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Comment So his arrest warrant says...? (Score 1) 53

So his arrest and search warrant says he looks like Woody Harrelson, OMGolly.

I find it interesting...
      "Among the matches Harrelson’s photo returned, the detectives saw a man they believed was the person on camera,
          and they later arrested him for petty larceny — adding to the mounting evidence that police are using facial recognition
          technology seemingly however they see fit." https://futurism.com/police-wo...

Fueling speculation is FUD like this.
Teen Says Apple’s Facial Recognition Got Him Wrongfully Arrested
He’s now suing the company for $1 billion.
      https://futurism.com/suing-app...
Encryption

New John the Ripper Cracks Passwords On FPGAs 58

Posted by EditorDavid from the you-don't-know-Jack dept.
Long-time Slashdot reader solardiz has long bring an advocate for bringing security to open environments. Wednesday he contacted Slashdot to share this update about a piece of software he's authored called John the Ripper: John the Ripper is the oldest still evolving password cracker program (and Open Source project), first released in 1996. John the Ripper 1.9.0-jumbo-1, which has just been announced with a lengthy list of changes, is the first release to include FPGA support (in addition to CPU, GPU, and Xeon Phi). This is a long-awaited (or long-delayed) major release, encompassing 4.5 years of development and 6000+ commits by 80+ contributors. From the announcement:

"Added FPGA support for 7 hash types for ZTEX 1.15y boards [...] we support: bcrypt, descrypt (including its bigcrypt extension), sha512crypt & Drupal7, sha256crypt, md5crypt (including its Apache apr1 and AIX smd5 variations) & phpass. As far as we're aware, several of these are implemented on FPGA for the very first time. For bcrypt, our ~119k c/s at cost 5 in ~27W greatly outperforms latest high-end GPUs per board, per dollar, and per Watt. [...] We also support multi-board clusters (tested [...] for up to 16 boards, thus 64 FPGAs, [...] on a Raspberry Pi 2 host)."

Submission + - Why Do The Intercept's Sources Keep Getting Arrested?

Submitted by Nicola Hahn
Nicola Hahn writes: Looking back it seems like the whole Ed Snowden affair kind of ended with a whimper. That is, the spies won: digital backdoors and mass surveillance are more pervasive than ever. So if you’re going to take the risk of leaking TS/SCI documents to a prominent [read heavily surveilled] media outlet you’d better have training on par with a professional clandestine operations officer.

Assuming that a bunch of "secure" apps will guarantee anonymity with a wave of the hand is a dangerous proposition. In fact advocating such an approach could be construed as negligence insofar as journalists are concerned because there’s a growing body of empirical evidence (e.g. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Joaquín Guzmán, Kim Jong-un) which suggests that higher levels of privacy and personal security can only be achieved by eschewing digital conveniences.

Comment Re: creimer's phat bootay is hot as phuck!!! HNNNN (Score 4, Informative) 108

"Why is everyone so interested in Julia?
"At some high level, Julia seems to solve what Steven Johnson (MIT) described at EuroSciPy on Friday as 'the two-language problem'. It's also known as Outerhout's dichotomy. Basically, there are system languages (hard to use, fast), and scripting languages (easy to use, slow). Attempts to get the best of boths worlds have tended to result in a bit of a mess. Until Julia.
(https://agilescientific.com/blog/2014/9/4/julia-in-a-nutshell.html)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"the language-agnostic design of LLVM has since spawned a wide variety of front ends: languages with compilers that use LLVM include ActionScript, Ada, C#,[4][5][6] Common Lisp, Crystal, CUDA, D, Delphi, Fortran, Graphical G Programming Language,[7] Halide, Haskell, Java bytecode, Julia, Kotlin, Lua, Objective-C, OpenGL Shading Language, Pony,[8] Python, R, Ruby,[9] Rust, Scala,[10] Swift, and Xojo."

While Julia is not running on JVM it should be noted that a recent update to the JVM helps it be an interesting compiler target.
See: Java 7 JVM implements JSR 292: Supporting Dynamically Typed Languages[7] on the Java Platform, a new feature which supports dynamically typed languages in the JVM. This feature is developed within the Da Vinci Machine project whose mission is to extend the JVM so that it supports languages other than Java. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_virtual_machine)

LLVM
Television

Samsung Wants To Bring Web Browsing, Office Work To the TV (variety.com) 54

Posted by msmash from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.
Samsung's 2019 smart TVs will allow consumers to browse the web, access their PCs and even edit work documents from the comfort of their living room couch. From a report: The company previewed a new feature dubbed Remote Access this week, which integrates both Samsung's own Knox security framework as well as remote access software from VMWare. Samsung stopped short on revealing key details about Remote Access. It did disclose that Remote Access will make it possible to remotely access a PC from a TV, which then seems to function as a gateway to the web, as well as a way to play PC-based games.

To use Remote Access, consumers won't have to just rely on their TV remote controls. Instead, it will also work with a keyboard, mouse, and other input devices. These may come in handy when consumers access what Samsung vaguely described as a "web browser-based cloud office service" to "access files and work on documents."

Submission + - Linux Code of Conduct, F word code comments replaced with Hug (neowin.net)

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi writes: In October, the Linux kernel project adopted a new Code of Conduct with the aim of enforcing more inclusive language; while it did have plenty of supporters, it also had detractors who were not keen on the idea at all. Today, Jarkko Sakkinen from Intel began putting the Code of Conduct into practice against several code comments, replacing the F-word with 'hug'. Following the change, several contributors responded to the alterations calling them insane, one wondered if Sakkinen was just trying to make a joke, and another called it censorship and said he’d refuse to apply any sort of patches like this to the code he's in charge of. Another contributor said they didn’t mind the change but that some of the sentences were now difficult to understand, this was echoed by a Dutch contributor who said the replacements were confusing for non-native English speakers. Some of the post-change comments read “Some Athlon laptops have really hugged PST tables”, “If you don’t see why, please stay the hug away from my code”, and “Only Sun can take such nice parts and hug up the programming interface”.

Submission + - Amtrak workers seek answers to shutdown, relocation (pe.com)

Submitted by SpzToid
SpzToid writes: Amtrak currently has two call centers in Riverside, California and in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Riverside workers are being offered a chance to move to Philadelphia and work at the rail service’s single call center.

But workers and union leaders are angry, claiming Amtrak is using temporary workers at a non-union call center in Florida who handle heavy traffic days for reservation calls. Rep. Mark Takano, D-Riverside, one of several elected officials contacted by the union, had strong words for Amtrak.

“The idea that 500 employees can transition to the East Coast is disingenuous and deceitful,” Takano said. “This is an effort to reduce union employees so they can contract out to part-timers who make less.”

Workers were upset about the prospect of uprooting their families and moving across the country. The call center’s last day is about seven weeks away, but no relocation expense allocations have been discussed.

Submission + - California judge condemns startup for giving secret Facebook papers to UK (theguardian.com) 1

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: A California judge sharply criticized the legal team of the app developer that turned over confidential Facebook documents to the British parliament. The lawsuit, filed in 2015, alleged that Facebook encouraged developers to create platforms within its system by implying they would have long-term access to personal user data and then later removed this access. Facebook's lawyers claim that the developer was in contact with the UK parliament long before travelling to the UK.

The judge has decided to personally redact names from the papers and then release them to the public.

Submission + - Military warns EMP attack could wipe out America, 'democracy, world order.' (washingtonexaminer.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: In an extraordinary and sobering report meant to educate the nation on a growing threat, a new military study warns that an electromagnetic pulse weapon attack such as those developed by North Korea, Russia, and Iran could essentially challenge the United States and displace millions.

“Based on the totality of available data,” said the report from the Air Force’s Air University and provided to Secrets, “an electromagnetic spectrum attack may be a threat to the United States, democracy, and the world order.”

The report, titled, “Electromagnetic Defense Task Force,” and the product of a mostly classified summit of officials from 40 agencies just outside of Washington earlier this year, is a forceful call for a new focus on preparing for either an enemy EMP attack or a natural hit such as a solar storm.

Comment And behind Door #2 time is running out for (Score 4, Informative) 92

And behind Door #2 time is running out for WWVB.
The low frequency WWVB standard and short wave clock time standards seem have time running
out for them.
https://www.voanews.com/a/time...

It may simply be that we will know with more precision when infrastructure has its plug pulled.

GPS time is likely better than NTP time for computers.
Clocks like this may allow for the elimination of almost all Olympic timing errors and ties.
I can see headlines... runners fail to best Usain Bolt's best time by one Picosecond +/- 2.7 Femtoseconds.

Submission + - International Space Station switches from Windows to Linux (extremetech.com) 2

Submitted by kansas_plainsman
kansas_plainsman writes: From ExtremeTech: "The United Space Alliance, which manages the computers aboard the International Space Station in association with NASA, has announced that the Windows XP computers aboard the ISS have been switched to Linux. “We migrated key functions from Windows to Linux because we needed an operating system that was stable and reliable.”"

Comment And on the Linux front??? (Score 1) 78

by niftymitch (#57728080) Attached to: Intel Publishes Its First Modern Windows Driver for PCs

So on the Linux front do things get better or worse?

I almost transitioned an older laptop to Linux but tried Win10 first and the graphics drivers were much improved.
I has a nice big disk and a CDROM to rip music with... Then cygwin rsync to other machines and Bob's yer uncle.

Un-documented hardware is a global security risk.

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