Chalst - Slashdot User

Major Sites To Join ‘World IPv6 Day’ 247

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday January 12, 2011 @12:18PM from the skipping-five dept.

netbuzz writes "Facebook, Google, and Yahoo are among the major sites on board with what the Internet Society is dubbing 'World IPv6 Day,' a collective trial scheduled for June 8. 'It's an exciting opportunity to take IPv6 for a test flight and try it on for a full 24 hours,' says Leslie Daigle, the Internet Society's Chief Internet Technology Officer. 'Hopefully, we will see positive results from this trial so we will see more IPv6 sooner rather than later.'"

HP Patents Bignum Implementation From 1912 144

Posted by kdawson on Monday January 04, 2010 @11:01PM from the can-you-spell-prior-art dept.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The authors of GMP (the GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library) were invited to join Peer-to-Patent to review HP's recent patent on a very old technique for implementing bignums because their software might infringe. Basically, HP's patent claims choosing an exponent based on processor word size. If you choose a 4-bit word size and a binary number, you end up working in hexadecimal. Or for a computer with a 16-bit word and a base-10 number, you use base 10,000 so that each digit of the base-10,000 number would fit into a single 16-bit word. The obvious problem with that is that there's plenty of prior art here. Someone who spent a few minutes Googling found that Knuth describing the idea in TAOCP Vol. 2 and other citations go back to 1912 (which implemented the same algorithm using strips of cardboard and a calculating machine). None of this can be found in the 'references cited' section. Even though the patent examiner did add a couple of references, they appear to have cited some old patents. The patent issued a few months ago was filed back in October of 2004, and collected dust at the USPTO for some 834 days."

Craigslist Blocks Yahoo Pipes 164

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @10:32PM from the nose-meet-knife dept.

Romy Maxwell posted a blog piece on Craigslist apparently shutting off access to Yahoo Pipes. Maxwell was working on a project, one of 2,111 using Craigslist as a data source, for a (non-commercial) Pipes-based mashup. He sent Craig Newmark an invitation to the alpha test, after a few rounds of friendly communication — "...as a rule of thumb, okay to use RSS feeds for noncommercial purposes." The apparent response, 4 days later, was for Craigslist to redirect any request with an HTTP referrer of pipes.yahoo.com to the Craigslist home page. Maxwell writes: "It's a sad day for me. I'm not too upset about my own project, as Flippity was already removing Craigslist as a data source. With the likes of eBay and Oodle not only providing open APIs but encouraging and rewarding developers, spending my time wrestling with Craigslist is just plain stupid and exhausting. I'm sure I'm not the only person to have come to that conclusion, and I wish it were different. ... If Craigslist wants to keep its doors shut to the world, so be it."

Canadian Blood Services Promotes Pseudoscience 219

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @07:49PM from the type-A-negative-personality dept.

trianglecat writes "The not-for-profit agency Canadian Blood Services has a section of their website based on the Japanese cultural belief of ketsueki-gata, which claims that a person's blood group determines or predicts their personality type. Disappointing for a self-proclaimed 'science-based' organization. The Ottawa Skeptics, based in the nation's capital, appear to be taking some action."

Comment Re:Did no one read the fine summary? (Score 1) 305

by cperciva on Thursday November 19, 2009 @07:55PM (#30166140) Attached to: Synchronize Data Between Linux, OS X, and Windows?

Tarsnap is really designed as a backup service rather than a synchronization service: While it is very good at recognizing duplicate data and only uploading new blocks when you create an archive, it has no such mechanism for making archive extraction more efficient -- I wrote it with the presumption that people would only be extracting archives after losing data. That said, I think I can see a way to implement "tarsnap -x --sync" efficiently.

But for right now, as much as I'd love to get more customers, I don't think Tarsnap really matches the submitter's requirements.

Comment Bing replaces Live Search (Score 1) 1

by Chalst on Thursday November 19, 2009 @04:02AM (#30153856) Attached to: Bing - Now Featuring

Bing is, in essence a relaunch of the MSN Search / Windows Live Search / Live Search; Wikipedia says that Live Search was discontinued on 21st May this year, redirecting from then to Bing.

Hence Bing becomes the built-in search for many old browsers in Windows land. Some default market share is expected. What would be interesting is how the expectation stacks up against the new data.

Journal Journal: Old Slashdot news stories about open access (October 2003 to March 2009)

Journal by Chalst on Thursday November 19, 2009 @03:51AM

Seven old Slashdot stories: just news, no opinion/ask slashdot stories:

Journal Journal: Periodic LtU-node recommendation

Journal by Chalst on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @07:30AM

Node #3666: Liskov's list of papers.

Barbara Liskov, Turing award laureate, presented a list of papers that led up to her work. An excellent introduction to the theory of object-oriented programming language design.

Comment Typical modern CACM article (Score 1) 260

by Chalst on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @07:15AM (#30127500) Attached to: We Really Don't Know Jack About Maintenance

Long, wordy, buzz-word heavy article with a little bit of interesting content buried deep inside. I wish I hadn't bothered to read it.

In case you haven't, but are thinking you might: you can run machines that are never down, even when software is being updated, if you use a few tricks. I knew most of the one's they mentioned already, and use them on my company website, which is far from downtime-proof, but has a 3-year uptime so far: call my software maintenence status "fairly sturdy".

If you're interested in upgrading to software maintenance status "bulletproof", then read something about fault-tolerant computing in Erlang. You'll learn more that way.

Submission + - Pirate Bay shuts down tracker (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by think_nix on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @06:33AM

think_nix writes: The Pirate Bay has shut down their bit torrent tracker. Instead TPB is now using DHT [torrentfreak] (Distributed Hash Table) to distribute the torrents. TPB Blog [thepiratebay] states that DHT along with PEX (Peer Exchange) Technology is just as effective if not better for finding peers than a centralized service. The local (thelocal se) reports that shutting down the tracker and implementing DHT & PEX could be due to the latest court rulings in Sweden against 2 of tpb owners, and may decide the outcome of the case.

Submission + - Group: Founder of Tibetan Web site gets 15 years (komonews.com)

Submitted by The Installer on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @04:48AM

The Installer writes: The founder of a Tibetan literary Web site was sentenced to 15 years in prison on charges of disclosing state secrets, an overseas monitoring group said Tuesday.

Kunchok Tsephel, 39, was convicted and sentenced Nov. 12 after a closed-door trial at the Intermediate People's Court of Gannan prefecture in southwestern Gansu province, according to reports from Tibet received by Tibetan exiles, said the International Campaign for Tibet, a Washington D.C.-based advocacy group.

Some of the charges are believed to be related to content posted on his influential Web site, Chodme, or Butter-Lamp, which promotes Tibetan culture, and also for passing on information about last year's anti-government protests.

Become Your Own Heir After Being Frozen 375

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @01:55AM from the what-could-go-wrong dept.

destinyland writes "A science writer discovered it's possible to finance your cryogenic preservation using life insurance — and then leave a huge death benefit to your future thawed self. From the article, 'Most in the middle class, if they seriously want it, can afford it now. So by taking the right steps, you can look forward to waking up one bright future morning from cryopreservation the proud owner of a bank account brimming with money!' There's one important caveat: some insist that money 'will have no meaning in a future dominated by advanced molecular manufacturing or other engines of mega-abundance.'"

Man-In-the-Middle Vulnerability For SSL and TLS 170

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday November 05, 2009 @10:23AM from the alphabet-soup dept.

imbaczek writes "The SSL 3.0+ and TLS 1.0+ protocols are vulnerable to a set of related attacks which allow a man-in-the-middle (MITM) operating at or below the TCP layer to inject a chosen plaintext prefix into the encrypted data stream, often without detection by either end of the connection. This is possible because an 'authentication gap' exists during the renegotiation process, at which the MitM may splice together disparate TLS connections in a completely standards-compliant way. This represents a serious security defect for many or all protocols which run on top of TLS, including HTTPS."

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