snugge - Slashdot User

The Assassination of Wi-Fi 258

Posted by Zonk on Sunday March 04, 2007 @07:38PM from the sniper-has-range-on-the-target dept.

justelite writes "John C. Dvorak from PC Magazine has up an article looking at the new strategy of American cell-phone-service companies. From article: 'There is mounting evidence that the cellular service companies are going to do whatever they can to kill Wi-Fi. After all, it is a huge long-term threat to them. We've seen that the route to success in America today is via public gullibility and general ignorance. And these cell-phone-service companies are no dummies.'"

Submission + - Stallman to step down as Emacs maintainer

Submitted by

davids-world.com

on Sunday March 04, 2007 @05:00PM

davids-world.com writes: "Richard Stallman is planning to step down as head maintainer of the GNU Emacs project. In an e-mail to fellow Emacs developers, he today asked for candidates to succeed him. RMS wrote the first extensible Emacs text editor in 1975 at MIT's AI Lab. Seen by many as the founder and chief advocate of the free software movement, Stallman has also been actively involved in Emacs' development. GNU Emacs 22, due soon, will be the first major release of the editor since 2001."

Submission + - SPAM: New technology removes viruses from drinking water

Submitted by

FiReaNGeL

on Sunday March 04, 2007 @02:03PM

FiReaNGeL writes: "University of Delaware researchers have developed an inexpensive, nonchlorine-based technology that can remove harmful microorganisms, including viruses, from drinking water. The new technology could dramatically improve the safety of drinking water around the globe, particularly in developing countries. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), over a billion people — one-sixth of the world's population — lack access to safe water supplies. Four billion cases of diarrheal disease occur worldwide every year, resulting in 1.8 million deaths, primarily infants and children in developing countries. Eighty-eight percent of this disease is attributed to unsafe water supplies, inadequate sanitation and hygiene."

Hacker Defeats Hardware-based Rootkit Detection 126

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday March 04, 2007 @12:00PM from the immovable-object-vs-unstoppable-force dept.

Manequintet writes "Joanna Rutkowska's latest bit of rootkit-related research shatters the myth that hardware-based (PCI cards or FireWire bus) RAM acquisition is the most reliable and secure way to do forensics. At this year's Black Hat Federal conference, she demonstrated three different attacks against AMD64 based systems, showing how the image of volatile memory (RAM) can be made different from the real contents of the physical memory as seen by the CPU. The overall problem, Rutkowska explained, is the design of the system that makes it impossible to reliably read memory from computers. "Maybe we should rethink the design of our computer systems so they they are somehow verifiable," she said."

Submission + - RSAkey revealed in few sec w/o Quantum Computer

Submitted by

QuantumCrypto

on Friday March 02, 2007 @06:58PM

QuantumCrypto writes: "IRISA is reporting that Branch Prediction is NOT good for Security. Branch predictors allow processors to execute the next instructions without waiting for the previous ones to be resolved, which in turn allows the RSA key to be spied.
Old news. Right? Well André Seznec at IRISA has independently verified the claims. "I've tried to validate the principle. It works! Beautiful case study by the way!" said André Seznec. Onur Aciçmez and his colleagues managed to grab 508 bits out of a 512-bit key on RSA encryption , at first shot, in just a few thousandths of a second. Quite a feat when compared to the endless three months and the line-up of 80-some 2.2 GHz CPU computers that the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) once poured in to crack a SSL 640-bit key (3).

Background from the Artikle:
Until not so long ago,processors were executing threads in a time shared mode: T0 was executing during a time slice, then T1 was executing during the next time slice, then T0 again, ..."Each of these time slices lasts far longer than the processor execution cycle. Say a thread lasts around10 milliseconds, representing about 20 to 30 million processor cycles. As long as a spy thread and a cryptographic thread are not executed simultaneously, there is no way the former can grab very precise information on the latter." The impervious architecture keeps threads peep proof. But things have changed with the arrival of Pentium 4 HT processor generation (7), a SMT processor in PCs and servers. These CPUs run two threads at the same time: on the very same cycle, instructions from the two threads are executed on the CPU. Why? "Mainly to squeeze performance from the processor, Seznec answers. The processor can execute several instructions per cycle, but generally a significant part of the resource is lost if a single thread executes. When two threads execute at the same time, the hardware is significantly better utilized." Unfortunately, running two threads in parallel on the same hardware CPU can lead to some information leakage. "One can manage to grab an indirect view on a thread execution from a spying thread that is executed simultaneously. This indirect information about its execution can allow to recover critical information such an encryption key.""

Do-It-Yourself Steampunk Keyboard 159

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday February 28, 2007 @10:55AM from the because-you-can dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Who said there's no use for your old IBM "M Series" keyboards anymore? This creative fellow shows us step by step how to convert the keyboards of yesteryear into keyboards of an even further distant, fictional time. H. G. Wells would be proud."

Submission + - Samba Success in the Enterprise?

Submitted by

gunnk

on Wednesday February 28, 2007 @10:11AM

gunnk writes: "We've deployed a Samba server here to replace some aging Novell Netware boxes. It works great: fast, secure, stable. However, we have one VIP that feels that Samba is "amateur" software and that we should be buying Windows servers. I've been searching with little success for large Samba deployments in enterprise environments. Anyone out there care to share stories of places that are happily running large Samba installations for their file servers? Or not so happy, for that matter — better to be informed!"

Software Bug Halts F-22 Flight 579

Posted by kdawson on Sunday February 25, 2007 @07:35PM from the dare-you-to-cross-this-line dept.

mgh02114 writes "The new US stealth fighter, the F-22 Raptor, was deployed for the first time to Asia earlier this month. On Feb. 11, twelve Raptors flying from Hawaii to Japan were forced to turn back when a software glitch crashed all of the F-22s' on-board computers as they crossed the international date line. The delay in arrival in Japan was previously reported, with rumors of problems with the software. CNN television, however, this morning reported that every fighter completely lost all navigation and communications when they crossed the international date line. They reportedly had to turn around and follow their tankers by visual contact back to Hawaii. According to the CNN story, if they had not been with their tankers, or the weather had been bad, this would have been serious. CNN has not put up anything on their website yet." The Peoples Daily of China reported on Feb. 17 that two Raptors had landed on Okinawa.

Submission + - FreeBSD SMP greatly outperforms Linux under MySQL

Submitted by

shocking

on Sunday February 25, 2007 @07:25PM

shocking writes: "The recent work on moving FreeBSD to a new framework dealing with SMP issues (SMPng) has been finished, so developers have been benchmarking & profiling the code to find performance bottlenecks. After correcting a few, they found that a multithreaded MySQL benchmark performed extremely well under high load, maintaining throughput in situations where Linux throughput collapsed. The write-up is at http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/mysql.html "

Submission + - DragonFly BSD to develop own filesystem

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 25, 2007 @01:40AM

An anonymous reader writes: Matt Dillon has decided to develop a new filesystem from scratch to support DragonFly's clustering, rather than port an existing one. From his post: "There are currently two rough spots in the design. First, how to handle segment overflows in a multi-master environment. Such overflows can occur when the individual masters or slaves have different historical data retention policies. Second, where to store the regeneratable indexes."

Submission + - Rapid PHP Application Development

Submitted by santakrooz on Saturday February 24, 2007 @11:27PM

santakrooz writes: CodeGear has announced the first RAD IDE for PHP. Visual development, OSS component library, MySQL support, PHP5 and more. Will this change the PHP market?

From CodeGear "Delphi® for PHP is the first completely integrated visual Rapid Application Development (RAD) environment for PHP. Delphi's proven and familiar visual Rapid Application Development (RAD) approach means you are quickly up to speed and productive, without the headaches normally associated with learning a new development environment. The powerful PHP editor and debugger increase coding speed and efficiency, while the integrated VCL for PHP 5 component class library lets you quickly and visually create PHP web applications and integrate PHP open source components. Delphi for PHP has an integrated PHP 5 class library called Visual Component Library (VCL for PHP). A customizable palette of over 50 reusable components can include buttons, labels, check boxes, images, DHTML menus, flash objects, grids, tree views, list boxes and more. Database components are also available for accessing databases, tables, queries, and stored procedures, as well as data grids and navigation. You can also extend the VCL for PHP at any time with your own components, or use components offered through the open source PHP platform. Delphi for PHP makes it easy to create your own components and install customized packages to use in the IDE. The VCL for PHP makes it simple for you to develop new classes, because every component is built in pure PHP. Simply place components into forms and use them in your applications. VCL for PHP components have built-in properties, methods, and events that make web interface development a snap. Delphi for PHP is the fast and easy way to build powerful and reliable PHP web applications."

Submission + - Using free wireless at library described as theft

Submitted by

dallas

on Saturday February 24, 2007 @10:01PM

dallas writes: "http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/8667098p-8559 268c.html

Using free wireless at library described as theft
PALMER: Man was tapping into library connection after hours.

By ANDREW WELLNER
Anchorage Daily News

(Published: February 24, 2007)
WASILLA — Brian Tanner was sitting in his Acura Integra recently outside the Palmer Library playing online games when a Palmer police pulled up behind him.

The officer asked him what he was doing.

Tanner, 21, was using the library's wireless Internet connection. He was told that his activity constituted theft of services and was told to leave. The next day, Sunday, police spotted him there again.

"It was kind of like, 'Well gee whiz, come on,' " police Lt. Tom Remaley said.

The police officer confiscated Tanner's laptop in order to inspect what he may have been downloading, Remaley said. Remaley on Friday said he hasn't looked inside the computer yet; he's putting together a search warrant application.

Alaska state troopers had chased Tanner off a few times at other locations, Remaley said.

Tanner said that was true. He has a device on his keychain that sniffs out wireless networks. When he found one, he would park in his neighborhood and use his $800 Dell laptop to hop on the Web. But worried neighbors summoned the troopers, who told him to park in a public place.

"I went to the public library because I go there during the day," Tanner said.

Though the library was closed, its wireless was up and running, he said.

Tanner said he was upset that he hasn't gotten his computer back yet. The police have told him he won't until the case is concluded, he said.

Jeanne Novosad, the library system manager, said the wireless connection is normally shut off when the library is closed. But the library was waiting on a technician to install a timer and the connection was left on after hours for several days, she said.

Remaley said the investigating officer is talking with the District Attorney's Office to determine whether criminal charges are warranted.

Remaley said few of these cases that he's seen have resulted in criminal prosecution.

But, "in this particular case you know he's feeding off something that we know the city of Palmer pays for and there are requirements to use it," Remaley said.

Either way, Tanner's Internet usage has been curtailed. He's got a home computer, but his parents don't let him on the Web after 9 p.m. He's been using computers at the library during the day.

He's a moderator on an online gaming site, conquerclub.com, where he plays a game similar to the board game Risk.

"It's pretty addicting," he said.

Contact Daily News reporter Andrew Wellner at 352-6710 or awellner@adn.com

Copyright © 2007 The Anchorage Daily News (www.adn.com)"

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