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Submission + - Routing on OpenStreetMap.org (openstreetmap.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Good news for OpenStreetMap: the main website now has A-to-B routing (directions) built in to the homepage! The OSM website offers directions which are powered by third-parties using OSM data, providing car, bike, and foot routing. OpenStreetMap has a saying: “what gets rendered, gets mapped” – meaning that often you don’t notice a bit of data that needs tweaking unless it actually shows up on the map image. It will make OpenStreetMap’s data better by creating a virtuous feedback loop.

Submission + - Spamhaus under attack (in court this time) (spamhaus.org) 1

Submitted by stoatwblr
stoatwblr writes: Disclaimer: I am not spamhaus, but I respect their work. This is NOT linked off their website.

The following message has been circulated on several spamfighting lists.

"As folks may have noticed from Twitter, Spamhaus is currently the target of a lawsuit filed in the UK by a US bulk sender better known in the anti-spam world as 'Mamba Hosting' — an outfit which since 2008 has managed to rack up an impressive 184 SBL listings and get terminated by over 50 hosts.

As the case has been filed in the UK we intend to defend it vigorously. Our defence aims to reveal the extent of this outfit's spam activities over the last years. Our goal is to impress upon the court the scale and subterfuge used by this outfit with overwhelming evidence to counter any claims of sending only to opt-in lists.

To ensure the court views the bulk of evidence as unquestionably large, that the scope is global, and with many victims beyond just Spamhaus' trap network, Spamhaus will appreciate additional spam samples from folks here who have been on the receiving end of spam from this outfit under its many different names.

Thanks for your assistance!

Steve Linford
Chief Executive
The Spamhaus Project"

If you have any interest in helping Spamhaus, please respond to Matt@spamhaus and he will provide IP ranges, timeframes, and a submission address

Submission + - Lollipop : Android Latest Version 5.0 Updates And Features (blogspot.in)

Submitted by NavneetPandit
NavneetPandit writes: Google hopes that its new Android version 5.0 will soon roll out each device is going to have on the urge. This short code, battery life, better UI and other features like a producer for various positions to test the Android version has been released and can be seen in Google's new report.

Comment Re:Hopefully, but probably not (Score 4, Insightful) 439

by Z00L00K (#49058467) Attached to: Will Submarines Soon Become As Obsolete As the Battleship?

Considering the fact that either you have submarines and you know how they work - and can therefore at least have a reasonable defense against them or you don't have them and your knowledge will diminish because you can't train those scenarios.

Submarines also come in many variants - all the way from the nuclear "big dicks" to the miniature one-person type. It only takes a small one to cause a major impact in a harbor.

Submission + - Smoking Is Even Deadlier Than Previously Thought

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: "Who still smokes?" as Denise Grady reports at the NYT that however bad you thought smoking was, it’s even worse. A new study has found that in addition to the well-known hazards of lung cancer, artery disease, heart attacks, chronic lung disease and stroke, researchers found that smoking was linked to significantly increased risks of infection, kidney disease, intestinal disease caused by inadequate blood flow, and heart and lung ailments not previously attributed to tobacco. “The smoking epidemic is still ongoing, and there is a need to evaluate how smoking is hurting us as a society, to support clinicians and policy making in public health,” says Brian D. Carter, an author of the study. “It’s not a done story.” Carter says he was inspired to dig deeper into the causes of death in smokers after taking an initial look at data from five large health surveys being conducted by other researchers. As expected, death rates were higher among the smokers but diseases known to be caused by tobacco accounted for only 83 percent of the excess deaths in people who smoked. “I thought, ‘Wow, that’s really low,’ ” Mr. Carter said. “We have this huge cohort. Let’s get into the weeds, cast a wide net and see what is killing smokers that we don’t already know.” The researchers found that, compared with people who had never smoked, smokers were about twice as likely to die from infections, kidney disease, respiratory ailments not previously linked to tobacco, and hypertensive heart disease, in which high blood pressure leads to heart failure. "The Surgeon General's report claims 480,000 deaths directly caused by smoking, but we think that is really quite a bit off," concludes Carter adding that the figure may be closer to 540,000.

Submission + - Lack of CSPRNG in WordPress Threatens Millions of Sites

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: WordPress has become a huge target for attackers and vulnerability researchers, and with good reason. The software runs a large fraction of the sites on the Internet and serious vulnerabilities in the platform have not been hard to come by lately. But there’s now a bug that’s been disclosed in all versions of WordPress that may allow an attacker to take over vulnerable sites.

The issue lies in the fact that WordPress doesn’t contain a cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator. A researcher named Scott Arciszewski made the WordPress maintainers aware of the problem nearly eight months ago and said that he has had very little response.

The consequences of an attack on the bug would be that the attacker might be able to predict the token used to generate a new password for a user’s account and thus take over the account. Arciszewski has developed a patch for the problem and published it, but it has not been integrated into WordPress. He said he has had almost no communication from the WordPress maintainers about the vulnerability, save for one tweet from a lead developer that was later deleted.

Arciszewski said he has not developed an exploit for the issue but said that an attacker would need to be able to predict the next RNG seed in order to exploit it.

“There is a rule in security: attacks only get better, never worse. If this is not attackable today, there is no guarantee this will hold true in 5 or 10 years. Using /dev/urandom (which is what my proposed patch tries to do, although Stefan Esser has highlighted some flaws that would require a 4th version before it’s acceptable for merging) is a serious gain over a userland RNG,” he said by email.

Submission + - Five Years After The Sun Merger, Oracle Says It's Fully Committed To SPARC (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Sun Microsystems vanished into Oracle's maw five years ago this month, and you could be forgiven for thinking that some iconic Sun products, like SPARC chips, had been cast aside in the merger. But Oracle claims that the SPARC roadmap is moving forward more quickly than it did under Sun, and while the number of SPARC systems sold has dropped dramatically (from 66,000 in Q1 '03 to 7,000 in Q1 '14), the systems that are being sold are fully customized and much more profitable for the company.

Submission + - Q: Empirical study on how C devs use goto in practice? A: Not harmfully. (peerj.com)

Submitted by Mei Nagappan
Mei Nagappan writes: By qualitatively and quantitatively analyzing a statistically valid random sample from almost 2 million C files and 11K+ projects, we find that developers limit themselves to using goto appropriately in most cases, and not in an unrestricted manner like Dijkstra feared, thus suggesting that goto does not appear to be harmful in practice.

Submission + - Programming with computers

Submitted by Whiteox
Whiteox writes: After a 25 year break from programming on MS DOS and Apple machines, I've decided to take it up again as a hobby for fun (and maybe profit). I had a knowledge of BASIC and macro-assembly compilers. When I dug up my old documentation, most of it was eaten by mice, water damaged — basically unusable. Years ago I tried to convert a compiled basic program to visual basic with disastrous results, so I realize that I need to retrain.
I'm not sure if *nix O/S is more suitable than WinX as a platform of choice either. Whichever way I go, I'll need good support from books and the programming community.
I'm looking for a language that has a short learning curve, good documentation and would lead me towards command and control.
What language/direction should I take?

Submission + - Driving Force Behind Alkali Metal Explosions Discovered (nature.com) 1

Submitted by Kunedog
Kunedog writes: Years ago, Dr. Philip E. Mason (aka Thunderf00t on Youtube) found it puzzling that the supposedly "well-understood" explosive reaction of a lump of sodium (an alkali metal) dropped in water could happen at all, given such a limited contact area on which the reaction could take place. And indeed, sometimes an explosion did fail to reliably occur, the lump of metal instead fizzing around the water's surface on a pocket of hydrogen produced by the (slower than explosive) reaction, thus inhibiting any faster reaction of the alkali metal with the water. Mason's best hypothesis was that the (sometimes) explosive reactions must be triggered by a Coulomb explosion, which could result when sodium cations (positive ions) are produced from the reaction and expel each other further into the water.

This theory is now supported by photographic and mathematical evidence, published in the journal Nature Chemistry. In a laboratory at Braunschweig University of Technology in Germany, Mason and other chemists used a high-speed camera to capture the critical moment that makes an explosion inevitable: a liquid drop of sodium-potassium alloy shooting spikes into the water, dramatically increasing the reactive interface. They also developed a computer simulation to model this event, showing it is best explained by a Coulomb explosion.

The Youtube video chronicles the evolution the experimental apparatuses underwent over time, pursuant to keeping the explosions safe, contained, reliable, and visible.

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