Roar of China's 'Great Cannon' heard across the internet

Big guns for big jobs. archer10, CC BY-SA

China has once again surprised researchers by unleashing what has been dubbed its “Great Cannon” – a cyber weapon that has in recent weeks brought down several websites including the Github software code repository and GreatFire, an activist group working against censorship in China.

The offensive power of the cannon is closely linked to the defensive nature of the so-called Great Firewall of China, an internet control system that prevents citizens from accessing websites banned by the ruling party.

Researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab have released a detailed analysis of the attacks against GitHub and GreatFire. While the firewall works by intercepting traffic destined to or from banned websites, the cannon works by intercepting huge amounts of unencrypted web traffic passing through Chinese-controlled networks and re-routing it to a specific target. Such a deluge of traffic becomes a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, a tried-and-tested method in which the scale of requests overwhelms the site’s web servers, essentially knocking it offline.

Who’s pointing the cannon?

The identities of the Great Cannon’s targets provide circumstantial evidence of the Chinese government’s involvement. GreatFire provides real-time information on the status of Chinese internet censorship, allowing Chinese web users the possibility of avoiding keywords banned by the censor, and finding other ways around the Great Firewall. GreatFire also hosts two GitHub software repositories, one of tools for circumventing China’s Great Firewall, the other a mirror for The New York Times – hardly a Communist Party favourite.

That either might be a suitable target for the Chinese government is readily apparent, but the Citizen Lab researchers also found firmer evidence that the cannon is indeed of Chinese government origin. The Great Cannon and Great Firewall share a number of technical similarities that suggest a common origin. And they are located within the same network address space – somewhere within both the state-run firms of China Telecom and China Unicom.

If these forensic conclusions are correct, why would the Chinese government not hide both the existence and use of this capability better, particularly given that attacks of this nature flout international norms and are illegal in most jurisdictions?

How the Great Firewall and Great Cannon are linked Citizen Lab

Sabre-rattling on the world stage

The first possibility is that these attacks serve a short-term objective of countering the actions of entities China considers threats to its national security. This is a long list, that includes virtual private network and proxy providers, various non-governmental organisations and the Western media.

GreatFire for example has been significantly affected by the attack and its ability to conduct what it calls “collateral freedom” is greatly diminished. This might be considered a success by elements of the Chinese state apparatus, although any tactical gains are likely to be short-lived. Perhaps showing its hand so early in the game will make its Great Cannon less useful in the future, as other organisations are alerted to its characteristics.

At the same time, that the Chinese are prepared to weaponise the traffic passing through their networks into forming the Great Cannon demonstrates both the state’s capability and its willingness to deploy that capability. These are essential components in any attempt to deter opponents, state or non-state, who might attempt to degrade or circumvent Chinese state censorship. “Firing” the cannon may be an attempt to establish it as a credible deterrent – GreatFire’s web hosting costs rocketed to US$30,000 per day due to the explosion of traffic.

The Citizen Lab researchers also note that the Great Cannon can be used to deliver other payloads, more malicious ways of targeting and compromising foreign internet addresses than the relatively crude DDoS attacks launched in March. This must concern other states, although we do not know how it might affect their actions.

Casting a pall over international relations

Someone or, more likely, some committee, within the Party apparatus may have made a strategic decision that the benefits of demonstrating this capability outweigh the costs of attracting international condemnation for doing so. The only response the Chinese government has offered is its well-worn line that China is itself a target of foreign computer attacks – which while true hardly deflects criticism or allays suspicion.

China knows well that the US National Security Agency and UK GCHQ have already been found guilty of interfering with foreign networks but an appeal to this precedent no more exonerates China than it would any other country.

China and the US, its peer-competitor, have been trading blows in this fashion for many years. Far from dampening this mutual distrust, these latest actions only serve to heighten it. Given the global importance of China-US relations, this is not a development to be welcomed.

Atmospheric water may be giving Saturn its spots

In 2010, a massive storm broke out in Saturn’s northern hemisphere. Researchers hypothesize that circulating water may be behind the squalls that seem to appear on the planet every few decades.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space

Curing baldness may just be about having enough pluck

Ok, when will it come back? HuffingtonPost.com , CC BY

Shaved heads have come in and out of fashion over the past few decades, but some people don’t have the option of allowing their locks to grow. Thankfully, for those who do suffer from hair loss, or alopecia, help may be at hand. Somewhat counter-intuitively an effective treatment for baldness may come from plucking a certain number of hairs – in a specific formation – from the scalp.

Hair follicles – the skin organ responsible for hair growth – contain stem cells that constantly divide, they are the driving force behind new hair growth. A healthy hair follicle produces about six inches of hair every year, but if the follicle stem cells malfunction and stop dividing, hair growth ceases and conditions such alopecia are observed.

Androgenic alopecia – or male pattern baldness – is the most common form of hair loss and will effect around two-thirds of men and one-third of women during their lifetime.

Regeneration response

Our recent study, published in Cell, and completed on a mouse model, is unique because it not only studies the regeneration of a single hair follicle, but focuses on the regrowth of several follicles that had previously been effected by alopecia.

We demonstrated that plucking a few properly arranged hairs can trigger regeneration of hair follicles stem cells in up to five times more neighbouring, un-plucked surrounding hairs.

It is not surprising that follicle stem cell injury – caused by plucking – can cause a regeneration response. But, generally the stimulation of one stem cell through injury is only thought to cause regeneration in that stem cell alone. Triggering the regeneration of a whole head of hair in this way would be highly inefficient. But can the regeneration response of several stem cells be triggered by stimulating only a few key cells or signals?

Decision making in stem cell populations

Recently, we accidentally discovered that regeneration could occur through a collective decision-making process. By plucking the correct number of hairs with a proper arrangement, up to five times more neighbouring, unplucked resting hairs were activated to regrow. But if the number of plucked hairs was below a threshold, no hairs regenerated.

Collective-decision time. Cheng-Ming Chuong, CC BY

This type of regeneration is an all-or-nothing process which is dependent on the signals produced by a fraction of hairs being plucked, and is an example of the process known as “quorum sensing”.

Quorum sensing can be thought of as a decision-making process which is dependant on certain criteria being met within a population. Signalling molecules are released by each stimulated component of the population, the more components that are stimulated the more signal molecules are released. As the elements in the system are able sense the number of signal molecules released by the population as a whole, they can also sense the degree of stimulation. When a certain threshold of stimulation is reached, a collective response from the components in the system will follow.

The process of quorum sensing has been used to describe bacteria cell-to-cell communication, where the expression of certain genes is coordinated between many bacteria in response to environmental factors such as an increase in the presence of bacterial toxins. Quorum sensing has also been used successfully to explain the behaviour of social insects such as ants and honey bees for their collective decision-making.

Cast and count

But in reality, how does the population of hair follicles “cast and count its vote” in quorum sensing?. First, there is a stimulus – such as hair plucking, which stimulates follicle stem cells – to some, but not all, hair follicles. Second, the plucked hair sends out a signal to surrounding cells. Third, the group of cells gauges the intensity of signal from its surroundings. Finally, a local decision is made within the population in an all-or-nothing fashion: if enough hairs have been plucked, mass hair regrowth will occur, but if not, there will be no response at all.

In the most simple cases of quorum sensing, the signal molecule spreads by diffusion from the secreting cell. But it was found that the signals being released by plucked hair follicles were travelling further than could be achieved by simple diffusion, suggesting that a something more complicated was involved.

Molecular and genetic analysis revealed the that the signals were transmitted through a two-step immune response, triggered by the plucking of the hair follicle. First injured hair follicle stem cells will release a small signal molecule, this recruits a specific cell type involved in the immune response called a macrophage. This then secretes a signal molecule involved in the immune response called a cytokine, which acts directly on surrounding hair follicle cells by stimulating various cellular regeneration signal pathways.

Repair and regeneration

This work shows that a quorum-sensing system can sense cell injury and use immune response to quantify how much damage has occurred. The stem cell population then disregards the stimulus if the minimum number of hairs has not been have not been plucked, or responds to it with a full-scale regenerative response in many hair follicles when a threshold is reached.

This finding also is important in the field of regeneration medicine as a whole. We believe that the quorum-sensing behaviour principle is likely to be present in the regeneration of tissue and organs beyond the skin. Using such efficient regenerative strategies opens a new window in treating hair loss as well as many other degenerative disorders.

How a mindful approach to computer and smartphone use might just make you happier

Too much going on in there. messy mind by Ollyy/www.shutterstock.com

Computing today is perverse. Information technology may have freed up our time through computerisation and automation, but it has also encroached on our ability to switch off and relax. Technology is blamed for information overload, inescapable multitasking, the loss of any work/life balance, internet addiction and the abusive behaviour found on social media.

Research shows that internet use releases dopamine in the brain, triggering a reward response and leading to potentially obsessive pleasure-seeking behaviour. We can get so wrapped up in our internet use that we even forget to breathe — email or screen apnea is the effect of taking only shallow breaths or even holding your breath while working or playing in front of a screen.

Computers have infiltrated our entire waking day, so we are nagged constantly by text messages, notifications from Facebook, Whatsapp, or Viber – on top of the usual deluge of email. How we respond to these messages depends on our state of mind at the time, but our state of mind is also affected by them.

Computers stressing us out

As with any innovation, there are always concerns over how the benefits and drawbacks will play out. The rapid and almost total computerisation of society, particularly with the arrival of smartphones, has given us little time to consider how best to use them. History shows a pattern, with enthusiastic supporters becoming euphoric about a technological innovation while at others see the innovation as “the end of the world”.

Could computers be inherently bad for us – is it us, or is it them that turns us into computer addicts? Our relationship with technology has become a love-hate affair, with some taking extreme measures to eliminate or abandon email or social media or smartphones in an effort to stop the disruptions and help them focus on family or work. This sort of “digital detox” has been promoted as the way forward in getting our normal life back.

Computers giving us a break

So while there’s evidence technology has stressed us out, what has it done to improve matters, to introduce relaxation into our lives? There are a number of apps such as Headspace designed to help us relax and unwind, offering relaxing music, sounds of nature, or exhortations to breathe deeply or sleep.

It might seem that using technology to de-stress from using technology sounds oxymoronic, but we’ve previously suggested it’s possible to practise mindfulness to manage digital overload.

Mindfully speaking johnhain

One definition of mindfulness is the conscious awareness and acceptance of present experience. Mindfulness promotes presence of mind and awareness of patterns of thought and emotion, and how they affect mood, thought and action. Mindfulness has been used extensively in medicine, psychology and the business world as a way to alleviate stress and anxiety. In the context of business, mindfulness helps executives to see different perspectives and viewpoints, shed assumptions, and find new insights.

But there’s little research on mindfulness and the processing power of computers. A mindful approach to computing could provide us a way to use the technology we rely upon safely without suffering from the burn-out it tends to bring, while keeping our family and “real life” within reach.

Following a mindful approach, some strategies have already been suggested to bring a greater level of awareness to emailing and using social media. For example, a salesman rushes into the office while also responding to a trivial instant message. His stressed mind produces an irritated reaction to his unsuspecting colleague’s message. Had he created a dedicated hour for managing messages, rather than add to his already crazed morning, the outcome may have been different.

Re-writing the rules

There is a larger picture: technology doesn’t exist apart from society. According to Social Construction of Technology theory, a technology is not fully adopted before all interested parties are sufficiently convinced to align around using the technology for a common purpose. Just as traffic laws and etiquette formed around the automobile, we need to agree social rules around what is appropriate phone and computer use.

We need to set expectations at work about interrupting one another in order to protect our focus on projects, or get across how quickly queries require responses. What time should we stop sending or responding to email? Should we stop celebrating multitasking as a badge of honour when really it is a practice in futility? At home, families must decide when and where are screen-free times and places, in order to protect quality connection with each other over the lure of constant access to information.

We can’t do this without a collective conversation about our relationships with these devices and how we use them. Every culture, firm and family will have it’s own answers – but we need to start asking the questions.

Why employing autistic people makes good business sense

Autistic people see patterns that others miss. head by Dragana Gerasimoski/shutterstock.com

Microsoft has announced its intention to hire more autistic people – not as a charitable enterprise but because, as corporate vice-president Mary Ellen Smith said: “People with autism bring strengths that we need at Microsoft.” Employing autistic people makes good business sense.

Microsoft is not the only firm to reach this conclusion. More and more companies are beginning to seek employees from the pool of autistic talent. Specialisterne is a consultancy that recruits only autistic individuals. Originally based in Denmark it now operates in 12 countries worldwide and is currently working with Microsoft.

In recent years Vodafone and German software giant SAP have also launched recruitment drives to find more autistic employees, and to provide better support for them in the workplace. Both companies state that this is due to the competitive edge it gives, with SAP executives reporting increased productivity.

This is testament to the excellent work that many autistic people and their supporters have done to raise awareness of the strengths and abilities associated with autism, as well as the better-known difficulties with social communication and interaction. But what are these strengths?

Highlighting strengths not drawbacks

The three companies above might suggest that benefits come to those working in computing. Indeed Specialisterne has revealed that its autistic consultants find on average 10% more bugs than their non-autistic colleagues when checking software code for errors.

There is growing evidence to back up these observations. Studies of attention and perception among people with autism reveal that those with the condition see the world differently. For example, my colleagues and I have shown that autism is characterised by Increased Perceptual Capacity – the ability to process more information at any given time.

This can be problematic if the extra information results in altered sensitivities – such as finding bright lights painful, or having difficulty focusing on a conversation in a noisy room. But in other situations it can provide an increased ability to absorb and process useful information at an exceptional level of detail.

For example, in tasks that require you to find a target hidden among other elements, autistic people are faster and more accurate. They are also better at noticing both expected and unexpected things in their visual field. Autistic people also show excellent pattern recognition, a superior ability to identify and remember sounds and are much more likely to have perfect pitch.

This gives them skills to excel as artists, musicians and scientists. Perhaps controversially, these skills are also put to military use: the Israeli Defence Force has a specialist intelligence unit comprised exclusively of autistic analysts, whose skills are used to detect military threats.

Computer hacker Gary McKinnon, who was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, and his mother Janice. Katie Collins/PA

Beyond stereotypes

Is this idea of the “autistic genius” who is more comfortable with computers than people a worrying throwback to old stereotypes? We should be careful not to regress to the Rain Man vision of autism, depicting autistic people as largely unable to function yet with an isolated area of genius. Such savants do exist, but they are rare (1-10% of the population), whereas the increased perceptual abilities discussed above are more common. While the latter are less extreme, they demonstrate that alongside the difficulties autistic people often have unique gifts.

Temple Grandin, an autistic author, self-advocate and professor agrees, arguing that: “the autistic brain is good at something and bad at something else”. She urges us to seek out autistic people’s skills, rather than fixating on shortcomings. There are many old jokes within the IT industry that the top programmers at leading firms are on the autistic spectrum – hidden away in solitary cubicles, coding for hours on end (for example Bill Gates is regularly diagnosed as autistic by the press).

But Grandin reminds us not to pigeonhole all people based on classic “autism skills”. There are many types of autistic brain: not only the pattern thinkers and mathematicians who will excel at programming but also visual thinkers who will be great graphic designers, artists such as Stephen Wiltshire and photographers, or verbal thinkers who would make excellent stage actors (including Darryl Hannah) or journalists.

Stephen Wiltshire, an autistic artist who draws huge landscapes entirely from memory. Wallace Woon/EPA

Improving chances

Society’s understanding of this issue is improving, but there’s still much to be done. According to the National Autistic Society’s 2012 survey, only 15% of autistic adults in the UK are in full-time paid employment (compared to 31% for other disabilities), despite 61% of those who are unemployed saying they want to work.

What can we do to improve this? Microsoft’s announcement and others like it helps, but employers need to be better educated about the value autistic employees can bring. Businesses need to know about potential difficulties that autistic employees might experience, the simple adjustments that can accommodate them and the wide range of skills and interests that they can bring to the workplace. Lee Scott MP, the prime minister’s special needs envoy, is developing a scheme that will ask each MP to help find work for young autistic people in businesses in their constituencies.

We also need the education system to be better at equipping autistic people with the skills they need. On his blog, John Elder Robison, an autistic author and engineer, explains how the expectation of college graduation is harmful and believes we need to focus on making sure students, autistic and non-autistic alike, gain the skills they need rather than achieve a particular qualification. This leans towards more vocational programmes that capitalise on individuals’ special interests and abilities, helping shape those into employable skills.

The film X+Y is an example of what happens when talent and ability is identified early and fostered in the right way. Based on the real-life documentary (Beautiful Young Minds) about autistic mathematician Daniel Lightwing, the film tells his story from early childhood through his training to take part in the International Mathematics Olympiad. I won’t spoil the ending, but it’s definitely worth a watch.

We must also take care to value all autistic individuals, irrespective of whether they have a particular ability or not. As the extremely eloquent Ari Ne’eman, autistic campaigner and member of the US National Council on Disabilities, said: “People have worth regardless of whether they have special abilities. If society accepts us only because we can do cool things every so often, we’re not exactly accepted.”

Plants suck in nicotine from nearby smokers

Peppermint plants also draw in a fix from tobacco dropped on soil

Peppermint plants can build up nicotine from tobacco dropped on their soil or smoked indoors.

Forest & Kim Starr/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Plants turn out to be secondhand smokers, taking in nicotine from humankind’s tobacco and fumes. And lab tests suggest that slipping a cigarette butt into a plant’s pot sends a temporary surge of nicotine into its leaves.

Researchers sprinkled 100 milligrams of American Spirit tobacco — about an eighth to a tenth of a cigarette — onto the soil of potted peppermint plants. Nine days later older leaves carried roughly fivefold the background level of the leaves’ nicotine, Dirk Selmar of Technische Universität Braunschweig in Germany and his colleagues report April 7 in the journal Agronomy for Sustainable Development.

Nicotine levels spiked also in peppermints closeted with fumes from 11 cigarettes smoked in two hours.

“From a food safety point of view, there is no reason to panic,” Selmar says. He intended the research to help chase down sources of unexpected nicotine in herbal teas and spices despite the European Union’s 2009 ban on nicotine pesticides. Smoking farmers and processors could contribute, in part at least, to the rogue nicotine, Selmar concludes.

Crowdfunding could be a simple way to pay for science research

Eureka! Russiavia , CC BY

The outcome of science research benefits us all, but knowledge doesn’t come cheap. Crowdfunding – promoted by government incentives – may be the best way to meet these costs and garner greater awareness of scientific research priorities.

There is an ongoing debate on how to measure the amount of knowledge created through research. The traditional approach is to look at the number of published articles in peer-reviewed journals and work out the impact they have. How much does it cost to produce knowledge?

In 2012, the worldwide expenditure on scientific research and development was US$1.5 trillion, while an estimated 1.9m peer reviewed articles were published that year. This works out as a whopping US$790,000 per article.

This is a very rough and exaggerated estimate, since not all commercially funded research is published – and some research projects like space missions are extremely costly. Also, this estimate does not account for patents. But it’s an indication of how expensive science is and shows that there’s a market for it. Can we call this a market? I believe so. The average price of a car in the US in 2012 was US$30,000 and more than 10m were sold – this looks relatively cheap compared to the price of a peer-reviewed article.

Even Bill Gates is interested in crowdfunding, and he has very deep pockets indeed. experiment.com

Value for money

So do we get value for money when it comes to knowledge? The likely answer is No, because in most of cases the scientific research market is an “oligopsony” –- a market with many producers (the scientists and research groups) but only a few or even just one formal consumer.

Society is the consumer, but the money to fund research is channelled through at most, a handful of funding agencies (often a single agency). This has the benefit of ensuring that money is divided up fairly between disciplines – but on the other hand, funding agencies may exercise their market power to actually spend as little as possible. Why? Because there’s no one else to offer a better deal to the scientists.

Crowdfunding has proven to be a good source of investment for many small projects and start-up companies as it allows the easy aggregation of small contributions from many individuals to reach a target. As science becomes more mainstream – who hasn’t heard of the Higg’s Boson? – the myth that science is weird and alien is being overturned. This means there’s more fertile ground in which to secure scientific funding through collective effort.

There are now many websites dedicated to scientific crowdfunding such as including Petridish.org, Experiment.com, and crowdfunding has successfully funded several projects – for example the first publicly accessible orbital space telescope, and a specialist pressurised flight suit. These are good models but the real funding vehicle is yet to come, after all these projects have budgets under US$10,000 on average and this sort of cash doesn’t go far in terms of science.

Crowdfunding has paid to carry new inventions to the heavens, like this flight suit. Final Frontier Designs/Kickstarter

With a little government help

Clearly, this is where governments have to step in. Many countries have already benefited from governments having acted to remove monopolies and deregulate controlled industries in various markets. For example, air travel deregulation led to the boom in low-cost flights, while deregulating telecoms has seen a growth in services and providers.

In order for crowdfunding to actually involve the crowd, a government has to provide an incentive for funders, in this case its citizens. A great way would be to introduce science-funding shares – a sort of bond that could be issued by any research group for funding a specific research project, which could be tax deductible as an incentive. Of course, not all funding should be given to the crowd, but at least a portion of funding could be distributed in this way, with proper regulations and control.

There’s been a lot written about how crowdfunding can improve research outreach, and the extent to which the public understand research projects' aims and motivations. But large-scale involvement of citizens also poses some interesting questions. For instance, there is little doubt that a country needs strong and well-equipped armed forces. But would the research and development of nuclear weapons be ever sanctioned for crowdfunding by the public? Probably not.

The world is growing more competitive – and science is taking on a more important role in today’s society. In order for countries to remain competitive, new approaches to stimulate growth have to be developed. In the many countries with dysfunctional central governments, crowdfunding could be the only way for citizens to impose their democratic choices.

The internet has radically changed most forms of communication, government and business – why not science and research funding too?