Jose Nazario provides an excellent summary on the Arbor blog of a bot that spreads via USB and instant messenger. He starts with a note on anti-Sino bias often found in American security analysis.

Lest you think all of the DDoS bots we focus on come only from China, we found one that appears to be from the US.

It appears to be from the US, but it still has links to the countries where it is easier to evade law enforcement.

His servers that he has used go back to “Net-0x2a: Zharkov Mukola Mukolayovuch” in the Ukraine, and also “PIRADIUS” in Malaysia. This is someone familiar with underground hosting, it seems.

It sounds much less American now. Don’t let it slip away Jose.

Inspection of the bots we captured show a handful of user-agents (my favorite is the Cyberdog one!) and HTTP headers that appear distinctive, enabling us to detect its traffic selectively. The author appears to have imported Slowloris’ attack method without any modification.

We have also been sinkholing this botnet. Inspection shows hundreds of bots checking in from around the world, with most in the US.

Aha! I can’t overstate the importance of including the lineage in an attack analysis. But even more to the point, Cyberdog is an obviously American reference. I remember in the late 90s when Steve Jobs said he put a “bullet through the head” of Cyberdog.

And now Cyberdog is back, as a zombie! I bet Steve didn’t see that coming.

But seriously, a Chinese user-agent is unlikely to be Cyberdog. It might be ç‹—å±  or maybe called Sundog, if Chinese, but I doubt Cyberdog.

Even more seriously, the speculation about nationality just forces me to wonder if the common definition of a nation is being pushed too far to fit these scenarios.

It’s relevant to law enforcement and financial take-down operations but, when it comes to explaining where a bot is “from”, are we at risk of shoving a square peg into a round hole?

Maybe I’m getting stuck on this idea of nationality linked to a product because it brings to mind how some say Budweiser is from America, instead of the Czech Republic. I mean Cheddar cheese has to be from Cheddar, England, right?

Reuters says a federal agriculture agency is funding surveillance of school lunches

Using a $2 million grant from the Department of Agriculture, the schools in San Antonio are installing sophisticated cameras in the cafeteria line and trash area that read food bar codes embedded in the food trays.

Kids are going to become so used to surveillance and monitoring as an every-day fact that they are going to be far better equipped than previous generations to avoid it or game it. It’s like they are being trained to break common security controls at an early age.

“We’re going to snap a picture of the food tray at the cashier and we will know what has been served,” said Dr. Roberto Trevino of the San Antonio-based Social and Health Research Center, which is implementing the pilot program at five schools with high rates of childhood obesity and children living in poverty.

“When the child goes back to the disposal window, we’re going to measure the leftover.”

I hope I am not the first person to point this out but kids swap food at the table, and kids cheat. What they take from the line and what they throw away does not necessarily reflect what they actually eat.

It seems that a test of their body would be a more common sense approach. In the old days we used to joke about toilets that could print out a receipt with your health information when you finished. What happened? Where did our future go?

A camera that watches lunch trays? I have a feeling this system has more to do with regulating the kitchen, the register and the garbage collection than the health of the kids. After all, the monitors are focused on what’s served, what’s purchased and what’s thrown away.

Echon on Wednesday showed reporters a printout of the reading from one student’s tray at W.W. White Elementary School. It listed the size of the serving, and its calorie, fiber, sugar, and protein count.

He said the program can break down the data into total monounsaturated fatty acids, soluble dietary fiber, and more than 100 other specific measures.

Brilliant. That should make lunch-room trading and haggling far more interesting. Kids now can say “I’ll trade you an empty carton that will show 5g soluble dietary fiber at the garbage sensor for that bag of red corn syrup twists”.

Here’s my idea for how to do this and retain some futurist flair — give students a mouse for a computer when they take a test that also assesses their health and nutritional intake. When their hand touches the mouse it first authenticates them and then reads their data. Tiny pin-prick of blood like those new diabetic tests, etc. show that we already have the technology. Just need to put it together.

Privacy is a problem, but for the sake of argument let’s say the data can be made private enough to meet HIPAA/HITECH. Even better would be, instead of a mouse, for kids to order lunch from a touch-screen register. They first authenticate with their full hand and their body outline (via camera). Then it reads their health data. Then it records what they order. They can swap food later but the health data will be matched to their biometric.

Gary Taubes gives an extremely thorough and supportive review in the NYT of Robert Lustig’s argument that sugar should be evaluated as poisonous. It’s a sticky issue (pun intended) as illustrated with feats of acrobatic marketing by the junk food industry.

In the early 1980s, high-fructose corn syrup replaced sugar in sodas and other products in part because refined sugar then had the reputation as a generally noxious nutrient. (“Villain in Disguise?” asked a headline in this paper in 1977, before answering in the affirmative.) High-fructose corn syrup was portrayed by the food industry as a healthful alternative, and that’s how the public perceived it. It was also cheaper than sugar, which didn’t hurt its commercial prospects. Now the tide is rolling the other way, and refined sugar is making a commercial comeback as the supposedly healthful alternative to this noxious corn-syrup stuff. “Industry after industry is replacing their product with sucrose and advertising it as such — ‘No High-Fructose Corn Syrup,’ ” Nestle notes.

But marketing aside, the two sweeteners are effectively identical in their biological effects. “High-fructose corn syrup, sugar — no difference,” is how Lustig put it in a lecture that I attended in San Francisco last December. “The point is they’re each bad — equally bad, equally poisonous.”

As much as I hate both sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, I disagree. Here’s how he tries to drive the point home.

Because each of these sugars ends up as glucose and fructose in our guts, our bodies react the same way to both, and the physiological effects are identical.

I disagree because there is weak evidence that our bodies are the same, let alone that each body will “react the same” to different sugars. This difference in effect is no great secret if you look at the study and evolution of sports nutrition.

A related example is how some are affected differently by the lactose of various milks. Some people digest all forms of milk without noticing any differences. Those more sensitive to lactose, however, typically reject cow milk yet have few issues with camel or goat milk.

Along these lines, since I was a child I have run numerous tests (granted, not always very scientific or blind) that consistently demonstrate to me that high-fructose corn syrup has a very different effect on me than other forms of sugar.

The culmination of my research was in 2000 when I would eat two to three “health bars” during the day. I noticed right away that the days when I ate bars with high-fructose corn syrup I was less productive, less focused in my writing. I then started to isolate the bars by ingredients.

After just three weeks I found that Luna bars, sweetened without any high-fructose corn syrup gave me a boost of energy yet any bar that had high-fructose corn syrup would slow me down and sometimes even prevent me from thinking clearly.

Like removing caffeine or alcohol from a diet, after I had eliminated all high-fructose corn syrup from my diet the effect of it became even more pronounced. Very soon after high-fructose corn syrup now I notice a significant negative effect on mental acuity. Taubes points out a difference in “chronic toxins” and “acute toxins”. With that in mind it seems I treat high-fructose corn syrup as acute and other forms of sugar as chronic.

At the same time, despite all the non-fat marketing and advice, I have not found any link from the fat in nuts, vegetables and meat to obesity. I never accepted skim or low-fat milk as a step to health. It simply does not make sense to me and I have never noticed that effect. This is raised by Taubes as well.

…many of the key observations cited to argue that dietary fat caused heart disease actually support the sugar theory as well. During the Korean War, pathologists doing autopsies on American soldiers killed in battle noticed that many had significant plaques in their arteries, even those who were still teenagers, while the Koreans killed in battle did not. The atherosclerotic plaques in the Americans were attributed to the fact that they ate high-fat diets and the Koreans ate low-fat. But the Americans were also eating high-sugar diets, while the Koreans, like the Japanese, were not.

Strange that is taking so long for nutritionists to move ahead and advance their research and understanding of risks. Apparently there is very little work done in America on clinical trials that would help understand sugar and high-fructose corn syrup. That makes risk management far more difficult for consumers than necessary or safe. It is like being told to run a network without the means to look at the logs for breaches or inspect any traffic for malicious code.

The BBC calls it a use for curry powder, but scientists really are working with turmeric. They have found a way to make thin films of it on transparent plates to look for the presence of explosives.

The idea would be to use an inexpensive light source – the team uses LEDs – shone on to the thin films, detecting the light they then put off. In the presence of explosives, the light would dim.

By using an array of sensors, each sensitive to slightly different colours of light, a range of different materials could be detected, and, crucially, reduce the risk of false alarms.

In tests, the films can currently detect explosive levels down to 80 parts per billion, but Mr Kumar said that for hgh-sensitivity applications like mine detection, they needed to increase the sensitivity further, by adjusting the chemical groups attached to curcumin.

This could be more accurate than the rats trained for mine detection. How will a plate of turmeric be made operational and sent into the field?

I am reminded of the Red Dwarf episode when a Vindaloo Beast rampages the ship. What if scientists go too far and make a curry detection monster that gets out of control – a mind of its own? “Of course, Lager, the only thing that can kill a vindaloo.”