Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - Moxie Marlinspike: GPG Has Run Its Course (thoughtcrime.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Security researcher Moxie Marlinspike has an interesting post about the state of GPG-encrypted communications. After using GPG for much of its lifetime, he says he now dreads getting a GPG-encrypted email in his inbox. "Instead of developing opinionated software with a simple interface, GPG was written to be as powerful and flexible as possible. It’s up to the user whether the underlying cipher is SERPENT or IDEA or TwoFish. The GnuPG man page is over sixteen thousand words long; for comparison, the novel Fahrenheit 451 is only 40k words. Worse, it turns out that nobody else found all this stuff to be fascinating. Even though GPG has been around for almost 20 years, there are only ~50,000 keys in the “strong set,” and less than 4 million keys have ever been published to the SKS keyserver pool ever. By today’s standards, that’s a shockingly small user base for a month of activity, much less 20 years." Marlinspike concludes, "I think of GPG as a glorious experiment that has run its course. ... GPG isn't the thing that’s going to take us to ubiquitous end to end encryption, and if it were, it’d be kind of a shame to finally get there with 1990’s cryptography."

Submission + - Intel Moving Forward With 10nm, Switching Away From Silicon For 7nm (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Intel has begun talking about its plans for future CPU architectures. The company is already working on a 10nm manufacturing process, and expects the first such chips to be ready by early 2017. Beyond that, things are getting difficult. Intel says it will need to move away from silicon when it develops a 7nm process. "The most likely replacement for silicon is a III-V semiconductor such as indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs), though Intel hasn't provided any specific details yet." Even the current 14nm chips they're making ran into unexpected difficulties. "While Intel didn't provide any specifics, we strongly suspect that we're looking at the arrival of transistors based on III-V semiconductors. III-V semiconductors have higher electron mobility than silicon, which means that they can be fashioned into smaller and faster (as in higher switching speed) transistors."

Submission + - Question:Suggestions for a UPS with a 20 year battery life expectancy? 1

Submitted by mmiscool
mmiscool writes: I have a project that requires UPS battery backups for several piece of equipment that will be nearly inaccessible for long periods of time. The power will go out an estimated 4 time per year and be off for a day or so. Any one have any ideas for a product that will suit these needs?

Submission + - What If We Lost the Sky?

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Anna North writes in the NYT that a report released last week by the National Research Council calls for research into reversing climate change through a process called albedo modification: reflecting sunlight away from earth by, for instance, spraying aerosols into the atmosphere. But such a process could, some say, change the appearance of the sky — and that in turn could affect everything from our physical health to the way we see ourselves. “You’d get whiter skies. People wouldn’t have blue skies anymore.” says Alan Robock.“Astronomers wouldn’t be happy, because you’d have a cloud up there permanently. It’d be hard to see the Milky Way anymore.”

According to Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at the University of California, losing the night sky would have big consequences. “When you go outside, and you walk in a beautiful setting, and you just feel not only uplifted but you just feel stronger. There’s clearly a neurophysiological basis for that," says Keltner adding that looking up at a starry sky provides “almost a prototypical awe experience,” an opportunity to feel “that you are small and modest and part of something vast.” If we lose the night sky “we lose something precious and sacred.” “We’re finding in our lab that the experience of awe gets you to feel connected to something larger than yourself, see the humanity in other people,” says Paul K. Piff. “In many ways it’s kind of an antidote to narcissism.” And the sky is one of the few sources of that experience that’s available to almost everybody: “Not everyone has access to the ocean or giant trees, or the Grand Canyon, but we certainly all live beneath the night sky.”

Alan Robock says one possible upside of adding aerosols could be beautiful red and yellow sunsets as “the yellow and red colors reflect off the bottom of this cloud.” Robock recommends more research into albedo modification: “If people ever are tempted to do this, I want them to have a lot of information about what the potential benefits and risks would be so they can make an informed decision. Dr. Abdalati says that deploying something like albedo modification is a last-ditch effort adding that “we’ve gotten ourselves into a climate mess. The fact that we’re even talking about these kinds of things is indicative of that.”

Comment Re:Seiki +2 (Score 1) 330

by Wolfrider (#49064137) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Affordable Large HD/UHD/4K "Stupid" Screens?

> If I had to find downsides it would be no "discrete code" to switch to a particular input

--You might be able to get around this with an HDMI splitter.

http://www.amazon.com/LB1-High...

--This is the one I bought, but it's 3-input HDMI:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...

--It works perfectly, autoswitches even when not plugged into a power strip.

Submission + - How the New York Times Gets Made - With and Without Dead Trees

Submitted by schnell
schnell writes: Popular Mechanics has an in-depth profile detailing how the US paper of record, the New York Times, gets produced on a daily basis, from the newsroom conferences to the details of running the printing presses. Interesting tidbits include the Times's R&D lab that is charged with thinking 3-5 years down the road, and develops projects regardless of their profitability (like the first Google Glass newspaper app); how the newspaper offers its reporters classes on why and "how to tweet;" and how the paper's new focus on its digital future has led it to label not just reporters but also developers, graphic designers and video editors as among its 1,300-strong team of "journalists."

Submission + - Removing libsystemd0 from a live-running Debian system (lkcl.net) 1

Submitted by lkcl
lkcl writes: The introduction of systemd has unilaterally created a polarisation of the GNU/Linux community that is remarkably similar to the monopolistic power position wielded by Microsoft in the late 1990s. Choices were stark: use Windows (with SMB/CIFS Services), or use UNIX (with NFS and NIS). Only the introduction of fully-compatible reverse-engineered NT Domains services corrected the situation. Instructions on how to remove systemd include dire warnings that "all dependent packages will be removed", rendering a normal Debian Desktop system flat-out impossible to achieve. It was therefore necessary to demonstrate that it is actually possible to run a Debian Desktop GUI system (albeit an unusual one: fvwm) with libsystemd0 removed. The reason for doing so: it doesn't matter how good systemd is believed to be or in fact actually is: the reason for removing it is, apart from the alarm at how extensive systemd is becoming (including interfering with firewall rules), it's the way that it's been introduced in a blatantly cavalier fashion as a polarised all-or-nothing option, forcing people to consider abandoning the GNU/Linux of their choice and to seriously consider using FreeBSD or any other distro that properly respects the Software Freedom principle of the right to choose what software to run. We aren't all "good at coding", or paid to work on Software Libre: that means that those people who are need to be much more responsible, and to start — finally — to listen to what people are saying. Developing a thick skin is a good way to abdicate responsibility and, as a result, place people into untenable positions.

Submission + - US Military Soon Able to Copy & 3D Print Exact Replicas of Bones & Limbs (3dprint.com)

Submitted by ErnieKey
ErnieKey writes: The US military is working with technology that will allow them to create exact virtual replicas of their soldiers. Then in case of an injury, these replicas, which are created using x-rays, MRI and Ultrasound technology, will be able to be restored for surgeons to 3D print both exact medical models for rebuilding the injured patient's body and even 3D print exact replica implants. Could we all one day soon have virtual backups of ourselves that we can access and have new body parts 3D printed on demand? It appears as though we are getting closer.

Submission + - VLC Acquiring Lots of New Features

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Two weekends ago an update on the VLC media player was shared during a presentation in Brussels at FOSDEM. Lead developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf covered VLC's continued vibrant development and features that are coming for VLC 2.2 along with VLC 3.0. VLC 2.2.0 will feature automatic, GPU-accelerated video rotation support, extension improvements, resume handling, support for new codecs/formats and rewrites to some of the existing formats, VDPAU GPU zero-copy support, x265 encoder support, etc. Further out is VLC 3.0.0, which is planned to have Wayland support, GPU zero-copy support for OpenMAX IL, ARIB subtitle support, HEVC / VP9 hardware decoding on Android, a rework of the MP4 and TS demuxers, and browsing improvements. The VLC FOSDEM 2015 presentation is available in PDF form. The VLC Git shortlog can be used to follow the development of the project.

Comment Re:Does It Matter? (Score 1) 288

by Wolfrider (#48976787) Attached to: VirtualBox Development At a Standstill

> The only area where it's let me down in the past was with trying to mess with iPhone firmware (such as for jailbreaking) from a Windows VM on a Linux host...don't know if it was something weird Apple was doing with USB or something else.

--Trust me - you really, REALLY do *NOT* want to be messing with firmware over a virtualized USB connection. It's not sane. Use bare-metal hardware and OS access for that!

--I'm pretty sure my Vmware Workstation VMs can't see my Nexus 7 over virtualized USB for the same reason. You're dealing with virtual hardware, it may be 98-99% comparable to the host but it's not 100%. Stuff like USB drives and printers generally work fine but some devices are different (and may not be properly tested to work over virtual links.)

Submission + - Hells Angels Are Old Pros at Encryption

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Kate Knibbs reports at Gizmodo that the Silk Road trial is now focused on Dread Pirate Roberts' interactions with the Hells Angels, who he allegedly hired to kill a rogue drug vendor. Pretrial materials revealed that the Dread Pirate Roberts encouraged members of the Hells Angels to assassinate a drug dealer named FriendlyChemist, who owed the Hells Angels money. It's not clear whether FriendlyChemist was actually killed (or who killed him, if so) and it hasn't been confirmed that Ross Ulbricht ordered this hit as the vindictive (though polite) Dread Pirate. What we do know is that the self-identifying Hells Angels do not appreciate getting talked down to about encryption best practices. "We are familiar with PGP as we have been using it for years via email linked to our smartphones." reported Sara Jeong who has been reporting on the trial for Forbes. "Of course, in a case that rests on whether a digital identity can be definitively proven, it's not a guarantee that the "Hells Angels" that Dread Pirate Roberts spoke to were even recognized members of the storied crime organization," writes Knibbs. "This could've been a particularly intense catfish. "

Submission + - The end is reportedly near for RadioShack

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi writes: Reports of RadioShack's demise are nothing new, but now it seems like the electronics retailer may be done for good. Bloomberg reports that company is in talks with Sprint to hand over around half of its remaining stores to the wireless company. The rest of RadioShack's locations will close, and those that are included in the deal will be painted yellow and black. This means the shops where most of us purchased parts for a project will cease to exist. Nothing's final, and until the ink is dry, another suitor could swipe up the company and allow it to keep on chuggin' along. RadioShack is facing bankruptcy after years of declining sales, so even if Sprint doesn't agree to buy those stores, a move of some kind is imminent for the company that's been selling tech since 1921.

Slashdot Top Deals

Make sure your code does nothing gracefully.

Close