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Comment: Re:Don't block it, QoS it. (Score 1) 40

by Zocalo (#45741815) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Managing Device-Upgrade Bandwidth Use?
The article doesn't actually mention costs at all, so I don't think that's an issue so much as people soaking up the scarce bandwidth when others are trying use the connection for its primary intended purpose; schoolwork. If it were a problem, then I'd have expected the question to have included asking for advice on caching proxies and such like to save bandwidth. If there's no cap, then QoS would be a good part of a solution for this as it lets you make maximum use of your circuit, while avoiding degrading the experience for people just surfing the web.

+ - Inside Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit->

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes "You may find it mildly creepy that Microsoft has a private police force, but the Digital Crimes Unit has helped real law enforcement do things like disrupt huge botnets. According to Richard Boscovich, assistant general counsel for the Digital Crimes Unit, Microsoft is only able to do all this by relying on the company's existing infrastructure, including its Azure cloud service. The DCU can provision compute time from the cloud as necessary to combat complex threats, he said, and also uses cloud services to share information with law enforcement agencies quickly."
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+ - Meteorologists Solve the Last Great Mystery of Rain->

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes "Rain is so closely studied that it’s easy to imagine that it long ago gave up its secrets to science. In fact, rain drops still offer one great mystery: the droplets grow in clouds much more rapidly than anyone can explain. Meteorologists know the general details of course. Water vapour cools as it rises and condenses on tiny aerosol particles to form a fine mist of droplets about 1 micrometre in diameter. These drops are too small and light to fall as rain and have to grow to at least 50 micrometres before gravity takes over. This takes about 15 minutes or so, even though the rate of condensation is more or less matched by the rate of evaporation and the density of this mist is too low for the droplets to grow by colliding and coalescing. Indeed, the best theoretical models suggest that this kind of growth ought to take hours not minutes. Now one group of researchers say the fact that turbulence consists of many tiny vortices explains the difference. As the tiny droplets get swept along in these eddies, centripetal forces push them to the boundaries of the vortices where they become trapped. It's here that the density of the droplets becomes high enough for them to grow rapidly by coalescing, finally explaining the last great mystery of rain."
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+ - Fedora 20 upgrade broken->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Upgrading to Fedora 20, the version of Red Hat's community Linux distribution released this week, from version 19, at least, is broken. The problem lies with the version of FedUp (Fedora Upgrader) that is in version 19 — version 0.7. When one issues the necessary upgrade command using this version, the packages get downloaded but after reboot, when the upgrade is supposed to take place, the process terminates. Fortunately, one's existing installation is not gutted and one can get back into that and try again. One needs to update to FedUp 0.8 and the re-run the upgrade command."
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+ - Saab wins Brazil jet deal after NSA spying sours Boeing bid-> 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Brazil awarded a $4.5 billion contract to Saab AB on Wednesday to replace its aging fleet of fighter jets, a surprise coup for the Swedish company after news of U.S. spying on Brazilians helped derail Boeing's chances for the deal.

The contract, negotiated over the course of three presidencies, will supply Brazil's air force with 36 new Gripen NG fighters by 2020. Aside from the cost of the jets themselves, the agreement is expected to generate billions of additional dollars in future supply and service contracts.

The timing of the announcement, after more than a decade of off-and-on negotiations, appeared to catch the companies involved by surprise. Even Juniti Saito, Brazil's top air force commander, said on Wednesday that he only heard of the decision a day earlier in a meeting with President Dilma Rousseff.

Until earlier this year, Boeing's F/A-18 Super Hornet had been considered the front runner. But revelations of spying by the U.S. National Security Agency in Brazil, including personal communication by Rousseff, led Brazil to believe it could not trust a U.S. company.

Nice work Mr President, members of Congress, FISA court members and General Alexander. You've done the Stasi proud."
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+ - Scientists extract RSA key from GnuPG using sound of CPU->

Submitted by kthreadd
kthreadd writes "In their research paper titled RSA Key Extraction via Low-Bandwidth Acoustic Cryptanalysis Daniel Genkin, Adi Shamir and Eran Tromer et. all. present a method for extracting decryption keys from the GnuPG security suite using an interesting side-channel attack. By analysing the acoustic sound made by the CPU they were able to extract a 4096 bit RSA key in about an hour. A modern mobile phone placed next to the computer is sufficient to carry out the attack, but up to four meters have been successfully tested using specially designed microphones."
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+ - Nmap team releases 5 gigapixel favicon map 1

Submitted by iago-vL
iago-vL writes "From the creators of Nmap comes the largest survey of this its kind ever performed: the favicon.ico files of over a million Web sites were scanned, compiled, and sorted to create a 5 gigapixel image, blowing their 2010 survey out of the water! It's searchable, zoomable, and incredibly fun to play with! Can you find Slashdot without cheating? (Hint: it's near Facebook)"

+ - Apple Pushes Developers to iOS 7

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Chuong Nguyen reports that Apple is forcing developers to adopt iOS 7's visual UI for their apps and has advised iOS developers that all apps submitted after February 1, 2014 must be optimized for iOS 7 and built using Xcode 5 in a move that will remove visual fragmentation in the way apps look and feel for the iOS operating system. "It’s likely that Apple is more anxious than ever for developers to update their apps to fit in visually and mechanically with iOS 7, as it’s the largest change in the history of Apple’s mobile software," says Matthew Panzarino. "iOS 7 introduced a much more complex physical language while stripping out many of the visual cues that developers had relied on to instruct users. For better or worse, this has created a new aesthetic that many un-updated apps did not reflect." Most app developers have been building apps optimized towards iOS 7 since Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference in June 2013. Apple has been on a push over the past couple of years to encourage developers to support the latest editions of its OS faster than ever. To do this, it’s made a habit of pointing out the adoption rates of new versions of iOS, which are extremely high. Nearly every event mentions iOS 7 adoption, which now tops 76% of all iOS users, and Apple now publishes current statistics on a page on its site. In order to optimize apps for the new operating system, they must be built with the latest version of Xcode 5 which includes 64-bit support and access to new features like backgrounding APIs."

+ - Academics should not remain silent on hacking->

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes "The Guardian's technology editor, Charles Arthur, asks in an opinion piece in Nature why researchers have remained largely silent in the wake of the revelation that the US National Institute of Standards and Technology's standard for random numbers used for cryptography had been weakened by the NSA:
"The nature of the subversions sounds abstruse: the random-number generator, the 'Dual EC DRBG' standard, had been hacked by the NSA and the UK's GCHQ so that its output would not be as random as it should have been. That might not sound like much, but if you are trying to break an encrypted message, the knowledge that it is hundreds or thousands of times weaker than advertised is a great encouragement."
Arthur attributes the silence of UK academics, at least, to pressure from GCHQ. He goes on to say:
"For those who do care, White and Matthew Green, who teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, have embarked on an ambitious effort to clean up the mess — one that needs help.
They have created a non-profit organization called OpenAudit.org, which aims to recruit experts to provide technical assistance for security projects in the public interest, especially open-source security software.""
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+ - New modulation scheme said to be 'breakthrough' in network performance->

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes "A startup plans to demonstrate next month at CES a new digital modulation scheme that promises to dramatically boost bandwidth, capacity, and range, with less power and less distortion, on both wireless and wired networks. MagnaCom, a privately held company based in Israel, now has more than 70 global patent applications, and 15 issued patents in the U.S., for what it calls and has trademarked Wave Modulation (or WAM), which is designed to replace the long-dominant quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) used in almost every wired or wireless product today on cellular, microwave radio, Wi-Fi, satellite and cable TV, and optical fiber networks. The vendor, which has released few specifics about WAM, promises extravagant benefits: up to 10 decibels of additional gain compared to the most advanced QAM schemes today; up to 50% less power; up to 400% more distance; up to 50% spectrum savings."
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+ - Chinese Ban Causes Bitcoin Value to Crash 50%->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "China's ban on its financial institutions handling bitcoin causes world's largest exchange to cease trading, halving the value of the currency from $1,000 to less than $500 in a matter of days.

The country's central bank took a hard line on bitcoin in early December when it banned financial institutions from handling the decentralised crypto-currency, and as a result BTC China, the world's largest bitcoin exchange, has stopped accepting deposits from its users."
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+ - Amazon's Cloud Computing Business Completely Unaffected by Snowden Revelations->

Submitted by DavidGilbert99
DavidGilbert99 writes "There have been widespread reports of the cloud computing industry being negatively impacted by the revelations made by Edward Snowden. This week however, Amazon has come out stating that it has seen no impact whatsoever on its cloud computing business, with its customers happy to continue to use its AWS platform to do their business, according to David Gilbert at IBTimes UK who spoke to the company's UK and Ireland chief Iain Gavin."
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+ - Ted Nelson's Passionate Eulogy for Douglas Engelbart

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes "Speaking at a memorial event for the legendary Douglas Engelbart at the Computer History Museum, Ted Nelson was pissed-with-a-capital-P. Nelson in effect gave two powerful eulogies — one for his friend Dr. Engelbart, who left this Earth in July, and a second for Engelbart's career, which essentially began "dying" four decades earlier due to short-sighted organizations' failure to fund the brilliant guy who gave the world The Mother of All Demos in 1968. "Let us never forget that Doug Engelbart was dumped by ARPA," Nelson laments. "Doug Engelbart was dumped by SRI, Doug Engelbart was snubbed by Xerox PARC, and for the rest of his working life he had no chance to take us further...Just as we can only guess what John Kennedy might have done, we can only guess what Doug Engelbart might have done had he not been cut down in his prime." It's a very moving and passionate speech (despite some oddly inappropriate audience laughter). And, alas, a very sad one in a world that throws $4 billion at the likes of Snapchat and Pinterest."

+ - Wall Street's War on Instant Messaging Heats Up->

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes "What would Wall Street look like if instant messaging tools like Bloomberg didn't exist? Likely, the banking world would appear a lot less scandalous. Online chat tools, once viewed as a simple convenience for busy bankers, have morphed into instruments for collusion, insider trading and embarrassing boy's club banter. Banks have finally had enough.

After conducting reviews, J.P. Morgan and Deutsche Bank have joined UBS in banning multi-dealer online chat rooms, notably used by bankers who colluded to rig Libor interest rates and foreign exchange markets. A J.P. Morgan source told Reuters that the bank is also banning the use of IM tools for social bilateral purposes, eliminating the potential for "inappropriate" remarks to be made between co-workers. External chats between staff and clients will continue to be permitted, however.

For J.P. Morgan, the move comes just weeks after Chief Executive Jamie Dimon issued a stern warning, telling employees to be "vigilant" about what they post online. "Don't exagerate, don't ruminate, don't bulls**t," Dimon said at the time.

If IM bans touch other Wall Street banks, which they are likely to, terminal vendors like Bloomberg could lose their market dominance, as messaging is their most popular feature. Seeing the writing on the wall, Bloomberg, in a bit of good timing, announcedon Tuesday that it is rolling out a new single-screen feature that allows compliance staffs to limit user access and monitor messages in real-time. Ben Macdonald, head of product at Bloomberg, acknowledged that the move was, in part, due to worries that regulators may step in and restrict IM use themselves. Soon, shady bankers will need to brag about their exploits over the phone. Tough break."
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