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Submission + - Improve Your Dev, Ops, and Kittens collaboration with DevOps on Kittens

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: DevOps on Kittens is here to provide you with ways to integrate kittens into your DevOps initiative — from concepts, to how-to articles, to specific products that will make your kittens more productive and your enterprise more successful. Their first article, Use Central Configuration Right Meow, discusses one of the most important fundamentals of the DevOps movement.

Submission + - OkCupid advises its users to move away from Firefox

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Following the call to Brendan Eich to step down as Mozilla CEO by some Mozilla employees, it's now the turn of a few sites to call for a boycott of Firefox, such as OkCupid:

Hello there, Mozilla Firefox user. Pardon this interruption of your OkCupid experience. Mozilla’s new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples. We would therefore prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access OkCupid. Politics is normally not the business of a website, and we all know there’s a lot more wrong with the world than misguided CEOs. So you might wonder why we’re asserting ourselves today. This is why: we’ve devoted the last ten years to bringing people—all people—together. If individuals like Mr. Eich had their way, then roughly 8% of the relationships we’ve worked so hard to bring about would be illegal. Equality for gay relationships is personally important to many of us here at OkCupid. But it’s professionally important to the entire company. OkCupid is for creating love. Those who seek to deny love and instead enforce misery, shame, and frustration are our enemies, and we wish them nothing but failure. If you want to keep using Firefox, the link at the bottom will take you through to the site. However, we urge you to consider different software for accessing OkCupid: Google Chrome Internet Exploder Opera Thank you, OkCupid Background on Mr. Eich and Mozilla In 2008, Mr. Eich supported the passage of California’s Prop 8, a statewide initiative to ban gay marriage, with a $1000 donation. Granted, his contribution is now six years in the past, and people can change. But Mr. Eich’s boilerplate statements in the time since make it seem like he has the same views now as he did then. Mozilla recently promoted him to CEO, hence the issue only now coming to our attention. His donation was known to Mozilla at the time of his promotion, and, furthermore, CEOs are rewarded based on their company’s performance. The CEO is the visionary for a company and its products. We are sad to think that any OkCupid page loads would even indirectly contribute towards the success of an individual who supported Prop 8—and who for all we know would support it again. We wish Mozilla’s institutional commitment to freedom and openness were better reflected by their choice of leadership. Continue to OkCupid

Submission + - GOST 28147-89 block cipher gets 512 bit and 1 kbit keys (openwall.com)

Submitted by grfrkr
grfrkr writes: From the OSS-security mailing list:

'The GOST 28147-89 block cipher celebrates its' 25-years jubilee this year. First published in 1989, it's one of the oldest (if not the most) of all symmetric block ciphers which are currently in use.
Original publishing describes possible key sizes of 32, 64, 128 and 256 bits. However, the internal representation of key data consists of 32 subkeys of 32 bits each'

This allows to use extremely robust keys of up to 1024-bits long.

'Also, the number of rounds for 512 bits and 1 kbit keys encryption will be increased up to 48 and 64 respectively.

This makes GOST 28147-89 the second (after Threefish) block cipher capable of using 512 bit and 1 kbit keys. Together with its' resistance against superpipelined bruteforcing (rumoured to be effectively used somewhere in South-Eastern Asia to break Rijndael), that means the "old horse" is still running.

The updated standard will get the new GOST registry number from the GOST-R 34.xxx series and is expected to be published till the end of 2014.'

Submission + - New York Public Library Releases Over 20,000 Hi-Res Maps (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: Finally, you don't have to raise your voice over a group of whisperers in the New York Public Library to get a better view of its map collection. Actually, you don't even need to visit the place at all. Over 20,000 maps and cartographic works from the NYPL's Lionel Pincus & Princess Firyal Map Division have been uploaded and made downloadable for the public.

"We believe these maps have no known US copyright restrictions," explains a blog post announcing the wholesale release of the library's map collection. "It means you can have the maps, all of them if you want, for free, in high resolution. We’ve scanned them to enable their use in the broadest possible ways by the largest number of people." The NYPL is distributing the maps under Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, which means you can do whatever you want with the maps.

Submission + - New Microsoft CEO Member of Myhrvold-Gates Patent Club

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: It turns out a pretty good clue that new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella enjoyed an inside track for the top job at the software giant was just a patent search away. While a USPTO search turned up no issued or pending patents assigned to Microsoft that listed Nadella as an inventor, it did surprisingly turn up 33 patent applications listing Nadella, Bill Gates, and Nathan Myhrvold as co-inventors, most of which were assigned to Intellectual Ventures holding company Elwha, LLC. So, with Nadella and Gates driving Microsoft, is it time for the software giant to provide an explanation for why its top execs were moonlighting for a patent bully, and how that squares with the Microsoft Standards of Business Conduct?

Comment Re:The basics... (Score 1) 324

Money is it. They need to have a return on investment, and since the life-cycle cost of buried cable is about 2-4x of overhead cables it would be difficult for them to recoup those costs without charging you all an extraordinary up-front connection fee. If your sub-division offered to pay up-front for the cabling costs I'm sure they would do it, but good luck getting the neighbors to sign on for that one.

Submission + - SC13: GPUs would make terrific network monitors (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: A network researcher at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has found a potential new use for graphics processing units — capturing data about network traffic in real time. GPU-based network monitors could be uniquely qualified to keep pace with all the traffic flowing through networks running at 10Gbps or more, said Fermilab's Wenji Wu. Wenji presented his work as part of a poster series of new research at the SC 2013 supercomputing conference this week in Denver.

Submission + - First usage, now cell phone calling on US Airlines (wsj.com)

Submitted by aitikin
aitikin writes: The Federal Communications Commission will propose allowing passengers to use their cellphones on airplanes, people familiar with the matter said.

While phone use would still be restricted during takeoff and landing, the proposal would lift an FCC ban on airborne calls and cellular data use by passengers once a flight reaches 10,000 feet, an FCC official said.

Submission + - Samsung Ordered To Pay Apple $290M In Patent Case (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: After 3 days of deliberations, a jury has ordered Samsung to pay $290 million to Apple for infringement of several of its patents in multiple Samsung smartphones and tablets. The verdict is the second victory for Apple in its multiyear patent fight against Samsung in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Last year a jury in the same San Jose courtroom ruled Samsung should pay just over $1 billion for infringement of five Apple patents in multiple Samsung phones and tablets. But afterward, Judge Lucy Koh ordered a new trial to reconsider $450 million of the damages after finding the previous jury had applied an "impermissible legal theory" to its calculations. Thursday's verdict is the result of that new trial.

Submission + - Scientists Say They Have Found a Way to Outsmart Rain (vice.com) 1

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: A team of MIT engineers say they’ve discovered the most waterproof material ever, and it has the potential to bring about a drier future, free from the personal nuisance and industrial disadvantages of precipitation. If you're thinking, right, heard that one before, you're not alone. Remember NeverWet?... This is different—and au naturel, researchers say. Until now, waterproofing sprays relied on chemicals to repel the moisture. But the MIT team, led by Prof Kripa Varanasi, has discovered an approach that takes a cue from nature. The engineers found a way to cut the amount of time by half that a water droplet is in contact with the hydrophobic surface it’s being repelled from. The time it takes a drop of water to bounce off the surface after it hits is a limitation scientists previously tried to work around, rather than eliminate. The new technique reduces the bounce time by 40 percent, researchers say.

Submission + - How Long Can You Reasonably Expect Your Hard Drive To Last? (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: According to Backblaze, about one in 20 hard drives fails in the first 18 months. The failure rate drops to just 1.4 percent after this initial break-in period, before jumping up to 11.8 percent annually after 3 years. Beyond that time period, though, Backblaze doesn’t have much data—they’ve only been around and collecting this data for four years. Still the fact that 74 percent of hard drives that they buy last longer than 4 years strikes me as pretty surprising. It also makes perfect sense that, as Backblaze points out, most available hard drive warranties are either 12 or 36 months. As an online backup service, Backblaze keeps 25,000 disk drives spinning along, which add up to 75 petabytes of storage. Over the life of their company they recorded when hard disks needed to be replaced, producing a formidable sample size, even if there are caveats when comparing a hard drive in a home computer with one in a rack in a data center running 24 hours a day.

Submission + - Chrome Solves the Curse of the Banshee Tab 1

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Imagine this. You're sitting in the library using your laptop while your favorite professor—the one whose admiration you most desire—is leading a small, silent reading group in a corner of the room. Suddenly from your computer comes a blaring, a whining, a siren, a yowl. You have opened a YouTube page in the background, and now, in some hidden tab, it plays, brays, blats, and bellows an ungodly cacophony across the solemn stacks. Your blood pressure spikes, your face turns red, and your fingers become clumsy as you scramble to find and kill the tab that betrayed you. Where is it? What is it? Where is that ungodly sound coming from? Now Robinson Meyer writes in the Atlantic that Google has found a solution. The next version of the company’s browser, Google Chrome, will tell you which tab is the source of the din. If a tab plays music or a video, a small icon of a speaker will appear in the tab itself. So instead of hunting through tabs, with click after agonized click, when a tab contains an element that is making noise, the browser will pop up an indicator showing where that noise is coming from. Thank you Google.

Submission + - NASA Will Use 3D Printers In Space As Stand-In For Replicator (space.com)

Submitted by cold fjord
cold fjord writes: Space.com reports, "Starting next fall, astronauts on the International Space Station won't have to wait months for replacement parts to be launched from Earth. Instead, they can use a newly arrived 3D printer to fabricate the tools and materials they need. "The 3D printer that we're going to fly on space station will actually be the first-ever 3D printer in space," ... "It is the first step toward [the 'Star Trek' replicator]," Werkheiser added, referring to the machine in the science-fiction franchise capable of creating meals and spare parts. "

Submission + - Microsoft Warns Customers Away From RC4 and SHA-1

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: The RC4 and SHA-1 algorithms have taken a lot of hits in recent years, with new attacks popping up on a regular basis. Many security experts and cryptographers have been recommending that vendors begin phasing the two out, and Microsoft on Tuesday said that is now recommending to developers that they deprecate RC4 and stop using the SHA-1 hash algorithm.

RC4 is among the older stream cipher suites in use today, and there have been a number of practical attacks against it, including plaintext-recovery attacks. The improvements in computing power have made many of these attacks more feasible for attackers, and so Microsoft is telling developers to drop RC4 from their applications.

The company also said that as of January 2016 it no longer will validate any code signing or root certificate that uses SHA-1.

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