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Cloud

Submission + - Build your own 135TB RAID6 storage pod for $7,384 (extremetech.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Backblaze, the cloud-based backup provider, has revealed how it continues to undercut its competitors: by building its own 135TB Storage Pods which cost just $7,384 in parts. Backblaze has provided almost all of the information that you need to make your own Storage Pod, including 45 3TB hard drives, three PCIe SATA II cards, and nine backplane multipliers, but without Backblaze's proprietary management software you'll probably have to use FreeNAS, or cobble together your own software solution.

Using Storage Pods, Backblaze says it can provide 1 petabyte of storage with rackspace, power, and bandwidth for three years, for just $95,000. Using Dell hardware it would cost $500,000 — and using Amazon S3, 1PB costs $2.5 million.

(A couple of years ago they showed how to make their first-generation, 67TB Storage Pods: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/09/02/138209/Build-Your-Own-28M-Petabyte-Disk-Array-For-117k)
Security

Submission + - Reddit founder spent months stealing data from MIT (geek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In the 24 years Aaron Swartz has been alive he’s done a lot in the world of technology. His first notable achievement was helping to write the RSS 1.0 specification when just 14. He then went on to co-found his biggest venture yet, Reddit. In 2007 Reddit’s parent company asked Swartz to leave and his current focus seems to be his new venture, Demand Progress. He sounds like the type of person you’d want working on your next big project, but is currently facing up to 35 years in prison for data theft.

Swartz was indicted in Boston today where he stands accused of breaking into a secure and restricted area of MIT. Multiple visits to that restricted area are thought to have occurred with him entering a computer wiring closet to access MIT’s systems. Once in he stole 4.8 million documents from JSTOR.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service offering a digital archive of scientific journals and papers. The only reason he could have for taking such documents is because their access is restricted to academic establishments and libraries, but they are the places most likely to need the information in the archive.

The United States Attorney for the District of Massachussetts, Carmen M. Ortiz, plans to press charges because “stealing is stealing” regardless of what you steal and what you use to steal it with. A guilty verdict could mean 35 years in prison and up to a $1 million fine.

According to the indictment filing Swartz is also accused of taking mesures to elude detection and identification while accessing the system over several months. It is suggested he intended to share those documents on “one of more file-sharing networks.”

The computer used to grab the documents was an Acer laptop purchased on September 24th last year. On the same day he entered Building 16 on the MIT campus and accessed the network from a wiring closet using a guest user registration. The username used was “Gary Host” and his machine was identified as “ghost laptop”.

In order to elude detection the email Swartz used was a Mailinator throwaway address which automatically gets deleted after a few hours. He also setup software on the laptop that quickly downloaded large chunks of the JSTOR archive while at the same time sidestepping any security the system had in place to prevent such behavior. This was mainly achieved by continously changing the IP address of the laptop seen accessing the network.
Google

Submission + - Google giving away OpenWRT-based BISMark routers (extremetech.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: More than two years after the launch of Measurement Lab, the internet connection speed and analysis project, Google and the National Science Foundation are taking things to the next step and providing testers with free Netgear routers pre-loaded with benchmark and diagnostic firmware. Measurement Lab (aka M-Lab) is a collaborative project tasked with aggregating truly vast amounts of data about internet connections in the US. Until now M-Lab has only consisted of software tools that you can run on your PC — but now, thanks to the Broadband Internet Service Benchmark (BISMark) project being led by Georgia Tech and the University of Napoli, M-Lab participants can provide data straight from the horse’s mouth: their router.
Media

Submission + - Reddit Co-Founder accused of Hacking MIT Computers (webmarketingwar.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: New York Times has reported that Reddit co founder Aaron Swartz has been indicted for stealing more than 4 million documents from the highly prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) .
Supercomputing

Submission + - The common ground between supers and overclockers (extremetech.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: We all know that a cooler processor can run faster, but did you know that a cooler processor also uses less power? Fujitsu found that by water cooling the SPARC64 VIIIfx processor from 85C down to 30C, power consumption dropped by 12%. 68,544 of these water cooled processors are used in the world's fastest supercomputer — RIKEN's K computer — for a total saving of almost half a megawatt. Now you have a valid reason to invest in that water cooling kit for your PC: it's green!
AMD

Submission + - What to expect in OpenBSD 5.0 onwards (blogspot.com)

Submitted by
badger.foo
badger.foo writes: "OpenBSD-current just turned 5.0-beta, providing us a preview of what the upcoming release (slated for November 1st) will look like. Book of PF author Peter Hansteen takes us through the main new features and explains the development process that has consistently turned out high-quality releases on time, every six months for more than a decade."
Science

Submission + - Can Science Survive the Coming Age of Austerity?

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Alexis Madrigal writes that everyone agrees you need science and technology R&D, but when budgets get tight, research into quantum dots or the fundamental forces that cause earthquakes has a hard time holding the line against health care or tax cuts for the richest Americans. Different countries are taking different approaches. Japan is focusing on its most elite researchers, giving up to $50 million to 30 different people. Other countries are just giving up on some areas of research to focus on others; for example, take US particle physicists, who will spend their careers trying to drive from the backseat as our European counterparts run the Large Hadron Collider. A third approach might be to reduce redundancies in research. "An idea to provide funding in a larger number of key areas that would avoid duplication is to create dedicated research centers where several investigators can work in parallel on complementary topics," writes Joerg Heber. "If we do less research we need to do it right. And using this crisis to think about our research infrastructure needn’t be a bad thing. It should be seen as an opportunity to reform the academic research system in a more comprehensive and fundamental way than the academic community and the politicians normally dare to think about.""

Submission + - Outgoing Federal CIO Warns of 'An IT Cartel' (computerworld.com)

Submitted by JohnBert
JohnBert writes: In a wide-ranging discussion with President Barack Obama's top science advisors, Federal CIO Vivek Kundra warned of the dangers of open data access and complained of "an IT cartel" of vendors.

He also believes the U.S. can operate with just a few data centers. Kundra, who is leaving his job in mid-August, offered a kaleidoscopic view of his concerns about federal IT in an appearance before President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

In particular, Kundra is worried about the "mosaic effect," the unintended consequence of government data sharing, where data sets are combined and layered in ways that can strip away privacy and pose security threats. In the age of Facebook and Twitter, where a lot of personal data is already available, government data that may have been "innocuous in the past," can be used to "identify people that may not want to be identified," Kundra said.
Firefox

Submission + - Electrolysis: Firefox Gets Atomized To Run Faster (conceivablytech.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Despite a successful launch of Firefox 5 in June, Mozilla can’t especially claim to have had an easy 2011 so far. The transition to a 6-week release cycle is now in full effect, but the benefits of more Firefoxes in less time have still to be seen. Now it seems that Mozilla has found its groove and new projects are surfacing almost on a weekly basis. Electrolysis is one of them – one that may have a big impact on the speed and responsiveness of Firefox: Mozilla is splitting one big core process in many small ones and claims that Firefox will get gain speed, stability and security.

Submission + - XBRL Challenge (xbrl.us)

Submitted by pridepol
pridepol writes: Any professional coders complete challenges for a living? A $20,000 grand prize will be awarded to the company, team or individual developer who submits the most inventive and useful application leveraging XBRL-formatted data from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) EDGAR database. If you are interested enter the contest on the XBRL Challenge page on Facebook at http://xbrl.us/challengefb or by visiting http://xbrl.us/challenge.

Submission + - New Solar Fuel design (wired.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers Alexie Kolpak and Jeffrey Grossman at MIT have designed a new Solar Fuel competitive with lithium ion battery technology. Such technology could retrofit coal fired power plants as a renewable resource, or provide concentrated renewable heat in other applications. Finally we are getting the first glimpses of nano engineered solutions to the energy crisis.

Comment Re: Not really new from him. (Score 1) 347

by maXXwell (#35551576) Attached to: Michio Kaku's Dark Prediction For the End of Moore's Law

I remember this. Quote from that programme:

"Prof MICHIO KAKU (City University of New York): The end of Moore's Law is perhaps the single greatest economic threat to modern society, and unless we deal with it we could be facing economic ruin."

Really?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2004/hendrikshontrans.shtml

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