My Story Articles

For the first time since 2011, a Japanese supercomputer has managed to claim the first spot in a global speed competition. Fugaku has beaten the Chinese and American competitors and managed to clock in a score of 415.53 petaflops, thus claiming the first position on the biannual Top500 List. A system that is capable of one-petaflop speed can carry out one quadrillion ‘floating-point operations’ or computer arithmetic calculations. In order to keep up with a one-petaflop supercomputer, you will have to perform one calculation every second for a total of 31,688,765 years. For keeping up with Fugaku, you would have to perform one calculation every second for almost 13.2 billion years. This is also the first time that an Advanced Reduced instruction set computing Machine (ARM) supercomputer has claimed the lead spot on the Top500 List. Generally, ARM processors are reserved for the world of mobile devices, including tablets, laptops, and smartphones. This makes Fugaku’s win even more ...

Beware – any light bulb in a room that is visible from the window can be utilized for spying on your conversations from afar. The discovery comes from a team of researchers at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. The team has found that the patterns of vibrations in a light bulb can allow us to recover full conversations from a distance of hundreds of feet away. How is that possible, you ask? It is possible because a hanging light bulb not only acts as a diaphragm but also a transducer. This makes it a viable gadget for any intruders who might want to eavesdrop on your conversation. The paper says, ‘We show how fluctuations in the air pressure on the surface of the hanging bulb (in response to sound), which cause the bulb to vibrate very slightly (a millidegree vibration), can be exploited by eavesdroppers to recover speech and singing, passively, externally, and in real-time.’ The technique has been named ‘lamphone’ and can be executed by having a laptop, telescope, ...

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are a serious threat to an organization’s ability to attract, retain, and interact with customers. Simply put, a DDoS attack is designed to render an organization’s web presence inaccessible to legitimate users by overwhelming the underlying infrastructure with malicious traffic. Traditional DDoS attacks are only becoming cheaper and easier to perform. The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) and growth of cloud computing mean that cybercriminals have easy access to a great deal of Internet-connected computational power. These botnets can be tasked to send malicious requests to a website in volumes greater than the web servers can withstand. However, the growth of cheap and easily accessible computing power is not the only way in which the DDoS threat landscape is evolving. Cybercriminals are also taking advantage of new tools and techniques to perform their attacks. One example of such a technique is the NXNSAttack. This attack takes...