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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.
User Journal

Journal Journal: Merry Christmas! 1

Journal by mcgrew

For the first time in nine years I got to see my youngest daughter on Christmas; this is the first Christmas in nine years she didn't have to work. Great Christmas present!

And the second to last pre-publication copies came Christmas eve eve. I finished going through it this morning, and the book itself is ready. What wasn't was the cover; I fixed it and ordered another copy, so Mars, Ho! should be online in a couple of weeks.

Submission + - MH370 shot by US Navy in March

Submitted by hcs_$reboot
hcs_$reboot writes: Remember the lost Malaysia Airlines aircraft? No, not the one shot over Ukraine, that's MH17, in June. The other Malaysian plane lost in March is still being searched. But there's no need to keep searching for MH370 for ages as it it seems it was actually shot by US Navy, while the plane was hovering over the Indian Ocean. US military feared it had been taken over by hackers and was about to be used in a 9/11-style attack. The claim comes from a serious source: Marc Dugain, the former chief executive of now-defunct Proteus Airlines, said the jumbo jet was shot down near a U.S. military base on the remote island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean after it was hacked. As long as the Chinese don't find the remains of the wreckage on the sea floor, and that may take a while, the plane will keep its more peaceful "lost in sea" status.

Submission + - Scientists Say the Future Looks Bleak for Our Bones

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Nicholas St. Fluer reports at The Atlantic that according to researchers, our convenient, sedentary way of life is making our bones weak foretelling a future with increasing fractures, breaks, and osteoporosis. For thousands of years, hunter-gatherers trekked on strenuous ventures for food with dense skeletons supporting their movements and a new study pinpoints the origin of weaker bones at the beginning of the Holocene epoch roughly 12,000 years ago, when humans began adopting agriculture. “Modern human skeletons have shifted quite recently towards lighter—more fragile, if you like—bodies. It started when we adopted agriculture. Our diets changed. Our levels of activity changed,” says Habiba Chirchir, A second study attributes joint bone weakness to different levels of physical activity in ancient human societies, also related to hunting versus farming.

The team scanned circular cross-sections of seven bones in the upper and lower limb joints in chimpanzees, Bornean orangutans and baboons. They also scanned the same bones in modern and early modern humans as well as Neanderthals, Paranthropus robustus, Australopithecus africanus and other Australopithecines. They then measured the amount of white bone in the scans against the total area to find the trabecular bone density. Crunching the numbers confirmed their visual suspicions. Modern humans had 50 to 75 percent less dense trabecular bone than chimpanzees, and some hominins had bones that were twice as dense compared to those in modern humans. Both studies have implications for modern human health and the importance of physical activity to bone strength. “The lightly-built skeleton of modern humans has a direct and important impact on bone strength and stiffness,” says Tim Ryan. That's because lightness can translate to weakness—more broken bones and a higher incidence of osteoporosis and age-related bone loss. The researchers warn that with the deskbound lives that many people lead today, our bones may have become even more brittle than ever before. “We are not challenging our bones with enough loading," says Colin Shaw, "predisposing us to have weaker bones so that, as we age, situations arise where bones are breaking when, previously, they would not have."

Submission + - Did North Korea Really Attack Sony? 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Many security experts remain skeptical of North Korea's incolvment in the recent Sony hacks. Schneier writes: "Clues in the hackers' attack code seem to point in all directions at once. The FBI points to reused code from previous attacks associated with North Korea, as well as similarities in the networks used to launch the attacks. Korean language in the code also suggests a Korean origin, though not necessarily a North Korean one, since North Koreans use a unique dialect. However you read it, this sort of evidence is circumstantial at best. It's easy to fake, and it's even easier to interpret it incorrectly. In general, it's a situation that rapidly devolves into storytelling, where analysts pick bits and pieces of the "evidence" to suit the narrative they already have worked out in their heads."

Submission + - World's First 10 Gbps Consumer Fiber Broadband Service

Submitted by xzeroed
xzeroed writes: Tech Times reports that the world's first 10 Gbps consumer fiber broadband service has rolled out in Minneapolis. Current fiber customers of US Internet can now upgrade from 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps for the low cost of $399/month! This article states that they're also working on rolling out 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps service sometime in the future!

Submission + - Half-male, half-female bird has a rough life (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Scientists have taken a closer look at a rare half-female, half-male northern cardinal spotted a few years ago in Rock Island, Illinois. It turns out being a split-sex “gynandromorph” isn't all fun and games. The cardinal didn’t appear to have a mate, and observers never heard it sing. On the other hand, it wasn’t “subjected to any unusual agonistic behaviors from other cardinals,” according to the paper.

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