We could be close to this with the MinIon sequencer from Oxford Nanopore.

Less than $1000, disposable and about the size of a USB stick. Connect it to your computer, drop a sample into a hole in the top and a sequence file starts building up on your hard drive.

It's due to be released in a couple of months when we'll see if this is as good as it sounds.

I suspect Blackawton P.S (the first author) is Blackawton Primary School rather than a person.

If you watch the video in the Supplemental data you'll see that the referee comments relate to the referees who reviewed a funding application for the project which was rejected, rather than the reviewers of the final paper.

Which is well and good but unless you have a certificate authority which only ever grants certificates to people who are not part of the ISP or the music industry, it's more or less useless for this purpose.

I don't see how that follows at all. The point about a signing authority is that as long as you trust the authority then you can check that a given site certificate really belongs to that site. It's not sufficient to substitute another site's certificate, even if it's one signed by the same authority.

To compromise the system then CertsRUs would have to issue a signed certificate for thepriatebay.org to the RIAA. Whilst the tinfoil hat bridge may choose to believe that this might happen I can't see it. As soon as this was discovered (and the signatures from the RIAA certificate for thepiratebay.org and the real cert for that site would differ, so they would be disovered) then CertsRUs would rapidly be removed from the list of trusted signing authorities for a vast chunk of the internet, at which point their business goes down a hole.

If you RTFA, you'll see that the reason that they wanted to do the no password for signed packages was because if you always have to type in your password to install something, after awhile you just get in the habit of typing in your password whenever that little window pops up.

Actually the reason for this is that there is a more fundamental rewrite of the DeviceKit and PackageKit systems in Fedora underway which will eventually allow more flexible allocation of system admin privileges to different classes of user. This is a good thing.

However - when F12 was released this rewrite was only partially complete. The backend systems were pretty much all in place but the front end which allows the editing of rules and the assignment of roles had not been written. Fedora was therefore shipped with a default set of rules.

Under the new system the previous behaviour of asking for the root password, but allowing the option to not be asked for it again in future had been removed (for fear of creating a 'make it up as you go along' security policy). The decision therefore had to be made to either allow console (not remote) users to install signed packages with no authentication required, or to require the root password for every install. The developers chose the first option. This has now been changed to the second option.

I'm kind of ambivalent about the light this sheds on Fedora. It's a bad thing to have happened, but it was sorted out quickly and there is now much discussion about setting up a firmer security policy so this won't happen again. Mistakes happen, but as long as they are spotted and corrected then we should all just move along.

It depends when you last jailbroke your iPhone. I did a jailbreak early on. I installed openSSH and changed the default password. I then found out that the phone entered an infinite loop of restarting the home screen and had to be forcibly restored.

The problem appears to be that the passwd binary on the phone is (deliberately?) broken so it generates incorrect hashes for the password entered. If you actually want to change your password then you need to jump through some hoops to change it without using the usual passwd command.