Thursday, 31 December 2020

Applying voltage to an array of electrodes on a chip

 The ions themselves are held in place by applying voltage to an array of electrodes on a chip. “If I do that correctly, then I can create an electromagnetic field that can hold on to a trapped ion just above the surface of the chip.” By changing the voltages applied to the electrodes, Chiaverini can move the ions across the surface of the chip, allowing for multiqubit operations between separately trapped ions.

So, while the qubits themselves are simple, fine-tuning the system that surrounds them is an immense challenge. “You need to engineer the control systems — things like lasers, voltages, and radio frequency signals. Getting them all into a chip that also traps the ions is what we think is a key enabler.”

Chiaverini notes that the engineering challenges facing trapped ion quantum computers generally relate to difference between computer science and computer engineering control rather than preventing decoherence; the reverse is true for superconducting-based quantum computers. And of course, there are myriad other physical systems under investigation for their feasibility as quantum computers.

Wednesday, 30 December 2020

Remote Workers Fuel Versa’s SD-WAN, SASE Growth

 The rapid shift to remote work following the onset of the pandemic early this year helped to accelerate Versa Network’s SD-WAN and secure access service edge (SASE) platforms in a new market: the home, said CMO Mike Wood in an interview with SDxCentral.

Wood claims the pandemic drove a 100-fold increase in home use of either its SD-WAN or SASE platforms since the beginning of the year. And while Wood didn’t disclose raw numbers, Gartner estimates that Versa had more than 5,000 global SD-WAN customers by the end of September 2020. Additionally Gartner reports that Versa has managed to outpace the rest of the market.

And further bolstering the claim, Wood boasted that more than 200 Tb/s of traffic is now flowing from home offices through its SASE points of presence information technology vs computer science. “Quite honestly most of it has been driven by the pandemic. There is no question about that,” he said. “If 2020 had been a normal year we certainly don’t think there would have been a 100x increase.”

Monday, 28 December 2020

Quantum computing and turn its potential into reality

 But it’s still early days — quantum computing must clear a number of science and engineering hurdles before it can reliably solve practical problems. More than 100 researchers across MIT are helping develop the fundamental technologies necessary scale up quantum computing and turn its potential into reality.

It helps to first understand the basics of classical computers, like the one you’re using to read this story. Classical computers store and process information in binary bits, each of which holds a value of 0 or 1. A typical laptop could contain billions of transistors that use different levels of electrical voltage to represent either of these two values. While the shape, size, and power of classical computers vary widely, they all operate on the same basic system of binary logic.

Quantum computers are fundamentally different. Their quantum bits, called is computer science engineering, can each hold a value of 0, 1, or a simultaneous combination of the two states. That’s thanks to a quantum mechanical phenomenon called superposition. “A quantum particle can act as if it’s in two places at once,” explains John Chiaverini, a researcher at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s Quantum Information and Integrated Nanosystems Group.


Thursday, 24 December 2020

Lack Of Monitoring In SolarWinds Hack Is ‘Scary’

Most companies talk a good game about how much monitoring and auditing they do for cyberattacks--but flagrant incidents such as the SolarWinds breach and subsequent spread of malware to thousands of customers suggest many companies still have a lot of work to do.

That’s the message from Dave Mahoney, enterprise services architect at Blue Bell, Pa.-based Anexinet, No. 212 on CRN’s Solution Provider 500. Mahoney spoke with CRN as the fallout from the SolarWinds hack continued to grow and Microsoft disclosed that a second group may have also breached computer engineering career Orion, separately from the suspected Russian hackers behind the initial breach of the network monitoring platform.

Mahoney pointed out that hackers not only successfully inserted malicious code into SolarWinds software, but were then able to have the malware “phone home” to their command-and-control server. As a result, the hackers gained even greater access to take further actions within the system. How were you not monitoring network traffic that is calling out to an unknown destination?” Mahoney said. “What are you doing if you are not monitoring your network in an automated fashion?”

Wednesday, 23 December 2020

Purposes of different drones for different applications

 The students created the videos themselves, with Chiu using her phone, a GoPro, and screen recordings from her iPad, as well as later using iMovie to do the final edits. Rong also used iMovie to edit his video, but shot the whole thing on his Samsung phone.

The resulting videos are short and simple. Chiu's touched a little on the chemistry involved in her research, but mostly focused on the process of designing experiments. Rong opted to focus his video on an interest outside of his actual research.

"I actually have not conducted research into drones, but they have been a hobby project for me, as well as an extracurricular activity as part of a team, so I had practical experience designing and building them," computer science engineering said. "Mostly I just wanted something that was appealing, relevant to engineering, and something that wouldn't be so hard to understand that it would be discouraging. I covered the purposes of different drones for different applications—such as a hobby, search and rescue, or proof of concept and related those to the problems that engineers work on in their day to day lives."

Tuesday, 22 December 2020

The installation of this malware created an opportunity for the attackers

 The installation of this malware created an opportunity for the attackers to follow up and pick and choose from among these customers the organizations they wanted to further attack, which it appears they did in a narrower and more focused fashion. While investigations (and the attacks themselves) continue, Microsoft has identified and has been working this week to notify more than 40 customers that the attackers targeted more precisely and compromised through additional and sophisticated measures.

While roughly 80% of these customers are located in the United States, this work so far has also identified victims in seven additional countries. This includes Canada and Mexico in North America; Belgium, Spain and the United Kingdom in Europe; and Israel and the how much does a computer engineer make in the Middle East. It’s certain that the number and location of victims will keep growing.

Additional analysis sheds added light on the breadth of these attacks. The initial list of victims includes not only government agencies, but security and other technology firms as well as non-governmental organizations, as shown in the chart below.

Monday, 21 December 2020

Network device is safe while on premises

 Network teams are forced to trust that actual branch locations, wherever they may be, are secure and that their network device is safe while on premises. Branches can be a busy retail store, a government embassy, or a pharmacy lab testing new vaccines. The network device will see any and all data as the primary routing, switching, and security center. While it is critical to secure endpoints such as workstations, mobile, and IoT devices; the network platform itself must be considered vulnerable to attack as a data aggregation point.

Network segmentation helps to protect critical traffic from prying eyes, but it remains a single-layer approach. Cloud-managed, on-prem security deployments such as IPS and NGAV help layer network device security against rogue devices beyond traffic segmentation and make a zero-trust approach more thorough. And while some vendors offer network security as a cloud service, once the location gets above a few dozen endpoints, the traffic generated through security inspection outweighs the cost-benefit of using the cloud. is computer science engineering security simply offers the highest performance levels with the most control.

Furthermore, the remote activation process mentioned in this article involves taking the network device control plane (a function once tied to the device itself, thus requiring an on-site certified specialist) and moving it to a cloud-hosted architecture. Assuming the bare-metal cloud infrastructure hosting the SD-WAN or SASE console is itself secure (many IaaS providers should have documentation on their efforts here), the data transactions that verify and use the device must traverse the internet to operate and should be encrypted in a secure manner.