All of the Stars-1

Camera’s clicked, delegates all around, little Peter was excited to see his sister at the TV, all over the news, little did he know what for. Life after that local daily, was a different though. Peter has grown old now to understand everything that brought her into the limelight in the twenties. As IEEE SB NITP moves ahead to complete its fifty blogs we present you the story of Ema!

2015, Ema was all set to venture into a strange discovery now; clueless of what her findings will be, what that graph would mean, silently, as silence was never awkward, never intrusive, never noisy, supporting whilst Ed Sheeran played in the background; softly, in her workspace.

The world was not ending actually, but the man’s greed was unending and the mission was all about creating a Dyson Sphere or say another Earth, another habitat, a secret annexe for the tasc force and if needed an abode for the homosapiens. World’s best scientists and physicists were a part of this mission, different backgrounds but all tied up with a common thread of a vision, a dream not deferred and a quench for a new living.

Over those amorphous years when science had just begun working, when exploration was full of exclamations and no full stops; Ema was glad to brim upto the edges, boundaries, borders, brinks and limits she never thought of about the Stark Space Force’s CETI Division.

However, Ema had a different plight. Inspite of the fact that she was a college student, what brought her the email from the Mission Secretary was her passion in the quantum realm, the stars and the extra-terrestrial intelligence which reflected from her trending Wordpress those days.

Days passed and she enjoyed being at the station, working and helping with the logics, exosemiotics and algorithm communication systems (ACETI). She was loved by all and she made friends easily. The physicists called her a chatbot. All those findings and discussions at the station seem very normal to her except the Escapalator, an unknown deemed to be a communication device by a crazy scientist that seemed different and driving. Ema used to find ways to explore that whenever everyone went for breaks. Inquisitiveness is also a ladder, like chaos. You climb it up all the way to be amused, fearing any catastrophe knock at the door of our lives. And one usual day, dazzling yellow- blue rays emerge from the machine and this graph appeared;

She was filled with fear. She took away the print-out, switched-off the machine and ran from there. She kept on reading and exploring the untouched dimensions assuming the graph to be a machine running rating. Two days passed. Finally she gathered the courage to come back to the station on the third day. But she was unusually silent that day. Things bubbled up in her mind, but she could not question. She was silent like a bubble floating on a sea of noise.

This however did not kill Ema’s search for the unexplored, ‘I can see the stars from America, I wonder, do you see them too?...’ humming as she looked into the sky with the telescope, the beautifully formed constellations and that falling star like a slanting silver rope on the loose earth seemed a message, while another graph came out of the machine. 

Purple - The Japanese Secret

Hello, there fellow readers! We are back with episode 2 of the mini-series “Decrypting World War II communications”. Different countries developed different encoded forms of communication influenced by their language and culture and infused them with technology. Previously, we decoded the most popular cipher machine in Germany, and today, it will be Japan’s.

The “Type B Cipher Machine” or popularly known by “Purple” as coined by the United States, was an encryption machine used by Japanese Foreign Office right from Feb 1939 till the end of World War II, pretty consistent, right?

Purple was called Type B Cipher Machine because it was the successor of a Japanese machine called “Red” from which most of the properties were inherited but with positive modifications to cover the flaws.

97 shiki-obun In-ji-ki or Alphabetical Typerwriter’97 or Purple was important for Japanese to send diplomatic and military messages like the 14-part message, 5000 characters long note sent to the Washington embassy of Japan stating the broken-off negotiations between the United States and Japan which were considered as “The Failed Attempt To Avert The War with Japan, 1941”.

History

In 1937, the Japanese completed the next generation "Type 97 Typewriter". The Ministry of Foreign Affairs machine was the "Type B Cipher Machine", codenamed Purple by United States cryptanalysts.

The chief designer of Purple was Kazuo Tanabe. His engineers were Masaji Yamamoto and Eikichi Suzuki. Eikichi Suzuki suggested the use of a stepping switch instead of the more troublesome half-rotor switch.

Clearly, the Purple machine was more secure than Red, but the Navy did not recognize that Red had already been broken. The Purple machine inherited weakness from the Red machine that six letters of the alphabet were encrypted separately. It differed from Red in that the group of letters was changed and announced every nine days, whereas in Red they were permanently fixed as the Latin vowels 'a', 'e', 'i', 'o', 'u' and 'y'. Thus US Army SIS was able to break the cipher used for the six letters before it was able to break the one used for the 20 others.

Working

The System overview mentioned below is based on the replicate of the original one because the original was made sure never to be found. Find the reference to the overview here, Cryptoanalysis of Purple - presented by Barjol Lami, Gledis Kallco, Nicholas Guo, Sean Shi.

Elements of the Purple machine

Type B cipher machine has three main elements: input plugboard, permutation switches, and output plugboard.

Input Plugboard

It consists of two parts - the internal and the external alphabets. The external alphabet is the input from the user and each external letter was mapped manually to one of the internal alphabets so that every permutation of mapping would be valid. The internal alphabets were used in the encryption. They were further categorized as sixes and twenties; the vowels and the consonants respectively and each internal letter were encrypted in either a vowel or a consonant. This was actually a step of improvement because in Type A Cipher Machine, “like mapped to like” which made it easy to recognize.

Switches

After a letter goes through the input plugboard, it can be encrypted in two varied ways depending on whether it maps to one of the sixes (the vowels) or one the twenties (the consonants). Sixes get permuted through a switch called the sixes switch. It has 25 possible positions, which means 25 possible permutations of the sixes out of 6! = 720 that is the total space of permutations. The twenties have bigger space of possible permutations. They get permuted through 3 consecutive switches called twenties switches, each of which has 25 possible positions. Combined, 3 twenties rotors can produce 253 possible permutations for the twenties. Every time a letter gets encrypted by the machine, the sixes switch and one of the twenties switches will change the position. By doing this the machine generates a new alphabet permutation for the next letter to be encrypted.

Output Plugboard

The switches permute the input of the internal alphabet of input plugboard to the internal alphabets of output plugboard. From the internal alphabet of the output plugboard, letters then map to the output typewriter through the same identical mapping as the input plugboard.

Stepping Switches

The machine only uses the rotors to change the permutation alphabet for each letter. Each of the positions of the switches does a unique permutation of its respective input space. The permutation by each of the positions is created in a manner such that no two of the 3125 permutations from the twenties are the same.

The twenties switch advance based on the label they have. Each of them can get labeled as ”fast”, ”middle” and ”slow” so that gives 6 different possible labelings. Based on their names, the ”fast” switch will advance more quickly than the ”middle” one, which will advance more frequently than the ”slow” one. More precisely, the ”slow” switch advances every time the sixes reach position 24 and the ”middle” switch is at position 25. The ”middle” switch advances every time the sixes switch is at position 25 and the ”fast” switch is at position 25 and the ”fast” switch moves every other time.
If we analyze the structure of the machine, we see that there are 253 possible starting positions for the twenties switches. In addition, are 6 different ways we can label them as ”fast”, ”middle” and ”slow”. There also 25 different starting positions for the sixes.

Considering also the 26! possible permutations of the alphabet that depends on the wiring the user decides to use in the plugboard, in total we get: 6 •253 •25•26! ≈ 9.45∗1032 possible keys.

An Example

Here, we can see the encryption of a letter that is mapped to one of the sixes. On the left, there’s the input plugboard. In our case, it takes K as external input from Typewriter and outputs U as internal input. On the right of the figure we see the output plugboard which gets E from the internal output and outputs S. In the middle, the sixes switch permutes letter U depending on the permutation in position 3 of the 25-position switch and outputs E. For the Typewriter, this is equivalent to encrypting K to S, due to the plugboards.

How the US cracked Purple?

The Japanese built the machine based on its previous version Red, where the 6 vowels were permuted within themselves and used the same separation for the internal plugboard. They added the permutation from the external alphabet to the internal plugboard, but that turned out to not add complete security to the fact that these 6 letters are treated separately, especially since Americans had previous messages from Red and knew about the 6-20 split.

In 1939, cryptography expert William Friedman was chosen by the U.S. Army to work on breaking the Purple cipher. Fortunately, in eighteen months, he was able to make some progress before this, and, using his incomplete work, other members of his team were able to make continued progress. A precise chunk of the code was broken, and even though a Purple Machine had never been seen by American codebreakers, eight functional replicas of the Machine were created. Eventually, Purple Machine’s method of encryption was completely discovered. In time, Lt. Francis A. Raven discovered a pattern being used by the Japanese in their daily keys. He noticed that each month was broken into three ten-day

segments in which a pattern was discerned. With the final touches made to the puzzle by Lt. Raven, the Purple cipher was effectively broken and Japanese secrets were exposed.

Purple was considered to be a pretty wonderful cipher machine that displayed the advancement of technology with purpose. But every problem has a solution because we are humans. Somewhere in olden days, far away communication was impossible but with need, an invention was born. The US army utilized this decoding and broke a multitude of Japanese secret messages, even some containing the plans for the attack on Pearl Harbor which could have been used to prepare. However, as history reveals, not all of these were used to their full potential.

We hope you find this article insightful. Our sole motto is to elevate your knowledge in cryptography and who knows someone among you can invent the amazing cipher machine which can be called as the next unbreakable. Do like and share it and stay tuned till next Thursday. We will be back!

Tony's Travelogue

International Space Museum, somewhere in the 23rd Century :

A group of students and their science teacher with them. 

“Gather around kids, here’s the relic from a galaxy far, far away, The Arabiattan Atmos.”

“Growing up, we all want to achieve great things, sometimes it’s to be famous and immortal, somethings it’s being rich, sometimes, it’s just being the best at what you do. 

As a kid, the space always fascinated Anthony aka Tony (by his loving one). The absolute uncertainty of what lies beyond the realms of our galaxy eluded him for a long time. The unknown and uncertain was what fueled his 9 year old young mind. 

He worked on that curiosity, like one of the genius said before him, “I have no special talent, I’m just passionately curious,” Guess, we had a genius right here.

The pandemic which humanity went through in 2020, revealed something even more eluding. We supposedly had an alternate timeline where the time was reversed. Well, go figure and satisfy that curiosity.”

“Fast Forward 20 years later….,

The International Space Agency thought of something awesome yet scary.

It was a suicide mission, millions were being spent on it but they had to try, one trial, if it were successful, it could change our entire vision of how we viewed time. 

Our very own Tony, now grown up and now known Anthony was chosen for this sucide mission. 

Time passed by, the humans had lost all hope for finding Anthony ever again. It was just hopeless. Meanwhile Anthony stuck in the alternate dimension was struggling to figure out what was happening to him. He could not comprehend the bizarre reality that had unfolded. He was growing young!

At first it had been difficult to notice but slowly he could see the difference he felt, the wrinkles were gone, scars healed themselves, it was strange, really. But he was now sure of it, it was like Benjamin Button in real life. 

How he got back on earth was a source of case study for the coming generations. It was one of the most crafty techniques that has ever been used. Robert as a child was obsessed with builds of roboships and growing up while his PhD had designed a few himself. In his struggle to come back, his main issue was the damage to the roboship. 

As absolute geniuses go, he went ahead and designed a new one from scratch. Disintegrated his original ship and built a separate one entirely. Surprisingly that design is still used for the further space explorations we do.”

“So, you see kids, by the time Anthony finished his going back, he was back in his twenties. Reaching earth would take at least a few years. Coming back, he didn’t realize the time difference would take him back another 10 years. It was crazy.”

“He landed back on earth, 10 years after he had originally left. But this time, it wasn’t Anthony that came back, but it was Tony, the ever so curious 9 year old.”

Enigma - The Once Unbreakable

“Sometimes it’s the people no one imagines anything of who do the things no one can imagine.” - Alan Turing

We all are well introduced with world wars from our history classes that our dear world survived and still stand with its head held up high. During World War II, Germany with the hope of winning for the second time employed an encryption device to protect commercial, military, and diplomatic conversions which were known as “Engima”.

Enigma has an electromechanical rotor mechanism that scrambles 26 letters of English alphabets. When the plain text was entered in, the lit-up letters are the encoded ciphertext. Entering ciphertext transforms it back into readable plaintext. The rotor mechanism changes the electrical connections between the keys and the lights with each keypress. 

History

The German engineer Arthur Scherbius by the end of World War I invented an encryption device by 1918 and finished marketing it under brand name “Enigma” by 1923. The early models were being in the application by the 1920s adopted by several countries and mostly by Nazi Germany before WW II. Several different models inspired from it were made but the most complex was the German one. Many people know that when invented by the Germans, the information was first leaked to the French, and the first reconstruction was created by the Pole before it was offered to Britain's codebreakers as a way of deciphering German signals traffic during World War Two. As a result of the information gained through this device, it has been claimed, hostilities between Germany and the Allied forces were curtailed by two years.

How Does It Work?

Enigma allowed the operator to type in a message and scramble it with three to five notched wheels or say rotors that were fitted inside which displayed different letters of the alphabets. The receiver needed to know the exact settings of these rotors to reconstitute the coded text. Over the years the basic machine became more complicated, as German code experts added plugs with electronic circuits.
The more interesting thing about Enigma was the setting of the rotor which made it more complex. Each month, Enigma operators received codebooks that specified which settings the machine would use each day. Every morning the code would change.

The following setting example has been referenced from https://brilliant.org/:

For example, one day, the codebook may list the settings described in the day-key below:

1. Plugboard settings: A/L – P/R – T/D – B/W – K/F – O/Y

A plugboard similar to an old-fashioned telephone switchboard has ten wires, each wire having two ends that can be plugged into a slot. Each plug wire can connect two letters to be a pair (by plugging one end of the wire to one letter’s slot and the other end to another letter). The two letters in a pair will swap over, so if “A” is connected to “Z,” “A” becomes “Z” and “Z” becomes “A.” This provides an extra level of scrambling for the military.

To implement this day-key first you would have to swap the letters A and L by connecting them on the plugboard, swap P and R by connecting them on the plugboard, and then the same with the other letter pairs listed above. Essentially, one end of a cable would be plugged into the "A" slot and the other end would be plugged into the L slot. Before any further scrambling happens by the rotors, this adds a first layer of scrambling where the letters connected by the cable are encoded as each other. For example, if I were to encode the message “APPLE” after connecting only the "A" to the "L", this would be encoded as “LPPAE”.

2. Rotor (or scrambler) arrangement: 2 — 3 —1

The Enigma machines came with several different rotors, each rotor providing a different encoding scheme. To encode a message, the Enigma machines took three rotors at a time, one in each of three slots. Each different combination of rotors would produce a different encoding scheme. Note: most military Enigma machines had three-rotor slots though some had more.

To accomplish the configuration above, place rotor #2 in the 1st slot of the enigma, rotor #3 in the 2nd slot, and rotor #1 in the 3rd slot.

3. Rotor orientations: D – K –P
 

On each rotor, there is an alphabet along the rim, so the operator can set in a particular orientation. For this example, the operator would turn the rotor in slot 1 so that D is displayed, rotate the second slot so that K is displayed, and rotate the third slot so that P is displayed.

Each of the three rotors will display a number or letter (the rotors in the image above have letters), and when the rotors turn, a new set of three numbers/letters appears. With the initial set of three numbers/letters (meaning the numbers/letters on the sender’s machine when they began to type the message), a message recipient can decode the message by setting their (identical) Enigma machine to the initial settings of the sender’s Enigma machine. Each rotor has 26 numbers/letters on it. An Enigma machine takes three rotors at a time, and the Germans could interchange rotors, choosing from a set of five, resulting in thousands of possible configurations. For example, one configuration of rotors could be rotor #5 in slot one, rotor #2 in slot two, and rotor #1 in slot three.

In the first slot, there are 5 rotors to pick from, in the second there are 4 rotors to pick from, and in the third slot there are 3 rotors to pick from. So there are 5* 4* 3 = 60 ways to configure the five rotors.

There are 26 starting positions for each rotor, so there are 26×26×26=17,576 choices for initial configurations of the rotors’ numbers/letters.

The features above describe the components of commercial Enigma machines, but military-grade machines have additional features, such as a plugboard, which allows for even more configuration possibilities. Since there are 26 letters in the alphabet, there are 26! ways to arrange the letters, but the plugboard can only make 10 pairs, so there are 20 letters involved with the pairings, and 6 leftovers that must be divided out.

 Furthermore, there are 10 pairs of letters, and it does not matter what order the pairs are in, so divide also by 10! and the order of the letters in the pair does not matter. The resulting number of combinations yielded by the plugboard is as follows = 150,738,274,937,250. Therefore, there are 158,962,555,217,826,360,000 total number of ways to set a military-grade Enigma machine.

How was the Enigma decrypted by Britishers?

Alan Turing played a key role in decrypting the Enigma which resulted in the Germans’  defeat. He along with a colleague Gordon Welchman created a machine named “Bombe”.This device helped to significantly reduce the work of the code-breakers. From mid-1940, German Air Force signals were being read at Bletchley and the intelligence gained from them was helping the war effort.

After all the efforts made by the polish, the Germans added two more rotors which complicated the recognition of messages by them. Therefore, on 26 and 27 July 1939, in Pyry near Warsaw, the Poles initiated French and British military intelligence representatives into their Enigma-decryption techniques and equipment, including Zygalski sheets and the cryptologic bomb, and promised each delegation a Polish-reconstructed Enigma. The demonstration represented a vital basis for the later British continuation and effort.

In September 1939, British Military Mission 4, which included Colin Gubbins and Vera Atkins, went to Poland to evacuate code-breakers Gwido Langer, Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki, and Henryk Zygalski out of the country with their replica Enigma machines. The Poles were taken across the border into Atkins' native Romania, at the time a neutral country where some of them were interned. Atkins arranged for their release and onward travel to Western Europe to advise the French and British, who at the time were still unable to decrypt German messages.

Gordon Welchman, who became head of Hut 6 at Bletchley Park, has written: "Hut 6 Ultra would never have gotten off the ground if we had not learned from the Poles, in the nick of time, the details both of the German military version of the commercial Enigma machine, and of the operating procedures that were in use.

During the war, British cryptologists decrypted a vast number of messages enciphered on Enigma. The intelligence gleaned from this source, codenamed "Ultra" by the British, was a substantial aid to the Allied war effort.

Though Enigma had some cryptographic weaknesses, in practice it was German procedural mistakes, failure to systematically introduce changes in encipherment procedures, and Allied capture of key tables and hardware that, during the war, enabled Allied cryptologists to succeed and "turned the tide" in the Allies' favor.

Stay Tuned for the upcoming blogs included in the five-blog mini-series “Decrypting World War II communications”.

Saga of Necropolis

Saga of Necropolis 

The ubiquitous saga of the universe, as the people of Necropolis, knew it then. It is the dusk of gloriously grandiloquent dimension. It is a melancholic tale of Iris. Iris had endured what no one in the multiverse ever had. 

When the galactic frost liquefied, the stygian voids in the space as we perceive it today were filled with trillion times more water than in the Pacific Ocean. The entire space was submerged in water and shimmering, dazzling dust of infinity stones. A blue blazing cube with a stone radiating immense energy in all directions fell into the voids of Iris. In the blink of an eye, the watery space was cool but not frosted, dark but not stygian, calm but not quiet again. 
                                                            

     
Different stones occupied different dimensions. The one that came to Necropolis was space stone. Necropolis had never seen the birth but only death, was preparing for the nativity of a whole new world.  The world more beautiful than Terra. 

                            
The space stone was kept on the haunted planet of Necropolis. A mad Titan Thanos came to know about this powerful stone. He made a deal with Yondu, a marsupial alien race of the planet Centauri to bring that stone to him. Yondu with his group of scavengers and Star Lord( aka Peter Quill) raided Necropolis. A war broke out between the guardians of the stone and them. Yondu bombarded much of the planet and in this bombardment the blue blazing cube which was acting as the protective shell for space stone broked. At that time no one had any idea about the power of that stone and that it's impossible for a normal entity to control it's power. But Star Lord being the result of genetic testing of EGO ( Ego who called himself "Bioverse" is a living planet, every part of its substance, including the atmosphere, is alive as much as it is controlled by his consciousness, it often transforms its surface to appear as a giant face to address powerful beings and can shape its terrain to suit the circumstances) was able to get hold of all the powers of that stone. Then on Yondu's orders he hands over that stone to Thanos. But as soon as Thanos with his intent to destroy the entire universe touches the space stone there was a flash of exuberant energy and light.

                                 
                       
None of the inhabitant apart from Star Lord could withstand that explosion and Necropolis turned to stardust. Star Lord flowed unconscious in the space and the Infinity stone was lost in the grandeur of shimmering cataclysmic singularity. No one has seen such spontaneous events of a prominent scale ever in the history of the universe. What if we lift our eyelids to see the morning sun and what reveals itself to us is the Space Stone?
                        

Into Alexa

We are now interacting with technology in the most natural way possible-by talking. People talk to their smart devices every day and also flirt with the virtual assistants (shout out to all the single boys out there). So, today we will take a closer look at the technologies used in one of the most loved intelligent virtual assistants- Alexa.

Alexa is built based on natural language processing (NLP), a procedure of converting speech into words, sounds, and ideas.

It starts with signal processing, which gives Alexa as many chances as possible to make sense of the audio by cleaning the signal. The idea is to improve the target signal, which means being able to identify ambient noise like the TV and minimize them. To resolve these issues, seven microphones are used to identify roughly where the signal is coming from so the device can focus on it. Acoustic Echo Cancellation (AEC) can subtract that signal so only the remaining important signal remains.

In speech recognition systems, the term “acoustic echo” refers to the signal that is played out of a loudspeaker and captured by a microphone in the vicinity of the loudspeaker. The AEC algorithm functions by adaptively estimating the acoustic echo path (and thereby the acoustic echo) between the loudspeaker and microphone components. The estimated acoustic echo is then subtracted from the microphone signal to obtain a near echo-free microphone signal. An AEC-processed microphone signal is ideally free of acoustic echo.

The next task is “Wake Word Detection”. It determines whether the user says one of the words the device is programmed to need to turn on, such as “Alexa”. This is needed to minimize false positives and false negatives, which could lead to accidental purchases and angry customers. This is complicated as it needs to identify pronunciation differences, and it needs to do so on the device, which has limited CPU power.

Any command to Alexa is broken into 3 main parts: Wake word, Invocation name, Utterance. You already know about the Wake word. Invocation name is the keyword used to trigger a specific “skill”. Skills are voice-driven Alexa capabilities. Utterances are phrases the users will use when making a request to Alexa. Alexa identifies the user’s intent from the given utterance and responds accordingly. 

If the wake word is detected, Alexa enabled devices send the user’s instruction to a cloud-based service called Alexa Voice Service (AVS). AVS is the brain of Alexa enabled devices and performs all the complex operations such as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU).

Natural Language Processing (NLP) helps computer machines to engage in communication using natural human language in many forms, including but not limited to speech and writing. Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is a subset of the wider world of NLP.

At first, it converts the input of natural language into Artificial language like speech recognition. Here we get the data into a textual form which NLU (Natural Language Understanding) processes to understand the meaning. It tries to understand each word whether it is a Noun or Verb, what is the tense used, etc. This process is defined as POS: Part Of Speech Tagging.

NLP systems also have a lexicon (a vocabulary) and a set of grammar rules coded into the system. Modern NLP algorithms use statistical machine learning to apply these rules to the natural language and determine the most likely meaning behind what you said.

When Alexa makes a mistake in interpreting your request, that data is used to make the system better the next time through Machine learning.

So in a nutshell here's what happens when you make a request to Alexa:

• Amazon records your words. Indeed, interpreting sounds take up a lot of computational power, the recording of your speech is sent to Amazon’s servers to be analyzed more efficiently.

• Amazon breaks down your “orders” into individual sounds. It then consults a database containing various words’ pronunciations to find which words most closely correspond to the combination of individual sounds.

• It then identifies important words to make sense of the tasks and carry out corresponding functions. For instance, if Alexa notices words like “sport” or “basketball”, it would open the sports app.

• Amazon’s servers send the information back to your device and Alexa may speak. If Alexa needs to say anything back, it would go through the same process described above, but in reverse order

DMZ (demilitarized zone) is a physical or logical subnet that separates an internal LAN from other untrusted networks -usually the public internet.

Amazon is adding new capabilities to Alexa just about every day, with more skills and device compatibility. Beginning in 2020, Amazon is rolling out frustration detection features, so Alexa will be able to understand and acknowledge when you’re getting frustrated with her. If you want to learn more about Alexa, all you have to do is ask: “Alexa, what’s new with you?” and she’s happy to share.

DYSON SPHERE

Imagine the situation when Earth runs out of fuel, i.e. Coal, Nuclear fuel, etc. All we will be left with is the Sun, the constant source of energy which is not going to run out in the near future. A furnace 100 quintillion times more powerful than our most efficient nuclear reactor that shines with the energy of a trillion nuclear bombs per second. But there are many problems with solar energy, like varying intensity at different latitudes, available only in days, and only 1.316 kW per square meter of energy is incident on the Earth’s Surface.

The Solution is a Dyson Sphere.

In 1960, astrophysicist Freeman Dyson theorized another civilization that found a way to meet their ever-increasing energy and space demands. They rearranged their solar system. This hypothetical advanced civilization built a hollow sphere around their own sun and provided themselves with an incredible amount of energy and habitable real estate.

The concept was developed as part of a research paper in 1960 by the physicist Freeman Dyson. In a thought experiment, he assumed that the power needs for civilizations never stops increasing.

If our descendants could actually figure out how to enclose our star in a rigid shell, we’d have 550 million times more surface area than Earth has right now, and generate 384 Yottawatts of energy. 

The idea seems great, 550 million times bigger space to live in, figuratively unlimited energy to strive upon. But there are a whole lot of problems in constructing our Utopia.

First, the amount of matter required to build such Megastructure will be more than that in all the planets and nearby asteroids and other interstellar entities in the vicinity of our solar system.

Second, let us consider if we somehow manage to smash every single planet, asteroid, and all other bodies and use them up to construct the supergiant homeworld, we won’t be getting enough gravitational pull by the sphere to hold things tight. So we will have to somehow keep this Sphere rotating at a certain constant speed.

Third, since this is an artificial habitat it won’t have an atmosphere, we will have to create an atmosphere to survive.

This seems impossible now, but let's say, 2000 years from now, we might have the required technology to achieve this Herculean task.

It's May 10, 10 PM- few hours to go!!!


As you leaf over the pages of Plugged, we hope you will enjoy our first ever edition!

Dark Web

Only darkness or is there a ray of light?

“Technology is always a two-edged sword. It brings in benefits but as many as disasters.”

The dark web refers to encrypted online content that is not indexed by search engines. The dark web is a component of the deep web that displays that source of content that does not appear through regular Internet browsing activities. Most deep web content consists of private files hosted on Dropbox and its competitors or subscriber-only databases rather than anything illegal. Many dark web sites simply provide standard web services with more secrecy, which benefits political dissidents and people trying to keep medical conditions private.

To understand the dark web, consider internet content existing in three segments: 

The dark web, the clear web (or surface web), and the deep web.

The dark web’s content on the internet isn’t viable through common browsers or standard browsing technology. Content on the dark web is designed to be hidden from search engines and casual users — we can’t simply stumble across dark web sites by accident.
The dark web, compared to the billions of sites available on the clear and deep web, comprises just a few thousands of sites.

The clear web is the traditional, easily navigated internet content accessible through all standard browsers and technology. When someone visits any basic website e.g thetimeofindia.com, they will find the original content accessible to all without something to hide. Search engines, like Google, crawl (or index) the clear web to smooth users’ navigation.

The deep web consists of content search engines can’t index — this includes material that’s accessible only behind login pages or on websites that have restricted or blocked search engines from indexing their contents. When we log into a bank or social media accounts, for example, the content available to us as registered users is the deep web. Pages or sites that request not to be indexed or are designed so a crawler can’t navigate their contents (e.g., a page that might require extended user interaction to access materials) are also part of the deep web.

More on Dark Web

Researchers Daniel Moore and Thomas Rid of King's College in London distributed the contents of 2,723 live dark web sites over five weeks in 2015 and found that 57% host illicit material.
A 2019 study, Into the Web of Profit, conducted by Dr. Michael McGuires at the University of Surrey, shows that things have become worse. The number of dark web listings that could harm an enterprise has risen by 20% since 2016. Of all listings (excluding those selling drugs), 60% could potentially harm enterprises.

As with the early Internet, the dark web has also gained a reputation as a haven for illegal activities. The dark web, like the web before it, is frequently blamed for horrible crimes, such as child abuse and murder for hire. Even Though these crimes existed long before the invention of the internet, its invention helped to promote tolerance in the late 20th century, when many laws discriminated against alternative lifestyles. Similarly, drugs once sold illegally on the dark web are increasingly being decriminalized. The dark web makes it harder to enforce both just and unjust laws.

NOTE: The dark web and the deep web are also often erroneously used interchangeably. The deep web includes all the pages that don’t pop up when you run a web search. The dark web is just one part of the deep web. The deep web also contains everything requiring a login, such as online banking, pay sites, and file hosting services.

The Darker side

Within the criminal communities on the dark web, fraudsters have built entire e-commerce platforms designed to trade in illicit goods and services. The infamous Silk Road marketplace, launched in 2011, was the first market to combine the anonymizing dark web technology with the power of anonymous cryptocurrency transactions. Silk Road became a model for all future dark web marketplaces. At any given time, a handful of large-scale criminal marketplaces operate on the dark web, each with thousands to tens of thousands of listings for illicit goods and services. These marketplaces use familiar site structures, akin to the user experience of browsing on Amazon or eBay. On these markets, users can browse listings by category, navigate vendor advertisements, filter their search options by price, location or vendor reviews, and message the vendors or market administrators with questions.

Established platforms allow vendors — particularly fraud vendors dealing in digital goods — to automate and scale their operations. Many fraud vendors use an auto-delivery mechanism for their listings, which ensures buyers receive the volume of data purchased immediately after checkout. In this way, vendors can continue to turn profits and move inventory around the clock.

Is the Dark Web only a web of frauds?

The dark web is home to hundreds of different communities and hosts a wide variety of site types — medical forums, political parties, graphic design firms, anime fan gatherings, and more. It contains mirrors of clear websites. It’s a place of anonymity, but that doesn’t immediately equate to criminality. The dark web is a privacy tool, designed with user security and anonymity in mind. Security and privacy are neutral — they’re as beneficial to legal communities looking for protection as they are to criminal communities looking for a way to hide. Research conducted by Terbium Labs in 2017 showed that 47.7% of site content across Tor hidden services is legal — other numbers in the industry closely match this stat.

Dark Web Browser

Accessing the dark web requires the use of an anonymizing browser called Tor. The Tor browser routes your web page requests through a series of proxy servers operated by thousands of volunteers around the globe, rendering your IP address unidentifiable and untraceable. Tor works like magic, but the result is an experience that’s like the dark web itself: unpredictable, unreliable, and maddeningly slow.

Law enforcement officials are getting better at finding and prosecuting owners of sites that sell illicit goods and services. In the summer of 2017, a team of cybercops from three countries successfully shut down AlphaBay, the dark web’s largest source of contraband, sending shudders throughout the network. But many merchants simply migrated elsewhere.

“The anonymous nature of the Tor network also makes it especially vulnerable to DDoS”, said Patrick Tiquet, Director of Security & Architecture at Keeper Security, and the company’s resident expert on the topic. “Sites are constantly changing addresses to avoid DDoS, which makes for a very dynamic environment,” he said. As a result, “The quality of search varies widely, and a lot of material is outdated.”

Conclusion

There’s no reason to be afraid of the dark web. On the contrary, the dark web is an essential privacy tool. As governments work to weaken encryption with backdoors and corporations gain greater access to everything we do, privacy and security technologies like the dark web must be vigorously defended. And that starts with understanding them beyond sensational headlines.

Blockchain

Every once in a while, a new technology, an old problem, and a big idea turn into an innovation. Blockchain is this innovation. It is the biggest opportunity set we can think of over the next decade. Blockchain completely changes the perception of who controls the data and gives individuals the exclusive rights over the information pertaining to them.

Blockchain is a decentralized data management system. Its name translates literally into its functionality. A Blockchain consists of chunks of data known as blocks connected to each other in the form of a chain. Multiple copies of such chains are maintained and updated all over the world. Any discrepancy observed in a chained copy maintained by a volunteer can be then corrected with the help of other copies in the world.

In today's scenario, The storage of your data spans multiple servers and such physical environments are typically owned and managed by hosting companies. Most of the data is centralized and between the server and the client, the hosting companies can act as the third party.  Every now and then we get to hear about the mismanagement of such sensitive information by hosting companies.

● The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scam

● Indian Jobseekers scam 2019

● SORM Data leaks

Moreover, centralized information is susceptible to cyber-attacks. At times even states are at risk.

But what makes Blockchain a big game-changer? 

Blockchain works as the ultimate remedy to such problems. 

Blockchain is a ledger or diary which is impossible to forge setting up a mapping between owner and objects. Think about multiple diaries being maintained by individuals about the same thing. For example let us consider a transaction, the record of which gets simultaneously updated in all diaries all over the world.

These diaries now keep the record of all previous transactions with this new transaction in the same order. If anyone tries to maliciously change one of the diaries the changes would be caught.
The real system works in pretty much the same way. All over the world, nodes exist which keep a record of a particular Blockchain. A node is a computer when the nodes that are on the network all over the world validate the addition of a block then only the Blockchain is updated.

 Whenever a new block is added, it’s HASH value is also calculated. The HASH value is an alphanumeric string generated by a mathematical function that takes the message in the block as the input.

Each new block holds the HASH of the previous block and thus the Blocks are chained.

  

Any change in the information in the block would change it a HASH value, note that the blocks get added to the chain with their HASH value thus a changed HASH value would make the chain redundant.

The Blockchain updates itself every ten minutes. It does so automatically. No master or central computer instructs the computers to do this.

As soon as the spreadsheet or ledger or registry is updated, it can no longer be changed. Thus, it’s impossible to forge it. You can only add new entries to it. The registry is updated on all computers on the network at the same time.

Various nodes compete to add a new block to the Blockchain, once done by one, others also get updated. Signatures are maintained to ensure privacy so that individuals whose data is being saved can only access it. 

Smart Contracts

The best way to implement Blockchain technology in any field is to structure it’s working around the Smart Contracts concept. The best way to describe smart contracts is to compare the technology to a vending machine. Ordinarily, you would go to a lawyer or a notary, pay them, and wait while you get the document. With smart contracts, you simply drop a bitcoin into the vending machine (i.e. ledger), and your escrow, driver’s license, or whatever drops into your account. Thus an asset or currency is transferred into a program and the program runs some code and automatically validates a condition to determines whether the asset should go to one person or back to the other person, or whether it should be immediately refunded to the person who sent it or some combination thereof. In the meantime, the decentralized ledger also stores and replicates the document which gives it a certain security and immutability.

Applications of Blockchain

Trade

The very popular cryptocurrencies make use of Blockchain. Cryptocoin doesn’t have any centralized server used for its issuing, transactions, and storing, as it uses a distributed network public database technology named blockchain, which requires an electronic signature and is supported by a proof-of-work protocol to provide the security and legitimacy of money transactions. Bitcoin is one such example. Bitcoin’s market cap surpasses $138 billion and this is the most popular kind of digital currency.  Read here to know more about Bitcoin.

Healthcare

Blockchain technology can facilitate the transition from institution-driven interoperability to patient-centered interoperability. Blockchain technology allows patients to assign access rules for their medical data, for example, permitting specific researchers to access parts of their data for a fixed period of time. With blockchain technology, patients can connect to other hospitals and collect their medical data automatically.

Governance

A blockchain-based digital government can protect data, streamline processes, and reduce fraud, waste, and abuse while simultaneously increasing trust and accountability. On a blockchain-based government model, individuals, businesses, and governments share resources over a distributed ledger secured using cryptography. This structure eliminates a single point of failure and inherently protects sensitive citizen and government data.

With abundant possibilities, Blockchain opens up to a new era of information technology with much better and secure use of one's data.

Loihi Chip

A Chip that can Smell!!

“Need is the mother of invention!”

The growing requirements of robots to undertake and assist humans in all their undertakings has encouraged the origination of a chip that replicates mammals in the power of senses too. Wait for a minute and think, what if your PC smells the odour and also gives you an idea about the source of it!! A PC with a nose?

This chip “Loihi” isn't your typical silicon chip but rather is neuromorphic, developed to work the same way as a brain with digital circuits that communicate like neurons. It’s more of a digital recreation of a nose.It uses an asynchronous spiking neural network (SNN) to implement adaptive self-modifying event-driven fine-grained parallel computations used to implement learning and inference with high efficiency.

The chip was formally presented at the 2018 Neuro Inspired Computational Elements (NICE) workshop in Oregon.The chip is named after the Loihi volcano as a play-on-words - Loihi is an emerging Hawaiian submarine volcano that is set to surface one day.

It’s Origin

As a result of over a decade of studying olfactory bulb circuitry in rodents and trying to figure out essentially how it works, the researchers from Intel and Cornell University have developed a neuromorphic chip that can identify and learn the smell. While Thomas Cleland, a professor of psychology at Cornell University, was studying the biological olfactory system in mammals by measuring the electrical activity seen in their brains on smelling different odours, he configured a set of algorithm describing the use of Very-large-scale-integration(VLSI) systems containing electronic analog circuits to mimic neuro-biological architecture present in the nervous system. It is like a human brain with digital circuits that communicate like neurons.

Announced in September 2017, Loihi is predominantly a research chip meaning performance characteristic are not guaranteed. This is Intel's 5th chip in the neuromorphic category. The first three chips were early internal test chips while the fourth is a 10 nm wafer-level probe study. The chip was initially tested and simulated using FPGAs. Actual silicon implementations arrived in late November.

How does this Algorithm work?

This is based on rapid learning and robust recall in neuromorphic olfactory circuit. Identification of odorant samples under noise, based on the architecture of the mammalian olfactory bulb and implemented on the Intel Loihi neuromorphic system. As with biological olfaction, the spike timing-based algorithm utilizes distributed, event-driven computations and rapid (one shot) online learning. Spike timing-dependent plasticity rules operate iteratively over sequential gamma-frequency packets to construct odour representations from the activity of chemosensory arrays mounted in a wind tunnel. Learned odorants then are reliably identified despite strong destructive interference. Noise resistance is further enhanced by neuromodulation and contextual priming. Lifelong learning capabilities are enabled by adult neurogenesis. The algorithm is applicable to any signal identification problem in which high-dimensional signals are embedded in unknown backgrounds.

Implementation on the Loihi neuromorphic system

Combining the methods like Mitral cell implementation, Granule cell implementation, Excitatory synaptic plasticity and Inhibitory synaptic plasticity customizes integrated circuits that model biological neural computations, typically with orders of magnitude greater speed and energy efficiency than general-purpose computers. These systems enable the deployment of neural algorithms in edge devices, such as chemosensory signal analyzers, in which real-time operation, low power consumption, environmental robustness, and compact size are critical operational metrics. Loihi is fabricated in Intel’s 14-nm FinFET process and realizes a total of 2.07 billion transistors over a manycore mesh. Each Loihi chip contains a total of 128 neuromorphic cores, along with three embedded Lakemont x86 processors and external communication interfaces that enable the neuromorphic mesh to be extended across many interlinked Loihi chips.

Demonstrations and testing of chip

The chip, powered by the neural algorithm, is able to identify and even learn the neural pattern of odours based on inputs from an array of sensors. The chip was able to identify odours even when their pattern was 80% different from the one it had learned originally.In a demonstration, the chip was able to learn and recognize the scents of 10 hazardous chemicals based on data they fed to it, by 72 chemical sensors. The chip, based on the electrical responses, was able to mimic the biological olfaction system and learn each smell. It was then able to identify each smell, even in the presence of interfering odours.

Loihi based neuromorphic system

• Kapoho Bay (2 chip, 262k neurons)

Kapoho Bay is a USB stick form factor that incorporates 1 or 2 Loihi chips. Announced on Dec 6, 2018, Kapoho Bay includes a USB host interface and a DVS interface for neuromorphic sensors such as a camera. With 2 chip Kapoho Bay has 256 neuromorphic cores with 262,144 neurons and 260,000,000 synapses.

• Nahuku (32 chip, 4M neurons)

Nahuku is a scalable Arria10 FPGA expansion board. Intel uses the Nahuku board as the framework for building larger systems. The Nahuku board comes in multiple configurations from 8 to 32 chips. Those chips are organized as 16 chips in a 4 by 4 grid mesh on both sides. With 32 chips there is a total of 4,096 neuromorphic cores incorporating a total of 4,194,304 neurons and 4,160,000,000 synapses. With the Nahuku board, an FPGA host is connected to a set of conventional sensors such as actuators as well as neuromorphic sensors such as a DVS camera or a silicon cochlea. The board communicates with a standard "super host" CPU which can be used to send commands to the board and to the management core on the chips themselves.

Future Implementations of this neuromorphic chips

This may prove to be a milestone in the field of robotics. The Intel’s Loihi neuromorphic chip can smell hazardous chemicals and also exhibit the property of self learning of new smell. This “electronic nose systems" technology has many potentials in the field of chemistry to identify compounds on the basis of their peculiar smell and can also be very useful for assistants at chemical labs and industry. You never know one day using this AI, people would be able to generate all the senses which would could sense even better than the human’s original ones.