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Security

Submission + - 17% Smaller DES S-box Circuits Found (openwall.com) 2

solardiz writes: "DES is still in use, brute-force key search remains the most effective attack on it, and it is an attractive building block for certain applications (the key size may be increased e.g. with 3DES). Openwall researchers, with funding from Rapid7, came up with 17% shorter Boolean expressions representing the DES S-boxes. Openwall's John the Ripper 1.7.8 tests over 20 million of combinations against DES-based crypt(3) per second on Core i7-2600K 3.4 GHz, which roughly corresponds to DES encryption speed of 33 Gbps."

Comment not censorship (Score 1) 2

please, please, this is slashdot not your political forum, just go somewhere else if you want to talk about you first minister. You can say it's censorship when in your article you say you want to kill someone and you hope for his death, would you call censorship if the article closed was about recreating nazi party and go another time for the "final solution" ? There is a known ontoloy for journalists, and that article simply forget it.. just to get some more viewers, also in italy there's an old law called: apologia di reato which means you can't tell people to go and commit crimes. Finally for the submitter, at least put a good link for the savona e ponente blog, which is www.savonaeponente.com
Image

Homer Simpson Named Greatest TV Character 142

A survey by Entertainment Weekly has named Homer Simpson the greatest character created for television or film in the past 20 years. Everyone's favorite beer-swilling, donut-eating dad beat out Harry Potter and Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the top spot. From the article: "'People can relate to Homer because we're all secretly propelled by desires we can't admit to,' Groening was quoted as telling Entertainment Weekly. 'Homer is launching himself head-first into every single impulsive thought that occurs to him. His love of whatever ... is a joy to witness.'"
Linux Business

Penumbra: Overture Goes Open Source 74

As promised when the Humble Indie Bundle hit $1 million in donations the other day, indie developer Frictional Games has released Penumbra: Overture's source code. "The code for Penumbra: Overture is a continuation of the one used for the tech demo + some addition for the not so long lived Robo Hatch project. It also contains some code from Unbirth, giving it quite some history." The release also includes the HPL1 engine. "This is engine that has powered all of the Penumbra games and it even includes the stuff used to create the 2D platformer Energetic. The engine code was started in December 2004 and was actively developed until early 2008." The repositories are available at github.
Graphics

How To Play HD Video On a Netbook 205

Barence writes with some news to interest those with netbooks running Windows: "Netbooks aren't famed for their high-definition video playing prowess, but if you've got about $10 and a few minutes going spare, there is a way to enjoy high-definition trailers and videos on your Atom-powered portable. You need three things: a copy of Media Player Classic Home Cinema, CoreCodec's CoreAVC codec, and some HD videos encoded in AVC or h.264 formats. This blog takes you through the process."

Comment Re:Nice but (Score 2, Interesting) 56

what you say is reasonable but there are a lot of assumptions and i really would like to see some numbers.
Back in the old days pc were relatively polluting and none ever thought about that. Now we know of all the toxic problem related to their making - and their reciclying - so most companies are working on making them more "green".

So what about solar panel ? Are they made with this concepts in mind or are they made just as cheap as possible without taking in account pollution made to make them or not? How long does it takes to make them "greener" or , using math, when this is true ?

"amount of electricity of one panel per day" * "X days" + "pollution produced to make that panel" > "pollution per day of a fossile fuel power plant giving the same amount of electricity"
(i really hope it's readible)

Also you forget that solar panel will not last forever, so depending on the X of the equation above you can make some good assumption rather than running to solar panel because "they told me it's green so it must be".

Comment Nice but (Score 2, Interesting) 56

I'm very happy to see this kind of competition however from a scientific prospective i see some problem: saying you save co2 with solar energy is a bit "gross", first to produce all those solar panels you had to pollute the environment so the first question someone should ask is : ok solar is good but how much do you pollute to produce one flat panel ? Are we sure the pollution made (and i'm not speaking only about amount of CO2 but also toxic in rivers, sea etc. etc. ) to make a solar panel is less than the one we would make to make the same power from "classic" method ? CO2 savings: well this is just ridiculous: a nuclear reactor, a wind reactor, a carbon fuel power plant, a hydroelectric power plant. 4 ways of getting electricity, four different amount of Co2 produced, so from what kind of power plant does your electricity come, this is how you try to figure out your real "co2 savings" . Next thing to speak about should the fact that our pollution doesn't come only from Co2 but from toxic wastes too, so measuring pollution with Co2 is ineffective and misleading. I really DO care for my planet and sometimes looks like all this "environmental talks" are just exscuses to push new products rather than really doing something to make earth a better place for our future generations but I might be wrong .

Comment Re:Stability (Score 2, Interesting) 891

Besides is Linus really "free"? My time has value too (about $50/hour) and the hours I spent trying to connect to my ISP could have been spent earning overtime at work, buying Windoze for ~$120, and still having some cash leftover in my pocket. Sometimes it's worth handing-over the credit card to get plug-and-play software, rather than put-up with free software's constant need to "configure" everything.

Even with plug and play software you have sometimes to stay hour to fix a problem because they aren't doing what they were told to do, so in that case you have spent $$ to buy the program and you have to spent time trying to fix problem or either contact customer support to find a way to solve the problem. This is not about Foss or proprietary sw, it's about wether a program is good or not and if their "default config" is enough satisfying for the 99% of the users who are just beginning with it. So maybe today you will find your linux distro more enjoyable since many default configuration works for lots of people and you haven't to spend time making custom configs.

Comment Re:Surprising (Score 1) 552

I don't suppose your proposal has any more detail to it?

no sorry, i just know the system today is flawed but i don't have any serious proposal.

Actually, anyone doing research really doesn't have to worry about other people's patents. Since the beginning, patent law has recognized a strong research exemption from infringement.

So if you're doing research that you simply want to donate to the commons, then you have nothing to worry about.

Now, if you plan on selling the invention or using it in your business, *then* you need to worry about patents.

yes that's what i'm talking about R&D for business since the one for the "commons" is mostly a matter of universities rather than private companies.

Comment Re:Surprising (Score 3, Insightful) 552

true. stronger ip laws will lead to even less R&D or to R&D which will involve 50% of the people there just to check if there hasn't been alread a previous IP on that idea . it is time to wipe out patent and copyright or rewrite it from the scratch to help evolve and not involve

Comment doesn't look accurate (Score 1) 81

page 16 (or 14) there are the top 10 isp supporting p2p piracy: Telecom italia is named twice at 11.6% and 1.6%... how come they are twice ? Iunet is named but the provider is named wind/infostrada . later in the page they named what they DID in December 2009 ... clearly a typo but.. does anyone re read it before publishing it ?

Comment i don't like it at all (Score 2, Interesting) 926

i went to see that page and i found it really horrible. the layout is not professional at all but rather one of those "conspiration page ALIENS ABDUCTED BY GOVERNMENT ZOMG ZOMG" template. the "shocking" attitude that spreading of opinion more like facts rather then .. opinion, which lead to "yes is true" "no it isn't because of this this and that" flamebait debate the "get linux" .. no really, i've been using linux on all my desktop and server since '98 but i'm aware of the fact that he's still not ready for end user joe the plumber also why not simply saying to look around for other oses ? it's not about windows vs linux it's about freedom of choice; what about freedos, what about bsd ? If you want to fight for the cause i think fsf should focus on making linux desktop more friendly to end user while keeping a high level of "hackable" for those who know what to do. I really hate these kind of campaign because they hurt my work and my reputation: when i go to a new client and i propose linux then i get that "you open source taliban yadda yadda yadda" and i have to spend a lot of time weighting sentences and phrases to explain why i proposed that solution based on linux, why it's a good thing for the company because of the less cost, etc. etc. Now i have a new campaign that will drop out my credibility again: ah you use linux, you're an open source taliban where's you tin foil hat ? seriously fsf, focus on coding, focus on producing good documentation on how to do "stuff" with linux, help on traslations for multilanguage. if you want to get rid of that poisoning education help debian-edu to prepare a nice distro that can be easily installed on a school network .

Comment Re:Hmm (Score 1) 370

And, most importantly

  • NAT prevents direct attacks on Internet- connected machines
  • NAT prevents snooping of internal network structures

This is something you can activate on a router/firewall the same way today you activate Nat and Upnp to open some ports. Really, it's just a matter of the configuration guy to drop by default incoming to connection not initiated by you and enable only the hosts that are allowed to receive it.

Comment Re:Have them make it a bonus (Score 1) 395

yeah lawyers can make a mess for everything but if there's a written agreemen they can't ignore it. To the Author of the question: you can talk (through email) with your boss and make an agreement, the more you talk the less it is likely there would be a misunderstanding and it could be used in case some lawyers step in to claim anything. Since you already have some software licensed to you it would be only a mess to change property of the laptop and the software and it could lead to problem misunderstanding etc. etc. for his sake and yours it's better to just give $$ as a bonus without even saying it's because of the laptop. On the other side you'll both write and sing an agreement that at the moment you are using your personal laptop to do your work and both you and your company are good about this .

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