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Linux

MSI Will Launch iPad Alternative 756

Posted by kdawson from the breaking-down-the-walls dept.
itwbennett writes "Underwhelmed by the iPad? Don't give up on tablets just yet, says blogger Peter Smith. MSI has a tablet coming in the second half of 2010 that measures up on price and size and addresses a lot of the iPad's most noted shortcomings. 'The iPad runs iPhone OS while the MSI runs Android,' writes Smith. 'That means the MSI will multitask of course, and Flash support in Android should be a given by launch time (though that isn't certain). It has a camera. It's running on an Nvidia Tegra2 chip which Ars Technica suggests puts it on par with the iPad's A4 as far as computing horsepower. And of course Android doesn't live in a walled garden.'" The post notes that the MSI device does not support multitouch in its built-in apps. Still, would an Android-powered iPad-alike tempt you?

Update: 01/29 17:58 GMT by KD : Dave Altavilla suggests Hot Hardware's coverage of Asus's recently announced tablet, also based on the Tegra2 chip.
Encryption

Parallel Algorithm Leads To Crypto Breakthrough 186

Posted by timothy from the how-about-cluster-some-ipads dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Dr. Dobbs reports that a cracking algorithm using brute force methods can analyze the entire DES 56-bit keyspace with a throughput of over 280 billion keys per second, the highest-known benchmark speeds for 56-bit DES decryption and can accomplish a key recovery that would take years to perform on a PC, even with GPU acceleration, in less than three days using a single, hardware-accelerated server with a cluster of 176 FPGAs. The massively parallel algorithm iteratively decrypts fixed-size blocks of data to find keys that decrypt into ASCII numbers. Candidate keys that are found in this way can then be more thoroughly tested to determine which candidate key is correct." Update by timothy, 2010-01-29 19:05 GMT: Reader Stefan Baumgart writes to point out prior brute-force methods using reprogrammable chips, including Copacobana (PDF), have achieved even shorter cracking times for DES-56. See also this 2005 book review of Brute Force, about the EFF's distributed DES-breaking effort that succeeded in 1997 in cracking a DES-encrypted message.
Encryption

80% of Cell Phone Encryption Solutions Insecure 158

Posted by timothy from the nsa-working-on-the-rest dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Mobile Magazine writes about a blogger named Notrax who has tested 15 methods of secure encryption for mobile phones; out of those he found only 3 could not be cracked at some level. '12 of them were "worthless." It's easy to take the software at face value when it "tells you" that the call is secured. But how does someone actually go about being sure that it is secured? Notrax did some digging and discovered he could break in to almost all of them in under 30 minutes.'" (Above link is to a slightly older description of Notrax's approach; then, it was 9 out of 10 products that were worthless, instead of 12 out of 15.)

Comment Re:Dear FSF (Score 1) 1634

by cfriedt (#30939514) Attached to: iPad Is a "Huge Step Backward"

Sorry, but I have to agree with the EFF. I really do like apple hardware, but I can't say that I'm a big fan of their software. Come on - a 1GHz device that doesn't support multi-tasking?? Sure, the UI is cute, but seriously. Even after several weeks of using OS X on a desktop or a MacBook Pro, I still wished that it was running Linux so that I could at least have a choice about what desktop environment to use.

Furthermore, the LACK of freedom of choice is exactly the reason that I don't buy apple products. You're correct in assuming that there is some choice, but the only choice you can make is "to buy or not to buy". The choice stops there.

Don't forget, that the only reason Linux ever ran on any Apple hardware is because someone was able to find a way to load the kernel (i.e. exploit), reverse engineer the hardware, and so on. Luckily, due to the hard work of a lot of dedicated community members, Linux runs superbly on Mac hardware, even on their iPod :).
Space

Space Photos Taken From Shed Stun Astronomers 149

Posted by timothy from the love-the-gold-mylar dept.
krou writes "Amateur astronomer Peter Shah has stunned astronomers around the world with amazing photos of the universe taken from his garden shed. Shah spent £20,000 on the equipment, hooking up a telescope in his shed to his home computer, and the results are being compared to images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. 'Most men like to putter about in their garden shed,' said Shah, 'but mine is a bit more high tech than most. I have fitted it with a sliding roof so I can sit in comfort and look at the heavens. I have a very modest set up, but it just goes to show that a window to the universe is there for all of us – even with the smallest budgets. I had to be patient and take the images over a period of several months because the skies in Britain are often clouded over and you need clear conditions.' His images include the Monkey's head nebula, M33 Pinwheel Galaxy, Andromeda Galaxy and the Flaming Star Nebula, and are being put together for a book."

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Upgrading an Aging Linux Server

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: My company has been using an aging, unmaintained Linux server for years and I've been given the lovely task of updating it. Our server is based on Fedora Core 3. The server is not mission critical, so doing an over-night upgrade is not out of the question, but we do have several tens-of-gigabytes of data to carry over, aside from service configurations. Undoubtedly, there are several security holes in the aging versions of the services that we're running, including OpenSSH, Apache, PostgreSQL, MySQL, PureFTP, OpenVPN, SVN, CVS, and Jabber. Since FC3 has long been unsupported, most online sources suggest a clean install rather than trying a brute-force yum upgrade. So I'm left with several options. Should I choose a different distro? If so, can the Slashdot community recommend one that is both relatively painless to maintain and upgrade? Should I look into virtualization? Has anyone else in the Slashdot community been faced with a similar issue?

Comment Sorry, the Nexus One phone is not available... (Score 2, Interesting) 568

by cfriedt (#30660236) Attached to: Google's Nexus One Phone Launches

It would seem that many people outside of the US, including Canada and Germany, upon visiting www.google.com/phone have been receiving an error message saying "Sorry, the Nexus One phone is not available in your country."

I guess it doesn't go on sale in those countries until some undisclosed date.
Image

The Perfect Way To Slice a Pizza 282

Posted by samzenpus from the equal-distribution-of-the-pie dept.
iamapizza writes "New Scientist reports on the quest of two math boffins for the perfect way to slice a pizza. It's an interesting and in-depth article; 'The problem that bothered them was this. Suppose the harried waiter cuts the pizza off-center, but with all the edge-to-edge cuts crossing at a single point, and with the same angle between adjacent cuts. The off-center cuts mean the slices will not all be the same size, so if two people take turns to take neighboring slices, will they get equal shares by the time they have gone right round the pizza — and if not, who will get more?' This is useful, of course, if you're familiar with the concept of 'sharing' a pizza."

Comment Re:Dumb rumors (Score 1) 141

by cfriedt (#30421460) Attached to: Google Releases Experimental Phone To Employees

I see nothing to indicate they're going to enter the phone market themselves especially since it mentions the hardware is from "a partner".

I guess I missed the 'partner' keyword on my first read. That would seem a little bit more realistic than for Google to start manufacturing themselves. It would certainly make the OHA continue to resemble more of a playground than a battlefield.

One interesting note, is that the article does not explicitly say its a phone but rather a "device". Could this finally be the next step in the evolution of Qualcomm's SmartBook? Personally, I see it as a highly compatible platform for the Chrome OS.

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