CISA Cybersecurity Bill Advances Despite Privacy Critiques

The U.S. Capitol in Washington is seen Thursday, Jan. 15, 2015. J. Scott Applewhite/AP

For months, privacy advocates have been pointing to flaws in CISA, the new reincarnation of the cybersecurity bill known as CISPA that Congress has been kicking around since 2013. But today that zombie bill lurched one step closer to becoming law.

The Senate Intelligence Committee passed the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, or CISA, by a vote of 14 to one Thursday afternoon. The bill, like the failed Cybersecurity Information Sharing and Protection Act that proceeded it, is designed to encourage the sharing of data between private companies and the government to prevent and respond to cybersecurity threats. But privacy critics have protested that CISA would create a legal framework for companies to more closely monitor internet users and share that data with government agencies.

After Thursday’s vote, Senator Ron Wyden—the only member of the Senate’s intelligence committee to vote against the bill—repeated those privacy concerns in a public statement. “If information-sharing legislation does not include adequate privacy protections then that’s not a cybersecurity bill—it’s a surveillance bill by another name,” he wrote. “It makes sense to encourage private firms to share information about cybersecurity threats. But this information sharing is only acceptable if there are strong protections for the privacy rights of law-abiding American citizens.”

Wyden’s exact concerns about the final bill aren’t yet clear: A dozen amendments to the bill were made in a closed-door session just before it was put to a vote, and those amendments haven’t yet been publicly released. In an interview on Bloomberg TV following the vote, intelligence committee chairman Richard Burr said that some of those newly adopted amendments were designed to prevent users’ information from being shared with government agencies. “We don’t want them to send personal data to the federal government, unless it’s absolutely crucial to show the cyberattack. So we bar them from providing that data to the federal government,” Burr said. “If it finds its way to the federal government, though, once we distribute it in real time and we realize there’s personal information, any company that discovers it has to remove it or minimize it in a way that it can’t be shared anywhere else.”

Looking at the most recently revealed public version of CISA, privacy advocates have pointed out that it would allow sharing of personal data that goes beyond cybersecurity threats. It also allows the sharing of private sector data with the government that could prevent “terrorism” or an “imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm.” That language, Open Technology Institute privacy counsel Robyn Greene has argued, means CISA might “facilitate investigations into garden-variety violent crimes that have nothing to do with cyber threats.”

“If that weren’t worrisome enough, the bill would also let law enforcement and other government agencies use information it receives to investigate, without a requirement for imminence or any connection to computer crime, even more crimes like carjacking, robbery, possession or use of firearms, ID fraud, and espionage,” Greene wrote in February. “While some of these are terrible crimes, and law enforcement should take reasonable steps to investigate them, they should not do so with information that was shared under the guise of enhancing cybersecurity.”

For the moment, however, it’s not clear how much of that potential for surveillance has ended up in the final, amended version of the bill. And Greene says that’s problematic too. “This bill has the potential to seriously harm Americans’ privacy rights,” she said in a phone interview following the vote Thursday, “and it wasn’t even debated in public.”

Check back here for updates as we learn more of the final bill’s contents.

Kleiner Attacks Pao on the Stand as Resentful and Greedy

Ellen Pao leaves San Francisco Superior Court with her attorney Therese Lawless. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The one-time venture capitalist at the heart of Silicon Valley’s most-watched court case once created what a defense attorney called a “resentment chart” detailing her grievances toward her co-workers.

Ellen Pao is suing Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers for gender discrimination. To fight her claim, the famed firm is trying to show that Pao created her own problems. Kleiner’s defense lawyer, Lynne Hermle, introduced the chart—an email that Pao had sent to herself—to show that Pao was a difficult colleague. The chart included such categories as “Resentment,” “What Part of My Life it Affected,” “My Feelings,” and “My Part,” and named colleagues Pao had worked with at the firm, where she worked from 2005 to 2012.

Of famed VC John Doerr, Pao’s mentor and ex-boss, she wrote that she resented him “tolerating incompetence.” She begrudged Wen Hsieh, another colleague, for “being weak, wasting my time.” Of Ajit Nazre, a co-worker with whom she once had an affair and whom she accuses of professionally retaliating against her after their breakup, she wrote: “Telling me he loves me—and only one or three other people.”

Pao said she used the chart to work through her feelings.

I was told that I should pack up my things and not come back. Ellen Pao

Throughout her morning cross-exam today, Hermle kept hammering away at the defense’s effort to show that Pao did not succeed at her job not because of a culture of gender bias, but because Pao herself was not qualified. Over three days of cross-examination in this San Francisco courtroom, Hermle has sought to portray Pao as an argumentative, resentful employee whose version of events is riddled with inconsistencies. Hermle also sought to call Pao’s motives for suing into question by portraying her as money-hungry.

Pao’s suit alleges that Kleiner Perkins did not promote her while letting other male junior partners advance within the company. She also claims the firm retaliated against her after she told managers about her issues. The trial, now in its third week, has riveted the tech industry, where women are scant. In venture capital, the gender imbalance is even worse, especially in VC firms’ upper ranks.

Severance Benefits

Contrary to claims of Kleiner’s mistreatment, Hermle called attention to Pao’s generous severance package after she left the company in October 2012. According to a document introduced in court, Kleiner pledged to pay Pao her regular salary of $33,333 per month for a six-month period ending in March 2013. The terms of separation proposed that Pao remain an employee in name, though she would not have office space at Kleiner.

Despite the pretense of continued employment at Kleiner, Pao admitted on the stand that she had started with online community Reddit, where she is now interim CEO, during the six-month period of her severance. Pao previously testified that as a consultant to Reddit, she made $650 an hour.

On the witness stand, Pao argued against the insinuation that she was double-dealing, saying she considered herself fired. “I was told that I should pack up my things and not come back,” she said. “I considered not having an office being told to leave termination.”

Pao testified that she contacted the CEOs of the portfolio companies she worked with at Kleiner Perkins to let them know she had been fired. Hermle argued that Pao was engaging in her own form of revenge, violating the understanding that the transition period was in place so as not to jar the companies.

“It was the right thing to do in my mind,” Pao said on the witness stand.

“It was the right thing for you,” Hermle fired back.

“It was the right thing for the companies,” Pao said.

Pao’s Financial Situation

Also today, Judge Harold Kahn denied Hermle’s surprise motion yesterday asking him to reverse his pretrial ruling that the jury should not consider Pao’s current financial situation when deciding the $16 million suit. The defense was likely seeking leeway to bring up the monetary problems of Pao’s husband, Alphonse “Buddy” Fletcher Jr., whose hedge fund filed for bankruptcy in 2012, right around the time Pao filed her lawsuit against KPCB. Fletcher has also been accused of fraud in connection with the fund.

In his ruling on the motion, posted Thursday morning, Kahn said considering Pao’s financial situation “would greatly intrude on the privacy of both Ms. Pao and Mr. Fletcher.” He also said it would “create an unseemly sideshow.”

In the afternoon, after Pao left the stand, former Kleiner Perkins chief operating officer Eric Keller testified that Pao told him she wanted to be compensated upon leaving the frim at least as well as Nazre had when he left—a sum of “eight figures,” or at least $10 million.

Pao testified earlier that she believed an eight-figure sum would be a “meaningful” amount to Kleiner—a number that would “actually hit their radar.”

“I wanted my payment to be enough so [Kleiner Perkins] saw it would be painful not to fix problems,” she said.

Unique proteins found in heat-loving organisms attach to plant matter

Unique proteins newly discovered in heat-loving bacteria are more than capable of attaching themselves to plant cellulose, possibly paving the way for more efficient methods of converting plant matter into biofuels.

The unusual proteins, called tapirins (derived from the Maori verb 'to join'), bind tightly to cellulose, a key structural component of plant cell walls, enabling these bacteria to break down cellulose. The conversion of cellulose to liquid biofuels, such as ethanol, is paramount to the use of renewable feedstocks.

In a paper published online in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, researchers from North Carolina State University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory report the structure and function of tapirins produced by bacteria that live in hot springs across the globe, including Yellowstone National Park. These bacteria, called Caldicellulosiruptor, live in temperatures as high as 70 to 80 degrees Celsius -- or 158 to 176 degrees Fahrenheit.

"These hot springs scavengers make proteins that are structurally unique and that are seen nowhere else in nature," said Dr. Robert Kelly, Alcoa Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at NC State and the paper's corresponding author. "These proteins bind very firmly to cellulose. As a result, this binding can anchor bacteria to the cellulose in plant biomass, thus facilitating the conversion to fermentable sugars and then biofuels."

In the study, the researchers showed that tapirins bind to Avicel, a cellulose powder that served as a test compound. The researchers also expressed the tapirin genes in yeast; yeast cells with the expressed proteins attached to cellulose, while normal yeast cells could not. The paper also reports the tapirins' crystal structure.

"Once we saw how unique the tapirins were at the genome level, we worked with protein crystallographers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and were able to determine that the tapirins' protein structure is also completely unique," said Dr. Sara Blumer-Schuette, the lead author of the study and now assistant professor of biology at Oakland University. "Having structural data for the tapirins is crucial and will allow us to continue to focus on the mechanism used by these proteins to adhere to the cellulose present in plant cell walls. This ultimately is enabling us to design superior strategies to overcome the recalcitrance of cellulose and improve biofuels production."

"Before now, these proteins were hypothetical proteins, meaning their existence could be predicted but their function never shown," Kelly said.

Kelly theorizes that, in places like the hot springs at Yellowstone National Park where food sources are rare, the heat-loving bacteria use tapirin proteins to scavenge plant matter that washes into the hot springs after heavy rains or snow melt.

Future work will delve into learning more about the cellulose binding and degradation process, and why a hot springs denizen seems to be so proficient at it.

"The end goal is to engineer these bacteria to not only break down cellulose but also to make a fuel -- starting with ethanol," Kelly said.

The research was supported by the BioEnergy Science Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy bioenergy research center. Co-authors include Jonathan Conway, Laura Lee and Jeffrey Zurawski from NC State, Markus Alahuhta, Vladimir Lunin and Michael Himmel from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Richard Giannone and Robert Hettich from Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

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The above story is based on materials provided by North Carolina State University . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

An Open Source Drone Camera You Can Modify With Apps

An Israeli startup called wants to make adding new features to your drone as easy as downloading apps from an app store.

The company, called Percepto, is currently raising funds on Indiegogo. Percepto will offer a camera that can be mounted to your existing drone. You can then download apps to your mobile phone that can interact with the camera in different ways.

The company has already built apps for the device, including one that can automatically follow and film a particular object. But the idea is to let other developers join in. The company plans to open source its machine vision platform, enabling developers not just to build their own apps, but improve upon the vision software itself—the heart of the technology that allows drones to operate on their own.

Those could include collision avoidance, urban navigation, gesture control, or other applications that the company hasn’t even thought of yet. “The idea is that because this is an emerging technology it’s not clear what the use cases are that people will want in the future,” says co-founder Dor Abuhasira.

The Drone Race

Abuhasira, an electrical engineer by trade, and his co-founder, mechanical engineer Raviv Raz, came up with the idea about two years ago on a snowboarding trip. They were using a GoPro camera to record their action but realized what they really wanted was a drone that could follow their movement and keeping figures in focus. Determined to make the idea a reality, they recruited another friend, Sagi Blonder, to help them build the software.

Initially, they focused only on building their own software, but soon realized that the machine vision problems they had to solve to build object-tracking were relevant to a much wider range of applications. That led them to the idea of creating a platform that other developers could build on. But they decided to go further than just releasing a set of tools for creating apps for its own app store. By releasing the source code, developers will be able to create their own apps — or even their own hardware — based on Percepto’s technology without any need to use the company’s app store at all.

Abuhasira and company expect Percepto to be used mostly for recording video and playing games at first. But he thinks in the long-term, as drones find their way into more and more of the world—from agriculture to construction to search and rescue—its uses will expand dramatically.

The most obvious comparison to Percepto is Intel’s RealSense 3D camera system that wowed audiences at the Consumer Electronics Show this year, and is already being built into drone company AscTec’s Firefly line. But Perceptro isn’t just a camera. It’s also the software and algorithms required to enable the drone’s vision. Abuhasira claims that Percepto’s system is better suited for outdoor and long-range use than what Intel demoed earlier this year. Plus, it’s open source, so anyone will be able to contribute their own improvements.

“We hope [open source] will give us an edge in the competition because it’s definitely a race,” he says.

First Star Wars Spin-Off Gets a Title, and Episode VIII Gets a Date

First Star Wars Spin-Off Gets a Title, and Episode VIII Gets a Date

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Director Gareth Edwards' stand-alone Star Wars movie, Rogue One will hit theaters Dec. 16, 2016. Jim Merithew/WIRED

Director Gareth Edwards' stand-alone Star Wars movie, Rogue One, will hit theaters Dec. 16, 2016. Jim Merithew/WIRED

Just when it was almost quiet on the Star Wars news front, Disney kicked up some dust with two big announcements about the future of its oldest cinematic universe: Star Wars: Episode VIII will hit theaters on May 26, 2017, and the title of the franchise’s first stand-alone film will be Rogue One.

Episode VIII is being directed by Looper writer/director Rian Johnson, who will also write the script for his Star Wars film. (For fans of Johnson’s work, like us, this is what they call Oh Hell Yes News.) His movie will pick up where J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars: The Force Awakens—hitting theaters in December—leaves off, Disney CEO Bob Iger told shareholders today in San Francisco. That release date, for the calendar-minded, is 40 years and a day after the release of Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope.

Rogue One is being directed by Godzilla director Gareth Edwards and will star Theory of Everything actress Felicity Jones. The movie is based on an idea from Industrial Light & Magic VFX maestro John Knoll, and although no details about the film’s plot were revealed, the announcement of Jones’ casting suggests the possibility of a female-fronted Star Wars film, which also lands squarely in Oh Hell Yes News territory. Rogue One beats Episode VIII into theaters by just about six months, opening on Dec. 16, 2016.

A lot of this news was already in the atmosphere in one form or another—rumors about Jones joining the franchise started popping up during awards season—but it’s always nice to get confirmation. Johnson is brilliant and has proven his deftness with everything from time-travel tropes to Breaking Bad, so the fact that he now has a license to drive Star Wars promises very good things. And the casting of Jones for the franchise’s first stand-alone film promises that the diversity Abrams brought to the casting of The Force Awakens could continue. Also, how great would it be if this means Jones is commanding Rogue Squadron?

There was no news in today’s announcement about the other spin-off film that Chronicle director Josh Trank is reportedly working on, but hey, it’s only Thursday.

Nature's inbuilt immune defense could protect industrial bacteria from viruses

Findings from a new study that set out to investigate the evolution of immune defences could boost the development of industrial bacteria that are immune to specific viral infections. The study is published today in the journal Current Biology.

Bacteria have many industrial uses including the production of cheese and yoghurt, paper making, biogas and the synthetic production of hormones like insulin. Viral infections of these bacterial cultures can halt production processes resulting in significant financial cost.

Dr Edze Westra from the Environment and Sustainability Institute at the University of Exeter's Penryn Campus in Cornwall said: "Our study indicates that it is the risk of infection that determines the type of immune defence used. This naturally occurring mechanism can be used to our advantage to equip industrial bacteria with immunity against viral attack."

In a series of experiments researchers from the University of Exeter exposed bacteria to phages -- viruses that infect bacteria. They discovered that when the bacteria were exposed to high numbers of the same strain of phage they evolved a permanent immune response by modifying their cell walls. This was an irreversible defence mechanism that had a negative impact on the long term health of the bacteria.

When the bacteria were exposed to low numbers of the same phage, a temporary defence was induced that used an immune response known as a CRISPR. Although costly when in use, in the absence of viruses the CRISPR response can lie dormant until required. The low overhead cost of this immune response has little impact on the long term health of the bacteria making it ideal for use in commercial applications.

Working in a similar way to a vaccine, bacteria could be 'pre-loaded' with CRISPR immune responses for multiple different phages. This is better for the health of the bacteria and results in higher product yields as well as protecting the culture in the event of infection with a range of viruses.

CRISPR functions by integrating genetic information from the virus into the bacterial DNA, forming a genetic database of viral sequences that is used as a memory to identify viruses during infection. If a viral infection then threatens the bacterial cell, the CRISPR immune system can thwart the attack by destroying the genome of the invading virus.

The research indicates that parasite exposure is likely to be a key factor in driving the evolution of permanent versus inducible -- or temporary -- defences in nature. This suggests that organisms living together in large populations, or parasite-rich conditions, are more likely to evolve permanent defences, whereas low parasite conditions select for inducible defences.

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The above story is based on materials provided by University of Exeter . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Remembering Terry Pratchett, a Fantasy Icon

Terry Pratchett in Toronto in 1995. Boris Spremo/Toronto Star/Getty Images

Terry Pratchett, the prolific English author best known for satirizing the fantasy genre in his long-running Discworld series, died today. He was 66.

Pratchett had been battling a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease—which he referred to as his “embuggerance”—since 2007. At the time of his diagnosis, he wrote: “I know it’s a very human thing to say ‘Is there anything I can do,’ but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry.”

It was classic Pratchett: warm and dry, even in the face of a troubling reality.

Not that reality was ever really Pratchett’s thing, at least not on the page. In 1983, he published his first Discworld novel, The Color of Magic. The prologue set the scene for the 40-odd books to come: a flat world spinning on the backs of four giant elephants balancing on the shell of an even more massive turtle swimming slowly through space. “It’s one of the great ancient myths, found wherever men and turtles were gathered together,” Pratchett later wrote by way of explaining the idea. He added: “There are no maps. You can’t map a sense of humor.”

Years later, maps of Discworld cities actually would come out, but it was beside the point: Pratchett’s project was to poke fun at every convention in fantasy, from its elaborate world-building and systems of magic to the epic quests of its colorful characters. Whereas Tolkien wanted his Middle-earth to be as detailed and consistent as any real place, Pratchett didn’t care if Discworld made no sense at all. It was a land of impossibilities and absurdities—wizards who couldn’t do magic, disappearing dragons, turtles the size of planets. Over time, the series got less meta and even more original, as Pratchett’s themes matured (see, for instance, the standalone Discworld novel Small Gods).

Though his books sold well in the United States, Pratchett was always more popular in his native UK. In an introduction to A Slip of the Keyboard, a book of Pratchett’s nonfiction essays that came out last year, fellow English fantasist (and sometime collaborator) Neil Gaiman wrote that Pratchett was angry “at his early American publishers who could not bring his books out successfully.” Pratchett’s fame certainly rose over time, but more Americans still need to read him: Even more than 30 years after The Color of Magic, his work feels as alive as ever. And it seems to show up, one way or another, in a lot of new fantasy. The magical realm in Lev Grossman’s Magicians series? It’s perched atop a stack of giant turtles.

In that same essay, Gaiman “rage[s] at the imminent loss of my friend”: “But I…understand that any Terry Pratchett book is a small miracle, and we already have more than might be reasonable, and it does not behoove any of us to be greedy.”

Terry Pratchett will be deeply missed.