Entropia Universe

Entropia Universe started life as Project Entropia and has since transformed once more, into the platform on which individual game development companies can create new planets for the Universe.

The original planet is now called ‘Planet Calypso’ and run by First Planet Company AB.

Entropia Universe requires a fairly good Internet (broadband) connection for optimum playing. However, it is still possible to play via dial up or ISDN lines, the trade-off being that resultant game play will be affected by a very high latency. Therefore, it is worth at least having a 512Kbps DSL/Cable/T1 low-latency connection for a playable experience.If Entropia Universe is played on a connection having speed less than 512Kbps then you will experience problems, even with all the graphics setting set to low, like your avatar might take much time to move or you might lose connection occasionally.

Operating Systems compatibility

Currently only the Windows platform is supported, thus rendering users of Linux/Unix, Mac, DOS, and other operating systems unable to play Entropia Universe. This is heavily based on the fact that the underlying graphics/game engine that the game uses is reliant on DirectX, which is a Microsoft proprietary driver platform. This said, some people have still been successful in getting Entropia Universe to work under Linux using WINE, however this is not supported by Mindark and has not been fully and thoroughly tested.

Before you ask whether that is an oxymoron, let me explain. Cold here is not cold in the Arctic sense; rather the opposite of scalding hot. Plasma — an ionized gas sometimes called the fourth state of matter — typically exists at thousands of degrees Celsius, and hot plasmas are regularly used to sterilizing surgical equipment.

Cold plasmas are closer to room temperatures. And only recently have researchers been able to make plasmas at a steady 35 to 40 degrees Celsius and at atmospheric pressure. This is cold enough to touch safely.

Svetlana Ermolaeva and her research team at the Gamaleya Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology in Moscow wanted to see how well cold plasma could work against nasty microbes that lead to infections.They used a cold plasma torch in the lab to combat two common bacteria, Pseudomonas aeruginosa andStaphylococcus aureus, which show up frequently in wound infections, but are resistant to antibiotics because they have a protective layer called a biofilm.

After five minutes, the plasma torch killed 99 percent of bacteria grown in a Petri dish, and after ten minutes, it killed 90 percent of bacteria present in the wounds of a rats. And because the torch can be directed at a specific, small area of infection, surrounding tissue is left unharmed.

“Cold plasmas are able to kill bacteria by damaging microbial DNA and surface structures without being harmful to human tissues. Importantly we have shown that plasma is able to kill bacteria growing in biofilms in wounds, although thicker biofilms show some resistance to treatment,” Ermolaeva said in a press release.

The researchers published their results in the Journal of Medical Microbiology.

Antibiotics, you may have met your match. Not only does cold plasma treatment avoid the nasty side effects that drugs often bring, but the ionized torch destroys bacteria indiscriminately — whether it is antibiotic-resistant or not. There is no escaping a plasma attack.

“This means you will be able to keep large datasets for the long term in a box of bacteria in the refrigerator,” said Aldrin Yim, a student instructor on the university’s biostorage project, a 2010 gold medallist in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology prestigious iGEMcompetition.

Biostorage — the art of storing and encrypting information in living organisms — is a young field, having existed for about a decade.

In 2007, a team at Japan’s Keio University said they had successfully encoded the equation that represents Einstein’s theory of relativity, E=MC², in the DNA of a common soil bacterium.

They pointed out that because bacteria constantly reproduce, a group of the single-celled organisms could store a piece of information for thousands of years.

But the Hong Kong researchers have leaped beyond this early step, developing methods to store more complex data and starting to overcome practical problems which have lent weight to skeptics who see the method as science fiction.

The group has developed a method of compressing data, splitting it into chunks and distributing it between different bacterial cells, which helps to overcome limits on storage capacity. They are also able to “map” the DNA so information can be easily located.

This opens up the way to storing not only text, but images, music, and even video within cells.

As a storage method it is extremely compact — because each cell is minuscule, the group says that one gram of bacteria could store the same amount of information as 450 2,000-gigabyte hard disks.

They have also developed a three-tier security fence to encode the data, which may come as welcome news to U.S. diplomats, who have seen their thoughts splashed over the Internet thanks to WikiLeaks.

“Bacteria can’t be hacked,” points out Allen Yu, another student instructor.

“All kinds of computers are vulnerable to electrical failures or data theft. But bacteria are immune from cyber attacks. You can safeguard the information.”

The team have even coined a word for this field — biocryptography — and the encoding mechanism contains built-in checks to ensure that mutations in some bacterial cells do not corrupt the data as a whole.

Professor Chan Ting Fung, who supervised the student team, told AFP that practical work in the field — fostered by MIT, who have helped develop standards enabling researchers to collaborate — was in its early stages.

But he said: “What the students did was to try it out and make sure some of the fundamental principles are actually achievable.”

The Hong Kong group’s work may have a more immediate application.

The techniques they use — removing DNA from bacterial cells, manipulating them using enzymes and returning them to a new cell — are similar to those used to create genetically modified foods.

But rather than changing the building blocks of an organism, the Hong Kong group allows extra information to piggyback on the DNA of the cell, after checking their changes against a master database to make sure they do not have accidental toxic effects.

Their work could enable extra information to be added to a genetically modified crop in the form of a “bio barcode”, Chan said.

“For example, a company that makes a GM tomato that grows extra large with a gene that promotes growth — on top of that we can actually encode additional information like safety protocols, things that are not directly related to the biological system.”

Other types of information, like copyright and design history, could help to monitor the spread of GM crops, he said.

“It’s kind of a safety net for synthetic organisms,” said Wong Kit Ying, from the student team.

Beyond this, Chan and the students are evangelical about the future possibilities of synthetic biology.

“The field is getting popular because of the energy crisis, environmental pollution, climate change. They are thinking that a biological system will be a future solution to those — as alternative energy sources, as a remedy for pollution. For these, micro-organisms are the obvious choice,” Chan said.

One type of bacterium, Deinococcus radiodurans, can even survive nuclear radiation.

“Bacteria are everywhere: they can survive on things that are unthinkable to humans. So we can make use of this,” Chan said.

So is it possible that a home computer could one day consist of a dish filled with micro-organisms?

The group dismisses concerns that this could be dangerous, pointing out that despite E. coli‘s poor reputation, they use an altered form that cannot exist outside a rich synthetic medium.

In fact, says Chan, while safety rules are strict, more measures are taken to protect the bacteria from contamination than to protect the researchers from the bacteria.

However, Yim admitted that while the group’s work is a “foundational advance”, a Petri dish PC is not likely to be on the market in the coming years, not least because the method of retrieving the data requires experts in a laboratory.

“It’s possible,” he said, “but there’s a long way to go.”

Variety is the key to survival in a changeable world – and evolution may have come up with an extraordinary way of generating more variety

A man walks into a bar. “I have a new way of looking at evolution,” he announces. “Do you have something I could write it down on?” The barman produces a piece of paper and a pen without so much as a smile. But then, the man wasn’t joking.

The man in question is Andrew Feinberg, a leading geneticist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore; the bar is The Hung, Drawn and Quartered, a pub within the shadow of the Tower of London; and what’s written on the piece of paper could fundamentally alter the way we think about epigenetics, evolution and common diseases.

Before setting foot in the pub, Feinberg had taken a turn on the London Eye, climbed Big Ben and wandered into Westminster Abbey. There, as you might expect, he sought out the resting place of Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. He was struck by the contrast between the lavish marble sculpture of a youthful Newton, reclining regally beneath a gold-leafed globe, and Darwin’s minimalist floor stone.

As he looked round, Feinberg’s eyes came to rest on a nearby plaque commemorating physicist Paul Dirac. This set him thinking about quantum theory and evolution, which led him to the idea that epigenetic changes – heritable changes that don’t involve modifications to DNA sequences – might inject a Heisenberg-like uncertainty into the expression of genes, which would boost the chances of species surviving. That, more or less, is what he wrote on the piece of paper.

Put simply, Feinberg’s idea is that life has a kind of built-in randomness generator which allows it to hedge its bets. For example, a characteristic such as piling on the fat could be very successful when famine is frequent, but a drawback in times of plenty. If the good times last for many generations, however, natural selection could eliminate the gene variant for piling on fat from a population. Then, when famine does eventually come, the population could be wiped out.

But if there is some uncertainty about the effect of genes, some individuals might still pile on the fat, even though they have the same genes as everyone else. Such individuals might die young in good times, but if famine strikes they might be the only ones to survive. In an uncertain world, uncertainty could be crucial for the long-term survival of populations.

The implications of this idea are profound. We already know there is a genetic lottery – every fertilised human egg contains hundreds of new mutations. Most of these have no effect whatsoever, but a few can be beneficial or harmful. If Feinberg is right, there is also an epigenetic lottery: some people are more (or less) likely to develop cancer, drop dead of a heart attack or suffer from mental health problems than others with exactly the same DNA.

To grasp the significance of Feinberg’s idea, we have to briefly rewind to the early 19th century, when the French zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck articulated the idea - already commonly held – that “acquired characteristics” can be passed from parent to offspring. If a giraffe kept trying to stretch to reach leaves, he believed, its neck would get longer, and its offspring would inherit longer necks.

Darwin the Lamarckist

Contrary to what many texts claim, Darwin believed something similar, that the conditions an organism experiences can lead to modifications that are inherited. According to Darwin’s hypothesis of pangenesis, these acquired changes could be harmful as well as beneficial – such as sons getting gout because their fathers drank too much. Natural selection would favour the beneficial and weed out the harmful. In fact, Darwin believed acquired changes provided the variation essential for evolution by natural selection.

Pangenesis was never accepted, not even during Darwin’s lifetime. In the 20th century it became clear that DNA is the basis of inheritance, and that mutations that alter DNA sequences are the source of the variation on which natural selection acts. Environmental factors such as radiation can cause mutations that are passed down to offspring, but their effect is random. Biologists rejected the idea that adaptations acquired during the life of an organism can be passed down.

Even during the last century, though, examples kept cropping up of traits passed down in a way that did not fit with the idea that inheritance was all about DNA. When pregnant rats are injected with the fungicide vinclozolin, for instance, the fertility of their male descendants is lowered for at least two generations, even though the fungicide does not alter the males’ DNA.

No one now doubts that environmental factors can produce changes in the offspring of animals even when there is no change in DNA. Many different epigenetic mechanisms have been discovered, from the addition of temporary “tags” to DNA or the proteins around which DNA is wrapped, to the presence of certain molecules in sperm or eggs.

What provokes fierce argument is the role that epigenetic changes play in evolution. A few biologists, most prominently Eva Jablonka of Tel Aviv University in Israel, think that inherited epigenetic changes triggered by the environment are adaptations. They describe these changes as “neo-Lamarckian”, and some even claim that such processes necessitate a major rethink of evolutionary theory.

While such views have received a lot of attention, most biologists are far from convinced. They say the trouble with the idea that adaptive changes in parents can be passed down to offspring via epigenetic mechanisms is that, like genetic mutations, most inherited epigenetic changes acquired as a result of environmental factors have random and often harmful effects.

At most, the inheritance of acquired changes could be seen as a source of variation that is then acted on by natural selection - a view much closer to Darwin’s idea of pangenesis than Lamarck’s claim that the intent of an animal could shape the bodies of its offspring. But even this idea is problematic, because it is very rare for acquired changes to last longer than a generation (Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, vol 9, p 233).

While epigenetic changes can be passed down from cell to cell during the lifetime of an organism, they do not normally get passed down to the next generation. “The process of producing germ cells usually wipes out epigenetic marks,” says Feinberg. “You get a clean slate epigenetically.” And if epigenetic marks do not usually last long, it’s hard to see how they can have a significant role in evolution – unless it is not their stability but their instability that counts.

Rather than being another way to code for specific characteristics, as biologists like Jablonka believe, Feinberg’s “new way of looking at evolution” sees epigenetic marks as introducing a degree of randomness into patterns of gene expression. In fluctuating environments, he suggests, lineages able to generate offspring with variable patterns of gene expression are most likely to last the evolutionary course.

Is this “uncertainty hypothesis” right? There is evidence that epigenetic changes, as opposed to genetic mutations or environmental factors, are responsible for a lot of variation in the characteristics of organisms. The marbled crayfish, for instance, shows a surprising variation in coloration, growth, lifespan, behaviour and other traits even when genetically identical animals are reared in identical conditions. And a study last year found substantial epigenetic differences between genetically identical human twins. On the basis of their findings, the researchers speculated that random epigenetic variations are actually “much more important” than environmental factors when it comes to explaining the differences between twins (Nature Genetics, vol 41, p 240).

More evidence comes from the work of Feinberg and his colleague Rafael Irizarry, a biostatistician at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. One of the main epigenetic mechanisms is the addition of methyl groups (with the chemical formula CH₃) to DNA, and Feinberg and Irizarry have been studying patterns of DNA methylation in mice. “The mice were from the same parents, from the same litter, eating the same food and water and living in the same cage,” Feinberg says.

Stunning finding

Despite this, he and Irizarry were able to identify hundreds of sites across the genome where the methylation patterns within a given tissue differed hugely from one individual to the next. Interestingly, these variable regions appear to be present in humans too (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 107, p 1757). “Methylation can vary across individuals, across cell types, across cells within the same cell type and across time within the same cell,” says Irizarry.

It fell to Irizarry to produce a list of genes associated with each region that could, in theory at least, be affected by the variation in methylation. What he found blew him away. The genes that show a high degree of epigenetic plasticity are very much those that regulate basic development and body plan formation. “It’s a counter-intuitive and stunning thing because you would not expect there to be that kind of variation in these very important patterning genes,” says Feinberg.

The results back the idea that epigenetic changes to DNA might blur the relationship between genotype (an organism’s genetic make-up) and phenotype (its form and behaviour). “It could help explain why there is so much variation in gene expression during development,” says Günter Wagner, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University. But that does not necessarily mean epigenetic changes are adaptive, he says. “There has not been enough work on specifying the conditions under which this kind of mechanism might evolve.”

When he began exploring the idea with Feinberg, Irizarry constructed a computer simulation to help him get his head round it. At first, he modelled what would happen in a fixed environment where being tall is an advantage. “The taller people survive more often, have more children and eventually everyone’s tall,” he says.

Then, he modelled what would happen in a changeable environment where, at different times, it is advantageous to be tall or short. “If you are a tall person that only has tall kids, then your family is going to go extinct.” In the long run, the only winners in this kind of scenario are those that produce offspring of variable height.

This result is not controversial. “We know from theory that goes some way back that mechanisms that induce ‘random’ phenotypic variation may be selected over those that produce a single phenotype,” says Tobias Uller, a developmental biologist at the University of Oxford. But showing that something is theoretically plausible is a long way from showing that the variability in methylation evolved because it boosts survival.

Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Chicago, is blunter. “There is not a shred of evidence that variation in methylation is adaptive, either within or between species,” he says. “I know epigenetics is an interesting phenomenon, but it has been extended willy-nilly to evolution. We’re nowhere near getting to grips with what epigenetics is all about. This might be a part of it, but if it is it’s going to be a small part.”

To Susan Lindquist of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, however, it is an exciting idea that makes perfect sense. “It’s not just that epigenetics influences traits, but that epigenetics creates greater variance in the traits and that creates greater phenotypic diversity,” she says. And greater phenotypic diversity means a population has a better chance of surviving whatever life throws at it.

Lindquist studies prions, proteins that can not only flip between two states but pass on their state to other prions. While they are best known for causing diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Lindquist thinks they provide another epigenetic mechanism for evolutionary “bet-hedging”. Take Sup35, a protein involved in the protein-making machinery of cells. In yeast, Sup35 has a tendency to flip into a state in which it clumps together, spontaneously or in response to environmental stress, which in turn can alter the proteins that cells make, Lindquist says. Some of these changes will be harmful, but she and her colleagues have shown that they can allow yeast cells to survive conditions that would normally mean death.

While Jablonka remains convinced that epigenetic marks play an important role in evolution through “neo-Lamarckian” inheritance, she welcomes Feinberg and Irizarry’s work. “It would be worth homing in on species that live in highly changeable environments,” she suggests. “You would expect more methylation, more variability, and inheritance of variability from one generation to the next.”

As surprising as Feinberg’s idea is, it does not challenge the mainstream view of evolution. “It’s straight population genetics,” says Coyne. Favourable mutations will still win out, even if there is a bit of fuzziness in their expression. And if Feinberg is right, what evolution has selected for is not epigenetic traits, but a genetically encoded mechanism for producing epigenetic variation. This might produce variation completely randomly or in response to environmental factors, or both.

Feinberg predicts that if the epigenetic variation produced by this mechanism is involved in disease, it will be most likely found in conditions like obesity and diabetes, where lineages with a mechanism for surviving environmental fluctuation would win out in the evolutionary long run. He, Irizarry and other colleagues recently studied DNA methylation in white blood cells collected in 1991 and 2002 from the same individuals in Iceland. From this, they were able to identify more than 200 variably methylated regions.

To see if these variable regions have something to do with human disease, they looked for a link between methylation density and body mass index. There was a correlation at four of these sites, each of them located either within or near genes known to regulate body mass or diabetes. Feinberg sees this in a positive light. If random epigenetic variation does play a significant role in determining people’s risk of getting common diseases, he says,untangling the causes may simpler than we thought. The key is to combine genetic analyses with epigenetic measurements.

Feinberg is the first to admit that his idea could be wrong. But he’s excited enough to put it to the test. Perhaps, he suggests, it could be the missing link in understanding the relationship between evolution, development and common disease. “It could turn out to be really quite important.”

WPA stores passwords using an algorithm known as SHA-1, which has already been shown to be insecure, but Roth didn’t actually exploit this kind of insecurity. Instead, he brute-forced the algorithm by running through around 400,000 passwords per second in an attempt to find the correct password – and he plans to increase the speed to 1 million passwords per second.

Roth says that GPUs are hundreds of times faster than standard quad-core central processing units (CPUs) when it comes to cracking SHA-1, and Amazon provides a cluster of these processors for $2.10 per hour, allowing Roth to break into a Wi-Fi network for a theoretical cost of just 21 cents per password – though the cost is likely to be higher as Amazon charges per complete hour. He plans to release the tool he used at the Black Hat hacker conference in Washington DC next week.

While Roth’s work suggests that Wi-Fi networks are now at risk, he has so far only tested the techniques on passwords up to six characters in length. People who use WPA to protect their Wi-Fi are advised to use a minimum password length of eight characters – passwords can be anything up to 63 characters long. Each additional character makes a password roughly 100 times stronger, so the system is still very secure if used correctly.

Protecting your network with WPA isn’t even strictly necessary, as modern Wi-Fi devices can also use the higher-security WPA2, which employs a more advanced algorithm than SHA-1, though older devices are unsupported. In other words, your network is still pretty safe.

What’s more interesting is Roth’s use of Amazon’s cloud service. Cracking WPA in the cloud has been done before - WPACracker offers to find a WPA password in under 20 minutes at a cost of $35 – but Amazon’s computing power allows the job to be done much faster and cheaper. Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener told Reuters that using Roth’s technique on the company’s servers would be a violation of its acceptable use policy, but it has so far taken no action against him.

Now that Roth has demonstrated how people can easily and cheaply command the power of a small supercomputer, should Amazon be actively policing the use of its services? And did it ever anticipate that selling spare server capacity could lead to these kinds of applications? The company recently decided to stop hosting WikiLeaks on its servers due to terms-of-service violations, leading to unsuccessful retaliation by the internet activists Anonymous.

Could cracking down on hackers lead to further action against the not-so-humble bookseller?

An Amazon spokesperson said: ‘It is a violation of our acceptable use policy to use our services to compromise the security of a network without authorisation.’

Sony claims that disclosing this information has caused “irreparable injury and damage” to the company because it now allows people to run pirated games on the PS3.

The PS3 was once considered invulnerable and the most secure games console ever built. It was the only one to have consistently withstood hacking attempts. But in December 2010 at the Chaos Communication Conference in Berlin a group of European programmers calling themselves fail0verflow revealed they had finally broken specific lower levels of the PS3′s encryption system that let them run their own programs on the console.

Jailbreaker

Shortly after this, George Hotz, a US-based hacker known as geohot, who gained notoriety in 2007 for unlocking Apple’s iPhone, built on fail0verflow’s method to gain complete access to the PS3 by obtaining the master encryption key.

Crucially, Hotz then published a decryptor key for Sony’s master key and released “jailbreak” software to allow others to run unauthorised programs and pirated games on their PS3. The hack comes as a huge blow to Sony, which produces and licences its own video games for the console.

Every file that is authorised to work on a PS3 uses a digital signature that is generated by Sony using a pair of keys, one of which is created by the firm, while the other, the “root” key, is encrypted within the console itself. By discovering this root key, Hotz was able to trick the PS3 into applying Sony signatures to any file, allowing unauthorised programs to be run on the system.

Pirates ahoy

Both fail0verflow and Hotz maintain that their only motivation is to run their own “homebrew” software and games on the PS3 hardware. “I do not support piracy or counterfeiting,” Hotz told New Scientist.

But in Sony’s motion for a temporary restraining order it claims that publishing the methods and keys encourages piracy and violates the user agreement. “Indeed, in the last few days people have already started copying, playing and trafficking in pirated copies of video games,” it reads.

“I am a firm believer in digital rights,” says Hotz. “I would expect a company that prides itself on intellectual property to be well versed in the provisions of the law, so I am disappointed in Sony’s current action. I have spoken with legal counsel and I feel comfortable that Sony’s action against me doesn’t have any basis.”

No consolation

Marcia Hofmann, an attorney with the Electronic Freedom Frontier in San Francisco, agrees. “The internet is a place where freedom of speech is protected,” she says. And code counts as speech. Hardware is protected against hacking under US law. “But the law also contains an exclusion for reverse engineering where it is done to make a system interoperable with other systems,” says Hofmann.

Sony’s complaint also draws upon the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, arguing that the company still has some form of ownership of the console. “They are suggesting that if you access your own computer in a way that Sony doesn’t like then you are committing a felony,” says Hofmann. “That’s a completely ridiculous scenario.” And one that has already been unsuccessfully argued in court, she says.

Regardless of what happens with the lawsuit, it will be impossible for Sony to put this genie back in the bottle. Not just because the encryption keys are now widely available (not just on the internet but also on T-shirts and coffee mugs) but also because, according to fail0verflow and Hotz, no amount of software updates or patches can secure the PS3 against this sort of hack. Sony’s only option, the hackers claim, is to change the hardware with an entirely new encryption system.

“Governments should take a calm, disciplined approach and evaluate the risks of each type of attack very carefully rather than be swayed by scare stories,” says Peter Sommer of the London School of Economics.

Under the pseudonym “Hugo Cornwall”, Sommer published the infamousHacker’s Handbook in 1985. Since then he has become a noted security researcher and expert witness. Now he has co-authored a report for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) which warns governments against swallowing wholesale stories about “cyberwar” and “cyberweapons”.

Published today, Reducing Systemic Cybersecurity Risk says that a truecyberwar would have the destructive effects of conventional war but be fought exclusively in cyberspace – and as such is a “highly unlikely” occurrence. Like others, New Scientist has often used the term.

Cyber-spying

“Analysis of cyber-security issues has been weakened by the lack of agreement on terminology and the use of exaggerated language,” the report says. “Cyber-espionage is not a few keystrokes away from cyberwar, it is a method of spying.”

Controversially, the OECD advises nations against adopting the Pentagon’s idea of setting up a military division – as it has under the auspices of the US air force’s Space Command – to fight cyber-security threats. While vested interests may want to see taxpayers’ money spent on such ventures, says Sommer, the military can only defend its own networks, not the private-sector critical networks we all depend on for gas, water, electricity and banking.

Co-authored with computer scientist Ian Brown of the Oxford Internet Institute, UK, the report says online attacks are unlikely ever to have global significance on the scale of, say, a disease pandemic or a run on the banks. But they say “localised misery and loss” could be caused by a successful attack on the internet’s routing structure, which governments must ensure are defended with investment in cyber-security training.

Jay Abbott, a security manager at the consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers, agrees that the routing structure is indeed vulnerable. “Short of physically cutting the wires, it’s the best way to take down a country from the internet,” he says.