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Submission + - LibreSSL Update (openbsd.org)

Submitted by the_B0fh
the_B0fh writes: Bob Beck reports on the progress the OpenBSD team has made on LibreSSL. Some highlights:

Code was horrible. Nobody wanted to touch it. OpenSSL Foundation appears to be a million dollar a year for-profit company doing FIPS consulting. Bugs rot for years in bug tracker. ROP coding function — allows you to jump to any arbitrary address — ROP coder's wet dream! Current third party ports are all insecure. Need funding. Linux Foundation has not committed to support LibreSSL.

Submission + - Robbery Suspect Tracked by GPS and Killed (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Lew Lorton
Lew Lorton writes: Relying on a GPS device placed in a decoy pill bottle, police officers tracked an armed man suspected of robbing a pharmacy on Friday afternoon and fatally shot him during a confrontation on the Upper East Side. When the man was confronted while his car was in a traffic jam, according to police he raised a gun to shoot and an officer shot and killed him.
The pill bottles sit on the pharmacy shelf in a special base; when the bottles are lifted from the base, they begin to emit a signal.
The decoy bottles were developed by Purdue Pharma, which makes OxyContin, a brand of oxycodone,

Submission + - Waterloo WeBike Project (uwaterloo.ca)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A research group at University of Waterloo — ISS4E is planning to use electric bikes to study many different problems facing today's Electric Vehicles (EVs).

Academic studies of EVs are limited by the fact that they are expensive. The idea is to deploy a fleet of sensor-equipped electric bicycles or e-bikes to UW faculty, staff, and students, analyze data collected from them to study the problems of EV range, battery performance, battery life, and battery temperatures (given the recent Tesla fire mishaps)! Given that both EVs and e-bikes use very similar battery technology.

Not only does it go a long way in benefitting EV research, but it also may present in the future, a cost-effective completely off-grid transportation solution.

Submission + - George R R Martin Reveals His Secret Weapon for Writing GOT- Wordstar

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Ryan Reed writes that when most Game of Thrones fans imagine George R.R. Martin writing his epic fantasy novels, they probably picture the author working on a futuristic desktop (or possibly carving his words onto massive stones like the Ten Commandments). But the truth is that Martin works on an outdated DOS machine using Eighties word processor WordStar 4.0, as he revealed during an interview on Conan. "I actually like it," says Martin. "It does everything I want a word processing program to do, and it doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type a lower case letter and it becomes a capital letter. I don't want a capital. If I wanted a capital, I would have typed a capital. I know how to work the shift key." “I actually have two computers," Martin continued. “I have a computer I browse the Internet with and I get my email on, and I do my taxes on. And then I have my writing computer, which is a DOS machine, not connected to the Internet."

Submission + - OpenBSD 5.5 Released (openbsd.org)

Submitted by ConstantineM
ConstantineM writes: Just as per the schedule, OpenBSD 5.5 was released today, May 1, 2014. The theme of the 5.5 release is Wrap in Time, which represents a significant achievement of changing time_t to int64_t on all platforms, as well as ensuring that all of the 8k+ OpenBSD ports still continue to build and work properly, thus doing all the heavy lifting and paving the way for all other operating systems to make the transition to 64-bit time an easier task down the line. Signed releases and packages and the new signify utility are another big selling point of 5.5, as well as OpenSSH 6.6, which includes lots of DJB crypto like chacha20-poly1305, plus lots of other goodies.

Comment OPENSSL_NO_HEARTBEATS (Score 1) 144

by ConstantineM (#46883737) Attached to: OpenSSH No Longer Has To Depend On OpenSSL

You're referring to the exploit-mitigation-mitigation in OpenSSL, which indeed couldn't be disabled, as per tedu@openbsd, but OPENSSL_NO_HEARTBEATS was a separate option that noone has volunteered to claim of not working.

OPENSSL_NO_HEARTBEATS has since been made the default and only option in LibreSSL, and the heartbeats were removed.

Comment Didn't Target had Chip and Pin back in 2005? (Score 1) 210

by ConstantineM (#46880893) Attached to: Target Moves To Chip and Pin Cards To Boost Security

Didn't Target already had Chip and Pin back in 2005 or 2004? What happened to all of those?

I remember I got a Chip and Pin card from Fleet around that time (just on the edge of them being acquired by B of A); Fleet has even sent me a free card reader, which I've never used, actually.

Submission + - OpenSSH no longer has to depend on OpenSSL (gmane.org)

Submitted by ConstantineM
ConstantineM writes: What has been planned for a long time now, prior to the infamous heartbleed fiasco of OpenSSL (which does not affect SSH at all), is now officially a reality — with the help of some recently adopted crypto from DJ Bernstein, OpenSSH now finally has a compile-time option to no longer depend on OpenSSL — `make OPENSSL=no` has now been introduced for a reduced configuration OpenSSH to be built without OpenSSL, which would leave you with no legacy SSH-1 baggage at all, and on the SSH-2 front with only AES-CTR and chacha20+poly1305 ciphers, ECDH/curve25519 key exchange and Ed25519 public keys.

Submission + - US Should Use Trampolines to Get Astronauts to the ISS Suggests Russian Official

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: The Washington Post reports that Russia's Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin has lashed out again, this time at newly announced US ban on high-tech exports to Russia suggesting that "after analyzing the sanctions against our space industry, I propose the US delivers its astronauts to the ISS with a trampoline." Rogozin does actually have a point, although his threats carry much less weight than he may hope. Russia is due to get a $457.9 million payment for its services soon and few believe that Russia would actually give it up. Plus, as Jeffrey Kluger noted at Time Magazine, Russia may not want to push the United States into the hands of SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, two private American companies that hope to be able to send passengers to the station soon. SpaceX and Orbital Sciences have already made successful unmanned resupply runs to the ISS and both are also working on upgrading their cargo vehicles to carry people. SpaceX is currently in the lead and expects to launch US astronauts, employed by SpaceX itself, into orbit by 2016. NASA is building its own heavy-lift rocket for carrying astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit, but it won’t be ready for anything but test flights until after 2020. "That schedule, of course, could be accelerated considerably if Washington gave NASA the green light and the cash," says Kluger. "America’s manned space program went from a standing start in 1961 to the surface of the moon in 1969—eight years from Al Shepard to Tranquility Base. The Soviet Union got us moving then. Perhaps Russia will do the same now."

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