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Hardware

Submission + - New Lenovo x220 laptops are shipping with defects (lenovo.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Users of recently produced Lenovo x220 notebooks and x220 tablets are finding defects with their mSATA interfaces, preventing them from running an mSATA SDD + 2.5" HDD for the 'speed + storage' sweet spot. The stock laptops do not offer an mSATA drive, so this issues is popping up with users putting in Intel/Renice/MyDigitalSSD third party drives — however all laptops are likely affected, whether the owners know it or not. The issue is not related to bios updates and may need a hardware fix. Ouch.
Google

Submission + - Photovine: Google's next big thing? (timesofcommerce.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Back on 7th june, google filed a USPTO application for the name Photovine. The application cites a service dedicated to the transmission of images over telecommunication networks, wireless networks and internet. Unsurprisingly, the internet giant also purchased the corresponding domain name...

Read here: http://www.timesofcommerce.com/#ixzz1Pp3CT7ad

Comment Re:Wasn't this the whole point of CALEA? (Score 1) 174

If you're on a company network and you want to have a network performing okay while bittorrent clients are present on it, you'll need DPI.

That's complete nonsense. Bittorrent and other peer to peer networks are definitely bandwidth intensive, but you don't need DPI to maintain performance on a network. A properly configured QoS should be more than enough to balance things out. Simply prioritizing the outbound data by source address alone would ensure that anyone trying to perform bandwidth intensive tasks gets their fair share. IP protocols were designed to deal with bandwidth restrictions but also to use as much as possible. It's therefore possible that a few HTTP downloads could congest an entire network in the same way a bittorrent client does. This is becoming even more common with modern browsers which use multiple connections to try and retrieve data faster from remote servers.

The only thing DPI provides is the ability to restrict access to specific protocols based solely on packet content. If encryption is used, DPI is useless as it cannot differentiate between the traffic. The end result is a never ending war between software developers and network administrators. The final outcome has yet to be decided.

Security

Submission + - Samsung Keylogger Stories a False Alarm (threatpost.com)

Trailrunner7 writes: The panic that arose yesterday about Samsung allegedly shipping laptops that contained a pre-installed keylogger turns out to have been a complete mistake after further investigation by security researchers and the company itself. In fact, the controversy was the result of a false positive from one commercial antimalware suite and nothing else.

Several outlets reported on Wednesday that Samsung laptops had been found to contain a keylogger known as StarLogger right out of the box from the factory. However, upon closer inspection by security companies, the folder on the laptops that supposedly contained the malware was actually a directory that is part of Windows' multi-language support.

Japan

Submission + - Japan Suspends Efforts to Prevent Nuclear Meltdown 1

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The Christian Science Monitor reports that Japan has suspended efforts to prevent damaged reactors from melting down at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant as a surge in radiation has made it too dangerous for workers to operate. "The workers cannot carry out even minimal work at the plant now," says chief government spokesman Yuko Edano, referring to workers who had been dousing the reactors with seawater in a frantic effort to cool down their rising temperatures. "Because of the radiation risk, we are on standby.""
Linux

Submission + - Linux 2.6.38 Released (internetnews.com)

darthcamaro writes: The new Linux 2.6.38 kernel is now out and it's got a long list of performance improvements that should make Linux a whole lot faster. The kernel includes support for Transparent Huge Pages, Transmit Packet Steering (XPS),a utomatic process grouping, and a new RCU (Read/Copy/Update)-based path name lookup.

"This patch series was both controversial and experimental when it went in, but we're very hopeful of seeing speedups," James Bottomley, distinguished engineer at Novell said. "Just to set expectations correctly, the dcache/path lookup improvements really only impact workloads with large metadata modifications, so the big iron workloads (like databases) will likely see no change. However, stuff that critically involves metadata, like running a mail server (the postmark benchmark) should improve quite a bit."


Comment Re:Yes, SHA1 security is questionable.. (Score 1) 217

You and the author of the article both seem to be missing one important aspect of password hashing. You're never supposed to apply a particular hashing algorithm directly to a password. Instead the user's password should be combined with some salt(random data) and then hashed. The resulting hash can still be brute forced, but any resulting hashes can't be used as collisions for other stored hashes as they require a different known salt to be used. In other words, while it took the author 49 minutes he only had to compute 6^n number of hashes where n is the number of possible characters per position (lowercase, uppercase, numeric?). If each hashed password had a different known salt appended, he would have had to compute 14 * 6^n number of hashes. This is an order of magnitude larger than the original time. Of course, this only applies if the salt is known. If the salt is unknown during the brute-force it's practically impossible to discover the original password.

Comment $10,000 (Score 1) 16

Sadly it seems a lot of people still think $10,000 is a briefcase full of cash. Lets break it down shall we.. Assuming they used standard US bills we get the following:

  1. $10,000 = $100 x 100 bills = 1 stack of 100, $100 bills
  2. $10,000 = $50 x 200 bills = 2 stacks of 100, $50 bills
  3. $10,000 = $20 x 500 bills = 5 stacks of 100, $20 bills
  4. $10,000 = $10 x 1000 bills = 10 stacks of 100, $10 bills
  5. $10,000 = $5 x 2000 bills = 20 stacks of 100, $5 bills
  6. $10,000 = $1 x 10000 bills = 100 stacks of 100, $1 bills

At 0:14 when they open the case you can clearly see several stacks marked as $100, some as $50, and some as $5. If the briefcase truly has $10,000 in it, the stacks marked with $100 bills must be filled with something other than $100 bills as a single stack would equal the amount the briefcase was said to hold. Given the variety of bills in the case, it appears they went to a lot of trouble to convince us that they gave away $10,000 USD. The reality is they probably didn't, and that the entire thing was just as staged as the briefcase full of cash.

Comment Re:And who ... (Score 1) 297

I completely agree. Remove the word "lawful" from all sections and I'll be much more supportive of their efforts. If all content and application communications were protected under the First Amendment then word "lawful' would only serve to restrict that right in the future by designating specific things as "unlawful". The last thing we need is government overview of what applications or content are considered "lawful".

Comment Re:My experience with city-wide Wifi (Score 5, Insightful) 259

TFA is referring not to de-facto ubiquitous coverage by multiple independent access points, but by a single, centrally run mesh of access points owned and operated (at least partially) by the municipal government.

At least in the USA, this has largely been quashed by the telcos in the courts, claiming that such networks are unfair competition to their price gouging mobile data plans.

Comment Re:Bye Bye Monopoly (Score 1) 295

The problem is that you need jailbroken iphone...

This may be true for the moment, but now that someone is actually capitalizing on jailbroken iphones, Apple's attempts to completely restrict people from installing what they want on their devices could be construed as anti-competitive behavior by a judge. That is, if they were to secure all flaws in the phone's operating system via an update and not provide people with the availability to install software from a competing vendor, Apple could face some serious fines for effectively trying to eliminate the competition.

If this ever winds up in court, Apple might try to argue that jailbroken iphones are against the DMCA. The competing store however might argue that it was done for "compatibility" purposes, which last I recall was allowed under current copyright laws. In the end if something like this does ever happen, it'll definitely be a case worth paying attention to.

Comment PBS (Score 3, Interesting) 325

PBS had a great 1 hour segment on this not too long ago. Their segment covered the rapid decline in albatrosses due to offspring being fed the plastic from the pacific. I haven't been able to find the complete coverage of the segment I saw on my local PBS station, but I have managed to locate part of it here titled: World's Oceans Face Problem of Plastic Pollution

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