Monthly Archives: April 2019

Science & Digital Briefs for April 10, 2019

By Dave Bunting, Shopper Editor

Payroll employment increases
by 196,000 in March;
unemployment rate
remains at 3.8%:

Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 196,000 in March, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 3.8 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Notable job gains occurred in health care and in professional and technical services.

Info:   shpr.fyi/2IlYg1K

Carbon Monoxide Detectors
look for biological life
on exo-planets

The detectors similar to those in our homes could be used on telescopes looking at planets similar to earth. If they found a little CO2, it could mean life. But if they found a lot of CO2, it would mean no life.

Info:   shpr.fyi/2uSSkp0

Unemployment Applications
at 49-year low

The number of Americans filing applications for unemployment benefits fell to a 49-year low last week, pointing to sustained labor market strength despite slowing economic growth. In the week ending March 30, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 202,000, a decrease of 10,000 from the previous week’s revised level. This is the lowest level for initial claims since December 6, 1969 when it was 202,000.

Info:   shpr.fyi/2Kty6Nc

Recent Widespread
DNS Hijacking Attacks

The U.S. government — along with a number of leading security companies — recently warned about a series of highly complex and widespread attacks that allowed suspected Iranian hackers to siphon huge volumes of email passwords and other sensitive data from multiple governments and private companies. But to date, the specifics of exactly how that attack went down and who was hit have remained shrouded in secrecy.

The post linked below seeks to document the extent of those attacks, and traces the origins of this overwhelmingly successful cyber espionage campaign back to a cascading series of breaches at key Internet infrastructure providers.

Before we delve into the extensive research that culminated in this post, it’s helpful to review the facts disclosed publicly so far. On Nov. 27, 2018, Cisco’s Talos research division published a write-up outlining the contours of a sophisticated cyber espionage campaign it dubbed “DNSpionage.”

The DNS part of that moniker refers to the global “Domain Name System,” which serves as a kind of phone book for the Internet by translating human-friendly Web site names (example.com) into numeric Internet addresses (192.168.123.456) that are easier for computers to manage.

The researcher said the perpetrators of DNSpionage were able to steal email and other login credentials from a number of government and private sector entities in Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates by hijacking the DNS servers for these targets, so that all email and virtual private networking (VPN) traffic was redirected to an Internet address controlled by the attackers.

Some DNS servers such as those set for us by our internet service provider (ISP) carriers, without our knowledge, redirect our addresses to sites from which they can earn money by putting ads onto our screens. Some DNS servers are known to be less reliable at getting us to the web site we want, some are more vulnerable, more easily hijacked. Hackers can change the DNS servers so that they direct us to criminal sites that steal our passwords and credit card numbers. We need to specify DNS servers that are known reliable. Generally we specify two DNS servers, a primary and a secondary. 

Known reliable and free DNS servers are those by Cloudflare.com: 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1, and those by OpenDNS.com: 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220. These are known and verified to not be hackable, and they keep no record of the sites we visit. They just simply and purely translate our words like google.com or highwayshopper.com into their correct computer addresses.

This is pretty deep for most computer users, even though every computer user, especially every user who buys and turns on a router or computer, within that setup process, actually chooses the DNS server they will use.

If you delve deep enough into your router or computer to be able to set the DNS servers you want to use, a good choice would be 1.1.1.1 for primary, and 208.67.222.222 for secondary.

Info:   shpr.fyi/2IhN8TG

Einstein once asked:

“If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind,
what is an empty desk a sign of?”

 

Earth Day April 22
in past years

There are currently 7.7 billion people worldwide and we (sometimes literally) burn through natural resources quickly, leaving an indelible mark on the planet. We’ve known about this impact for a long time—since well before environmentalism became a topic of politics—but it’s hard to change our ways.

• March 1879: Cutting down so many trees helped boost the industrial revolution, but even in the late 19th century “disastrous effects” were recognized.
• August 1948: The dust storms of 1948 were a reminder of how farming on “marginal lands” created the “dustbowl.”
• August 1974: “The ocean is a plausible place” to dump garbage. Although plastic pollution back then was a matter of “aesthetics.”
• September 2016: Modernity is great! But the long-lasting planetary transition caused by human activity now has a name: The Anthropocene.

Info:   shpr.fyi/2UpA2ef

We might improve the health
of our blood veins and arteries
by killing the bacteria in our gut.

Researchers gave young mice and old mice broad-spectrum antibiotics to kill off the majority of bacteria living in their gut, aka their gut microbiome. After three to four weeks of the treatment, the young mice saw no change in vascular health. The old mice, however, saw vast improvements on all measures.

“When you suppressed the microbiome of the old mice, their vascular health was restored to that of young mice.

Info:   shpr.fyi/2U4ceHV

By Dave Bunting, Shopper Editor

What is “5G?”

Most adult Americans
expect big changes

• 72% expect income gaps to widen, and 44% see living standards declining.
• 57% see tougher financial times on the horizon for older Americans. 84% say by 2050 most Americans will have to work into their 70’s.
• 59% of adults are pessimistic about the environment, and 69% are worried about climate change.
• 82% say robots and computers will definitely or probably do much of the work currently done by humans. 69% see this as a bad thing for the U.S.
• Americans are more likely to see the nation’s shift to “majority-minority” status as a good thing than a bad thing, but 42% say it’s neither good nor bad.
• 87% expect a woman and a Hispanic person to become president by 2050.
• 60% of adults see a smaller role for the U.S. on the world stage.
• 65% of adults say the U.S. will be more politically divided in 2050 than it is today, and this belief is held across partisan lines: 68% of Republicans say this, as do 62% of Democrats.
• 48% say they are very worried about the ability of political leaders to solve the country’s biggest problems.
• Info: fyi/2TYxWBZ

What is “5G”?

5G or 5th Generation is the latest generation of cellular mobile communications.

5G refers to the method by which your cellphone connects to the internet when you are not within range of a wifi router or base station. Our cellphones now connect to the telephone tower using 4G or older generations. 4G is the current 4^th Generation that we now have.

The coming new cellular 5G succeeds the 4G (LTE-A, WiMax), 3G (UMTS, LTE) and 2G (GSM) systems. Every cellphone we have uses one of these. 5G performance when it is implemented will offer better high data rate, reduced connection delays, energy saving, cost reduction, higher system capacity, and massive device connectivity.

Wifi and cellular are different kinds of communication. Our WiFi strength is shown on our phones usually by several umbrella-shaped arcs. Our cellular strength is shown by several vertical bars of increasing height.

Our current 4G telephone devices perform around 5 to 12 Mbps with peak download speeds hitting the 50 Mbps range.

Mbps is millions of data bits per second.

MBps with the capital B is millions of data Bytes per second where each Byte is eight bits—watch out for the difference indicated by the capital B or lowercase b when comparing speeds. A speed of 1MBps is the same as 8Mbps.

Most current model Wifi Wireless-N users can expect around WiFi 40 to 50 Mbps and the currently fastest Wifi Wireless-AC users around 70 to 100 Mbps.

Wifi communication is faster than cellular data but is geographically limited to within range of a wifi router or base station.

Performance-wise, when fully implemented in the next several years, 5G is expected to operate at speeds that are three times the speed of 4G technology, or 15 to 36 Mbps primarily due to speedier data speeds. Some network providers claim, however, that their 5G networks will be able to achieve 20 times current speeds.

For comparison, wired ethernet systems such as ours at the Shopper office and in many businesses and homes, have higher speeds depending on the terminal devices but mainly limited by the cable type used: Cat5E cable can have speeds of 1000 Mbps or one Gigabit per second, and Cat6 cabling would give 10,000Mbps or 10 Gbps. Ethernet speeds are much faster than either wifi or cellular 4G, even 5G, but require wire cabling. However, the low 5 to 12 Mbps speed of current 4G is enough for many users.

The new mmWave 5G will use frequencies between 30GHz and 300Ghz. The highest band used for cellular in the US at the moment is 2.5GHz. The advantage of using such higher frequencies is that there is a lot of mmWave bandwidth available and it is also much easier to develop massive antenna arrays with higher frequencies.

The higher frequencies shorten range, though carriers probably will build many more towers so a tower will be closer to us. One phone maker- Samsung- said recently that it tested its 28Ghz infrastructure with Verizon Communications Inc. for its home-brewed fixed 5G service at ranges of up 1,500 feet, much smaller than our current 4G-LTE-A systems with range of up to and over five miles.

Also, the signal penetration and range at 28GHz or higher gets more subject to line-of-sight as well as blockages and reflections by building walls and foliage.

Carriers can’t fully implement 5G until its specifications are established. The first phase of 5G Specifications in Release-15 will be completed by April 2019 to accommodate the early commercial deployment. The second hopefully final phase of specifications in Release-16 is due to be completed by April 2020 for submission to the International Telecommunication Union, the body that controls such specifications worldwide.

5G implementation will take several years. The first 4G phones in the US appeared in 2010, but the sorts of 4G applications that changed our world didn’t appear until later. Snapchat came in 2012, and Uber became widespread in 2013. Video calls over the new 4G-LTE networks also became widespread in the US around 2013.

The speed and latency in early deployments, using 5G NR software on our current 4G hardware, are only slightly better than current-best 4G systems, estimated at 15% to possibly 50% better.

For now, 5G may be largely hype. For example, AT&T’s “5G E” service is slightly slower than Verizon’s and T-Mobile’s advanced 4G LTE networks, a study by OpenSignal has found. AT&T renamed a large portion of its 4G network, calling it “5G E,” for “5G Evolution.” If you see a 5G E indicator on an AT&T phone, that means you’re connected to a portion of AT&T’s 4G LTE network that supports standard LTE-Advanced features such as 256 QAM, 4×4 MIMO, and three-way carrier aggregation. All four major carriers have rolled out LTE-Advanced. But while Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile accurately call it 4G, AT&T calls it 5G E.

No carrier is yet offering true 5G.

The actual 5G radio system, known as 5G-NR, isn’t compatible with our 4G phones. But all 5G devices in the US, initially, will need 4G because they’ll need it to make initial connections before rising up to 5G where it’s available.

In 2018 ninety percent of US citizens had at least one Internet-of-Things (IOT) device, such as home security or heating/air-conditioning systems, printers or nursery webcams. Approximately 21 billion IOT devices will be in operation by 2020, which is three for every person on the earth. Every IOT device has a computer-like CPU and is capable of communicating worldwide on the internet. Many IOT devices are readily taken over by criminals and used for various nefarious purposes such as theft of our credit card, bank and other passwords, and forming millions of them together as robots to simultaneously disrupt government, business or other systems. Our home and business routers are almost as vulnerable as other IOT devices.

The 5G technology will connect billions of devices and sensors, and will have a formidable impact on all people and industries in the form of smart homes, fully automated vehicles, augmented reality, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, robotics, 3D printing, and technology-enhanced health care services including automated surgery. Our world will change quite drastically!

The mention of a potential 6G technology by President Trump created a stir in technology circles, with some industry observers saying no such technology exists and others saying that consumers can and might expect 6G mobile by 2030 or so.

Info:   shpr.fyi/2I3yYW4

https://www.pcmag.com/article/345387/what-is-5g