Enlarge / Sven Olaf Kamphuis’s Facebook profile picture, taken in front of the original CyberBunker facility. Its German successor was seized by police on September 26. (credit: Sven Olaf Kamphuis)

On September 26, a data center in a former NATO military bunker in the town of Traben-Trarbach, Germany was raided by police, according to a report by the Associated Press. Set up by a man who authorities describe as a 59-year-old Dutchman, the “CyberBunker” offered “bulletproof” hosting services—promising to keep hosted sites secure from law enforcement actions and operational regardless of legal demands.

According to authorities, the bunker housed the servers for a multitude of “dark web” sites selling drugs, hosting child pornography, and conducting other illegal activities. Among the sites hosted was “Wall Street Market,” which authorities claim was one of the world’s largest criminal marketplaces—selling drugs, stolen financial data, and hacking tools—until it was taken down earlier this year. The Traben-Trabach data center was also involved in a 2016 distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against Deutsche Telekom.

Seven people were arrested, and six other suspects, including two Dutch nationals, are still being sought by police. The raid was part of a coordinated law enforcement action at five locations by authorities in Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, and Luxembourg.

Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Source: Ars Technica – Video: Ubisoft’s Alex Karpazis rates your Rainbow Six: Siege loadouts

A depiction of the complex topology of the connections among qubits in D-Wave’s next-generation hardware. (credit: D-Wave)

On Tuesday, D-Wave announced the details of its next-generation computation hardware, which it’s calling “Advantage,” and released a set of white papers that describe some of the machine’s performance characteristics. While some of the details of the upcoming system have been revealed earlier, Ars had the chance to sit in on a D-Wave users’ group meeting, which included talks by company VP of Product dDsign, Mark Johnson and Senior Scientist Cathy McGeoch. We also sat down to discuss the hardware with Alan Baratz, D-Wave’s chief product officer. They gave us a sense of what to expect when the machine comes online next year.

Part of the landscape

D-Wave’s hardware performs a form of computation that’s distinct from the one being pursued by companies like Google, Intel, and IBM. Those companies are attempting to build a gate-based quantum computer that’s able to perform general computation, but they’ve run into known issues with scaling up the number of qubits and limiting the appearance of noise in their computations. D-Wave’s quantum annealer is more limited in the types of problems it can solve, but its design allows the number of qubits to scale up more easily and limits the impact of noise.

It’s easiest to think of a D-Wave as exploring an energy landscape filled with hills and valleys. It specializes in finding the lowest valley in one of these landscapes and avoids getting stuck in a local valley by using quantum effects to “tunnel” through intervening hillsides. That can be used to perform calculations, but only if the calculation can be structured so that it looks like an energy minimization problem.