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Submission + - Internet Controllable Halloween Decorations still going strong

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Controllable Halloween Decorations for Celiac Disease have allowed Internet Users to view and control (for real!) Alek Komarnitsky's house for a decade.

While the Halloween decorations have evolved over the years (every house should have an 8 foot inflatable Homer Simpson — D'OH!), the website is still Web0.0 complete with Javascript pop-ups and flashing GIF's — although it is W3C compliant. But the underlying Perl code (can you find the Camel book in the Haunted Office?) running on Linux/Apache continues to provide entertainment for the Internet masses plus raise over $80,000 for charity.

Surf on by this evening (MDT) to view three live webcams and use X10 controls to turn 10,000 lights ON & OFF plus inflate/deflate the giant Frankenstein, Pumpkins, Grim Reaper, Skull, Headless Horseman, SpongeBob SquarePants, and Homer Simpson. It's a high-tech trick-or-treat!

Submission + - Details of iOS and Android Device Encryption

Submitted by swillden
swillden writes: There's been a lot of discussion of what, exactly, is meant by the Apple announcement about iOS8 device encryption, and the subsequent announcement by Google that Android L will enable encryption by default. Two security researchers tackled these questions in blog posts:

Matthew Green tackled iOS encryption, concluding that at bottom the change really boils down to applying the existing iOS encryption methods to more data. He also reviews the iOS approach, which uses Apple's "Secure Enclave" chip as the basis for the encryption and guesses at how it is that Apple can say it's unable to decrypt the devices. He concludes, with some clarification from a commenter, that Apple really can't (unless you use a weak password which can be brute-forced, and even then it's hard).

Nikolay Elenkov looks into the preview release of Android "L". He finds that not only has Google turned encryption on by default, but appears to have incorporated hardware-based security as well, to make it impossible (or at least much more difficult) to perform brute force password searches off-device.

Comment "Please don't throw me in the briar patch!" (Score 5, Insightful) 152

by J'raxis (#47812743) Attached to: Google Serves Old Search Page To Old Browsers

This is supposed to motivate me to upgrade? Right now, on the rare occasion I use Google,* I have JavaScript completely disabled to make Google (search, image search, and news) actually work the way I want it to in my browser. If they're going to help with this by serving me their older---read "cleaner, simpler, faster"---search page, I say, thanks, Google!

* Google alternative. They use the Google index but don't track their users.

Submission + - Some raindrops exceed their terminal velocity (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: New research reveals that some raindrops are “super-terminal” (they travel more than 30% faster than their terminal velocity, at which air resistance prevents further acceleration due to gravity). The drops are the result of natural processes—and they make up a substantial fraction of rainfall. Whereas all drops the team studied that were 0.8 millimeters and larger fell at expected speeds, between 30% and 60% of those measuring 0.3 mm dropped at super-terminal speeds. It’s not yet clear why these drops are falling faster than expected, the researchers say. But according to one notion, the speedy drops are fragments of larger drops that have broken apart in midair but have yet to slow down. If that is indeed the case, the researchers note, then raindrop disintegration happens normally in the atmosphere and more often than previously presumed—possibly when drops collide midair or become unstable as they fall through the atmosphere. Further study could improve estimates of the total amount of rainfall a storm will produce or the amount of erosion that it can generate.

Comment Re:Right ... (Score 1) 175

by J'raxis (#47630753) Attached to: Yahoo To Add PGP Encryption For Email

That's what these large corporations all do.

Look at Google, grandstanding about moving things to HTTPS a few months ago, making things harder for the NSA, and so on, and yet at the same time they are now proactively scanning people's data for illegal activity and then handing it over to the government. Microsoft is doing the same thing.

What makes you think Yahoo will do anything different? The whole plan here is probably to get uninformed users to hand over their PGP keys so they can store them.

Comment "Highly concentrated life zone" (Score 0) 184

by J'raxis (#47619971) Attached to: Man-Made "Dead Zone" In Gulf of Mexico the Size of Connecticut

If you read the article, it explains this "dead zone" is actually full of algae---in other words, it probably has more life in it than the entire surrounding area (in terms of number of organisms, concentration of organisms, total biomass, and so on). Maybe this is a good thing, maybe it's bad, maybe it's entirely indifferent, but it is not a "dead zone."

But of course if we described the zone honestly, we wouldn't be able to use it as environmentalist propaganda, now could we?

Comment Re:so, I'm in the more than 8 yrs ago camp (Score 1) 391

by ackthpt (#47608167) Attached to: How long ago did you last assemble a computer?

I generally will upgrade some component(s) over that time frame. I built my first desktop back about 2000, using a Lian-Li case, which I still use (modular aluminum) the PSU has been upgraded 3 times, mobo 3 times, CPU 4 times, memory several times, video several times, storage several times and the OS twice.

Originally a 32 bit system with 256MB RAM and 1 80 GB HDD, it's now 64 bit, 6 cores, 32GB RAM, 256 GB SSD boot drive and 6TB RAID 5. Still screwing around with cheap video cards as I can do everything I need with a $49 card.

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