June 28, 2023

The digital future may rely on ultrafast optical electronics and computers

Our system of ultrafast optical data transmission is based on light rather than voltage. Our research group is one of many working with optical communication at the transistor level – the building blocks of modern processors – to get around the current limitations with silicon. Our system controls reflected light to transmit information. When light shines on a piece of glass, most of it passes through, though a little bit might reflect. That is what you experience as glare when driving toward sunlight or looking through a window. We use two laser beams transmitted from two sources passing through the same piece of glass. One beam is constant, but its transmission through the glass is controlled by the second beam. By using the second beam to shift the properties of the glass from transparent to reflective, we can start and stop the transmission of the constant beam, switching the optical signal from on to off and back again very quickly. With this method, we can switch the glass properties much more quickly than current systems can send electrons. So we can send many more on and off signals – zeros and ones – in less time.

SEO Poisoning Attacks on Healthcare Sector Rising, HHS Warns

Some threat actors also use targeted types of SEO poisoning, including spear-phishing, to go after specific users, such as IT administrators and other privileged users. "The technique enables attackers to target and customize their attacks to specific audiences, making them more challenging to identify and defend against," HHS HC3 wrote. Common SEO poisoning methods also include typosquatting, which targets users who might open their browser and input a website address that has an inadvertent typo or click on a link with a misspelled URL, HHS HC said. Attackers often register domain names that are similar to legitimate ones but contain minor spelling errors. ... Another tactic is cloaking, which involves displaying search engine crawlers with different material than what is presented to the user when the link is clicked; manipulating search ranking by artificially increasing a website's click-through rate to boost its ranking in search engine; and using private link networks, which involves connecting a group of unrelated websites resulting in a network of backlinks to a main website.

Democratizing data to fuel data-driven business decisions

Gone are the days when all an organization’s data lived in just one place. Business and technical users alike must be able to fully leverage data that spans cloud, distributed, and mainframe infrastructures. Because of this, effective data intelligence tools are those that can be applied at scale and support various technology connections to successfully plug and play into large organizations’ complex environments. This is increasingly critical as a growing number of organizations turn to hybrid solutions to leverage the benefits of both the cloud and the mainframe. According to a recent Rocket Software survey, an overwhelming 93% of respondents strongly agree with the sentence, “I believe my organization needs to embrace a hybrid infrastructure model that spans from mainframe to cloud.” Today’s data intelligence tools need to remove the barriers that prevent organizations from leveraging their data assets to the fullest. From being able to find and use the right data to increasing data use and trust, maintaining a competitive edge requires organizations to leverage trusted data to make informed and strategic business decisions.

I'm done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

This past week, Red Hat took that knife and twisted it hard, when they published this blog post. Let there be no mistake: this was meant to destroy the distributions the community built to replace what Red Hat took away. There were only two things that kept me around after Red Hat betrayed us the first time: First, instead of attacking the community of open source users, many Red Hatters reached out and asked, "How can we do better?" It didn't heal the wound, but it meant something, knowing someone at Red Hat would at least listen. Second—and more importantly—Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux stepped in. They prevented a mass-exodus from the Red Hat ecosystem, giving developers like me a stable target for my open source work. But Rocky and Alma relied on Red Hat sharing their source code. Here's how it used to work:Red Hat would grab a copy of Linux They would add magic sauce that makes it Red Hat Enterprise Linux;?They would release a new version;?They would update a source code repository with all the data required to build it from scratch

What’s Next for JavaScript: New Features to Look Forward to

TypeScript was developed to make JavaScript developers more productive, rather than to replace JavaScript, but it’s also been a source of improvements to the language. Currently, you use TypeScript to make types explicit in your code while you’re writing it — but then you remove them when your code runs. Still some way off, the stage 1 Type Annotations proposal for including type information in JavaScript code but having them treated as comments by JavaScript engines is important, because it converges TypeScript and JavaScript for consistency in a way that keeps them aligned, but also makes it clear that they’re working at different layers. Developers can use first class syntax for types, whether that’s TypeScript or Flow syntax with long JSDoc comment blocks, and know that their code is still compatible with JavaScript engines and JavaScript tooling — avoiding the complexity of needing a build step to erase the types before their code will run, Palmer pointed out. “There’s huge value just in having static types that only exist during development and are fully erased during runtime,” he explained.

Human brain-inspired computer memory design set to increase energy efficiency and performance

The researchers focused on hafnium oxide, an insulating material commonly used in the semiconductor industry. However, there was one significant obstacle to overcome: hafnium oxide lacks structure at the atomic level, making it unsuitable for memory applications. But the team found an ingenious solution by introducing barium into thin films of hafnium oxide, resulting in the formation of unique structures within the composite material. These novel structures, known as vertical barium-rich "bridges," allowed electrons to pass through while the surrounding hafnium oxide remained unstructured. At the points where these bridges met the device contacts, an adjustable energy barrier was created. This barrier influenced the electrical resistance of the composite material and enabled multiple states to exist within it. ... One remarkable aspect of this breakthrough is that the hafnium oxide composites are self-assembled at low temperatures, unlike other composite materials that require expensive high-temperature manufacturing methods.

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