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Submission + - Heartbleed Disclosure Timeline Revealed 1

Submitted by bennyboy64
bennyboy64 writes: Ever since the Heartbleed flaw in OpenSSL was made public there have been various questions about who knew what and when. The Sydney Morning Herald has done some analysis of public mailing lists and talked to those involved with disclosing the bug to get the bottom of it. The newspaper finds that Google discovered Heartbleed on or before March 21 and notified OpenSSL on April 1. Other key dates include Finnish security testing firm Codenomicon discovering the flaw independently of Google at 23:30 PDT, April 2. SuSE, Debian, FreeBSD and AltLinux all got a heads up from Red Hat about the flaw in the early hours of April 7 — a few hours before it was made public. Ubuntu, Gentoo and Chromium attempted to get a heads up by responding to an email with few details about it but didn't get a heads up, as the guy at Red Hat sending the disclosure messages out in India went to bed. By the time he woke up, Codenomicon had reported the bug to OpenSSL and they freaked out and decided to tell the world about it.

Submission + - Comcast PAC gave money to every senator examining Time Warner Cable merger (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It's no surprise that Comcast donates money to members of Congress. Political connections come in handy for a company seeking government approval of mergers, like Comcast's 2011 purchase of NBCUniversal and its proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable (TWC).

But just how many politicians have accepted money from Comcast's political arm? In the case of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which held the first congressional hearing on the Comcast/TWC merger yesterday, the answer is all of them.

Submission + - Kate Mulgrew, aka Captain Janeway, Thinks Sun Revolves Around Earth. (rawstory.com) 3

Submitted by synaptik
synaptik writes: A new documentary film, narrated by a former Star Trek actress, promotes the long-ago disproven idea that the sun revolves around the Earth. 'Everything we think we know about our universe is wrong,” says actress Kate Mulgrew as she narrates the trailer for “The Principle.' The film, which is set to be released sometime this spring, was bankrolled in part by the ultra-conservative and anti-Semitic Robert Sungenis, who maintains the blog 'Galileo Was Wrong.'

Submission + - Snowden's purloined documents are now available online (aclu.org)

Submitted by Frosty Piss
Frosty Piss writes: The ACLU and others have long suspected that the National Security Agency has gone far beyond its mandate of gathering information for counter-terrorism and foreign intelligence purposes. Many Those suspicions were confirmed when, on June 5, 2013, The Guardian released the first in a series of documents provided by Edward Snowden detailing the NSA's unlawful spying activities. All of the documents released since that day, both by the media and the government, are housed in a database maintained by the ACLU and accessible by the public on-line.

Comment Re:Who cares about systemd anyway? (Score 2) 641

by dpilot (#46664201) Attached to: Linus Torvalds Suspends Key Linux Developer

The problem with systemd has been the steamroller attitude of its developers and advocates. They seem to want systemd to be the one true init system, accept no substitutes. RedHat, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch have all gone to systemd, and I'm not sure what other distros have as well. As far as I know Slackware, Gentoo, and Funtoo are the only distros that haven't, though Gentoo offers it.

I don't mind if systemd is an option. But I feel that there is some bad design in there, and would rather not use it myself. The problem comes when I can't avoid doing so.

Comment Re:systemd Architecture (Score 4, Insightful) 641

by dpilot (#46663853) Attached to: Linus Torvalds Suspends Key Linux Developer

It's only a good idea sticking all of that in PID1 until there's a problem. When PID1 crashes, so does your box. The more stuff in PID1, the more likely there is to be a bug somewhere in there. Now stuffing all of that in PID2, and having PID1 take care of itself and restarting PID2 might be a different story.

Submission + - Cheaper Fuel From Self-Destructing Trees (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Wood is great for building and heating homes, but it’s the bane of biofuels. When converting plants to fuels, engineers must remove a key component of wood, known as lignin, to get to the sugary cellulose that’s fermented into alcohols and other energy-rich compounds. That’s costly because it normally requires high temperatures and caustic chemicals. Now, researchers in the United States and Canada have modified the lignin in poplar trees to self-destruct under mild processing conditions—a trick that could slash the cost of turning plant biomass into biofuels.

Submission + - Congress's Scientific Illiterates Are Resigning the World to Ruin (vice.com) 1

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: Brian Merchant at Motherboard examines the March 26th at the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology's 2015 budget request hearing...the one White House adviser Dr. John Holdren addressed to defend funding for science programs. Video clips prove the comments that are difficult to believe, when you read them. It's pretty appalling, and it isn't any better in the US Senate, as Merchant points out.

Submission + - Is Mankind Warming the Earth? Fantastic look at coverage from 1970s (thebulletin.org)

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: Dan Drollette looked in the archives of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and found some pretty amazing coverage of "climate change" (including an early use of that term) from the 1970s. Drollette focuses on a 1978 article by meteorologist William Kellogg, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. There's a link to Kellogg's article, which includes some pretty fantastic diagrams, including a list of "Mankind's Leverage Points on Climate," which includes not only leverage points (such as "land use") but also a prediction about the scale and importance of each point on the climate. Really fascinating stuff.

Submission + - NASA Can't Ethically Send Astronauts on One-Way Missions to Deep Space (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: If NASA is serious about deep space missions, it’s going to have to change its safety guidelines, because there’s no conceivable way that, within the next few years, our engineering capabilities or understanding of things like radiation exposure in space are going to advance far enough for a mission to Mars to be acceptably “safe” for NASA. So, instead, the agency commissioned the National Academies Institute of Medicine to take a look at how it can ethically go about changing those standards.

The answer? It likely can't.

In a report released today, the National Academies said that there are essentially three ways NASA can go about doing this, besides completely abandoning deep space forever: It can completely liberalize its health standards, it can establish more permissive “long duration and exploration health standards,” or it can create a process by which certain missions are exempt from its safety standards. The team, led by Johns Hopkins University professor Jeffrey Kahn, concluded that only the third option is remotely acceptable.

Submission + - UN Report: Climate Changes Overwhelming (bbc.com)

Submitted by iONiUM
iONiUM writes: From the article, "The impacts of global warming are likely to be "severe, pervasive and irreversible", a major report by the UN has warned." A major document was released by the IPCC outlining the current affects on climate change, and they are not good. For specific effects on humans: "Food security is highlighted as an area of significant concern. Crop yields for maize, rice and wheat are all hit in the period up to 2050, with around a tenth of projections showing losses over 25%."

Submission + - Debugging Death: An Engineer's Eureka Moment With a GM Flaw 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Hired by the family of Brooke Melton in their wrongful-death lawsuit against GM, engineer Mark Hood was at a loss to explain why the engine in Melton's 2005 Chevy Cobalt had suddenly shut off, causing her fatal accident in 2010. Hood had photographed, X-rayed and disassembled the two-inch ignition switch, focusing on the tiny plastic and metal switch that controlled the ignition, but it wasn't until he bought a replacement for $30 from a local GM dealership that the mystery quickly unraveled. Eyeing the old and new parts, Hood quickly figured out a problem now linked to 13 deaths that GM had known about for a decade. Even though the new switch had the same identification number — 10392423 — Hood found big differences — a tiny metal plunger in the switch was longer in the replacement part, the switch's spring was more compressed, and most importantly, the force needed to turn the ignition on and off was greater. "It's satisfying to me because I'm working on behalf of the Meltons," Hood said. "It won't bring their daughter back, but if it goes toward a better understanding of the problem, it might save someone else." Next week, GM CEO Mary Barra will testify before Congress about events leading up to the wide-ranging recall of 2.6 million vehicles.

Submission + - Homemade Sci-fi Movie Space Trucker Bruce = Lots of Cardboard Goodness 2

Submitted by antoine64
antoine64 writes: "It took Juneau, Alaska filmmaker Anton Doiron 6 years and around $10,000 to complete his sci-fi movie Space Trucker Bruce. All the sets for the film were built in rooms of his house using cardboard including a 35ft long hallway in his back yard. The movie took 6 years to make because all the filmmaking tasks were done by Anton. He built the sets, operated the camera, acted, edited, and completed the 105 computer animated space shots and 450 composite shots. Space Trucker Bruce is available on Vimeo and on the Space Trucker Bruce website."

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