Tuesday Sweep: 9 May 2017
Weekly Round Up
Where do you scan for news?
- It’s a long one, but a talk about the search for the perfect door by Deviant Ollam presented at 2016 Shakacon is a good reminder that we’re all a bunch of clever tool users, and that the goal for security is always the better not the perfect.
- Speaking of physical safety, NASA 4D-print ‘space chain mail’ to protect astronauts from flying meteorites
- Some folks, myself included, have toyed with the idea of data pollution as security. Here’s the EFF on why that isn’t good enough.
- IoT security anti-patterns
- Intel chips MT system has been a concern for awhile, and it just keep getting worse.
Sweep
This list will be getting longer, but lets keep it simple while folks are still setting up.
- Updated software recently? Pick a new device to check on today.
- Backups still up and running? When was the last time you made a clean disk image? Here’s a new great article on how to design a backup system.
- Reduce your attack surface: Delete a low quality app from your phone. Delete an account.
- Add a password to your password manager… and delete it from everywhere else.
- Anywhere you could add two factor authentication?
- Double check privacy settings on your phone, social media accounts.
Reflect
What’s are the frictions keeping you from doing “what’s right”? Regret is only useful if it leads to a plan on how to improve.
Continuing Set Up
We’ve covered so much so fast. You’re not behind, you’re just where you are. Pick something to do.
- If you’re having trouble with all the set up, the coach tool at the Crash Override Network has a great step by step break down for many of the same introductory steps we did here.
- Review the list of OneThing articles so far and pick one to catch up on.
Engage
We are a community. You are a welcome part of it.
I leaned this week that you can reverse engineer evolution in your spare time by “designing” synthetic proteins in a game online.
I’m summarizing, but:
The proteins which exist today took billions of years to evolve to this state. The protein design process starts with the new synthetic structure of a potential protein which is desired, and then works backwards to find the corresponding amino acid sequence which would fold into that structure.
If you’re good at math (I’m not), you’ll see the challenge in claculating the “lowest energy/highest scoring” protein fold combination out of (~3 Nres) possible polypeptide chain conformations and the possible (20 Nres) protein sequences that make up a protein.
So The Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington is crowdsourcing the public’s help in speeding things up.
Check it out – https://fold.it/portal/
“Foldit is an online puzzle video game about protein folding developed in response to this feedback from Rosetta@home users. It is part of an experimental research project developed by the University of Washington, Center for Game Science, in collaboration with the UW Department of Biochemistry. The objective of Foldit is to fold the structures of selected proteins as well as possible, using tools provided in the game. The highest scoring solutions are analyzed by researchers, who determine whether or not there is a native structural configuration (native state) that can be applied to relevant proteins in the real world.”
p.s. One day my article will be approved and published here (in a “protein design for dummies” type of format for those of us who aren’t astrophysicists ):
https://michelsonmedical.org/initiatives/institute-for-protein-design
But who know if/when that day will come.