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Submission + - How many years is ideal for long term distro support?

Submitted by couchslug
couchslug writes: Howls of anguish from betrayed CentOS users highlight the value of its long support cycles. As distros become more refined how important are changes vs. stability for users running tens, thousands and hundreds of thousands of servers or who just want stability and security over change for its own sake? Should competitors like Ubuntu and SUSE offer truly LTS versions to seize that (obviously large thus important to widespread adoption) user base? Distro-hopping is fun but people with work to do and a fixed task set have different needs.
Why do you think distro leadership are so eager for distro life cycles? Boredom, progress or what mix of both?
What sayeth the hive mind and what distros do you use to achieve your goals?

Submission + - A bug in Joe Biden's campaign app gave anyone access to millions of voter files (techcrunch.com) 1

Submitted by mi
mi writes: A privacy bug in Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s official campaign app allowed anyone to look up sensitive voter information on millions of Americans, a security researcher has found.

The campaign app, Vote Joe, allows Biden supporters to encourage friends and family members to vote in the upcoming U.S. presidential election by uploading their phone’s contact lists to see if their friends and family members are registered to vote. The app uploads and matches the user’s contacts with voter data supplied from TargetSmart, a political marketing firm that claims to have files on more than 191 million Americans.

Submission + - Swedish ISP Bahnhof Blocks Elsevier in response to court demand to block Sci-Hub (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by _Sharp'r_
_Sharp'r_ writes: Last year Slashdot reported on publisher Elsevier's lawsuit against Swedish ISPs to force them to block Sci-Hub and other sites which make science papers available for free. After losing a recent court fight, Bahnhof, in a measure only an ISP would take, decided to put up a block page not only for Elsevier but also a special page for users from the Patent and Market Court system. Attempting to access Elsevier's site from Bahnhof redirects users to a site which plays modem tones and explains the issue, before allowing them to proceed if they really want to.

Submission + - Jeff Bezos Shares Video of 10,000-Year Clock Project (cnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos shared a video on Tuesday of his latest project: a giant clock designed to keep time for 10,000 years. Buried deep in a west Texas mountain, the project is in partnership with San Francisco-based group The Long Now Foundation, which grew out of an idea for a 10,000 year clock that co-founder Danny Hillis proposed back in the '90s. Now, the 500-foot tall mechanical wonder is finally undergoing installation. Bezos is fronting the cash for the $42 million project, saying on the project's website that the clock is "designed to be a symbol, an icon for long-term thinking."

The clock is powered by a large weight hanging on a gear, built out of materials durable enough to keep time for 10 millennia. Bezos isn't the only noteworthy name on the clock project. Musician Brian Eno and writers Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand are also involved in the clock's construction. The team has spent the last few years creating parts for the clock and drilling through the mountain to store the pieces. You can read Bezos's account of that and view photos of the progress here.

Submission + - Tesla Internal Servers Infected with Cryptocurrency Miner (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Hackers have breached Tesla cloud servers used by the company's engineers and have installed malware that mines the cryptocurrency. The incident took place last year when hackers gained access to Tesla's Kubernetes server, an open-source application used by large companies to manage API and server infrastructure deployed on cloud hosting providers. Cloud security firm RedLock —whose experts discovered the hacked server— said hackers found a "pod" inside the Kubernetes console that stored login credentials for one of Tesla's AWS cloud infrastructure.

RedLock says the AWS buckets appeared to have been storing sensitive data such as telemetry, but a Tesla Motors spokesperson told Bleeping Computer in an email the data was from "internally-used engineering test cars only." However, the intruders didn't seem to care about the data stored on the server. Instead, they installed a mining application that utilized the vast computational resources of Tesla's AWS servers to mine the Monero cryptocurrency.

A Tesla spokesperson told Bleeping Computer the company received a notification about the incident and secured the server immediately. RedLock said today the incident took place because Tesla engineers forgot to secure the Kubernetes console with an access password.

Comment Re:smart money (Score 4, Interesting) 103

by Arkh89 (#55897989) Attached to: Tesla's New York Gigafactory Kicks Off Solar Roof Production

Sure but let's look at some values here : 750M for 8000 jobs (3K+5K) over say 10 years (at 0%) that's a requirement of 9.3K/person/year in state taxes to recover. Just from income, that would require each person to be paid over 150K/year (with about 100K income after taxes).
If we include sales taxes at about 9% and we assume that each person spends half of his/her after-tax income, we get to down to a requirement of 101K/year salary per person.
There are certainly other indirect sources (you mentioned some) to consider to get to the complete picture here, but still... it seems far-fetched...

Submission + - Western Digital 'My Cloud' devices have a hardcoded backdoor (betanews.com)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Today, yet another security blunder becomes publicized, and it is really bad. You see, many Western Digital MyCloud NAS drives have a hardcoded backdoor, meaning anyone can access them — your files are at risk. It isn't even hard to take advantage of it — the username is "mydlinkBRionyg" and the password is "abc12345cba" (without quotes). To make matters worse, it was disclosed to Western Digital six months ago and the company dot nothing.

GulfTech Research and Development explains, "The triviality of exploiting this issues makes it very dangerous, and even wormable. Not only that, but users locked to a LAN are not safe either. An attacker could literally take over your WDMyCloud by just having you visit a website where an embedded iframe or img tag make a request to the vulnerable device using one of the many predictable default hostnames for the WDMyCloud such as 'wdmycloud' and 'wdmycloudmirror' etc."

Comment Re:May bite them in the ass, especially in academi (Score 1) 312

by Arkh89 (#55880201) Attached to: Nvidia Wants To Prohibit Consumer GPU Use In Datacenters

In cluster environments, the NVidia products are well ahead of anything made by AMD. And a good portion of the other core components (management, scheduler, ...) are already built to support NVidia hardware (with NVML/SMI/...).
Some of the Intel accelerators might get close but are also pretty pricey.

Submission + - Nvidia Prohibits Consumer GPU Use In Data Centers? (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by Xesdeeni
Xesdeeni writes: (Except blockchains)

Nvidia has banned the use of its GeForce and Titan gaming graphics cards in data centers â" forcing organizations to fork out for more expensive gear, like its latest Tesla V100 chips.

The chip-design giant updated its GeForce and Titan software licensing in the past few days, adding a new clause that reads: âoeNo Datacenter Deployment. The SOFTWARE is not licensed for datacenter deployment, except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted.â

Is this really even legal?

First, because it changes use of existing hardware, already purchased, by changing software (with potentially required bug fixes) agreements retroactively.

Second, because how can a customer (at least in the US) be told they can't use a product in a particular place, unless it's a genuine safety or security concern (i.e. government regulation)!?

https://www.theregister.co.uk/... https://wccftech.com/nvidia-ge... https://www.google.com/amp/s/w...

Submission + - EFF: Accessing Publicly Available Information On the Internet Is Not a Crime (eff.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: EFF is fighting another attempt by a giant corporation to take advantage of our poorly drafted federal computer crime statute for commercial advantage—without any regard for the impact on the rest of us. This time the culprit is LinkedIn. The social networking giant wants violations of its corporate policy against using automated scripts to access public information on its website to count as felony “hacking” under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a 1986 federal law meant to criminalize breaking into private computer systems to access non-public information.

EFF, together with our friends DuckDuckGo and the Internet Archive, have urged the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to reject LinkedIn’s request to transform the CFAA from a law meant to target “hacking” into a tool for enforcing its computer use policies. Using automated scripts to access publicly available data is not “hacking,” and neither is violating a website’s terms of use. LinkedIn would have the court believe that all “bots” are bad, but they’re actually a common and necessary part of the Internet. “Good bots” were responsible for 23 percent of Web traffic in 2016. Using them to access publicly available information on the open Internet should not be punishable by years in federal prison. LinkedIn’s position would undermine open access to information online, a hallmark of today’s Internet, and threaten socially valuable bots that journalists, researchers, and Internet users around the world rely on every day—all in the name of preserving LinkedIn’s advantage over a competing service. The Ninth Circuit should make sure that doesn’t happen.

Submission + - Victims of Mystery Attacks In Cuba Left With Anomalies In Brain Tissue (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: American victims of mysterious attacks in Cuba have abnormalities in their brains’ white matter, according to new medical testing reported by the Associated Press. But, so far, it’s unclear how or if the white-matter anomalies seen in the victims relate to their symptoms. White matter is made up of dense nerve fibers that connect neurons in different areas of the brain, forming networks. It gets its name from the light-colored electrical insulation, myelin, that coats the fibers. Overall, the tissue is essential for rapidly transmitting brain signals critical for learning and cognitive function.

In August, U.S. authorities first acknowledged that American diplomats and their spouses stationed in Havana, Cuba, had been the targets of puzzling attacks for months. The attacks were carried out by unknown agents and for unknown reasons, using a completely baffling weaponry. The attacks were sometimes marked by bizarrely targeted and piercing noises or vibrations, but other times they were completely imperceptible. Victims complained of a range of symptoms, including dizziness, nausea, headaches, balance problems, ringing in the ears (tinnitus), nosebleeds, difficulty concentrating and recalling words, permanent hearing loss, and speech and vision problems. Doctors have also identified mild brain injuries, including swelling and concussion.

Comment Question (Score 1) 348

by Arkh89 (#55638603) Attached to: Bitcoin Hits $10,000 Because Ceilings Are Just a Construct, Man

Ok, I am not well versed in economics but may be someone here can answer these questions :
With roughly 250B$ market cap between the 4 first crypto-currencies, would a collapse of Bitcoin send significant ripples through the "real" economy?
Do we know how much of this value was really invested in the currencies versus how much comes from the speculation?

Submission + - Tax plan would levy a tax on graduate student tuition waivers 1

Submitted by Camel Pilot
Camel Pilot writes: The new Tax Plan will tax Tuition Waivers as income. Graduate Students working as a TA or RA on meager stipends would have to declare Tuition Waivers as income on the order of $70K income. This will force many Graduate Students of modest means to quit their career paths and walk away from their research. As Prof Claus Wilke points out "This would be a disaster for US STEM Ph.D. education"

Submission + - Intel Recruits AMD RTG Exec Raja Koduri To Head New Visual Computing Group (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Intel just announced that former AMD Radeon Technologies Group SVP, Raja Koduri, would be joining its team to head up a newly formed Core and Visual Computing Group, and as a general manager of a new initiative to drive edge and client visual computing solutions. With Koduri's help, Intel plans to unify and expand its IP across multiple segments including core computing, graphics, media, imaging and machine learning capabilities for the client and data center segments, artificial intelligence, and emerging opportunities. Intel also explicitly stated that it would also expand its strategy to develope and deliver high-end, discrete graphics solutions. This announcement also comes just after Intel revealed it would be employing AMD's Vega GPU architecture in a new mobile processor that will drive high-end graphics performance into smaller, slimmer, and sleeker mobile form factors. With AMD essentially spinning the Radeon Technologies Group into its own entity, Intel now leveraging AMD graphics technology, and a top-level executive like Koduri responsible for said graphics tech switching teams, we have to wonder how the relationship between Intel and AMD's RTG with evolve.

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