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Comment Re:Hopefully (Score 1) 39

by JSG (#44987451) Attached to: Rapid7 Launches Crowdsourced Security Research Project

Stale -Ha!

Here's a snippet from one of the data dumps (telnet is less than 300MB), note the dates. Have a look yourself and you'll get the IP address this belongs to along with many, many others:

(This is a telnet login banner which I've had to clean out somewhat to post here)
Copyright (c) 1998-2007 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. All rights reserved. Without the owner's prior written consent, no decompiling or reverse-engineering shall be allowed.

I was pretty horrified but not too surprised at the contents of just one data dump after a quick look.

Cheers
Jon

Submission + - Scientists create new form of matter from photons (phys.org)

Submitted by wasteoid
wasteoid writes: We are one step closer to Star Trek replicators and holodecks with the advancement achieved by scientists at the Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms. The scientists have managed to coax the photons to bind together to form photonic molecules, a state of matter that was previously only theoretical. Using an ultra-cold version of light refraction, two photons were slowed down sufficiently to cause them to bind together in the ultra-cold media, exiting as a single photon molecule.

Submission + - Big Box? Nissan Note The First-Ever Car You Can 'Buy' On Amazon (thecarconnection.com)

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: You knew the day was coming when they started selling diapers. Amazon is now dipping its toe into car sales by selling a single car: the 2014 Nissan Versa Note. Amazon users hit a real live Versa Note product page, but instead of "Add to cart" you provide your ZIP code so Amazon can connect you with a nearby Nissan dealer. The first 100 Versa Note customers whose car purchases are initiated through Amazon receive $1,000 Amazon gift cards. Best part: Customers who end up actually buying the Note *will* receive them via boxed home delivery. Now, that's a big box.

Submission + - Undiscovered Country of HFT: FPGA JIT Ethernet packet assembly

Submitted by michaelmalak
michaelmalak writes: In a technique that reminds me of the just-in-time torpedo engineering of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, a company called Argon Design has "developed a high performance trading system" that puts an FPGA — and FPGA-based trading algorithms — right in the Ethernet switch. And it isn't just to cut down on switch/computer latency — they actually start assembling and sending out the start of an Ethernet packet simultaneously with receiving and decoding incoming price quotation Ethernet packets, and decide on the fly what to put in the outgoing buy/sell Ethernet packet. They call these techniques "inline parsing" and "pre-emption."

Submission + - RSA devs - Do NOT USE RSA as it may have been backdoored by the NSA (bbc.co.uk) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: RSA, the internet security firm, has warned customers not to use one of its own encryption algorithms after fears it can be unlocked by the US National Security Agency (NSA).
In an advisory note to its developer customers, RSA said that a default algorithm in one of its toolkits could contain a "back door" that would allow the NSA to decrypt encrypted data.
It "strongly recommends" switching to other random number generators.
RSA is reviewing all its products.

- Source (bbc.co.uk)

Submission + - Vietnamese Father and Son Found Living in a Treehouse for 40 Years (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: A father and son who fled their village during the Vietnam War 40 years ago have apparently been discovered living in a treehouse deep in the jungle. They wore loincloths made of bark and used a homemade axe to chop down trees for firewood. They fed on corn that they had grown, plus fruits and cassava roots from the jungle. Inside their treehouse home, five metres in the air, the pair kept a stash of arrows for hunting and knives for killing animals. After they were returned back to rest of civilization by travelers, they had almost completely lost the ability to speak a language. The Vietnamese district authorities have confirmed that the father Ho Van Thanh once lived a normal life with his family in the commune’s Tra Kem hamlet. They suggested that he was probably driven by shock when he took his young son and ran into the jungle after the mine explosion wiped out the rest of their family.

Comment Re:You never know (Score 1) 41

by JSG (#44836067) Attached to: The Ig Nobels Are Tonight

Do you actually remember what search engines looked like before Google came on the scene?

They were awful and ad ridden (cf the modern Google - it's rather subtle) and shallow. I moved my home page away from Altavista pretty smartish when I heard of them.

Fault them all you like but G's founders filled a niche nicely with good (enough) maths/algorithms and a canny eye for user requirements and as it turns out by results: good business sense.

They do evil by default nowadays but they are still pretty good at the basic premise - search.

AC - I see you as a kid until you uncloak - twat.

Cheers
Jon

Comment Where are the nerds (Score 3, Funny) 41

by JSG (#44835933) Attached to: The Ig Nobels Are Tonight

This is real news for nerds.

I note that the story above about the NSA inventing a new magnifying glass and can now read text down to 2 point or something has shit loads of comments but this one has very few.

Come on you buggers, comment here where it really counts.

Oh - you can't hear me no matter how hard I tap the keys ...... bugger

Cheers
Jon

Submission + - When you can scan the entire Internet in under an hour (zmap.io)

Submitted by dstates
dstates writes: A team of researchers at the University of Michigan has realeased Zmap, a tool that allows an ordinary server to scan every address on the Internet in just 45 minutes. This is a task that used to take months, but now is accessible to anyone with a fast internet connection. In their announcement Friday, at the Usenix security conference in Washington they provide interesting examples tracking HTTPS deployment over time, the effects of Hurricane Sandy on Internet infrastructure, but also rapid identification of vulnerable hosts for security exploits. As Washington Post Blog discussing the work shows examples of the rate with which of computers on the Internet have been patched to fix Universal Plug and Play, “Debian weak key” and “factorable RSA keys” vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, in each case it takes years to deploy patches and in the case of UPnP devices, they found 2.56 million (16.7 percent) devices on the Internet and not yet upgraded years after the vulnerability had been described. Zero day exploits just became zero hour.

Submission + - The Science of 12-Step Programs

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Since the inception of Alcoholics Anonymous — the progenitor of 12-step programs — science has sometimes been at odds with the notion that laypeople can cure themselves because the numerous spiritual references that go with the 12-step program puts A.A. on "the fringe" in the minds of many scientists. But there is an interesting read at National Geographic where Jarret Liotta writes that new research shows that the success of the 12-step approach may ultimately be explained through medical science and psychology. According to Marvin Seppala, chief medical officer at Hazelden and sober 37 years, attending 12-step meetings does more than give an addict warm, fuzzy feelings. The unconscious neurological pull of addiction undermines healthy survival drives, causing individuals to make disastrous choices, he says. "People will regularly risk their lives—risk everything—to continue use of a substance." Addicts don't want to engage in these behaviors, but they can't control themselves. "The only way to truly treat it is with something more powerful," like the 12 steps, that can change patterns in the brain. Philip Flores, author of Addiction as an Attachment Disorder, says the human need for social interaction is a physiological one, linked to the well-being of the nervous system. When someone becomes addicted, Flores says, mechanisms for healthy attachment are "hijacked," resulting in dependence on addictive substances or behaviors. Some believe that addicts, even before their disease kicks in, struggle with knowing how to form emotional bonds that connect them to other people. Co-occurring disorders, such as depression and anxiety, make it even harder to build those essential emotional attachments. "We, as social mammals, cannot regulate our central nervous systems by ourselves," Flores says. "We need other people to do that."

Submission + - There is a Fly in My Tweet (rochester.edu)

Submitted by kraken9
kraken9 writes: New research shows that online chatter can help you avoid food poisoning. Leveraging a statistical language model of Twitter users’ online communication, nEmesis finds individuals who are likely suffering from a foodborne illness. People’s visits to restaurants are modeled by matching GPS data embedded in the messages with restaurant addresses. As a result, each venue is assigned a health score based on the proportion of customers that fell ill shortly after visiting it. The paper shows that this score correlates with the ofcial inspection data from the Department of Health, and argues that 'nEmesis offers an inexpensive way to enhance current methods to monitor food safety (e.g., adaptive inspections) and identify potentially problematic venues in near-real time.' Similar techniques have been used before to predict the spread of flu from GPS-tagged social data.

Comment Re:No need for a terabyte (Score 1) 147

by JSG (#44525401) Attached to: Memory Wars May Herald Mobile Devices With Terabytes of Capacity

I seem to recall rather a lot of floppies making up GEOS - yes the "desktop" might have appeared eventually from one but it was a disc swapping frenzie I seem to recall to actually do anything.

As you say though - they weren't as spacious as those fancy new 1.44MB jobbies.

LOAF on the other hand got rather a lot out of a 1.44MB floppy.

Cheers
Jon

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