Archive for April, 2008

The U.S. Department of Defense wants to know if chip makers are building remotely accessible kill switches into high-end microprocessors. These days, the U.S. military consumes only about 1 percent of the world’s integrated circuits, and offshoring has begun to raise some alarms about the safety of the chips in the military’s most mission-critical electronics.

Making the Government apprehensive perhaps?

Editor’s note: Actual advertisement

Recognizing an enormous vulnerability, the DOD recently launched an extremely ambitious program to verify the integrity of the electronics that will underpin future additions to its arsenal. In December, the DOD’s advanced-research wing released details about a three-year initiative it calls the Trust in Integrated Circuits program. The findings from the program could give the military–and defense contractors who make sensitive microelectronics like the weapons systems for the F-35–a guaranteed method of determining whether their chips have been compromised with a kill switch.

But how exactly would you kill an integrated switch, and for what purpose? In “The Hunt for the Kill Switch,” IEEE Spectrum’s Sally Adee reports on the methods that could kill a chip, the possible consequences, and the methods being devised to verify the Pentagon’s most important microchips.

We all know it’s possible….nothing is impossible as they say. It just depends how bad you need/want it to “Be”. Take Microsoft’s kill switch in Vista for example, yes one is software the other hardware but you get the idea. Some larger companies have taken the stance (For many years) that they own the company and therefore forever own the product. What they fail to realize is, we bought that piece of software/hardware and we now own it without strings attached. It was designed to perform a particular task and supposedly that would be all. What about locking out a processors ability to be over clocked like some of the pentium and AMD chips were? Remember that? How about locking some of the over clocking features in the BIOS of your motherboards? Let’s not forget the reporting feature built into the Pentium’s 4’s not long ago and (sheez) the automated license registration of most software when you first install it….without you even realizing it! Another reason I engage an internet lock down until said software is installed and I can either block or remove these features.

Privacy? Never heard of it.

A new life-detecting instrument is preparing for a mission to the Red Planet. The Urey: Mars Organic and Oxidant Detector instrument, developed by a scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, received approximately $2 million in NASA funding to further refine the design and technology for the European Space Agency’s (ESA) 2013 ExoMars Rover Mission.

Urey instrument

Named after the late Nobel Laureate and UC San Diego scholar Harold C. Urey, the Urey instrument will perform the first search for key classes of organic molecules in the Martian environment using state-of-the-art analytical methods at part-per-million sensitivities. This highly sensitive instrument is the first with the capability to effectively discriminate between Martian materials produced by biological and non-biological processes. In addition, the investigation will provide definitive oxidation characteristics of those same samples.

Jeffrey Bada of Scripps Oceanography, along with a multinational research team including colleagues Frank Grunthaner of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Richard Mathies of UC Berkeley, Aaron Zent of the NASA Ames Research Center, Richard Quinn of the SETI Institute, Pascale Ehrenfreund of the NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center and Mark Sephton of Imperial College, London have designed an investigation using the Urey instrument to look for signs of past or present life on Mars. It will analyze Martian rock and soil samples provided by the ESA-developed ExoMars Rover, for organic molecules and amino acids, the building blocks of life. Urey will be built and tested at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif.

Artist’s concept of ExoMars rover planned for launch in 2013. Image courtesy of European Space Agency (ESA)

“This next phase of funding assures that the Urey instrument’s design will be completed on schedule and we will be prepared to start building the actual instrument next year,” said Bada, professor of marine chemistry at Scripps and principal investigator of the Urey investigation.

The instrument has been supported by NASA Research and Development funding for the past several years leading up to this transition to Phase A Flight planning and design.

The Urey instrument has been identified as an integral component of ExoMars, a six-month mission on the Red Planet and ESA’s first rover mission to Mars. “We will be working very closely with our European partners over the next year to finalize interfaces and to further solidify how Urey fits into the overall ExoMars payload system,” said Allen Farrington, project manager of the Urey development team at JPL.

A compact instrument that can be held in the palm of one’s hand, Urey will search for trace levels of amine-containing organic molecules by “making espresso” from spoon-sized amounts of Martian soil, freeze drying the liquid to remove the water, and then slowly re-heating the residue, and concentrating the organic molecules by condensing them on a cold trap. A lab-on-a-chip, micro-fluidic, laser-induced fluorescence detector initially developed by team members at UC Berkeley will probe the trap’s contents.

Urey: Mars Organic and Oxidant Detector can detect the faintest traces of life’s molecular building blocks and analyze whether they were produced by biological processes. The NASA-funded instrument is being developed for the ExoMars mission in 2013.

In addition to the organic compound analyses, Urey will also test the Martian samples and environment for their ability to degrade organic compounds through oxidation. The Mars Oxidant Instrument developed by team members at NASA Ames Research Center, JPL and the SETI Institute will enable the scientists to evaluate the stability of compounds directly under Martian conditions. Even if no organic compounds are detected, this oxidation information will provide important data for understanding the reasons why organic compounds might not be preserved on Mars.

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Scripps Institution of Oceanography, at UC San Diego, is one of the oldest, largest and most important centers for global science research and graduate training in the world. The National Research Council has ranked Scripps first in faculty quality among oceanography programs nationwide. Now in its second century of discovery, the scientific scope of the institution has grown to include biological, physical, chemical, geological, geophysical and atmospheric studies of the earth as a system. Hundreds of research programs covering a wide range of scientific areas are under way today in 65 countries. The institution has a staff of about 1,300, and annual expenditures of approximately $155 million from federal, state and private sources. Scripps operates one of the largest U.S. academic fleets with four oceanographic research ships and one research platform for worldwide exploration.