[Hplusroadmap] Fwd: [tt] Turns out empowered-individuals can, in fact, deliver in times of need (was: NS: Emergency 2.0)

Thu May 8 21:22:03 CDT 2008

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From: Premise Checker <checker at panix.com>
Date: Thu, May 8, 2008 at 8:30 AM
Subject: [tt] NS: Emergency 2.0 is coming to a website near you
To: Transhuman Tech <tt at postbiota.org>

Emergency 2.0 is coming to a website near you
http://technology.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19826545.900&print=true
8.5.2
[Related material appended.]

* Jason Palmer

In September 1970, when wildfires displaced tens of thousands of
people in Southern California, overwhelming emergency services,
residents took matters into their own hands. They found a place for
evacuees to gather and organised the washing of exhausted
fire-fighters' clothes. Fast forward to October 2007, when wildfires
ravaged the state again and residents banded together, this time in
a way that wasn't possible in the seventies.

Armed with an array of online "social media" tools such as blogs,
annotatable maps, photo sites and instant messenging services, they
were able to gather and disseminate information on, for example, the
progress of the fire, the location of evacuation areas and shelters,
and which schools and businesses were closed - information
unavailable through traditional channels.

"I knew that a lot of my less [tech] savvy friends were having
problems getting real information from the news so I just soaked up
as much as I could from the internet and regurgitated it through
text messages, instant messenging, Twitter and my blog," one
California resident told a team of researchers led by Leysia Palen
of the University of Colorado at Boulder, who carried out a survey
on the use of social media during the wildfires (see Diagram).

Palen's survey showed that some of the social media tools were
extremely well suited to disaster response, despite not being
designed for that purpose. For instance, the team found that to
coordinate efforts such as rescue operations, residents made good
use of the "micro-blog" Twitter. The site rolls social networking,
blogging and instant messenging into one and was launched mainly to
allow friends to stay in touch around the clock and on the move.
Others created a map of their community using Google Maps and showed
the progress of the fire, or areas where schools and businesses were
closed.

Because anyone with an internet connection can access and contribute
to these sites, they ended up gathering together up-to-the-minute
information from far-flung rural areas that the media and the
emergency services were not able to reach. In addition, many
residents said the media reports were biased towards metropolitan
areas and focused on the sensational, while official information
sources tended to be out of date. "National news websites were
completely worthless as they ignored everything except the
comparatively minor Malibu fire, which burned near some celebrities'
homes," said one.

The fires are just one example of how tools developed for online
socialising have been co-opted to help out in times of crisis. Palen
has also studied the online response to the shootings at Virginia
Tech on 16 April, 2007. Her team found that the first Wikipedia page
on the killings went up within an hour and a half, with an "I'm OK
at VT" Facebook group starting just 20 minutes later. Online
contributors also began a concerted effort to compile information on
the identities of the victims in the form of a Facebook discussion
thread called "You know a student is confirmed dead? Compile the
list here". Palen noted that people made an effort to make sure
information was accurate, for example, stating when someone hadn't
been seen and was feared dead as opposed to being confirmed dead.
"Instead of rumour-mongering, we see socially produced accuracy,"
wrote the team.

To discuss the value of such tools, how best to harness them and how
emergency services, as well as locals, can make use of them,
researchers are meeting this week at the International Conference on
Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management in Washington
DC. "Members of the public play an absolutely critical role in
disaster response," says Palen. "Now we're seeing what happens when
you superimpose a technological layer on top of that."

Existing online resources such as Facebook, Twitter and Google Maps
are clearly useful, but some researchers see these merely as
starting points. One tantalising question is whether emergency
management agencies, as well as members of the public, should mine
the web community for information.

The American Red Cross has started using Twitter to exchange
up-to-the-minute information about local disasters with those
affected, and the US Geological Survey operates a site called Did
You Feel It? where citizens can report local earthquake activity.

Right now though, most agencies still see themselves as providers of
information rather than engaging in information exchange with the
public. For example, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
maintains a disaster website that automatically updates itself
according to RSS feeds from multiple, disaster-related government
agencies, and has a blog that officials can contribute to, but there
is no input from ordinary residents. Molly McPherson, spokeswoman
for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a branch of the DHS,
says: "As far as web 2.0 is concerned, that social online
interaction, we're really not there yet."

Ben Shneiderman of the University of Maryland in College Park would
like that to change. Last year he suggested "911.gov" websites,
inspired by Facebook and MySpace but run by emergency agencies. The
sites would allow victims to post up-to-the-minute information,
which could then feed into official decisions such as where to send
teams of relief workers. These decisions would in turn get posted
online for local residents (Science, vol 315, p 944). Shneiderman
and colleagues have submitted a proposal to develop such a site to
the DHS.

Gathering the information is just the first step, however: how do
you make sense of it all once it is in? To try and minimise
confusion, Murray Turoff and colleagues at the New Jersey Institute
of Technology in Newark are building a software program that allows
officials to post specific questions - such as where are emergency
supplies most needed - and then invites officials and members of the
general public to vote on possible answers. Everyone who replies
gets ranked for their level of authority on that subject and the
votes are weighted accordingly. The program constantly updates the
vote results, draws attention to issues that are still contentious
and, when problems are resolved, informs the decision makers.

But even if you can organise user-generated information properly
with this software, David Woods of Ohio State University in Columbus
also points out that you need to avoid being distracted - by visual
input in particular. He carried out simulations of a chemical
release disaster with eight disaster-response professionals and
found that seven failed to notice information in the traditional
channels - such as whiteboards - which was missing in a video of the
disaster being shown at the same time. "People get caught up in
their virtual view, they start to think that it's really what's
happening on the ground," Woods says.

Ron Langhelm, a former FEMA employee who now works for technology
consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton in Seattle, Washington, agrees that
there is potential for confusion with people providing reports
through multiple mechanisms. "We need to make sure that we don't
muddy that water," he says.

There are also likely to be other challenges ahead. For example,
Shneiderman suggests the web should be used not just in the heat of
the moment, but also as a way for people to organise themselves
ahead of time. "That requires getting people to agree that, for
instance, taking Mr Jones in the wheelchair from apartment 301 with
you when you evacuate the area is your responsibility," he says.
"But how do we get people to commit to helping one another in times
of stress?"

Related Articles

* MySpace-style websites perfect for disaster survival
* http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn11189
* 15 February 2007
* Let California burn
* http://technology.newscientist.com/article/mg19626283.900
* 01 November 2007
* Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites
* http://technology.newscientist.com/article/mg19025556.200
* 09 June 2006
* Call 911, the phone will do the rest
* http://technology.newscientist.com/article/mg18324663.700
* 25 September 2004

Weblinks

* International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis
  Response and Management
* http://www.iscram.org
* Leysia Palen, University of Colorado
* http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~palen/
* Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland
* http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/
* David Woods, Ohio State University
* http://csel.eng.ohio-state.edu/woods/
* Murray Turoff, New Jersey Institute of Technology
* http://web.njit.edu/~turoff/
* DHS Blog
* http://www.dhs.gov/journal/leadership/
* Twitter, American Red Cross
* http://twitter.com/redcross
* Did You Feel It?, USGS
* http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/dyfi/

Malicious hardware may be next hacker tool
http://technology.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19826546.000&print=true
8.5.1

* Mason Inman

As if computer viruses and worms aren't enough of a nuisance,
malicious hardware, which will be much more difficult to detect,
could soon become a threat too.

Today, computer viruses, which are programs downloaded either as an
email attachment or when someone visits a website, are responsible
for most computer attacks. Hackers use them to gain control of a
computer so that they can press-gang it into sending spam or
downloading more malicious software, such as a keystroke logger,
which can record credit card details and passwords typed in by the
user.

Anti-virus (AV) software monitors a computer for signs of a virus,
such as chunks of telltale code. To fight back, hackers write new
viruses that use different code, or bury the code deeper in the
operating system where the AV software isn't programmed to look. So
AV firms and hackers are locked in an arms race, continually trying
to outdo each other.

Soon hackers could up the ante even further. Samuel King and
colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have
shown that they could also gain control of a computer by adding
malicious circuits to its processor. Because these circuits
interfere with the computer at a deeper level than a virus, they
effectively operate "below the radar" of AV software.

To evaluate the risk from such hardware, King's team designed their
own malicious circuits. They used a processor called a field
programmable gate array (FPGA), whose logic circuits can be
rearranged, to create a replica of an existing open source processor
called Leon3, which contains around 1.7 million circuits. They then
added about 1000 malicious circuits not present in Leon3.

The team found that the circuits allowed them to bypass security
controls on Leon3 in a similar way to how a virus hands control of a
computer to a hacker, but without requiring a flaw in a software
application. When they hooked the FPGA up to another computer, they
were able to steal passwords stored in its memory and install
malicious software that would allow the operating system it was
running to be remotely controlled. "Once you have this mechanism in
place, you can do whatever you want," says King, who presented the
work at the Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats conference in
San Francisco last month.

Sneaking malicious hardware onto a chip is not as easy as installing
a virus. The attacker must either have access to a chip during its
design or manufacture, or be capable of manufacturing their own
chips, which they would then have to sell to computer makers, or
slip into computers during assembly. "It's not something someone
would carry out on weekends," says King.

Nonetheless, computer scientist Simha Sethumadhavan of Columbia
University in New York says that chips and their design processes
are becoming more complex, making it easier for a hacker to
infiltrate. Recently, some Apple iPods and Seagate hard drives were
found to have been sold with viruses pre-installed, demonstrating
their vulnerability, says King.

Computer Viruses - Learn more about the threats to your PC in our
comprehensive special report.

Related Articles

* To defeat a malicious botnet, build a friendly one
* http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn13753
* 22 April 2008
* Revealed: the true cost of computer crime
* http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn7580
* 25 June 2005
* Microchip imperfections could cut cloning
* http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn6457
* 04 October 2004

Weblinks

* Designing and implementing malicious hardware
* http://www.usenix.org/event/leet08/tech/full_papers/king/king_html/
* Leon3
* http://www.gaisler.com/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=13&Itemid=53
* Samuel King, University of Illinois
* http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/directory/directory.php?name=king
* Simha Sethumadhavan, Columbia University
* http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~simha/

E-mail me if you have problems getting the referenced articles.
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