Ed K4EGP

#AmateurRadio #HamRadio #VolunteerExaminer
#CWForever (QRS) SKCC,FISTS,LICW
IC-7300, AT-878UV+, AT-578+
FN42hv

[Frank M. Howell @frankmhowell]

The US Military Quietly Turned GPS Into a Global 'Numbers Station,' Evidence Suggests - Slashdot https://t.co/1CfdwogRmh

[EarthSky @earthskyscience]

Did you know the days of the week are named after objects in our solar system? How did Mars become Tuesday? 🤔 Read here: https://t.co/95PUKzcRzS

📸 Pixabay/ EarthSky.

[Planetary Society @exploreplanets]

The White House’s Office of Management and Budget just proposed new rules that would let political appointees, not scientists, decide which research gets funded in the United States.

Under these rules, a senior political official would have to personally approve every single federal grant before it goes out.

Peer review, which has been the gold standard for evaluating science on merit, would be reduced to just a suggestion. And if your research falls out of political favor? Any active grant can be revoked at any time, with no explanation required.

We're talking about NASA grants, NSF grants, the funding that powers discoveries about our Universe and our planet. This rule was not written by NASA's leadership, and it works against the agency's own exploration goals for the Moon, Mars, and beyond.

The rules would also ban entire categories of research outright, and cut off collaboration with scientists from other countries, even if those researchers live in the U.S.

Researchers wouldn't even be able to use grant money to publish their findings or attend scientific conferences without getting special permission first.

This affects everyone from PhD students to career scientists to all of us whose lives improve because of federally funded research.

The public comment period is open right now, but this time,
we're not asking you to sign a form letter. We need your actual words, your story, to make a difference. Identical submissions get counted as a single comment, so the more you write, the less OMB can ignore us.

We cannot stress how dangerous this rule would be if enacted.
But we can stop this if enough people submit their personal story of why peer-reviewed science is important.

The deadline to submit comments is July 13th. https://t.co/42YYTxVYK2

[Ed K4EGP @egprentice]

@ProtonMail Three: Something you know, something you have, and something you are.

[Sawyer Merritt @SawyerMerritt]

Tesla has officially applied for an Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit in Nevada.

Tesla is seeking approval for up to 5,000 robotaxis during the first 12 months after the permit is granted.

The filing covers Clark County (Las Vegas), including Harry Reid International Airport and Henderson Executive Airport, according to a new public notice from the Nevada Transport Authority.

[NWS Tornado @NWStornado]

Tornado Warning continues for Swanton NE until 8:15 PM CDT

[NWS Tornado @NWStornado]

Tornado Warning including Swanton NE until 8:15 PM CDT

[K3RRR @K3TripleR]

This device, built by "DL4AZ", allows two different radio frequencies to share a single https://t.co/SvBZ87v8MH is designed for use in the 145 MHz (2-meter) and 440 MHz (70-centimeter) amateur radio bands

[Vintage Maps @vintagemapstore]

One third of the population of Switzerland lives within 5 kilometers of the main train line crossing the country

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

This is so insanely corrupt, I can’t even believe it.

More than half the donors to Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom just won over $50 billion in new federal contracts in six months.

And here’s the part that should make your blood boil.

Sixteen of these 27 donors were facing federal enforcement actions, antitrust reviews, labor cases, securities charges. Many of those cases have been quietly dropped or scaled back since Trump took office. You write a check, your legal problems disappear. That’s not a coincidence.

The White House won’t even release the full donor list. They’re hiding it on purpose, because daylight is the one thing pay-to-play can’t survive. A federal judge already ruled ballroom construction has to stop until Congress authorizes it.

Government is supposed to serve the people, not auction itself off to the highest bidder. When access goes to whoever pays the most, working families always end up paying the price.

We either end the corruption, or the corruption will end us.

https://t.co/4MGFzSseFl

[Ed K4EGP @egprentice]

@W6KSR not to mention understanding radio better than I did at General.

[Jure Atanackov @JAtanackov]

Wow! The HUXt forecast also indicates a possible double impact. The arrivals are expected around 5h and 9h UTC on June 5th, with the arrival window extending from late on June 4th to early on June 6th. Arrival speeds are in 700-800 km/s range, hit probabilities 80% and 47%. Far from a certain show, but it looks fairly promising.

[NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center @NWSSWPC]

The current forecast calls for combined CME arrival around mid-afternoon EDT of June 4, with up to G3 levels possible afterwards. CME passage would likely continue into the evening and possibly overnight hours of June 5. Stay aware at https://t.co/TV7Yw6Lq1Y

[ISS National Lab @ISS_CASIS]

👀 Kall Morris Inc.’s REACCH system capturing a target object during testing on the ISS.

Instead of a single small satellite test, the team completed 172 test runs, validating the system for debris removal and in-orbit relocation: https://t.co/HiLLKs1lGj

#SpaceDebris #ISS

[Stephan Berger @malmoeb]

On a recent Linux-based Incident Response case, we found a dropped GSocket binary as a persistence mechanism [1]. The threat actor planted the dropped binaries under user-space directories to blend in, specifically masquerading as legitimate system processes:

./.config/dbus/php-fpm
./.config/htop/defunct

Persistence was established via standard execution vectors, either triggered through cron entries or embedded within profile startup scripts (.bashrc / .profile).

The "echo large-base64-blob piped to bash" is not really hard to miss (see image), but I had to laugh about the first line: DO NOT REMOVE THIS LINE. SEED PRNG. :)

As this was an older compromise, I took the secret from another file planted next to php-fpm (called php-fpm.dat, holding the secret) and tested the reverse shell locally using gs-netcat -s <secret_from_the_dat_file> -i, which gave me shell access under the user who started gsocket in the first place.

Global Socket is a pretty cool project, and the website goes to great lengths to explain the various scenarios. You might want to hunt for these binaries on your Linux fleet :)

[1] https://t.co/azVVDmMTig

[Justin Drake @drakefjustin]

Today a crazy quantum story just got wilder.

On March 31, the Google Quantum AI team published a landmark result on Shor's algorithm for elliptic curve cryptography. Technically, the paper was a bombshell: a dramatic 10x improvement over the state-of-the-art. As a stunt and wakeup call to the blockchain space, those optimisations were illustrated on secp256k1, the elliptic curve underlying Bitcoin and Ethereum signatures.

But perhaps the most striking part of the paper was sociological, not technical. Instead of following standard academic process, the optimisations were kept secret, hidden behind a zero-knowledge (ZK) proof. Google's accompanying blog post mentions they "engaged with the U.S. government". The ZK proof demonstrates the existence of algorithmic improvements without leaking details. Academic censorship with ZK, a historic first!

As a co-author of the Google paper I witnessed some of the context surrounding this censorship. To be honest, multiple aspects of that context don't sit well with me. As much as I believe the general public ought to know more, I am limited in my ability to whistleblow. Though let me be clear about one thing: the Google team's professionalism has been absolutely exemplary, and they deserve nothing but praise.

Censorship has a way of backfiring. The Streisand effect, where an attempt to bury something only draws more attention to it, is exactly what's unfolding today. First, Google's key optimisation has been rediscovered by the French. And in a thrilling turn of events, a collaborative Shor-at-home challenge just launched. The initiative, available at ecdsa[.]fail, breached a new Shor world record in a matter of hours.

Let's start with the rediscovery. Just two months after Google's paper, French quantum expert André Schrottenloher cracks the main secret optimisation. His paper, titled "Optimized Point Addition Circuits for Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithms", landed on the arXiv today. Big congrats to André, who beat several other nerdsnipped experts to it. In a blog post also published today, Craig Gidney, the world expert on Shor optimisations, revealed that he'd been sitting on this very optimisation for a whole year under censorship pressure.

Interestingly, André missed a handful of minor optimisations, both from Google's original publication and from improvements found since. It's plausible there's still plenty of juice left to squeeze out of Shor, and this is exactly what the ecdsa[.]fail challenge is about. The verifier program developed for the ZK proof does double duty, automatically filtering for valid submissions. Dozens of compounding small and micro improvements are rolling in. As of the time of writing there's an 8.4% improvement to Google's circuit, as measured by the product of logical qubit count and Toffoli gate count. Nice!

The nerdsnipping ran deeper than anyone expected. Over the last few weeks it became clear it extended well beyond André and other quantum experts. Behind the scenes, a small army of amateurs quietly got to work. Inspired by Karpathy-style autoresearch, they turned AI on Shor. Ironically, the verifier program for the ZK proof makes an ideal reward function for AIs. The barrier to entry for this modern style of research is refreshingly low, with several non-experts, even a teenager, finding nice optimisations. Get in touch if you'd like to join a Telegram group with fellow autoresearchers :)

Part 2: neutral atoms and qday

The story doesn't end with Google. On the same day Google went public, a stealthy startup called Oratomic published its own Shor paper in a coordinated release. It made a splash, ultimately becoming the most upvoted paper on scirate[.]com, a website ranking arXiv papers.

Oratomic's claim was wild. By building on Google's logical optimisations and applying custom physical optimisations for neutral atoms, they claimed just 10K physical qubits were sufficient to run Shor's algorithm on secp256k1. That number is mind-bogglingly low.

Knowing essentially nothing about neutral atoms when Oratomic's paper landed, I was intrigued and decided to learn more about the tech. I fell straight down the rabbit hole and spent a couple hundred hours on the topic. I got a little obsessed and watched every YouTube video I could find and spoke to a bunch of experts.

My conclusion? The tech is real, very real. Even Google recently decided to start a neutral atom lab, a notable pivot from their sole focus on superconducting qubits. If you care about qday, i.e. the day a quantum computer will break the first piece of cryptography in production, neutral atoms demand your attention. I shared some of my learnings on Shor and neutral atoms in a 30min talk at the ZKProof cryptography conference. You can find it on YouTube by searching "zkproof neutral atom".

Here's an interesting observation about this duo of breakthrough papers: neither Google nor Oratomic say a word about what their results mean for qday. No timelines. Zero. Nada. That is especially baffling given that the whole point of whitehat quantum cryptanalysis is to inform qday estimations and help the general public make good decisions.

So let me attempt to partially fill the silence, similarly to what Scott Aaronson did in his April 29 post. Given everything I know, including scary non-public information, I now put the odds of qday by 2032 at 50%. 10% by 2030.

Anecdotally, the US government has its own date: 2035. Originating at the NSA and later adopted by NIST, it's when branches of the US government will be disallowed from using quantum-vulnerable cryptography. In plain language: with hindsight, that date is a joke and should be discounted entirely. I don't see how NIST avoids being forced to pull it forward by years.

Part 3: post-quantum cryptography

There are good reasons to sound the alarm today, but please do not panic. Rushing carelessly towards immature post-quantum cryptography is a recipe for disaster. IMO a good target date for migration is 2029, roughly 3.5 years out. 2029 happens to be the date selected by Google, Cloudflare, and the Ethereum Foundation.

These days most of my time goes to safely migrating Ethereum towards post-quantum cryptography as part of the broader lean Ethereum effort. There's a lot to do. We need to rip out and replace BLS signatures at the consensus layer, KZG commitments at the data layer, and ECDSA signatures at the execution layer.

The plan to get there is compelling, and is based on hash-based cryptography. Within the Ethereum Foundation we've developed a Swiss army knife called leanVM (github[.]com/leanEthereum/leanVM) powered by the magic of hash-based SNARKs. Thanks to truly exceptional work by Emile, Thomas, and others, its performance is derisked. Regarding security, leanVM is a jewel, a minimal zkVM crafted for end-to-end formal verification and maximum security.

Want to help? There are two $1M initiatives. First, the Proximity Prize (proximityprize[.]org). Solve a long-standing mathematical conjecture in coding theory, improve hash-based SNARKs, and go home a millionaire. Second, the Poseidon Initiative (poseidon-initiative[.]info), offers $1M for breaking Poseidon, the SNARK-friendly hash function.

[Ed K4EGP @egprentice]

@elonmusk @IterIntellectus Earth captures roughly 1 part in 2 billion of sun's output

[RossRadio @cqcqcqdx]

I don’t think so?

[Ed K4EGP @egprentice]

@fold_app @CoachKorey3 Used my @Fold_app credit card to buy groceries today.

[Ed K4EGP @egprentice]

@W6KSR Not practical. I doubt you could even recover (steal) power from 60Hz power lines that way.