In today’s Bulldog wrapup of science and technology news:
- 3 share Nobel chemistry prize
- Yahoo reportedly gave US intel agenices email
- Encrypted app faces a legal test
- FBI’s new Silicon Valley-San Francisco leader
The details:
- 3 win Nobel chemistry prize for molecular machines
Frenchman Jean-Pierre Sauvage, British-born J. Fraser Stoddart and Dutch scientist Bernard Feringa on Wednesday won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing molecular machines.
The laureates share the 8 million kronor ($930,000) prize for the “design and synthesis” of molecules with controllable movements, which can perform a task when energy is added, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
The academy said molecular machines “will most likely be used in the development of things such as new materials, sensors and energy storage systems.”
- VIDEO: Watch Wednesday’s awards ceremony at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfB4NHDI83Q
The chemistry prize was the last of this year’s science awards. The medicine prize went to a Japanese biologist who discovered the process by which a cell breaks down and recycles content. The physics prize was shared by three British-born scientists for theoretical discoveries that shed light on strange states of matter.
The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday, and the economics and literature awards will be announced next week.
The Nobel Prizes will be handed out at ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo on Dec. 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896.
Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, wanted his awards to honor achievements that delivered the “greatest benefit to mankind.”
- Report: Yahoo gave US intel agencies access to email
Yahoo scanned hundreds of millions of incoming emails at the behest of U.S. intelligence or law enforcement, according to a report published Tuesday.
The internet company conducted the surveillance last year after receiving a classified demand from the National Security Agency or the FBI, Reuters said in its story. The report cited three former Yahoo employees and another unidentified person familiar with the matter.
Those individuals told Reuters that the government pushed Yahoo to search for a string of letters, numbers or other characters. That meant the fishing expedition could have involved finding a specific phrase or code in the text of an email or an attachment.
Yahoo built a special software program to comply with the government’s request, according to Reuters.
The Sunnyvale, California, company did not deny the report in a Tuesday statement that described itself as a company “that complies with the laws of the United States.” The Department of Justice and the FBI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
- US subpoena tests privacy promise of encrypted messaging app
The company responsible for spreading top-of-the-line message encryption across the internet has had a first legal skirmish with the U.S. government.
Open Whisper Systems — whose Signal app pioneered the end-to-end encryption technique now used by a swath of messaging services — was subpoenaed for information about one of its users earlier this year, according to legal correspondence released Tuesday. The American Civil Liberties Union, which represented the company, said the small San Francisco firm didn’t produce the user’s name, address, call logs or other details requested by the government.
“That’s not because Signal chose not to provide logs of information,” ACLU lawyer Brett Kaufman said in a telephone interview. “It’s just that it couldn’t.”
Created by anarchist yachtsman Moxie Marlinspike and a crew of surf-happy developers, Signal has evolved from a niche app used by dissidents and protest leaders into the foundation stone for the encryption of huge tranches of the world’s communications data. When any one of WhatsApp’s billion-plus users sees a discreet lock icon with the words, “Messages you send to this chat and calls are now secured with end-to-end encryption,” they have Signal to thank . Facebook’s recently launched private chat feature, Secret Conversations , uses Signal’s technology; so too does the incognito mode on Google’s messenger service Allo.
Signal remains a favorite among security-minded users, among them National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden. A key selling point has been Open Whisper Systems’ refusal to retain nearly any form of metadata — the often revealing who-how-when-where of calls and messages.
“We try to have as little information as possible,” Marlinspike said in an interview (over Signal, naturally.)
- New FBI head in San Francisco was key figure in iPhone hack
Special Agent Jack Bennett was at the FBI’s computer investigation lab in Quantico, Virginia, on a Sunday in March when an outside company showed the bureau how it could hack into an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters.
The tool would end the FBI’s high-profile fight with Apple over access to the phone, but Bennett said there was no celebration.
“There wasn’t high fives, and there weren’t people singing down the hallways,” he recalled. “It was very much business. ‘OK, let’s move forward to the next steps. Let’s get on the phone. What do we need to do to purchase the tool?'”
The iPhone fight exposed a rift between the FBI and Silicon Valley technology companies over encryption, and sparked a debate about the right balance between privacy and national security. Bennett, 52, was a key figure in that battle as head of the bureau’s digital forensics labs, which extract evidence from computers and other devices and were tasked with accessing the San Bernardino shooter’s phone.
Bennett is now in charge of the agency’s San Francisco division, where he views his role, in part, as trying to bridge the divide between Silicon Valley and the FBI.
He took over as special agent in charge of San Francisco in May after nearly 30 years in law enforcement. He started his career as a narcotics investigator with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and did a stint with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration eradicating cocaine smuggling operations in South America.
He has investigated child sex crimes and animal rights extremists for the FBI and previously served as an assistant special agent in San Francisco.
