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Submission + - Russia's Dyatlov Pass Incident explained by modern science? (failuremag.com)

Submitted by swellconvivialguy
swellconvivialguy writes: Fifty-five years ago today, nine young Russians died under suspicious circumstances during a winter hiking trip in the Ural mountains. Despite an exhaustive investigation and the recovery of the group’s journals and photographs, the deaths remained unexplained, blamed on “an unknown compelling force.” Now American film and television producer Donnie Eichar believes he has solved the mystery of the Dyatlov Pass Incident. Working in conjunction with scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, CO, Eichar developed a theory that the hikers died because they panicked in the face of infrasound produced by a Kármán vortex street.

Submission + - Great Firewall of UK blocks game patch because of substring matches

Submitted by Sockatume
Sockatume writes: Remember the fun of spurious substring matches, AKA the Scunthorpe problem? The UK's advanced "intelligent" internet filters do. Supposedly the country's great new filtering regime has been blocking a patch for League of Legends because some of the filenames within it include the substring "sex". Add one to the list of embarrassing failures for the nation's new mosaic of opt-out censorship systems, which have proven themselves incapable of distinguishing between abusive sites and sites for abuse victims, or sites for pornography versus sites for sexual and gender minorities.

Submission + - Fighting the Flu May Hurt Those Around You (sciencemag.org) 4

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: When you've got the flu, it can't hurt to take an aspirin or an ibuprofen to control the fever and make you feel better, right? Wrong, some scientists say. Lowering your body temperature may make the virus replicate faster and increase the risk that you transmit it to others. A new study claims that there are at least 700 extra influenza deaths in the United States every year because people suppress their fever.

Submission + - Who makes the best disk drives? (zdnet.com) 1

Submitted by Hamsterdan
Hamsterdan writes: Backblaze, which open sourced their Storage Pod a few years ago, is now giving drive failure rates. They currently have over 27,000 consumer grade drives spinning in Backblaze storage pods.

Almost 13,000 each are Seagate and Hitachi drives, almost 3000 Western Digital drives and a too small for statistical reporting smattering of Toshiba and Samsung drives.

One cool thing: Backblaze buys drives the way you and I do: they get the cheapest drives that will work. Their workload is almost hundred percent write. Because they spread the incoming writes over several drives their workload isn't very performance intensive either.

Submission + - OpenBSD Foundation Receives A Commitment for 100k, sets annual goal to 150k (openbsdfoundation.org)

Submitted by ConstantineM
ConstantineM writes: Bob Beck, director of the OpenBSD foundation, writes on misc@ — 'To all of you who have donated, please allow me to give you a huge "Thank You". In a nutshell, we have in one week gone from being in a dire situation to having a commitment of approximately $100,000 in donations to the foundation. From a developer's perspective let me assure you that this reaffirms the worth of what we are supporting and makes us want to work on it that much more.' Based on the updated list of significant contributors, in addition to the donation by the Mircea Popescu of MPEx Bitcoin securities exchange, genua, Google and many others have joined in. 'We would like to continue to build on your groundswell of support, and have set a target for $150,000 this year in fundraising.', Bob concludes.

Submission + - AMC theatres call FBI to arrest a Google Glass user (the-gadgeteer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A Google Glass user is interrogated without legal counsel for a couple of hours under suspicion that he may have been recording a film in the AMC movie theater. Although the matter could have been cleared in minutes, federal agents insisted on interrogating the user for hours. So long for our constitutional freedoms.

Comment Re:Rumour (Score 1) 209

by ConstantineM (#46016589) Attached to: Romanian Bitcoin Entrepreneur Steps In To Pay OpenBSD Shortfall

It has been confirmed:

The MPEx Bitcoin stock exchange (run by Mircea Popescu) is listed on the significant contributors page.

Also, according to Bob Beck, director of OpenBSD Foundation, 100k has been raised so far; their target goal for 2014 fundraising is 150k:

http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2014.html

Comment Package signatures were supported since 2010 (Score 1) 232

For what it's worth, it would seem like [a different kind of?] a package signature system was actually supported since 2010, it's just that the official packages were never signed.

http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq15.html#PkgSig

Revision 1.71:
Sat Jul 17 09:02:47 2010 UTC (3 years, 6 months ago) by ajacoutot
Changes since revision 1.70: +65 -1 lines

Add a "Package signatures" section to teach people how to create and use
signed packages. Still opened for enhancement but all info is there now.

Submission + - First transmission of Bitcoin over public radio 1

Submitted by kbahey
kbahey writes: A local radio channel in Kitchener-Waterloo was able to successfully transmit Bitcoin over radio waves. This makes what is believed to be the first known transmission of the digital currency by a public radio station. A series of beeps were played over the air, and listeners were asked to use an app known as chirp.io to decipher a code produced by the sound. Chris Skory of Rockland County, New York was the winning recipient, and unlocked 0.05 Bitcoin worth about $40. The Bitcoin was donated by Waterloo start-up Tinkercoin and a local Bitcoin enthusiast.

Those local enthusiasts engage in local buying and selling of Bitcoin.

Submission + - FreeBSD 10.0 Released

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: FreeBSD 10.0 has been released. A few highlights include: pkg is now the default package management utility. Major enhancements in virtualization, including the addition of bhyve, virtio, and native paravirtualized drivers providing support for FreeBSD as a guest operating system on Microsoft Hyper-V. Support for the high-performance LZ4 compression algorithm has been added to ZFS and TRIM support for SSD has been added to ZFS. clang is the default compiler. This release has official Raspberry Pi support. For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the online release notes and a quick FreeBSD installation video is here. FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE may be downloaded via ftp or via a torrent client that supports web seeding.

Comment Re:Very surprised that it took this long (Score 1) 232

And why would you do that? Going that way you're easily MITM'ed.

Can you give some better reason than 'everyone does it'?

Why exactly would you prefer an insecure transmission channel over a reasonably secure one, for the software you install? How does that even remotely fit the OpenBSD mindset?

Maybe it doesn't, but that's not a good reason to claim of a widespread practice, "in OpenBSD land", that's completely foreign to anyone actually familiar with OpenBSD.

I repeat: I don't know of anyone who compiles software from ports all the time (besides, that's not that much more secure, since the ports tree itself isn't signed, either). A `pkg_add` from a nearby mirror is what gets things done for the vast majority of people. Many mirrors are run by developers; personally, I wouldn't use any mirror that wasn't; and yes, especially in light of the recent revelations, this does leave some room for a Government-in-the-Middle attack, which is probably exactly the reason of why this won't be as it was anymore.

Comment Re:Very surprised that it took this long (Score 1) 232

Using binary package is just considered not the right way to do things, in OpenBSD land.

Entirely false. Binary packages, installed with pkg_add from a nearby mirror, has been the recommended way to install ports for as long as I remember (I've been a user for some 10 years, and a developer, too). I've never heard of anyone compiling packages directly from ports in OpenBSD. Not even the developers, unless they're port developers, that is.

Even for the kernel itself, it is highly recommended for non-developers to only run the binary snapshots.

Unless one is tracking the stable branch, which has no official binary builds, then compiling from source tree is only ever advised for the developers.

Comment Re:it won't fit? (Score 1) 232

On i386, OpenBSD 5.4 can be installed from either one of the 3 floppies:

%ftp ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/OpenBSD/5.4/i386/
...
ftp> ls floppy*
150 Here comes the directory listing.
-rw-r--r-- 1 500 450 1474560 Jul 30 18:27 floppy54.fs
-rw-r--r-- 1 500 450 1474560 Jul 30 18:27 floppyB54.fs
-rw-r--r-- 1 500 450 1474560 Jul 30 18:27 floppyC54.fs
226 Directory send OK.

Which one do you use? You'd have to see which one supports your hardware, which is documented in the INSTALL.i386 file, generated from src/distrib/notes/i386/hardware, amongst other files:

Drivers for hardware marked with [A] are NOT included in floppy A.
Drivers for hardware marked with [B] are NOT included in floppy B.
Drivers for hardware marked with [C] are NOT included in floppy C.

In summary, it would seem like OpenBSD is only intended to be boot-strapped from a floppy (e.g. to fetch the rest of the files from the network), and from a single floppy at that. So, even with the licence aside, including something like gnupg is indeed unrealistic and cumbersome.

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