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Comment Bleh (Score 3, Insightful) 128

by m.dillon (#47130491) Attached to: Ford's Bringing Adaptive Steering To the Masses

Sounds idiotic to me. Non-linear steering is great, but any sort of dynamic/adaptive steering that changes according to conditions is stupid beyond belief and will cause an endless stream of accidents because the driver can no longer predict how the car will react to similar steering motions.

-Matt

Comment Awesome (Score 4, Interesting) 164

Reading Rainbow was a wonderful show on PBS that ran for a long long time, and LeVar Burton has been involved with it and with kids education for decades (even before playing his role in Star Trek TNG). Even though it has reached its goal, I'm throwing in a hundred or two myself. My opinion: Anything donated will be well spent, LeVar Burton is just that type of person, who you know you can depend on.

-Matt

Comment Stupidity != righteous anger (Score 1, Insightful) 221

It's kinda hard to have any sympathy when only an idiot connects these 'smart' consumer devices to the internet in the first place. These devices do not have any functionality that I can't already get simply using a Roku or AppleTV or Airplay or Chromecast.

I have a bunch of these... VCRs, Receivers (for the integrated Pandora), etc. I leave them all disconnected from the internet, and so should everyone.

Having just one media device be connected to the internet is kinda like picking your poison, but at least you have a choice. And something like a Roku or an AppleTV is going to be far, *far* more secure than the crap you find in VCRs and SmartTVs and other devices of that ilk.

-Matt

Comment Re:didn't they decline H264 on Windows a while ago (Score 1) 403

I'm too lazy to find the source right now, but my recollection was that Mozilla was first to make a stance against H.264 (in order to not partition the Linux out), prior all those stories of Google dropping support for H.264 in Chrome (which I guess they never did, after all).

Comment Re:"OpenSSL C dialect" (Score 5, Informative) 164

by ConstantineM (#47028681) Attached to: 30-Day Status Update On LibreSSL

OpenSSL has basically wrote their own version of libc, and all the functions they've introduced differ is some very subtle ways from what appears in libc used by the rest of the world.

Rest assured, OpenBSD is no stranger to portable code. Just take a look at the number of platforms they support -- http://www.openbsd.org/plat.ht....

Submission + - Bob Beck gives a 30-day status update on LibreSSL at BSDCan in Ottawa

Submitted by ConstantineM
ConstantineM writes: Bob Beck — OpenBSD, OpenSSH and LibreSSL developer and the director of Alberta-based non-profit OpenBSD Foundation — gave a talk earlier today at BSDCan 2014 in Ottawa, discussing and illustrating the OpenSSL problems that have led to the creation of a big fork of OpenSSL that is still API-compatible with the original, providing for a drop-in replacement, without the #ifdef spaghetti and without its own "OpenSSL C" dialect.

Bob is claiming that the Maryland-incorporated OpenSSL Foundation is nothing but a for-profit front for FIPS consulting gigs, and that noone at OpenSSL is actually interested in maintaining OpenSSL, but merely adding more and more features, with the existing bugs rotting in bug-tracking for a staggering 4 years (CVE-2010-5298 has been independently re-discovered by the OpenBSD team after having been quietly reported in OpenSSL's RT some 4 years prior). Bob reports that the bug-tracking system abandoned by OpenSSL has actually been very useful to the OpenBSD developers at finding and fixing even more of OpenSSL bugs in downstream LibreSSL, which still remain unfixed in upstream OpenSSL. It is revealed that a lot of crude cleaning has already been completed, and the process is still ongoing, but some new ciphers already saw their addition to LibreSSL — RFC 5639 EC Brainpool, ChaCha20, Poly1305, FRP256v1, and some derivatives based on the above, like ChaCha20-Poly1305 AEAD EVP from Adam Langley's Chromium OpenSSL patchset.

To conclude, Bob warns against portable LibreSSL knockoffs, and asks the community for Funding Commitment — Linux Foundation is turning a blind eye to LibreSSL, and instead is only committed to funding OpenSSL directly, despite the apparent lack of security-oriented direction within the OpenSSL project upstream. Funding can be directed to the OpenBSD Foundation.

Submission + - LibreSSL Update (openbsd.org)

Submitted by the_B0fh
the_B0fh writes: Bob Beck reports on the progress the OpenBSD team has made on LibreSSL. Some highlights:

Code was horrible. Nobody wanted to touch it. OpenSSL Foundation appears to be a million dollar a year for-profit company doing FIPS consulting. Bugs rot for years in bug tracker. ROP coding function — allows you to jump to any arbitrary address — ROP coder's wet dream! Current third party ports are all insecure. Need funding. Linux Foundation has not committed to support LibreSSL.

Submission + - Robbery Suspect Tracked by GPS and Killed (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Lew Lorton
Lew Lorton writes: Relying on a GPS device placed in a decoy pill bottle, police officers tracked an armed man suspected of robbing a pharmacy on Friday afternoon and fatally shot him during a confrontation on the Upper East Side. When the man was confronted while his car was in a traffic jam, according to police he raised a gun to shoot and an officer shot and killed him.
The pill bottles sit on the pharmacy shelf in a special base; when the bottles are lifted from the base, they begin to emit a signal.
The decoy bottles were developed by Purdue Pharma, which makes OxyContin, a brand of oxycodone,

Submission + - Waterloo WeBike Project (uwaterloo.ca)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A research group at University of Waterloo — ISS4E is planning to use electric bikes to study many different problems facing today's Electric Vehicles (EVs).

Academic studies of EVs are limited by the fact that they are expensive. The idea is to deploy a fleet of sensor-equipped electric bicycles or e-bikes to UW faculty, staff, and students, analyze data collected from them to study the problems of EV range, battery performance, battery life, and battery temperatures (given the recent Tesla fire mishaps)! Given that both EVs and e-bikes use very similar battery technology.

Not only does it go a long way in benefitting EV research, but it also may present in the future, a cost-effective completely off-grid transportation solution.

Submission + - George R R Martin Reveals His Secret Weapon for Writing GOT- Wordstar

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Ryan Reed writes that when most Game of Thrones fans imagine George R.R. Martin writing his epic fantasy novels, they probably picture the author working on a futuristic desktop (or possibly carving his words onto massive stones like the Ten Commandments). But the truth is that Martin works on an outdated DOS machine using Eighties word processor WordStar 4.0, as he revealed during an interview on Conan. "I actually like it," says Martin. "It does everything I want a word processing program to do, and it doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type a lower case letter and it becomes a capital letter. I don't want a capital. If I wanted a capital, I would have typed a capital. I know how to work the shift key." “I actually have two computers," Martin continued. “I have a computer I browse the Internet with and I get my email on, and I do my taxes on. And then I have my writing computer, which is a DOS machine, not connected to the Internet."

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I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

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