DOJ Asks Court To Keep Secret Any PARTNERSHIP Between GOOGLE And NSA:
The Justice Department refuses to divulge whatever sort of agreement there may be between Google and the National Security Agency. Not that there is one, of course.
Mike Scarcella in The Legal Times writes about The Justice Department defending the government’s refusal to discuss, or acknowledge the existence of, “any cooperative research and development agreement between Google and the National Security Agency.”
The Washington based advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center sued in federal district court here to obtain documents about any such agreement between the Internet search giant and the security agency.
The NSA responded to the suit with a so-called “Glomar” response in which the agency said it could neither confirm nor deny whether any responsive records exist. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington sided with the government last July.
Drug data reveal sneaky side effects:
An algorithm designed by US scientists to trawl through a plethora of drug interactions has yielded thousands of previously unknown side effects caused by taking drugs in combination. The work, published today in Science Translational Medicine1, provides a way to sort through the hundreds of thousands of 'adverse events' reported to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) each year. “It’s a step in the direction of a complete catalogue of drug–drug interactions,” says the study's lead author, Russ Altman, a bioengineer at Stanford University in California. Pills in pill boxes. A program predicts the potential side-effects of mixing different pills. Although clinical trials are often designed to assess the safety of a drug in addition to how well it works, the size of the trials needed to detect the full range of drug interactions would surpass even the large, late-stage clinical trials sometimes required for drug approval. Furthermore, clinical trials are often done in controlled settings, using carefully defined criteria to determine which patients are eligible for enrollment — including other conditions they might have and which medicines they can take alongside the trial drug. Once a drug hits the market, however, things can get messy as unknown side-effects pop up. And that’s where Altman’s algorithm comes in. “Even if you show a drug is safe in a clinical trial, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be safe in the real world,” says Paul Watkins, director of the Hamner–University of North Carolina Institute for Drug Safety Sciences in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, who was not involved in the work. “This approach is addressing a better way to rapidly assess a drug’s safety in the real world once it is approved.”
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Altman and his colleagues have been studying drug–drug interactions as a way to understand how a person’s genes influence their response to pharmaceuticals. To do that, he says, you must first have a good picture of the molecular mechanisms that underlie drug responses. “Adverse events are incredibly valuable clues to what these drugs are doing in the body,” Altman says. “They can tell you the other pathways in the cell that are being tickled by these drugs.” But reports of adverse drug events are notoriously prone to bias. For example, cholesterol-lowering treatments are more often taken by older patients, and so conditions associated with ageing, such as heart attack, could be wrongly linked to a drug as a side effect. Altman and his colleagues reduced this bias by adopting an approach sometimes used in observational clinical trials. They developed an algorithm that would match data from each drug-exposed patient to a nonexposed control patient with the same condition. The approach automatically corrected for several known sources of bias, including those linked to gender, age and disease1. The team then used this method to compile a database of 1,332 drugs and possible side effects that were not listed on the labels of those drugs. The algorithm came up with an average of 329 previously unknown adverse events for each drug — far surpassing the average of 69 side effects listed on most drug labels. The team also compiled a similar database looking at interactions between pairs of drugs, which yielded many more possible side effects than could be attributed to either drug alone. When the data were broken down by drug class, the most striking effect was seen when diuretics called thiazides, often prescribed to treat high blood pressure and edema, were used in combination with a class of drugs called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, used to treat depression. Compared with people who used either drug alone, patients who used both drugs were significantly more likely to experience a heart condition known as prolonged QT, which is associated with an increased risk of irregular heartbeats and sudden death. A search of electronic medical records from Stanford University Hospital confirmed the relationship between these two drug classes, revealing at roughly 1.5-fold increase in the likelihood of prolonged QT when the drugs were combined, compared to when either drug was taken alone. Altman says that the next step will be to test this finding further, possibly by conducting a clinical trial in which patients are given both drugs and then monitored for prolonged QT. What should the drug regulators do with the thousands of possible side effects Altman and his team uncovered? That is a complex problem, says Watkins, who adds that regulators will have to factor in the availability of alternative treatments and the magnitude and seriousness of the side effect, among other considerations. Altman, who serves as an adviser on the FDA’s Science Board, says that he plans to present his results to the agency. He suggests that the algorithm could be used with the FDA’s existing drug-surveillance programs to remove bias. However, he points out the enormity of the task: “We’ve just released a database with 10,000 or more adverse events,” he says. “I do not expect the FDA to uncritically take these results and add them to every drug label.”
Google plans major overhaul to search engine:
Google is giving its tried-and-true web-search formula a makeover as it tries to fix the shortcomings of today's technology and maintain its dominant market share. Over the next few months, Google's search engine will begin spitting out more than a list of blue web links. It will also present more facts and direct answers to queries at the top of the search-results page. The changes to search are among the biggest in the company's history and could affect millions of websites that rely on Google's current page-ranking results. At the same time, they could give Google more ways to serve up advertisements. Google isn't replacing its current keyword-search system, which determines the importance of a website based on the words it contains, how often other sites link to it, and dozens of other measures. Rather, the company is aiming to provide more relevant results by incorporating technology called "semantic search," which refers to the process of understanding the actual meaning of words. Amit Singhal, a top Google search executive, said in a recent interview that the search engine will better match search queries with a database containing hundreds of millions of "entities" -- people, places and things -- which the company has quietly amassed in the past two years. Semantic search can help associate different words with one another, such as a company (Google) with its founders (Larry Page and Sergey Brin). Google search will look more like "how humans understand the world," Singhal said, noting that for many searches today, "we cross our fingers and hope there's a web page out there with the answer." Some major changes will show up in the coming months, people familiar with the initiative said, but Singhal said Google is undergoing a years-long process to enter the "next generation of search." Under the shift, people who search for "Lake Tahoe" will see key "attributes" that the search engine knows about the lake, such as its location, altitude, average temperature or salt content. In contrast, those who search for "Lake Tahoe" today would get only links to the lake's visitor bureau website, its dedicated page on Wikipedia.com, and a link to a relevant map. For a more complex question such as, "What are the 10 largest lakes in California?" Google might provide the answer instead of just links to other sites. The coming shift has major implications for Google, which dominates the Internet search market with around 66 percent market share and more than 75 percent of all search-ad revenue. The Mountain View, Calif., companies has succeeded because of the strength and ease of its keyword-search technology, which in turn fueled Google's search ads, which appear next to search results. That business now generates the majority of Google's $37 billion in annual revenue. Now Google is taking action to maintain that lead. The Internet giant is trying to stay ahead of Microsoft's Bing in web search, catch up to Apple's Siri voice-activated mobile search, and beat back rivals in niches such as product search.
DARPA director exits agency for Google, assumes mysterious role:
Not even the federal government's factory of sci-fi dreams can hold off the likes of Google's recruiters. According to Wired, Regina Dugan, DARPA's current director, will be moving on from the Department of Defense's fantastical research arm for an unspecified "senior executive position" with the folks from Mountain View. Dugan's served in her role for the past three years, winning over the likes of the Pentagon by shifting her agency's focus from out-there R&D experiments to more practical military applications, while also ruffling a few feathers with her brazen statements. No word was given on when exactly she'll officially join the search giant's ranks other than a vague mention of "sometime in the next few weeks.
With quantum encryption, in which a message gets encoded in bits represented by particles in different states, a secret message can remain secure even if the system is compromised by a malicious hacker.
No matter how complex they are, most secret codes turn out to be breakable. Producing the ultimate secure code may require encoding a secret message inside the quantum relationship between atoms, scientists say. Now cryptographers have taken "quantum encryption" a step further by showing how a secret message can remain secure even if the system is compromised by a malicious hacker.Artur Ekert, director of the Center for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore, presented the new findings here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Ekert, speaking Saturday (Feb. 18), described how decoders can adjust for a compromised encryption device, as long as they know the degree of compromise. The subject of subatomic particles is a large step away from the use of papyrus, the ancient writing material employed in the first known cryptographic device. That device, called a scytale, was used in 400 B.C. by Spartan military commanders to send coded messages to one another. The commanders would wrap strips of papyrus around a wooden baton and write the message across the strips so that it could be read only when the strips were wrapped around a baton of matching size. Later, the technique of substitution was developed, in which the entire alphabet would be shifted, say, three characters to the right, so than an "a" would be replaced by "d," and "b" replaced by "e," and so on. Only someone who knew the substitution rule could read the message. Julius Caesar employed such a cipher scheme in the first century B.C. Over time, ciphers became more and more complicated, so that they were harder and harder to crack. Harder, but not impossible. "When you look at the history of cryptography, you come up with a system, and sooner or later someone else comes up with a way of breaking the system," Ekert said. "You may ask yourself: Is it going to be like this forever? Is there such a thing as the perfect cipher?" The closest thing to a perfect cipher involves what's called a one-time pad. "You just write your message as a sequence of bits and you then add those bits to a key and obtain a cryptogram," Ekert said."If you take the cryptogram and add it to the key, you get plain text. In fact, one can prove that if the keys are random and as long as the messages, then the system offers perfect security." "If the keys are as long as the message, then you need a secure way to distribute the key," Ekert said. The nature of physics known as quantum mechanics seems to offer the best hope of knowing whether a key is secure. Quantum mechanics says that certain properties of subatomic particles can't be measured without disturbing the particles and changing the outcome. In essence, a particle exists in a state of indecision until a measurement is made, forcing it to choose one state or another. Thus, if someone made a measurement of the particle, it would irrevocably change the particle. If an encryption key were encoded in bits represented by particles in different states, it would be immediately obvious when a key was not secure because the measurement made to hack the key would have changed the key. This, of course, still depends on the ability of the two parties sending and receiving the message to be able to independently choose what to measure, using a truly random number generator — in other words, exercising free will — and using devices they trust. But what if a hacker were controlling one of the parties, or tampering with the encryption device? Ekert and his colleagues showed that even in this case, if the messaging parties still have some free will, their code could remain secure as long as they know to what degree they are compromised. In other words, a random number generator that is not truly random can still be used to send an undecipherable secret message, as long as the sender knows how random it is and adjusts for that fact. "Even if they are manipulated, as long as they are not stupid and have a little bit of free will, they can still do it,".
