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Submission + - Is the time over the code websites from scratch?

Submitted by thomawack
thomawack writes: As a designer I always do webdesign from scratch and put them into CMSMS. Frameworks are too complicated to work into, their code usually too bloated and adaptable online solutions are/were limited in options. Also despite I know my way around html/css, I am not a programmer. My problem is, always starting from scratch create menus, forms and now everything responsive too, it has become too expensive for most customers. I see more and more online adaptive solutions that seem to be more flexible nowadays, but I am a bit overwhelmed in checking everything out because there are so many solutions around. Is there someting your readers can recommend? Be it an online adaptive website or a CMS that works similar, which are very flexible but bring a good basis / templates?

Submission + - Illinois Says Rule-Breaking Students Must Give Teachers Their Facebook Passwords (vice.com)

Submitted by derekmead
derekmead writes: School districts in Illinois are telling parents that a new law may require school officials to demand the social media passwords of students if they are suspected in cyberbullying cases or are otherwise suspected of breaking school rules.

The law (PDF), which went into effect on January 1, defines cyberbullying and makes harassment on Facebook, Twitter, or via other digital means a violation of the state's school code, even if the bullying happens outside of school hours.

A letter sent out to parents in the Triad Community Unit School District #2, a district located just over the Missouri-Illinois line near St. Louis, that was obtained by Motherboard says that school officials can demand students give them their passwords.

Submission + - Silk Road 2.0 Deputy Arrested

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: With the Ulbricht trial ongoing in a case over the original Silk Road, Homeland Security agents have made another arrest in the Silk Road 2.0 a more than two and a half months after the site was shut down. This time they arrested Defcon's deputy who went by the moniker "DoctorClu."

Submission + - Nanobots Deliver Medical Payload in Living Creature for the First Time (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: Researchers working at the University of California, San Diego have claimed a world first in proving that artificial, microscopic machines can travel inside a living creature and deliver their medicinal load without any detrimental effects. Using micro-motor powered nanobots propelled by gas bubbles made from a reaction with the contents of the stomach in which they were deposited, these miniature machines have been successfully deployed in the body of a live mouse.

Submission + - The Blue Book is Open

Submitted by argStyopa
argStyopa writes: 130,000 pages of declassified files from Project Blue Book (and its predecessors) has been posted online at http://www.theblackvault.com/ the result of decades of FOIA requests. Previously the National Archive has had these available in microfilm, but this is the first posting of the full collection online. Somehow, there is no mention of Roswell 1947 in the documents, leaving conspiracy theorists something to chew on as well.

Submission + - Obama, Cameron announce 'Cambridge v. Cambridge' cybersecurity competition (scienceblog.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As part of a series of cybersecurity initiatives made public today during British Prime Minister David Cameron’s visit with President Barack Obama, the two nations announced that MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) will face off against the University of Cambridge this fall for a special student hackathon dubbed “Cambridge v. Cambridge.” The multiday competition is part of continued efforts by the two nations to collaborate on cybersecurity and harness their collective brainpower to help combat global cyberattacks.

Submission + - Iran forced to cancel its space program, dashing Ahmadinejad's astronaut dream (examiner.com)

Submitted by MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: The War is Boring blog reported that the Islamic Republic of Iran has been obliged to cancel its nascent space program. This development means that former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s dream of being the first astronaut to be launched into space by Iran have been dashed. Ironically, Anousheh Ansari, who was obliged to flee to the United States from Iran to avoid religious oppression, remains the only Iranian-born space traveler. She did it by going to Texas, making her fortune in the electronics business, and paying for her trip to the International Space Station.

Submission + - Book Review: "FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials", by Michael W. Lucas (amazon.com) 1

Submitted by Saint Aardvark
Saint Aardvark writes: (Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book for review. Disclaimer to the disclaimer: I would gladly have paid for it anyway.)

If, like me, you administer FreeBSD systems, you know that (like Linux) there is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to filesystems. GEOM, UFS, soft updates, encryption, disklabels — there is a *lot* going on here. And if, like me, you're coming from the Linux world your experience won't be directly applicable, and you'll be scaling Mount Learning Curve. Even if you *are* familiar with the BSDs, there is a lot to take in. Where do you start?

You start here, with Michael W. Lucas' latest book, "FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials". You've heard his name before; he's written "Sudo Mastery" (which I reviewed previously), along with books on PGP/GnuPGP, Cisco Routers and OpenBSD. This book clocks in at 204 pages of goodness, and it's an excellent introduction to managing storage on FreeBSD. From filesystem choice to partition layout to disk encryption, with sidelong glances at ZFS along the way, he does his usual excellent job of laying out the details you need to know without every veering into dry or boring.

Do you need to know about GEOM? It's in here: Lucas takes your from "What *is* GEOM, anyway?" (answer: FreeBSD's system of layers for filesytem management) through "How do I set up RAID 10?" through "Here's how to configure things to solve that weird edge-case." Still trying to figure out GUID partitions? I sure as hell was...and then I read Chapter Two. Do you remember disklabels fondly, and wonder whatever happened to them? They're still around, but mainly on embedded systems that still use MBR partitions — so grab this book if you need to deal with them.

The discussion of SMART disk monitoring is one of the best introductions to this subject I've ever read, and should serve *any* sysadmin well, no matter what OS they're dealing with; I plan on keeping it around for reference until we no longer use hard drives. RAID is covered, of course, but so are more complex setups — as well as UFS recovery and repair for when you run into trouble.

Disk encryption gets three chapters (!) full of details on the two methods in FreeBSD, GBDE and GELI. But just as important, Lucas outlines why disk encryption might *not* be the right choice: recovering data can be difficult or impossible, it might get you unwanted attention from adversaries, and it will *not* protect you against, say, an adversary who can put a keylogger on your laptop. If it still make sense to encrypt your hard drive, you'll have the knowledge you need to do the job right.

I said that this covers *almost* everything you need to know, and the big omission here is ZFS. It shows up, but only occasionally and mostly in contrast to other filesystem choices. For example, there's an excellent discussion of why you might want to use FreeBSD's plain UFS filesystem instead of all-singing, all-dancing ZFS. (Answer: modest CPU or RAM, or a need to do things in ways that don't fit in with ZFS, make UFS an excellent choice.) I would have loved to see ZFS covered here — but honestly, that would be a book of its own, and I look forward to seeing one from Lucas someday; when that day comes, it will be a great companion to this book, and I'll have Christmas gifts for all my fellow sysadmins.

One big part of the appeal of this book (and Lucas' writing in general) is that he is clear about the tradeoffs that come with picking one solution over another. He shows you where the sharp edges are, and leaves you well-placed to make the final decision yourself. Whether it's GBDE versus GELI for disk encryption, or what might bite you when enabling soft updates journaling, he makes sure you know what you're getting into. He makes recommendations, but always tells you their limits.

There's also Lucas' usual mastery of writing; well-written explanations with liberal dollops of geek humour that don't distract from the knowledge he's dropping. He's clear, he's thorough, and he's interesting — and that's an amazing thing to say about a book on filesystems.

Finally, technical review was done by Poul Henning-Kamp; he's a FreeBSD developer who wrote huge parts of the GEOM and GBDE systems mentioned above. That gives me a lot of warm fuzzies about the accuracy of this book.

If you're a FreeBSD (or Linux, or Unix) sysadmin, then you need this book; it has a *lot* of hard-won knowledge, and will save your butt more than you'll be comfortable admitting. If you've read anything else by Lucas, you also know we need him writing more books. Do the right thing and buy this now.

Comment Re:Theo de Raadt (Score 1) 299

by MrBingoBoingo (#48706067) Attached to: Slashdot Asks: The Beanies Return; Who Deserves Recognition for 2014?
And then instead of running an Operating Sytem development project you get stuck running a school. There's no shortage of other Open Source projects which go out of their way to cater to people learning. The OpenBSD approach by contrast is simply offering what they are and new comers can take it or leave it. Also whose place is it to really say that it isn't a kindness to let people know that something might not be for them?

Comment Re:Theo de Raadt (Score 1) 299

Also very important is that contrary to all of the lovey dovey lets get along on the Internet propaganda being spread around now, his "being an asshole" by insisting things be done right is being revealed to be incredibly valuable. While pro and anti systemd camps debate trolling Theo and the OpenBSD team are doing the important work of making existing tools better. Already jsut cleaning up the OpenSSL codebase to birth LibreSSL has resulted in code that in its few months of life has avoided some new security advisories the parent OpenSSL is vulnerable to. Theo's accomplishments are not limited to merely making an SSL implementation that is less of a turd. It is that he managed to grow a community of capable programmers that can and does make essential utilities less shitty.

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