Jawaharlal Nehru University -----JOBS

CLICK HERE

Private data gatekeeper stands between you and the NSA

Software like openPDS acts as a bodyguard for your personal data when apps – or even governments – come snooping

BIG BROTHER is watching you. But that doesn't mean you can't do something about it – by wresting back control of your data.

Everything we do online generates information about us. The tacit deal is that we swap this data for free access to services like Gmail. But many people are becoming uncomfortable about companies like Facebook and Google hoarding vast amounts of our personal information – particularly in the wake of revelations about the intrusion of the US National Security Agency (NSA) into what we do online. So computer scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created software that lets users take control.

OpenPDS was designed in MIT's Media Lab by Sandy Pentland and Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye. They say it disrupts what NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden called the "architecture of oppression", by letting users see and control any third-party requests for their information – whether that's from the NSA or Google.

If you want to install an app on your smartphone, you usually have to agree to give the program access to various functions and to data on the phone, such as your contacts. Instead of letting the apps have direct access to the data, openPDS sits in between them, controlling the flow of information. Hosted either on a smartphone or on an internet-connected hard drive in your house, it siphons off data from your phone or computer as you generate it.

It can store your current and historical location, browsing history, content and information related to sent and received emails, and any other personal data required. When external applications or services need to know things about you to provide a service, they ask openPDS the question, and it tells them the answer – if you allow it to. People hosting openPDS at home would always know when entities like the NSA request their data, because the law requires a warrant to access data stored in a private home.

Pentland says openPDS provides a technical solution to an issue the European Commission raised in 2012, when it declared that people have the right to easier access to and control of their own data. "I realised something needed to be done about data control," he says. "With openPDS, you control your own data and share it with third parties on an opt-in basis."

Storing this information on your smartphone or on a hard drive in your house are not the only options. ID3, an MIT spin-off, is building a cloud version of openPDS. A personal data store hosted on US cloud servers would still be secretly searchable by the NSA, but it would allow users to have more control over their data, and keep an eye on who is using it.

"OpenPDS is a building block for the emerging personal data ecosystem," says Thomas Hardjono, the technical lead of the MIT Consortium for Kerberos and Internet Trust, a collection of the world's largest technology companies who are working together to make data access fairer. "We want people to have equitable access to their data. Today, AT&T and Verizon have access to my GPS data, but I don't."

Other groups also think such personal data stores are a good idea. A project funded by the European Union, called digital.me, focuses on giving people more control over their social networks, and the non-profit Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium advocates for individuals' right to control their own data.

OpenPDS is already being put to use. Massachusetts General Hospital wants to use the software to protect patient privacy for a program called CATCH. It involves continuously monitoring variables including glucose levels, temperature, heart rate and brain activity, as well as smartphone-based analytics that can give insight into mood, activity and social connections. "We want to begin interrogating the medical data of real people in real time in real life, in a way that does not invade privacy," says Dennis Ausiello, head of the hospital's department of medicine.

OpenPDS will help people keep a handle on their own data, but getting back information already in private hands is a different matter. "As soon as you give access to that raw data, there's no way back," says de Montjoye.

Reprogrammed bacterium speaks new language of life

THE language of life has been rewritten. A bacterium has had its genome recoded so that one of its genetic words has been freed up to impart a different meaning, allowing the creation of proteins that don't exist in nature.

The work has been described as the first step towards a new biology because the techniques used should open the door to reinventing the meaning of several words simultaneously. This could lead to novel types of biomaterials and drugs with exotic properties. It also raises the tantalising possibility of integrating these genetically recoded organisms (GROs) into living organisms – to create virus-resistant plants or animals, for example.

To understand how the recoding was achieved, we need to zoom down to what happens inside cells when proteins are made. First, an enzyme called RNA polymerase converts our DNA code into RNA. Then the cell's protein-production machinery, the ribosome, reads the four letters of the RNA code in sets of three letters called codons. The three-letter "words" indicate which amino acid – the building blocks of proteins – the ribosome should add next to its growing chain of peptides.

There are 64 ways of combining the four letters (U, A, G and C) into groups of three, and 61 of these codons are used to encode the 20 amino acids found in nature. So some of the codons encode the same amino acid – a phenomenon called redundancy. The three combinations left over, UAG, UAA and UGA, act like a full stop or period – telling the ribosome to terminate its production process. When this happens, a release factor binds and triggers the release of the peptide chain, so it can be folded into a protein.

A team of synthetic biologists led by Farren Isaacs at Yale University has now rewritten these rules. They took Escherichia coli cells and replaced all of the UAG stop codons with UAAs. They also deleted the instructions for making the release factor that usually binds to UAG, effectively rendering UAG meaningless (see diagram).

The swap was done by placing bacterial cells in a water bath with viral enzymes and fragments of single-stranded DNA. The strands were identical to the DNA the team wanted to alter in the E. coli, except with the stop codons substituted. When a jolt of electricity was applied, pores in the bacterial cell membranes opened and let the bits of DNA float in. The next time the cells divided, the viral enzymes incorporated the altered DNA fragments. Not every codon was replaced on the first hit, so the team knitted together the genomes of many bacteria to create one with a completely recoded DNA genome.

The next step was to assign a new meaning to UAG during protein production. The team did this by designing molecules called transfer RNAs and accompanying enzymes that would attach an unnatural amino acid – fed to the cell – wherever they spotted the UAG codon. Many such amino acids have been created by biologists and they have even been substituted into simple organisms such as fruit flies. But until now, the new cell machinery competed with the old. This made the process inefficient and meant that sometimes unnatural amino acids would be inserted into other proteins as well. By reintroducing UAGs at specific locations, as the Yale team have done, unnatural amino acids can be added into proteins at will (Science, doi.org/pb8).

"We now have an organism that has a new code, and we can reliably and efficiently open up the chemical diversity of proteins," says Isaacs.

For example, artificial amino acids could be added that give proteins unusual properties, such as the ability to bind to metals – resulting in novel adhesives. Or enzymes could be developed that are activated only in the presence of other molecules – which could be useful for drugs.

"The genetic code is conserved for all of life, so this is a fundamental step forward," says Philipp Holliger of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. He says that because so much of the genetic code is redundant, there might be other codons that could be reassigned to expand the chemistry of living organisms.

Isaac's team are already on the case. In separate experiments, they picked 13 other codons and substituted them for alternatives with the same function across 42 different E. coli genes. Even though 24 per cent of the genes' DNA had changed, the proteins the cells produced seemed identical to the originals (Science, doi.org/pb9). The next step would be to endow these freed up codons with new meaning.

"This has great potential for the future to not just replace one codon here and there, but to replace loads of them and have completely new types of biopolymers made in cells," says Holliger. "It's a first step down the road to a new biology."

Deutsche Telekom Pitches NSA-Free German Internet

Encryption protocols will get tighter as a result of the NSA's spying, but "there are enough people who want to preserve the good and open aspects of the Internet that segmentation and firewall efforts will eventually fail," suggested Xmission's Pete Ashdown. Indeed, "the very people you try to restrict will likely be the ones that find a way around the wall,' said Tirias Research analyst Jim McGregor.

Germany might go off the global Internet in response to the United States National Security Agency's recently uncovered surveillance activities.

Instead, German telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom, whose motto is "Life Is for Sharing," has proposed a national routing scheme that would see all data packets -- including emails -- transmitted only within the country's borders, WirtschaftsWoche recently reported.

In particular, data packets would no longer go through discredited nodes in the U.S. and the UK.

The proposal was reportedly presented at Germany's Federal Ministry of Economics and Business on Oct. 1. Implementation would require support from foreign carriers such as Vodafone and Telefonica, which are apparently studying the proposal.

In light of technical and legal hurdles to the idea, DT has reportedly suggested that Germany pass a law making the national routing scheme mandatory.

DT's proposal is an outgrowth of an encrypted email service, "Email Made in Germany," launched in August by the company's T-Online division with two other major German email providers: GMX and Web.de.

Iran proposed a similar move back in 2011, and Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff is pushing legislation to force Internet companies such as Google and Facebook to store local data within Brazil's borders.

Rousseff also wants to construct submarine cables that do not route through the U.S.; build Internet exchange points in Brazil; and create an encrypted email service through the country's postal service.

DT can set up a local Internet in Germany, Pete Ashdown, founder and CEO of Xmission, told TechNewsWorld.

It would need its own root DNS servers and its own designs for address allocation as well as a protocol to hand off traffic to the Internet at large, Ashdown said.

However, such a venture would also require government funding and the network would require maintenance and -- possibly -- monitoring "in the form of deep packet inspection just to ensure network efficiency," Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research, pointed out.

Heavy rain batters Andhra Pradesh, thousands evacuated

HYDERABAD: Heavy rain triggered by northeast monsoon and a low pressure area over Bay of Bengal lashed several parts of Andhra Pradesh for the fourth consecutive day on Friday, prompting authorities to evacuate thousands of people from low-lying areas.

Low lying areas continued to remain under water in number of towns and villages, particularly in coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema.

Hundreds of houses have been damaged due to the rainfall, rendering many people homeless.Thousands of people have been evacuated from their homes and shifted to emergency relief camps.

The rain has claimed over ten lives and crops over a vast area of land has been destroyed.

"The situation is very grim as the entire delta area is completely inundated. Drains and tanks are overflowing and there is a threat of breaches occurring at some places because of the nonstop rain," Guntur district collector S Suresh Kumar told PTI over phone.

In Guntur district, 36 relief camps have been opened for 11,000 people who were evacuated from rain-ravaged villages, he said.

Six lift-irrigation scheme workers, who were stuck in flood at Chilakaluripet and Yedlapadu since Thursday, were rescued on Friday with the help of National Disaster Response Force personnel, the collector said.

River Krishna is in spate with a heavy inflow of floodwater.

Consequently, 70 crest gates were lifted at Prakasam Barrage in Vijayawada to discharge 1.18 lakh cusecs of water into the Bay of Bengal.

In Srikakulam district in north coastal Andhra, more than 45,000 people have been shifted to relief camps as heavy rain continues to lash the district.

Several rivers including Vamsasadhara and Bahuda in north coastal Andhra and rivulets were in spate at many other places.

The rain has disrupted buses and train services in north coastal Andhra.

Hyderabad and various parts of Telangana also received heavy rainfall for the last few days, which led to water logging on roads and also several residential colonies.

The heavy downpour and waterlogging resulted in massive traffic jams making it difficult for vehicle drivers to find their way through.

As the railway track at Golantri remained under a sheet of two-feet of water, train services between Visakhapatnam and Bhubaneswar were cancelled.

In East Godavari district, headquarters town Kakinada remained submerged, throwing life out of gear.

Incessant rain have also left Hyderabad-Secunderabad twin cities battered.

Chief Minister N Kiran Kumar Reddy spoke to the collectors of Srikakulam, Prakasam, Guntur and others districts late on Thursday night and directed them to give top priority to rescue operations, shifting people to safer places and organizing other relief measures, official sources said here on Friday.

He directed the officials to help the farmers and take steps to strengthen bunds of tanks and other water bodies.

The CM also asked the chief secretary to coordinate with the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) police, fire and other emergency personnel in rescue and relief operations.