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Submission + - Obama, Cameron announce 'Cambridge v. Cambridge' cybersecurity competition (scienceblog.com)

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)

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

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 Pope Francis is pissing all over MY religion ! (Score 1) 894

It might sound fine to you but it's definitely not fine with me. By saying that one ought not to insult a religion, pope Francis denies me the right to practice my own religion, Discordianism, for which blaspheme, apostasy and heresy are actual religious duties.

He's denying me the right to practice my religion, and basically insults my most sacred beliefs, while denying everyone the right to insult religions in general. What an hypocrite.

So, yes, shupt the fuck up Francis, and go fuck your mother.

Comment Biased Institutions FTW (Score 5, Insightful) 784

"I think what CPS considered neglect, we felt was an essential part of growing up and maturing," says Alexander. "We feel we're being bullied into a point of view about child-rearing that we strongly disagree with."

The "child protection" services have all the apparent responsibilities of caring, without having to pay the price for the efforts they demand. That's why they are intrinsically biased in favor of perpertually inflating the needs of childs and the duties of caretakers... to the point of ridiculous extremes.

Comment Study debunks nothing at all, move along (Score 4, Interesting) 19

The study focuses solely on siliceous scoria droplets, says they were made from local rock in high temperature but conventional fires. Well, that's great to know, but the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis has agreed on that all along anyway. Those scoria were indeed local and made in fires - like the vast fires that spread everywhere after the airburst. The best evidence for the very high temperature and pressure associated with impact is not the siliceous scoria droplets, but the hexagonal-structure nanodiamonds (lonsdaleite) found all over the large zone sampled: http://test.scripts.psu.edu/de...

Sci-Fi

HOA Orders TARDIS Removed From In Front of Parrish Home 320

An anonymous reader writes A Florida couple learned that they are much bigger fans of Doctor Who than their homeowner association, after receiving a notice to remove the TARDIS from their driveway. Leann Moder and her husband David were given 15 days to get rid of the big blue box. From the article: "It was built by Moder's father as a wedding set piece, and she and her husband, David, were married in front of it. 'My husband mentioned, "Do you want to do a Doctor Who themed wedding?"' Moder said. 'That could be fun.' Since then, their TARDIS has been used at sci-fi conventions and parties, and was even the focus of a Halloween haunt the Moders set up on their driveway in October." The HOA had no comment on their stance on sonic screwdrivers, or the Eye of Harmony.

Comment Re:What other choice is there? (Score 1) 79

This has been my experience too, unfortunately. But, hey, at least your doctor straight-out asked you what tests you wanted. I had to argue with mine just to get to that point.

For most of my life I’ve had episodes of tachycardia, intense nausea+vomiting, severe muscular weakness and dizziness happening seemingly randomly sometimes after physical exertion or exposition to cold. I’ve had an abnormally early puberty with almost absent secondary sexual characteristics. Also, at times my limbs become paralysed, unable to move at all except for breathing and talking, it usually happens after resting.

The crises receded in my 20s when I became prediabetic and grew very fat, and came back with a vengeance after I followed a very low carb diet in my 30s, lost the extra weight and suppressed my HbA1c back to healthy level. In a few of those ‘new and improved’ crises I almost died, so I firmly committed to finding an explanation and possibly a cure. The occasional paralysis also came back.

I went to my GP who prescribed a dozen blood tests, then some more, and then assumed it was all in my head somehow. After more arguing and disproving some of his false assumptions (mostly about my character and reactions to stress) he grudgingly dismissed me to an endocrinologist. I thought I was making progress at last.

The endo swept most of the lab tests aside and just assumed that I was overdosing on vitamin D (which I only had been supplementing in the previous winter months). So I stopped all vitD and saw no improvement on the crises’ front.

I talked about all this to a (rather unorthodox) psychotherapist, in case it really was in my head all along, and this guy suggested instead it might be some rare genetic disease at play. He then asked for a second opinion from a friend of his, a surgeon with a fondness for puzzles, who accused me of either being insane or of lying about my symptoms and lab results – because it all made no sense to him and he had no answer.

I never held the medical profession in any special regard to begin with, to me they’ve always been highly-trained workers with heads full of precious, specific knowledge but with little wisdom to connect it all and make sense of it except in the most common clinical cases. But even if I had special consideration for them, I’d have certainly lost it after all this, because they’ve been right next to useless. All the useful data I got so far came from blood tests I had to pry from them with pointy words, all their proposed treatments failed, all their explanations conflicted with already present evidence. It’s like they have no curiosity at all, and little training in actual science – as in epistemology = the proper way of forming beliefs from objective reality.

To think that there are millions of people like me, all with all kinds of rare diseases that all these doctors know little or nothing about, that the medical profession fails to help in the same way, is rather unnerving.

To this date, and all on my own using the Internet, some dangerous self-experiments and my college training in science, I have finally figured out diet adjustments that really do work for me, preventing the crises and drastically reducing the frequency and severity of the paralysis episodes. It consists of avoiding a long list of food items, and gobbling salt by the gram nearly every day. I’ve had zero crisis since.

The websites that actually helped me: support groups' forums for people with CAH and Addison's disease (neither I have though... mine might be pseudohypoaldosteronism type 1, except it’s unusually mild and with a late onset, and covers only half the symptoms), Wikipedia's trove of pages about steroidogenesis and associated disorders, and several obscure publications on PubMed about specificities of organ-specific aldosterone receptors and the genetics thereof.

At this point the “proper” thing I should do is find a geneticist and confirm the suspicions of having some unclear, maybe unknown, rare disease, or just keep doing my stuff and disregard medical “help”. And the former really looks like a waste of time and money... I've just sent a DNA sample to 23andme as a stab in the dark, I'm waiting on the results now.

Comment Re:Theo de Raadt (Score 1) 299

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

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.

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