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Submission + - SPAM: Pentagon Explains Odd Transfer of 175 Million IP Addresses To Obscure Company

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The US Department of Defense puzzled Internet experts by apparently transferring control of tens of millions of dormant IP addresses to an obscure Florida company just before President Donald Trump left the White House, but the Pentagon has finally offered a partial explanation for why it happened. The Defense Department says it still owns the addresses but that it is using a third-party company in a "pilot" project to conduct security research. "Minutes before Trump left office, millions of the Pentagon's dormant IP addresses sprang to life" was the title of a Washington Post article on Saturday. Literally three minutes before Joe Biden became president, a company called Global Resource Systems LLC "discreetly announced to the world's computer networks a startling development: It now was managing a huge unused swath of the Internet that, for several decades, had been owned by the US military," the Post said.

The number of Pentagon-owned IP addresses announced by the company rose to 56 million by late January and 175 million by April, making it the world's largest announcer of IP addresses in the IPv4 global routing table. The Post said it got an answer from the Defense Department on Friday in the form of a statement from the director of "an elite Pentagon unit known as the Defense Digital Service." The Post wrote: "'Brett Goldstein, the DDS's director, said in a statement that his unit had authorized a 'pilot effort' publicizing the IP space owned by the Pentagon. 'This pilot will assess, evaluate, and prevent unauthorized use of DoD IP address space,' Goldstein said. 'Additionally, this pilot may identify potential vulnerabilities.' Goldstein described the project as one of the Defense Department's 'many efforts focused on continually improving our cyber posture and defense in response to advanced persistent threats. We are partnering throughout DoD to ensure potential vulnerabilities are mitigated.'"
Link to Original Source

Submission + - 40% of U.S. COVID-19 Deaths Could Have Been Avoided According To The Lancet (slate.com) 3

Submitted by phalse phace
phalse phace writes: The British medical journal the Lancet, on Wednesday, published a damning assessment of Donald Trump’s presidency and its impact on Americans’ health, concluding that 40 percent of the nearly 500,000 COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. over the past year were avoidable. The journal came to the conclusion by comparing the U.S. health outcomes on the coronavirus—the country leads the world in COVID deaths and confirmed cases with more than 27 million—with the weighted average of other G-7 nations. So it’s not a wildly abstract conclusion to draw: the U.S. could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives if it had just performed similarly to its economic peers.

Submission + - Value of university degree continues to decline

Submitted by BarbaraHudson
BarbaraHudson writes: Following up from an earlier report from Statistics Canada (pdf), the Parliamentary Budget Officer warns that an increasing number of university graduates are overqualified for their jobs.



Last year, 40 per cent of university graduates aged 25-34 were overqualified for their job. Five years ago, that percentage was only 36 per cent. In 1991, it hit a low of 32 per cent, or less than one out of every three university graduates.

The problem is bigger than that, because those young workers spent money, time, and resources to get those qualifications.

If you have a university degree in one of the following:

  • business, management and public administration
  • social and behavioural sciences and law
  • humanities.

you are much more likely to end up in a job that isn't commensurate with your education. All that debt and no pay-off.

Submission + - Oracle Bakes Security Into New Chips (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Oracle's Larry Ellison gave a presentation yesterday at OpenWorld in which he detailed how the M7 chip's new Silicon Secured Memory system works. "On the M7, pointers and their memory blocks are stamped with a 4-bit 'color,' and accesses are verified to make sure the color in the highest bits of the pointer matches the color of the memory allocation. This works with virtual memory allocated from the heap rather from the stack, it appears. Solaris tries to avoid giving adjacent blocks the same color." El Reg notes that a 4-bit security stamp doesn't really offer that many distinct options. "Four bits of color means there are 24, or 16, possible colors a memory block can have. A hijacked pointer has a one-in-16 chance of having a matching color when it accesses any block of memory, allowing it to circumvent the SSM defense mechanism. ... It is even possible [a hacker] can alter the color bits in a pointer to match the color of a block she wishes to access, and thus avoid any crashes and detection. In short, SSM is a mitigation rather than bulletproof protection." Still, Ellison claims this would have shut down vulnerabilities like Heartbleed and Venom.

Submission + - Eben Upton Explains The Raspberry Pi Model A+'s Redesign

Submitted by M-Saunders
M-Saunders writes: It's cheaper, it's smaller, and it's curvier: the new Raspberry Pi Model A+ is quite a change from its predecessor. But with Model Bs selling more in a month than Model As have done in the lifetime of the Pi, what's the point in releasing a new model? Eben Upton, a founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, explains all. “It gives people a really low-cost way to come and play with Linux and it gives people a low-cost way to get a Raspberry Pi. We still think most people are still going to buy B+s, but it gives people a way to come and join in for the cost of 4 Starbucks coffees.”

Submission + - Rich Geldreich is Worried About Some Aspects of Linux Gaming

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Former Valve engineer Rich Geldreich has written up a blog post about the state of Linux Gaming. It's an interesting read, that's for sure. When talking about recent bigger game ports, his take is that the developers doing these ports just aren't doing their best to optimize these releases for Linux and/or OpenGL. He points out how it took significant resources from Valve to properly optimize Source engine for Linux, but that other game studios are not walking the last mile. About drivers, he asks "Valve is still paying LunarG to find and fix silly perf bugs in Intel's slow open source driver. Surely this can't be a sustainable way of developing a working driver?" He ends his post by agreeing with a Slashdot comment where someone is basically saying that SteamOS is done, and that we will never get our hands on the Steam Controller.

Submission + - Peter Sunde Is a Free Man Again

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Former Pirate Bay spokesperson Peter Sunde was released from prison this morning. Peter is expected to take some time off to spend with family and loved ones before returning to normal grind. He was arrested in late May this year. Despite being accused of non-violent crimes, Peter was transferred to a high-security unit. His time in prison is described being tough. There was no concern for high values such as vegan diet or even proper treatment of depression. Peter also lost 15 kg of weight. After the experience he tweeted "My body just got re-united with my soul and mind, the parts of me that matters and that never can be held hostage."

Submission + - As Prison Population Sinks, Jails Are a Steal

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: After rising rapidly for decades, the number of people behind bars peaked at 1.62 Million in 2009, has been mostly falling ever since down, and many justice experts believe the incarceration rate will continue on a downward trajectory for many years. New York, for example, saw an 8.8% decline in federal and state inmates, and California, saw a 20.6% drop. Now the WSJ reports on an awkward byproduct of the declining U.S. inmate population: empty or under-utilized prisons and jails that must be cared for but can’t be easily sold or repurposed. New York state has closed 17 prisons and juvenile-justice facilities since 2011, following the rollback of the 1970s-era Rockefeller drug laws, which mandated lengthy sentences for low-level offenders. So far, the state has found buyers for 10 of them, at prices that range from less than $250,000 to about $8 million for a facility in Staten Island, often a fraction of what they cost to build. “There’s a prisoner shortage,” says Mike Arismendez, city manager for Littlefield, Texas, home of an empty five-building complex that sleeps 383 inmates and comes with a gym, maintenence shed, armory, and parking lot . “Everybody finds it hard to believe.”

The incarceration rate is declining largely because crime has fallen significantly in the past generation. In addition, many states have relaxed harsh sentencing laws passed during the tough-on-crime 1980s and 1990s, and have backed rehabilitation programs, resulting in fewer low-level offenders being locked up. States from Michigan to New Jersey have changed parole processes, leading more prisoners to leave earlier. On a federal level, the Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder has pushed to reduce sentences for nonviolent drug offenders. Before 2010, the U.S. prison population increased every year for 30 years, from 307,276 in 1978 to a high of 1,615,487 in 2009. “This is the beginning of the end of mass incarceration,” says Natasha Frost. "People don’t care so much about crime, and it’s less of a political focus."

Submission + - Does "Scientific Consensus" deserve a bad reputation? (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by nerdyalien
nerdyalien writes: From the article: Fiction author Michael Crichton probably started the backlash against the idea of consensus in science. Crichton was rather notable for doubting the conclusions of climate scientists—he wrote an entire book in which they were the villains—so it's fair to say he wasn't thrilled when the field reached a consensus. Still, it's worth looking at what he said, if only because it's so painfully misguided:

As a STEM major, I am somewhat bias towards "strong" evidence side of the argument. However, the more I read literature from other somewhat related fields i.e. psychology, economics and climate science; the more I felt that they have little opportunity in repeating experiments, similar to counterparts in traditional hard science fields. Their accepted theories are based on limited historical occurrences and consensus among the scholars. Given the situation, should we consider "consensus" as accepted scientific facts ?

Submission + - Police use WhatsApp for surveillance operations, share intel with civilian.

Submitted by TheP4st
TheP4st writes: A group of Swedish police officers thought it a good idea to use WhatsApp as a work tool for surveillance operations, the officer that set up their chat group mistyped one of the phone numbers to mistakenly include a civilian IT teacher. Once the teacher informed authorities about the mistake it took more than 24 hours before he stopped receiving sensitive case information that included criminal records excerpts, passport photos and communications between surveillance teams tailing suspects.

When confronted by Computer Sweden (article in Swedish) the officer responsible for setting up the group say "I know this server is not located in Sweden and that one cannot share every kind of information" Yet it took less than an hour from that the group were set up that the teacher started getting sensitive intel on suspects. The only mobile chat medium approved for sensitive information is Blackberry, and this initiative by a small group of officers happened as they do not have access to Blackberry handsets which are considered too expensive.

Article in English

Submission + - Australian team working on engines without piston rings

Submitted by JabrTheHut
JabrTheHut writes: An Australian team is seeking funding for bringing an interesting idea to market: cylinder engines without piston rings. The idea is to use small groves that create a pressure wave that acts as a seal for the piston, eliminating the piston ring and the associated friction. Engines will then run cooler, can be more energy efficient and may even burn fuel more efficiently, at least according to the story at http://www.motoring.com.au/news/2013/aussie-invention-eliminates-piston-rings-40773. Mind you, they haven't even built a working prototype yet. If it works I'd love to fit this into an older car...

Submission + - The FBI's Secret Interrogation Manual: Available for checkout at the Library (motherjones.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: The FBI Supervisory Special Agent who authored the FBI's interrogation manual submitted the document for copyright protection — in the process, making it available to anyone with a card for the Library of Congress to read.

The story is particularly mind-boggling for two reasons. First, the American Civil Liberties Union fought a legal battle with the FBI over access to the document. When the FBI relented and released a copy to the ACLU, it was heavily redacted — unlike the 70-plus page version of the manual available from the Library of Congress.

Second, the manual cannot even qualify for a copyright because it is a government work. Anything "prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties" is not subject to copyright in the United States.

Submission + - Google Glass Teardown

Submitted by saccade.com
saccade.com writes: Ever wonder how Google packed all of the Google Glass functionality into a slender eyeglass frame? Find out by checking out this teardown by Scott Torborg and Star Simpson. Goodies found inside include proximity, light and inertial sensors, sound transducers, a TI OMAP CPU, flash, RAM, camera and tiny projection display.
Desktops (Apple)

Submission + - Is Apple pushing away professionals? (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by
Barence
Barence writes: "Is Apple turning its back on professional users to focus on consumers? That's the argument forwarded by PC Pro, which claims Apple is alienating the creative professionals who have supported the company for 20 years or more. Fury over the dumbing down of Final Cut Pro, Apple's refusal to sell non-glossy screens and poor value hardware is fuelling anger from professional Mac users. "“People will get hacked off. I’m only Apple because I want the OS, but if I could come up with a ‘Hackintosh’ with OS X, I’d be so happy," claims one audio professional."
Handhelds

Bloomberg Reports That Palm Is Up For Sale 240

Posted by timothy from the handwriting-on-the-wall-is-graffiti dept.
leetrout writes with this excerpt from a story at Bloomberg News "Palm Inc., creator of the Pre smartphone, put itself up for sale and is seeking bids for the company as early as this week, according to three people familiar with the situation."

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