At the SIGCOMM 2021 data communication conference on Thursday, Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi of the University of California, Irvine presented “Solar Superstorms: Planning for an Internet Apocalypse,” an examination of the damage a fast-moving cloud of magnetized solar particles could cause the global internet. Abdu Jyothi’s research points out an additional nuance to a blackout-causing solar storm: the scenario where even if power returns in hours or days, mass internet outages persist. 

Read the full story at Wired.

“If you’re being nondiscriminatory in an absolute sense, so there’s no prioritization, there’s no special insight—it just goes back to how many times the words appear on a web page, like the early search engines—that’s not what Google offers you,” said Scott Jordan, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at UC Irvine and former chief technologist at the Federal Communications Commission. A search engine that didn’t try to bring the best, most relevant results to the top would be basically worthless. “If you mean nondiscriminatory in a much narrower sense, like does Google’s algorithm include whether the webpage has a conservative or a liberal tint, or is based on anything else—gender, race, what have you—then, yeah, Google might say that they’re nondiscriminatory in these narrower senses. But this doesn’t easily map onto the question of common carriage.”

Read the full article at Wired.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Van Buren v. United States on June 3 requires lawyers and policymakers to revisit the roles that law, policy and technology play in deterring, detecting, preventing and punishing misuse of sensitive data. Free societies must find ways to effectively harness increasingly large datasets and advanced powers to analyze and use such data to enhance people’s security and improve their lives while protecting individual privacy, intellectual property and other key interests.

Read the full article at Lawfare.

In just its third year of competing, UCI’s cybersecurity club placed fifth in the nation at the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition finals last month. It was Irvine’s first trip to the finals after beating perennial favorite Stanford in the Western Regionals.

Read the full article at Irvine Standard.

For her junior year of high school, Sirui Hu decided to take a step outside her comfort zone – a big one. The Shenzhen, China teen went abroad her junior and senior year and landed in Orange County. And when her high school offered a joint summer program that brought her to UCI to explore campus and meet new students, she fell in love with the campus and its inclusive culture.

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Cybersecurity experts agree that Biden will have to move past stern warnings and sanctions to use U.S. cyber capabilities to either directly disrupt foreign cybercriminal networks or hit a Russian target. “The president needs to say, if something happens like this again from within the territory of Russia, we will take appropriate response action directly inside Russia,” said Bryan Cunningham, executive director of the University of California, Irvine Cybersecurity Policy & Research Institute.

Read the full article on the KABC website.

Saltanat Mashirova is a Cyber Security Consultant at Honeywell (Industrial IT and Cybersecurity Engineer/Architect). She is focused in Control systems, Network engineering and Cyber Security in various fields of Oil, Gas, and Energy Industries.

Read the full article at Medium.

Neural networks have begun finding use in glaciology, becoming a critical new tool in the study of climate change and its effects on receding glaciers. A recent publication in The Cryosphere releases and evaluates a new neural network known as the Calving Front Machine (CALFIN), a program capable of automatically identifying the calving fronts of ocean-terminating glaciers from decades of satellite imagery. Programs such as CALFIN could make it possible to catalog and monitor the rates of glacier loss all around the world, even at sites that scientists haven’t been able to study manually.

Read the full story at Phys.org.

The Association for Computing Machinery has selected UCI computer scientist Michael Franz to receive the ACM Charles P. “Chuck” Thacker Breakthrough in Computing Award. Franz was recognized for his development of just-in-time compilation techniques that enable fast and feature-rich services on the internet, including such widely used applications as Gmail and Facebook.

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