The headline on Slashdot is misleading - as the snippet says, locking and unlocking the device will restore the touchscreen. My guess (having worked on capacitive touch systems) is that the touchscreen doesn't properly recalibrate on a sudden temperature change, resulting in loss of touch detection until the touchscreen recalibrates (which happens every time you unlock the phone). This is easily fixed by a software or firmware change, and has a fairly simple workaround in the meantime.

Unlike what most commenters seem to assume, the phone is not suddenly unusable in the cold - just click the power button to lock the phone and click it again to unlock. Takes less than 2 seconds, after which you can go back to scrolling Facebook in the bitter cold.

If anyone's curious, I've dropped the decrypted contents of the "free sample" up on GitHub: https://github.com/nneonneo/eq.... Hopefully this makes analyzing the collection a bit easier. The code's pretty old - 2010-2013 according to timestamps - but it does look like real exploit/implant code from a distance.

Yes, and it's a fair point that most SSDs haven't been around long enough to even measure their long-term stability. SSD technology has also advanced very far in a short period of time - older generation SSDs are probably also much less mature in technology and therefore more prone to failure.

The SSD manufacturers have yet to see all the ways in which their drives can fail under real-world, long term conditions. I expect long term reliability to improve as companies develop a fuller understanding of the failure modes and countermeasures. For example, hard drives added shock (acceleration) sensors after laptops became commonplace - the failures caused by dropping the hard drive were not previously considered a major risk.

Let's work it out. A few years ago, TechReport ran an SSD endurance experiment to figure out how much punishment current-gen SSDs could take before failing. Their test setup essentially involved writing random data at maximum speed for 18 months straight. The results indicated that the worst SSD in their bunch, a Intel's 335 Series, wrote about 700 TB before dying, and the best SSD, a Samsung 840 Pro SSD, went on to 2.4 PB.

Various estimates say you can put between 60-75 hours of HD content on a 500GB drive, so, assuming the largest possible size, that works out to about 8.3 GB/hour. Since you're writing two streams, that's 16.6 GB/hour, or 145 TB per year. For the worst drive in the bunch, that's about 4.8 years of service (right at the upper end of your HDD's service life); for the best drive, it's over 16 years.

Keep in mind that these tests were all run on 250GB drives. Smaller drives have less flash to work with, and have to write over the same flash cells more often. Therefore, if you bought a 1TB drive, you can expect the lifetime to be easily 4x better (more if you're using a more recent drive, such as the Samsung 850 Pro) - 64 years of DVR recording should be more than sufficient.

If it really is only $75-120K to crack SHA1, I propose we start a Kickstarter to gather the funds. Given the estimate of a few months, we'll ship our SHA1 collision well before a lot of other Kickstarter projects ship their products :)

Manual car sensors can also be hacked! Shining bright lights at the windshield, especially in nighttime driving conditions, incapacitates the optical sensor of a manually-driven car. Worse, unlike self-driving cars, manual cars behave erratically or unpredictably in these conditions. Even worse, all cars are equipped with hardware that can generate these bright lights, meaning that any car can attack any other manual car in vision range.

Cars are doomed!

Some folks were asking how this works, so here goes:

newgrp is a UNIX utility that executes a shell with a new group ID (UNIX specification page: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onli...). This requires root permission since it can change the group ID to one outside the current shell's group list (e.g. to any group in the uid's group list). Therefore, newgrp is a setuid root application which launches a shell.

DYLD_PRINT_TO_FILE is a dyld (OS X dynamic linker) environment variable that tells dyld where to print debugging information. Ordinarily, dyld supports a large number of debugging options to facilitate debugging shared libraries and to allow neat tricks like DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES (equivalent to LD_PRELOAD on Linux). When dyld sees this environment variable, it opens a new file descriptor connected to the specified file. Since fds 0,1,2 are already connected to stdin, stdout and stderr, the file is opened as fd 3.

Notably, since newgrp starts as root, the file is opened using root's permissions, even though newgrp later drops privileges to spawn the shell.

Because DYLD_ environment variables can modify a program's behaviour in unexpected ways, they are usually deleted or sanitized prior to running setuid programs (because otherwise an unprivileged attacker could cause a setuid program to misbehave, exactly as in this exploit). Apple clearly forgot to sanitize the new DYLD_PRINT_TO_FILE when shipping Yosemite, opening this particular flaw up.

Finally, the (outer) echo command tells the subshell spawned by newgrp to execute the (inner) echo command, which outputs the string "$(whoami) ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL" into fd 3, which (due to the DYLD_PRINT_TO_FILE variable) is /etc/sudoers. This line tells sudo that *any* account is allowed sudo access, and that no password is required to use sudo.

The subshell then exits (no more commands to run), and the final command "sudo -s" executes. Since sudo no longer requires a password, and all accounts can use sudo, "sudo -s" just immediately opens a root shell without prompting.

Efficiency needs to count programmer time, too. From watching first-year programmers in University struggle with C, to watching seasoned programmers struggle with C, I can assure you that Python wins on programmer efficiency. I've used C longer than I've used Python (~16 years for C, ~13 years for Python), so I am definitely comfortable with both, but I now use Python for virtually all general-purpose programming.

Even when CPU cycles count, I will usually prototype in Python to get all the algorithmic details right before porting to C. Often I won't even port the whole program; a number of my recent projects have had C routines called from Python front-end code (so that the front-end can handle stuff like HTTP requests, text parsing, response formatting and the like).

Finally, libraries like NumPy and Sage are taking Python beyond mere scripting and into the realm of serious scientific programming. It is now possible to write and use complex computer vision algorithms, mathematical algorithms, and heavy-duty number crunching (like MATLAB) in Python, meaning that a good amount of scientific computing is starting to be done with Python instead of more traditional languages like Perl, MATLAB or Java.

Your vbnc was last updated in 2010, and targets Visual Basic .NET 8, which was released with Visual Studio 2005. The VBNC compiler has not had any significant updates since 2011.

Visual Basic .NET is now on version 12. vbnc is horribly behind, and it does not appear to be actively supported. If your instructor were to use any newer language features, such as lambdas, iterators or asynchronous programming, you would not be able to use VBNC to compile that code and would probably have to resort to using Windows somehow.

On the flipside, Python now comes standard with most Linux distributions, and is standard with Mac OS X. It's very simple to install on Windows and even comes with a bare-bones IDE for editing code. In every respect, it is easier to get started using Python than to start using VB .NET, especially on non-Windows platforms.

I understand the popularity at the moment of the Python, however this language is also based on the C language. When it comes to more complex constructs Python cannot do them and I would be forced to rely on C.

It's pretty obvious that this guy hasn't done his research. This is a very ignorant statement about both Python and C in general.

I'd love to see *any* "complex construct" that C can do, that Python cannot do in a general computer science/algorithm sense.

One of the updates that folks seem to have overlooked is Metal, Apple's upcoming replacement for OpenGL.

While I think Apple is likely to continue supporting OpenGL for the foreseeable future, it's somewhat worrying that they've decided to just build a brand-new graphics library. It represents a refocusing of their optimization efforts, certainly, so in the future I would expect devs to have to use Metal in order to obtain decent graphics performance. This in turn will make development even harder, especially for cross-platform shops which expect OpenGL to work reasonably well in all environments...

No, because version 10^100 comes after that, at the same time that Apple and Google merge.

Defaults should be sane, and optimized for the common case. Fall-through-by-default is not the common case, it's the exceptional case. Because C chose fall-through-by-default, programmers are penalized for the much more common case of no-fall-through by having to type "break;" at the end of every frickin' case statement.

Because of this, common C practice is to annotate intentional fall-through statements with a comment, like so:

switch(expr) {
    case superset:
/* superset code ...*/
/* FALLTHROUGH */
    case base:
/* base code ...*/
}

So, guess what Swift does? That's right, an explicit fallthrough keyword, which you can apply to get the uncommon (but, as you noted, occasionally useful) fallthrough behaviour. This is both wonderfully self-documenting, and eliminates the need for break in the common case. Switch statements in Swift are shorter and safer as a result. (Also, their use of Lisp/Scheme/...-esque matching semantics for switch is a nice touch, as are the genericized Enums...but that's a story for later).

Any C library can touch Python objects any time it likes, by nature of being linked to the Python C-API. However, you can only safely access Python objects while holding the GIL. CPython libraries are entered into with the GIL held (otherwise you couldn't even interact with the arguments given to the function), and they may decide to release the GIL some time later (and promise not to touch the Python API while the GIL is not held).

*Many* CPython release the GIL during operations that may be long-running, so you get the illusion that basically any long-running C operation releases the GIL.

PIL not releasing the GIL should be construed a bug in this case.