to quickly fill in Web forms with information like your name, address, phone number and even your credit card number. The information is saved over time by Autofill as you fill out other online forms. Google software engineer James Hawkins confirms, “personal information stored in Chrome is safely stored and kept private until a user chooses to share the information with a website.” He also stressed that Chrome only saves credit card information when the user permits it to do so. You can view a demo of Autofill in this video hosted on YouTube.

User interface of Chrome 6 has also been improved. Speed-wise, the beta offers 15 per cent faster performance on the V8 and SunSpider benchmarks, which both track javascript performance According to Hawkins, the Omnibox (Chrome’s address bar that handles search and other tasks) is now “more approachable." The Chrome 6 also has a few more new options in the settings menu, including Zoom and Edit (cut/copy/paste). Download Chrome 6 and try out all these feature.

This launch comes on the same day as Mozilla's release of the Firefox 4 Beta 3 with multi-touch feature, which we reported earlier. The search giant had previously launched the Google Chrome Canary Build, which they termed as the most experimental and risky version of the browser yet, as a teaser to this launch.

Do you think Chrome 6 has a fighting chance against Firefox 4 and IE9?

This Microchip 'Talks' To Human Brain

Scientists at the University of Calgary have developed a neurochip that "communicates" with brain cells. By monitoring the electrical and chemical dialogue between brain cells using the microchip, scientists could eventually test drugs to treat several neurological conditions (such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson') accurately and quickly.

The new technology from the lab of Naweed Syed is developed in collaboration with the National Research Council Canada (NRC).

“This technical breakthrough means we can track subtle changes in brain activity at the level of ion channels and synaptic potentials, which are also the most suitable target sites for drug development in neurodegenerative diseases and neuropsychological disorders,” says Syed, who led the team of researchers.

The new neurochips are also automated, meaning that anyone can learn to place individual brain cells on them. Previously it took years of training to learn how to record ion channel activity from brain cells, and it was only possible to monitor one or two cells simultaneously. Now, larger networks of cells can be placed on a chip and observed in minute detail, allowing the analysis of several brain cells networking and performing automatic, large-scale drug screening for various brain dysfunctions.

This new technology can help scientists in a variety of fields and on a variety of research projects.

Gerald Zamponi, professor and head of the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, and member of the Hotchkiss Brain Institute, says, “This technology can likely be scaled up such that it will become a novel tool for medium throughput drug screening, in addition to its usefulness for basic biomedical research.”