Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Software

Submission + - URL shortener goes community-owned/FOSS (blog.tr.im)

Submitted by
Death Metal
Death Metal writes: "1. We will renounce all ownership interest in the tr.im domain name and donate it to the community. We will work out the legalities of this over the coming weeks, but it will ensure no one is ever able to hijack tr.im URLs in the future. They will always exist, period. Everyone can use tr.im with confidence.

2. We will release the source code used to implement tr.im for anyone to use, help develop, or privately extend as they like. We will release it under the MIT open-source license. It is our sincere hope that every URL shortener becomes as good or better than tr.im, or can learn from our architecture and feature set."
Transportation

Submission + - New battery could change world, 1 house at a time

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a modest building on the west side of Salt Lake City, a team of specialists in advanced materials and electrochemistry has produced what could be the single most important breakthrough for clean, alternative energy since Socrates first noted solar heating 2,400 years ago. The prize is the culmination of 10 years of research and testing — a new generation of deep-storage battery that's small enough, and safe enough, to sit in your basement and power your home. http://www.heraldextra.com/news/article_b0372fd8-3f3c-11de-ac77-001cc4c002e0.html
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft's GPL code because of breach. (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by
ozmanjusri
ozmanjusri writes: "While Microsoft presented its recent embrace of the GPL as "a break from the ordinary", and the press spoke of them as going "to great lengths to engage the open source community", as is often the case with Microsoft, it turns out they had an ulterior motive.

According to Stephen Hemminger, an engineer with Vyatta, Microsoft's Hyper-V used open-source components in a network driver and the company released the code to avoid legal action over a GPL violation.

Microsoft's decision to embrace the GPL was welcomed by many in the open source community, but their failure to honestly explain the reason behind the release will have squandered this opportunity to build trust, something which is sadly lacking in most people's dealings with Microsoft."

Comment Re:Serious bug in gcc? (Score 2, Informative) 391

by dakkar (#28740087) Attached to: New Linux Kernel Flaw Allows Null Pointer Exploits

The description given by SANS is a bit misleading. What I believe is happening is:

  1. 1) tun is derefenced during the assignment to sk
  2. 2) if tun were NULL, the dereferencing would blow up the process
  3. 3) so the if (!tun) will always be false if we get there (says the compiler)

Since point 2 is mostly true, the compiler is not completely wrong to assume point 3

As Spengler says, a bigger problem is that loading SELinux (or, it looks like, most other security modules) causes the NULL dereference protection to be disabled.
Security

Submission + - New Linux kernel flaw allows null pointer exploits (threatpost.com) 6

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: A new flaw in the latest release of the Linux kernel gives attackers the ability to exploit NULL pointer dereferences and bypass the protections of SELinux, AppArmor and the Linux Security Module. Brad Spengler discovered the vulnerability and found a reliable way to exploit it, giving him complete control of the remote machine. This is somewhat similar to the magic that Mark Dowd performed last year to exploit Adobe Flash. Threatpost.com reports: "The vulnerability is in the 2.6.30 release of the Linux kernel, and in a message to the Daily Dave mailing list Spengler said that he was able to exploit the flaw, which at first glance seemed unexploitable. He said that he was able to defeat the protection against exploiting NULL pointer dereferences on systems running SELinux and those running typical Linux implementations."
Sci-Fi

Submission + - SPAM: Physical reality of string theory demonstrated

Submitted by
FiReaNGeL
FiReaNGeL writes: "String theory has come under fire in recent years. Promises have been made that have not been lived up to. Leiden theoretical physicists have now for the first time used string theory to describe a physical phenomenon. Their discovery has been reported in Science Express. 'This is superb. I have never experienced such euphoria.' Jan Zaanen makes no attempt to hide his enthusiasm. Together with Mihailo Cubrovic and Koenraad Schalm, he has successfully managed to shed light on a previously unexplained natural phenomeon using the mathematics of string theory: the quantum-critical state of electrons. This special state occurs in a material just before it becomes super-conductive at high temperature. Zaanen describes the quantum-critical state as a 'quantum soup', whereby the electrons form a collective independent of distances, where the electrons exhibit the same behaviour at small quantum mechanical scale or at macroscopic human scale."
Link to Original Source
The Internet

Submission + - British Library Puts Oldest Surviving Bible Online

Submitted by
Peace Corps Library
Peace Corps Library writes: "BBC reports that about 800 pages of the earliest surviving Christian Bible, the 1,600-year-old Codex Sinaiticus manuscript, have been recovered and put on the internet. "The Codex Sinaiticus is one of the world's greatest written treasures," says Dr Scot McKendrick, head of Western manuscripts at the British Library. ""This 1,600-year-old manuscript offers a window into the development of early Christianity and first-hand evidence of how the text of the Bible was transmitted from generation to generation." The New Testament of the Codex Sinaiticus appears in Koine Greek, the original vernacular language and the Old Testament in the version, known as the Septuagint, that was adopted by early Greek-speaking Christians. For 1,500 years, the Codex Sinaiticus lay undisturbed in a Sinai monastery until it was found in 1844 and split between Egypt, Russia, Germany and Britain and is is thought to have survived because the desert air was ideal for preservation and because the monastery, on a Christian island in a Muslim sea, remained untouched, its walls unconquered. The British Library is marking the online launch of the manuscript with an exhibition which includes a range of historic items and artefacts linked to the document. "The availability of the virtual manuscript for study by scholars around the world creates opportunities for collaborative research that would not have been possible just a few years ago.""
Encryption

Submission + - Breakthru Allows Calculations on Encrypted Data 2

Submitted by BBCWatcher
BBCWatcher writes: Can data be encrypted in a way that allows any calculation to be performed on the scrambled information without unscrambling it? It's a simple concept that sounds impossible, but if it were possible businesses and individuals could then protect their secrets yet still perform Web searches, medical studies, financial risk assessments, and many other tasks. Computer scientists call this idea "fully homomorphic encryption," and it was first envisioned 30 years ago by Ronald Rivest, one of RSA's coinventors. Rivest and two coauthors thought it was probably impossible. However, Craig Gentry at IBM Research recently discovered a solution, although at present the solution requires too much computing horsepower for common adoption. Nonetheless, Rivest now predicts the remaining engineering problems will be solved, yielding fully homomorphic encryption products and services. Crypto experts believe this breakthrough will make encryption much more convenient and more widespread.
Networking

Submission + - Right Story, Wrong Pic for Neda

Submitted by arizwebfoot
arizwebfoot writes: In this article, "The Speed At Which Wrong Information Flows", comes a bit of interesting info. "If you've been following the news of the protests in Iran over the past few days, you've no doubt heard about the story of "Neda Soltani, who was shot and killed on video, and has become, as some news reports have noted, "the face of Iran's struggle." Not to get into the politics of it all, what is quite fascinating is the news that the photo that many individuals and news sources are using for Soltani isn't just of a different Neda Soltani, but it's due to confusion over how Facebook works (found via Mathew Ingram)
Operating Systems

Submission + - How Do You Manage Your Home Directories? 1

Submitted by digitalderbs
digitalderbs writes: A problem plaguing most people with multiple computers is the arduous task of synchronizing files between them : documents, pictures, code, or data. Every one seems to have their own strategies, whether they involve usb drives, emailed attachments, rsync or a distributed management system, all of which have varying degrees of success in implementing fast synchronization, interoperability, redundancy and versioning, and encryption. Myself, I've used unison for file synchronization and rsnapshot for backups between two linux servers and a Mac OS X laptop. I've recently considered adding some sophistication by implementing a version control system like subversion, git or bazaar, but have found some shortcomings in automating commits and pushing updates to all systems. What system do you use to manage your home directories, and how have they worked for you for managing small files (dot config files) and large (gigabyte binaries of data) together?
Programming

Submission + - Why Parrot is Important (linux-mag.com)

Submitted by
Martin Streicher
Martin Streicher writes: "Parrot lead developer Allison Randal explains why Parrot, the open source virtual machine for dynamic programming languages, is a fundamental advance in programming language research and development. With Parrot, a language developer need not reinvent the wheel. Parrot provides garbage collection, objects, a parser, abstract syntax trees, and all the tools necessary to create a rich programming language in weeks not years. Further, because Parrot can mix libraries from multiple languages, one can combine the best of every language that runs on Parrot. Parrot 1.0 is available now."
Earth

Submission + - Evolution can happen in just 10 years (sciencedaily.com) 1

Submitted by
Death Metal
Death Metal writes: "Gordon and her colleagues studied guppies — small fresh-water fish biologists have studied for long — from the Yarra River, Trinidad. They introduced the guppies into the nearby Damier River, in a section above a barrier waterfall that excluded all predators. The guppies and their descendents also colonized the lower portion of the stream, below the barrier waterfall, that contained natural predators.

Eight years later (less than 30 guppy generations), the researchers found that the guppies in the low-predation environment above the barrier waterfall had adapted to their new environment by producing larger and fewer offspring with each reproductive cycle. No such adaptation was seen in the guppies that colonized the high-predation environment below the barrier waterfall."
Earth

Submission + - Sperm Whales use Babysitters for Young

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Every new mother knows how hard it can be to find a babysitter — especially when the baby weighs about a ton and drinks more than 40 gallons of milk a day. Although sperm whales have long been known to have the largest brain of any animal and are highly social creatures often singing duets when they are socializing, now biologists studying sperm whales in the North Atlantic have discovered that while some whale mothers are making hour-long dives more than 2000 ft below the ocean's surface searching for the squid they feed on the whales use the equivalent of a babysitting pool to ensure mothers can feed without allowing their young to be endangered by killer whales who prey on the youngsters. After spending two years following 23 sperm whale calves and their families through the Sargasso Sea around Bermuda and the Eastern Caribbean in a 40 foot research vessel, scientists found that females share responsibility for the younger members of a pod by establishing networks of caregivers. "Sperm whales are slow reproducers — 5 years is a pretty good calving interval — so that means every calf represents a huge investment for the mother," says Dr Luke Rendell, a marine biologist at St Andrews University. "It is not unreasonable to suggest that the need to protect vulnerable offspring could have been an important evolutionary driver of co-operation among sperm whales, just as it may have been in humans.""
Unix

Submission + - SPAM: Saving Unix one kernel at a time

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "In this its 40th year of operating system life, some Unix stalwarts are trying to resurrect its past. That is they are taking on the unenviable and difficult job of restoring to its former glory old Unix software artifacts such as early Unix kernels, compilers and other important historical source code pieces. In a paper to be presented at next week's Usenix show, Warren Toomey of the Bond School of IT is expected to detail restoration work being done on four key Unix software artifacts all from the early 1970s — Nsys, 1st edition Unix kernel, 1st and 2nd edition binaries and early C compilers. In his paper, Toomey states that while the history of Unix has been well-documented, there was a time when the actual artifacts of early Unix development were in danger of being lost forever. [spam URL stripped]"
Link to Original Source
Power

Submission + - First Acoustic Black Hole Created In A BEC (technologyreview.com) 1

Submitted by
KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: "One of the many curious properties of Bose Einstein Condensates (BECs) is that the flow of sound through them is governed by the same equations that describe how light is bent by a gravitational field. Now a group of Israeli physicists have exploited this idea to create an acoustic black hole in a BEC. The team created a supersonic flow of atoms within the BEC, a flow that prevents any phonon caught in it from making headway. The region where the flow changes from subsonic to supersonic is an event horizon because any phonon unlucky enough to stray into the supersonic region can never escape. But the real prize is not the acoustic black hole itself but what it makes possible: the first observation of Hawking radiation. Quantum mechanics predicts that pairs of phonon with opposite momentum ought to be constantly springing in and out of existence in a BEC. Were one of the pair to stray across the event horizon into the supersonic region, it could never escape. However, the other would be free to go on its way. This stream of phononic radiation away from an acoustic black hole would be the first observation of Hawking radiation. The team haven't got that far yet but it can't be long now before either they or their numerous competitors make this leap."

Slashdot Top Deals

Happiness is twin floppies.

Close