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Hardware Hacking

Home-Built Turing Machine 123

Posted by Soulskill
from the i'll-order-a-dozen dept.
stronghawk writes "The creator of the Nickel-O-Matic is back at it and has now built a Turing Machine from a Parallax Propeller chip-based controller, motors, a dry-erase marker and a non-infinite supply of shiny 35mm leader film. From his FAQ: 'While thinking about Turing machines I found that no one had ever actually built one, at least not one that looked like Turing's original concept (if someone does know of one, please let me know). There have been a few other physical Turing machines like the Logo of Doom, but none were immediately recognizable as Turing machines. As I am always looking for a new challenge, I set out to build what you see here.'"

Apple Orders 10 Million Tablets? 221

Posted by ScuttleMonkey
from the pricepoint-better-be-right dept.
Arvisp writes "According to a blog post by former Google China president Kai-Fu Lee, Apple plans to produce nearly 10 million tablets in the still-unannounced product's first year. If Lee's blog post is to be believed, Apple plans to sell nearly twice as many tablets as it did iPhones in the product's first year."
Security

Null-Prefix SSL Certificate For PayPal Released 351

Posted by kdawson
from the don't-mess-with-mister-inbetween dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Nine weeks after Moxie Marlinspike presented at Defcon 17, null-prefix certificates that exploit the SSL certificate vulnerability are beginning to appear. Yesterday, someone posted a null-prefix certificate for www.paypal.com on the full-disclosure mailing list. In conjunction with sslsniff, this certificate can be used to intercept communication to PayPal from all clients using the Windows Crypto API, for which a patch is still not available. This includes IE, Chrome, and Safari on Windows. What's worse, because of the OCSP attack that Moxie also presented at Defcon, this certificate cannot be revoked." Update: 10/06 23:19 GMT by KD: Now it seems that PayPal has suspended Marlinspike's account.
Science

New Graphical Representation of the Periodic Table 140

Posted by kdawson
from the thulium-and-thalium dept.
KentuckyFC writes "The great power of Mendeleev's periodic table was that it allowed him to predict the properties of undiscovered elements. But can this arrangement be improved? Two new envisionings of the periodic table attempt to do just that. The first uses a new graphical representation that shows the relative sizes of atoms as well as their groups and periods. The other uses the same kind of group theoretical approach that particle physicists developed to classify particles by their symmetries (abstract). That helped particle physicists predict the existence of new particles, but may have limited utility for chemists who seem to have discovered (or predicted) all of the elements they need already."
Data Storage

Google Finds DRAM Errors More Common Than Believed 333

Posted by kdawson
from the forget-me-not dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A Google study of DRAM errors in their data centers found that they are hundreds to thousands of times more common than has been previously believed. Hard errors may be the most common failure type. The DIMMs themselves appear to be of good quality, and bad mobo design may be the biggest problem." Here is the study (PDF), which Google engineers published with a researcher from the University of Toronto.
Encryption

Thawte Will End "Web of Trust" On November 16 127

Posted by kdawson
from the fencing-of-the-commons dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Thawte is ending their Web of Trust, including their free Personal Email Certificates, in less than 2 weeks' time. This hasn't been picked up by the media yet. Seems to me a lot of people, including myself, are hurt by this." Thawte is offering a 1-year free VeriSign cert to those holding valid Personal Email Certificates; after that you pay.

Comment: You're doing it wrong (Score 1) 156

by InternetVoting (#28153729) Attached to: Voting Drops 83 Percent In All-Digital Election
The people running this election missed the point and thus all the benefits of internet voting. The name of the game is turnout. For that you need to give the electorate the widest array of simple options. First, there wasn't much simple about the solution provided by the UK\Australian company (Everyone Counts) that supplied the internet voting software. The voting system, even with the drastically low turnout was overwhelmed and slow response times and timeouts. Further the system used a java applet as a security solution, which just adds to the incompatibility problems.

The largest folly with this election though is that they forced internet voting on the electorate. Internet voting is about giving people additional options, not restricting them. The bottom line is crap technology and poor decisions can kill any project.
The Internet

Is Internet voting the future?->

Submitted by
InternetVoting
InternetVoting writes "The first ballots have already been cast in the first public Internet election in US history. The NYC Department of Education has launched a completely online electoral process for its itywide and Community Education Council Elections (school boards). Each candidate applied via the Internet and voters will vote online through April 22nd. This is a significant leap forward for NY State who hasn't been known for its election technology since the turn of the century. Nearly 1 million parents will be eligible to vote in this election and they will be able to do so in 9 languages. From the story:

Internet voting has been a long time coming. Today the United States takes a significant step away from dealing with long lines, paper ballot shortages, missing ballots, pollworker shortages and a host of other Election Day problems.

The NYC Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein estimates the Internet election will cost $500,000, or 60 percent less than the $1.3 million spent in 2007. The Internet voting engine is supplied by Washington, D.C. based voting services firm Election-America...New York is not alone in its push for electoral modernization. Arizona and Washington State both have online voter registration. Alabama recently had Internet voting legislation pass out of the House committee and is up for a full vote. Internet voting bills have been introduced in 9 states already this year."
Link to Original Source

The debate rages on: Is PL/I Bachtrian or Dromedary?