Tag: Ridge | SpinSafe

Keeping your computer safe is topic of Nov. 14 Friends of Oak Ridge National Lab lecture

November 14, 2023/in Computer Security

“How to keep your computer (and you) safe” is the topic of the next Friends of Oak Ridge National Laboratory monthly noon lecture meeting on Tuesday, Nov. 14.

The speaker will be James A. “Jim” Rome, a retired ORNL researcher who has expertise on computer security and is a webmaster for several nonprofit organizations, including FORNL.

He will deliver his lecture at the UT Resource Center, 1201 Oak Ridge Turnpike. Attendees may bring their own lunch to eat. To view the virtual noon lecture, click on the talk title on the homepage of the www.fornl.org website and then click on the Zoom link near the top of the page describing the lecture.

“Computer crime is a multi-trillion dollar business,” Rome said. “Unfortunately, the bad guys are winning. I will speak on how to proactively take steps to remain safe on the internet and how to protect your devices.”

Rome, who calls himself “a computer security paranoid,” spent the latter part of his career at ORNL providing computer security for classified systems.

After receiving four degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he started his career in 1971 at ORNL as a theoretical plasma physicist with the Fusion Energy Division, where he conducted research for 25 years. He specialized in doing configuration design and following charged particle orbits in fusion devices.

In the 1970s when personal computers first became available, Rome co-write a scientific graphics program, called GraphiC, for PCs.

He later moved to ORNL’s Computer Science and Mathematics Division, where he specialized in air traffic analysis and worked on making computer workstations “multi-level secure.”

He managed ORNL computer security for the National Science Foundation’s TeraGrid, a high-speed network that connected supercomputers and facilities at many universities. He also created a public key infrastructure to enable secure, encrypted logins and access to online Lab Notebooks.

Rome is author or co-author of 155 publications, and a fellow of the American Physical Society. You can learn more about him on his jamesrome.net website.

This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Keeping your computer safe is…

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Oak Ridge reports network issues after malware attack

March 23, 2023/in Computer Security

Officials said they are “working diligently” to get information and identify the impact on the city’s technology systems.

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Oak Ridge neutrons have a worldwide impact

September 30, 2022/in Computer Security

Free neutrons in Oak Ridge. They are drawing hundreds of scientists from all over the world to the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) and Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

“We are overbooked,” said Hans Christen, director of ORNL’s Neutron Scattering Division, in this month’s lecture to Friends of ORNL. One reason is that a few other neutron sources in the world are temporarily shut down.

Another reason is that the SNS and HFIR offer scientists some of the brightest of neutron beams (a million billion neutrons striking a tiny area every second), providing high resolution and sensitivity. It’s like observing dust floating in room air only when a beam of sunlight shines through a window.

Detectors on a neutron scattering instrument at the Spallation Neutron Source at ORNL.

The free neutrons are free in several ways. They are free of charge in the sense that they have no electrical charge like protons, their positively charged cousins with which they are confined in atomic nuclei. Because they have no charge, they can penetrate deeper into material than other probes such as X-rays and electrons.

Christen said they are free of charge for scientific users of the instruments costing millions of dollars that receive neutrons flowing from the beamlines of HFIR and SNS, provided the researchers publish the results of their experiments in the open literature.

He explained that the free neutrons had been liberated from nuclei in uranium-238 atoms bombarded by neutrons in HFIR or from the nuclei of mercury atoms in a steel vessel at the SNS target station, which are subjected to accelerated pulses of protons.

Neutrons:Learn about how neutrons help scientists make discoveries on Tuesday

For every proton striking a mercury nucleus, at least 20 neutrons are freed and then channeled into a beamline. They are aimed at a sample – a solid or liquid material in an instrument, ranging from plastics to proteins. Neutrons may bounce off a sample’s atomic nuclei at angles that can be measured. Or they may pass through the sample or get absorbed by it.

Detectors of the scattered neutrons that have different velocities and arrive at different times help researchers learn the positions of various atoms or molecules, indicating a material’s structure….

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Pea Ridge police say body cameras to aid in security, efficiency

January 29, 2022/in Computer Security

PEA RIDGE — As they prepare for their shifts, don their vests and attach gear, from now on police officers with the Pea Ridge Police Department will add one more piece of equipment. Each officer will wear a body camera that can record video and audio as well as take still photographs.

The small rectangular black box fits securely on the officer’s chest and will provide an additional dimension of security for both the officer and the public, according to the department.

“The Pea Ridge Police Department’s goals and objectives in deploying body-worn cameras are the accurate documentation of interactions between our officers and members of the public, arrests, and other critical incidents,” according to a press release issued by the department.

“It’s going help officers with transparency,” Police Chief Lynn Hahn said. “If anyone has questions … if we get complaints against an officer, we’ll be able to see what happened, not just hear.”

He said the evidence gained will be invaluable for court cases and will provide a more secure and efficient means of sharing evidence and case information with prosecutors.

In the past, officers have used their own personal phones for photographs. Now, Hahn said, they can take pictures with the camera and automatically upload the photographs to the cloud.

“I think it’s going to save us time in the long-run in document management,” Hahn said. The photographs and videos are uploaded to the cloud, and any evidence or documents pertaining to that case can be added.

Hahn said previously sharing case files with prosecutors could be very laborious. With the software, it is simplified. The department can share a link to prosecutors to receive the necessary information.

Officer Justin Lawson was the first Pea Ridge officer to return to the station with video. He placed the camera in the dock, and the images were quickly uploaded to the cloud and available on the computer.

As he reviewed the files, Matt Dugas, national director of business development for Intrensic, noted the information available on the file. Dugas was in Pea Ridge last week to train officers on the use of the camera and software.

Dugas said the range of the camera is 140 degrees and the camera is…

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