The War on Newton

No abstract

Changes in Israeli collective identity as a source of tension in the political arena

Stanowiska obu stron wobec kluczowych kwestii dotyczących społeczeństwa izraelskiego, odsłania zmagania pomiędzy dwoma społecznymi orientacjami na temat kształtu państwa Izrael. Jedna z nich prawicowa, reprezentuje żydowską etniczną tożsamość, wywodzącą się z żydowskiej tradycji i dąży do zachowania żydowskiego charakteru państwa. Druga liberalna tożsamość, reprezentuje orientację opowiadającą się za otwartym demokratycznym państwem w duchu wartości francuskiej rewolucji. Przez pierwsze trzy dekady, Izrael był we władaniu partii o orientacji lewicowej i świeckiej, które przyczyniły się do ukształtowania obywatelskiej tożsamości o proweniencji liberalno-świeckiej. Jednak w 1977 r. paradygmat ten radykalnie się zmienił, po dojściu do władzy prawicowo-religijnych ugrupować, które zdecydowanie opowiedziały się za tożsamością żydowską. Umocnienie prawicowych partii oraz ugrupowań religijnych ukazuje fundamentalną zmianę w społeczeństwie izraelskim. Konsekwencją umocnienia tożsamości żydowsko-etnicznej jest przyjęcie przez władze izraelskie dychotomicznego obrazu świata i zajęciu bezkompromisowego stanowiska wobec różnych kwestii w Izraelu jak i w stosunkach międzynarodowych, włączając w to Unię Europejską. Obecna struktura społeczeństwa izraelskiego wskazuje, że tendencja do utrzymania tożsamości żydowsko-etnicznej mocni się w najbliższych latach, pogłębiając rozdźwięki pomiędzy Izraelem a Unią Europejską.The positions of the political parties in Israel on the central issues that concern the Israeli society reveal a struggle between two social orientations regarding the desired character of the State of Israel. At one extreme stands the Jewish ethnic identity that draws its origins from the Jewish tradition and aspires to guaranty the Jewish nature of the state. The civic liberal identity that stands at the other end represents the aspiration of an equal and democratic state in the spirit of the values of the French Revolution. For the first thirty years, Israel was ruled by left-wing socialist and secular parties who cultivated the civic identity. However, in 1977 a political upheaval occurred when the right-wing and religious parties took power and since then have operated to promote the Jewish ethnic identity. The strengthening of right-wing parties reveals a fundamental change in Israeli society. A consequence of the strengthening of the Jewish ethnic identity is the adoption of a dichotomous world view by the Israeli government and uncompromising positions toward the international arena, including the EU. The current structure of Israeli society, together with the trend for the coming years, suggests the strengthening of the Jewish ethnic identity, and therefore the political gap between Israel and the EU widening

Parameter test ideals of Cohen Macaulay rings

We describe an algorithm for computing parameter-test-ideals in certain local Cohen-Macaulay rings. The algorithm is based on the study of a Frobenius map on the injective hull of the residue field of the ring and on the application of Rodney Sharp's notion of ``special ideals''. Our techniques also provide an algorithm for computing indices of nilpotency of Frobenius actions on top local cohomology modules of the ring and on the injective hull of its residue field. The study of nilpotent elements on injective hulls of residue fields also yields a great simplification of the proof of the fact that for a power series ring $R$ of prime characteristic, for all nonzero $f\in R$, $1/f$ generates $R_f$ as a $D_R$-module.Comment: 16 pages To appear in Compositio Mathematic

POWER-SUPPLaY: Leaking Data from Air-Gapped Systems by Turning the Power-Supplies Into Speakers

It is known that attackers can exfiltrate data from air-gapped computers through their speakers via sonic and ultrasonic waves. To eliminate the threat of such acoustic covert channels in sensitive systems, audio hardware can be disabled and the use of loudspeakers can be strictly forbidden. Such audio-less systems are considered to be \textit{audio-gapped}, and hence immune to acoustic covert channels. In this paper, we introduce a technique that enable attackers leak data acoustically from air-gapped and audio-gapped systems. Our developed malware can exploit the computer power supply unit (PSU) to play sounds and use it as an out-of-band, secondary speaker with limited capabilities. The malicious code manipulates the internal \textit{switching frequency} of the power supply and hence controls the sound waveforms generated from its capacitors and transformers. Our technique enables producing audio tones in a frequency band of 0-24khz and playing audio streams (e.g., WAV) from a computer power supply without the need for audio hardware or speakers. Binary data (files, keylogging, encryption keys, etc.) can be modulated over the acoustic signals and sent to a nearby receiver (e.g., smartphone). We show that our technique works with various types of systems: PC workstations and servers, as well as embedded systems and IoT devices that have no audio hardware at all. We provide technical background and discuss implementation details such as signal generation and data modulation. We show that the POWER-SUPPLaY code can operate from an ordinary user-mode process and doesn't need any hardware access or special privileges. Our evaluation shows that using POWER-SUPPLaY, sensitive data can be exfiltrated from air-gapped and audio-gapped systems from a distance of five meters away at a maximal bit rates of 50 bit/sec

Phase conjugation involving incoherent counterpropagating beams in photorefractive media

We propose and analyze a new type of phase conjugation between counterpropagating beams in photorefractive materials based on diffraction from transmission gratings only. This effect does not require temporal coherence between the counterpropagating beams and may occur spontaneously, with no external seeding, even with wide (frequency) band light sources

Optical interferometry between image-bearing beams and their redirected phase conjugates

We present three new interferometers, which are based on interference between combinations of image-bearing optical fields and their redirected phase-conjugate reflections in two- and three-dimensional configurations. Our interferometers can be used to implement mathematical operations on images, including the Hartley transform