Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
AMD

Submission + - John the Ripper Cracks Slow Hashes On GPU (h-online.com) 1

Submitted by
solardiz
solardiz writes: "New community-enhanced version of John the Ripper adds support for GPUs via CUDA and OpenCL, currently focusing on slow to compute hashes and ciphers such as Fedora's and Ubuntu's sha512crypt, OpenBSD's bcrypt, encrypted RAR archives, WiFi WPA-PSK. A 5 times speedup over AMD FX-8120 CPU per-chip is achieved for sha512crypt on NVIDIA GTX 570, whereas bcrypt barely reaches the CPU's speed on AMD Radeon HD 7970 (a high-end GPU). This result reaffirms that bcrypt is a better current choice than sha512crypt (let alone sha256crypt) for operating systems, applications, and websites to move to, unless they already use one of these "slow" hashes and until a newer/future password hashing method such as one based on the sequential memory-hard functions concept is ready to move to.

The same John the Ripper release also happens to add support for cracking of many additional and diverse hash types ranging from IBM RACF's as used on mainframes to Russian GOST and to Drupal 7's as used on popular websites — just to give a few examples — as well as support for Mac OS X keychains, KeePass and Password Safe databases, Office 2007/2010 and ODF documents, Firefox/Thunderbird/SeaMonkey master passwords, more RAR archive kinds, WPA-PSK, VNC and SIP authentication, and it makes greater use of AMD Bulldozer's XOP extensions."

Submission + - Sony blocks PS3 jailbreaks with firmware 3.42 (geek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Sony has released firmware 3.42 for the PlayStation 3 and with it stopped the current slew of jailbreak solutions from working.

Whether you use PSGroove, PSJailbreak, or PSFreedom, updating to 3.42 will stop them working PS3 Hacks has confirmed. Therefore if you want your console to remain jailbroken you should not update.
Open Source

Submission + - Why open source developers should thank Apple (h-online.com) 1

Submitted by Dj
Dj writes: Apple has become the enemy-du-jour for the free software and open source movements, with complaints ranging from the Apple App Store's censorship of applications to Apple's use of DRM. But Apple have also set a high competitive bar for open source, and proprietary developers to exceed.
Desktops (Apple)

Submission + - Google releases Chrome 5.0 for Win/Mac/Linux (h-online.com)

Submitted by ddfall
ddfall writes: Four months after the release of version 4.0 for Windows, Google has announced the availability of Chrome 5.0 for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux — the first stable release to be available on all three major platforms
Linux

Submission + - How to Become Linus Torvalds (h-online.com)

Submitted by Dj
Dj writes: Glyn Moody has had a look at the questions "What is Linus Torvalds' secret to managing the Linux development community? And is it a secret that can be applied elsewhere?" and he finds answers and parallels in an unexpected place, micro-blogging...
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft gets its FAT Patent back in Germany (h-online.com)

Submitted by Dj
Dj writes: The German appeals court has overturned a 2007 ruling by the German Federal Patent Tribunal that Microsoft's patent on the FAT file-system with short and long names was not enforceable.

Submission + - Gartner Issues Smackdown on Open Core (gartner.com)

Submitted by
Sortova
Sortova writes: "Those of us who are concerned about the growing prevalence of the open core (or fauxpen source) business model are often ignored when those VC-backed companies have much more to spend on marketing, as well as the few but profitable acquisitions accomplished by VCs such as Benchmark. We're often labelled as open source "zealots" and enterprises are told to ignore us.

However, enterprises tend not to ignore the advice of Gartner, one of the most respected analyst organizations out there. Today, Brian Prentice posted Open-Core: The Emperor's New Clothes which is a scathing critique of the business model, not as a road to VC riches, but as a solution that enterprises should consider.

There are way too many good quotes to pick just one, but he sums things up with "You see, when you start peeling back some of the value propositions being attached to open core business models what starts to appear is a picture of a bog standard software provider trying to use the latest phraseology to cut through the noise of a crowded marketplace".

In a similar blog post back in 2008 I wrote "The emperor is naked, folks." It is nice to see someone with influence agreeing with me."
Security

Submission + - Mozilla to protect Adobe Flash users (h-online.com)

Submitted by Dj
Dj writes: Mozilla are making Firefox check for old versions of the Flash plug in and warning users when it is out of date and vulnerable to security issues. The checking will appear in the next release of Firefox 3.5.3 and 3.0.14 which are in beta now.
Operating Systems

Linux Kernel 2.6.30 Released 341

Posted by Soulskill from the stick-a-fork-in-it-wait-let-me-rephrase dept.
diegocgteleline.es writes "Linux kernel 2.6.30 has been released. The list of new features includes NILFS2 (a new, log-structured filesystem), a filesystem for object-based storage devices called exofs, local caching for NFS, the RDS protocol (which delivers high-performance reliable connections between the servers of a cluster), a new distributed networking filesystem (POHMELFS), automatic flushing of files on renames/truncates in ext3, ext4 and btrfs, preliminary support for the 802.11w drafts, support for the Microblaze architecture, the Tomoyo security MAC, DRM support for the Radeon R6xx/R7xx graphic cards, asynchronous scanning of devices and partitions for faster bootup, the preadv/pwritev syscalls, several new drivers and many other small improvements."
The Internet

Submission + - Twitter spoofing fix fails in UK and Germany (h-online.com)

Submitted by ddfall
ddfall writes: An earlier claim that Twitter had fixed the spoof SMS messages issue has been proven not to apply to the UK and Germany, where an attacker with nothing more than the phone number of a mobile phone associated with a Twitter account can send faked messages that appear as a tweet from the victim. In testing at heise Security in Germany and at The H Security in the UK, we were able to create faked Tweets, such as this for @heisec and this for @honline, using nothing more than a SMS sender faking service.

Slashdot Top Deals

So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of money? -- Ayn Rand

Close