Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
Open Source

Submission + - Perl Gets $100,000 From a grateful craigslist (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: The craigslist Charitable Fund has donated $100,000 to the Perl community for Perl5 maintenance and general use by the Perl Foundation.
craigslist gets more than 30 billion views per month and it is mostly written in Perl. The entire architecture of the system is open source — a proxy array based on Perl and memcache and a backend provided by Apache, memcache, MySQL and, of course Perl.
So you could see this as a successful enterprise giving something back to open source — which is how it should be.
Math

Ranking Soccer Players By Following the Bouncing Ball 142

Posted by timothy from the well-it-ain't-baseball dept.
sciencehabit excerpts from an interesting report on statistics for soccer, in the stats-obsessed world of sports: "Only a handful of soccer ranking systems exist, most of which rely on limited information: the number of goals scored in a match, the number of goals assisted, and some indices of a match's difficulty and importance. ... So researchers turned to an unlikely source: social networks. Applying the kinds of mathematical techniques used to map Facebook friends and other networks, the team created software that can trace the ball's flow from player to player. As the program follows the ball, it assigns points for precise passing and for passes that ultimately lead to a shot at the goal. Whether the shot succeeds doesn't matter. Only the ball's flow toward the goal and each player's role in getting it there factors into the program's point system, which then calculates a skill index for each team and player."
Programming

Simpler "Hello World" Demonstrated In C 582

Posted by kdawson from the non-obfuscated dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Wondering where all that bloat comes from, causing even the classic 'Hello world' to weigh in at 11 KB? An MIT programmer decided to make a Linux C program so simple, she could explain every byte of the assembly. She found that gcc was including libc even when you don't ask for it. The blog shows how to compile a much simpler 'Hello world,' using no libraries at all. This takes me back to the days of programming bare-metal on DOS!"

Comment Summary of Vunerabilities (Score 3, Interesting) 413

by BrittanyGites (#28267053) Attached to: Security Flaw Hits VAserv; Head of LxLabs Found Hanged

Summary from http://www.milw0rm.com/exploits/8880 seems pretty serious but quite difficult to fix all of them in 2 weeks.

      Timeline :

      05/21/2009 - sent initial email to vendor with a link to a private
                                resource for viewing various kloxo hiab575
                                vulnerability info
      05/23/2009 - received the following: "Thanks for the info. I will
                                review this and let you know." (no signature)
      05/30/2009 - sent an email asking if there were any updates
      06/01/2009 - received the following: "Sorry for the delay. I am
                                currently looking into this, and will reply in a couple
                                of hours time." (no signature)
      06/04/2009 - nothing heard from vendor, and the private resource
                                containing the vulnerability info still does not
                                appear to have been accessed

      2 weeks have passed since the initial notification. Vendor appears
      uninterested.

      ISSUE 1 - uid/gid reuse
      ISSUE 2 - unprivileged port use
      ISSUE 3 - default passwords
      ISSUE 4 - useradd string in the process list
      ISSUE 5 - XSS
      ISSUE 6 - remotely create partially user controlled file names
                            and directories. Locally append uncontrolled data to
                            any file
      ISSUE 7 - local users can take control of any file or directory
      ISSUE 8 - local users can take control of any file or directory
      ISSUE 9 - local users can overwrite any file on the box
      ISSUE 10 - yet another symlink attack for local users
      ISSUE 11 - metachar injection, local command execution as root
      ISSUE 12 - web stats world readable password hashes
      ISSUE 13 - local users can overwrite any file on the box
      ISSUE 14 - metachar injection, local command execution as root
      ISSUE 15 - remotely block any - or every - IP addr in hosts.deny
      ISSUE 16 - remote CPU and mem usage DoS
      ISSUE 17 - local users can truncate and control any file
      ISSUE 18 - just 2 more symlinks to own any file on the box
      ISSUE 19 - file manager, view and edit any file
      ISSUE 20 - file manager PT II
      ISSUE 21 - file manager PT III
      ISSUE 22 - local user symlink attack
      ISSUE 23 - local user symlink attack (last one)
      ISSUE 24 - sql injection in the "Forgot Password" form
Mozilla

Firefox Faster In Wine Than Native 493

Posted by timothy from the that-sounds-hard-to-swallow dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Tuxradar did some benchmarks comparing Firefox's Windows and Linux JavaScript performance. 'We did some simple JavaScript benchmarks of Firefox 3.0 using Windows and Linux to see how it performed across the platforms — and the results are pretty bleak for Linux.' Later on, they tried Wine. 'The end result: Firefox from Mozilla or from Fedora has almost nil speed difference, and Firefox running on Wine is faster than native Firefox.'"
Cellphones

Cellphone Networks Survive Inauguration, Mostly 121

Posted by timothy from the ever-more-robust dept.
nandemoari writes "Everybody was talking about Barack Obama's inauguration on Tuesday morning, and it showed. According to reports, a number of mobile phone networks faced overload circumstances that day until late afternoon, when the chat sessions finally began to dissipate. Having the most trouble that morning appears to have been T-Mobile, and AT&T also had some difficulty that morning."

Slashdot Top Deals

Nothing ever becomes real until it is experienced. - John Keats

Close