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Submission + - Compiling my own SPARC CPU in a cheap FPGA board (www.thanassis.space)

Submitted by ttsiod
ttsiod writes: After reading an interesting article from an NVIDIA Engineer, about how he used a dirt-cheap FPGA board to code a real-time ray-tracer, I got my hands on the same board — and "compiled" a dual-core SPARC-compatible CPU inside it... basically, the same kind of design we fly in the European Space Agency's satellites.

I decided to document the process, since there's not much material of that kind available. I hope it will be an interesting read for my fellow Slashdotters — showcasing the trials and tribulations faced by those who prefer the Open-Source ways of doing things... Just read it and you'll see what I mean.

Submission + - The Most Important Right-To-Repair Hearing Yet Is On Monday (vice.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On Monday, the right-to-repair movement will have its best chance at advancing legislation that would make it easier to repair your gadgets. The Massachusetts state legislature is holding a three-hour hearing on the Digital Right to Repair act, a bill that would require electronics manufacturers to sell repair parts and tools, make repair guides available, and would prevent them from using software to artificially prevent repair.

So far this year, 19 other states have considered similar legislation. It hasn’t passed in any of them. But Massachusetts is one of the most likely states to pass the legislation, for a few different reasons. Most notably, the legislation is modeled on a law passed unanimously in Massachusetts in 2012 that won independent auto shops the right to repair, meaning lawmakers there are familiar with the legislation and the benefits that it has had for auto repair shops not just in Massachusetts but around the country. Crucially, important legislative hurdles have already been cleared in the state: Both the House and Senate bills are identical and has broad support from both Democrats and Republicans in the legislature. The hearing is going to be held in the Gardner Auditorium, which holds 600 people, making this the largest and highest-profile hearing on the topic in any state thus far.

Submission + - Facebook defends itself against op-ed calling for its breakup (theverge.com)

Submitted by soldersold
soldersold writes: On Thursday, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes wrote an op-ed in The New York Times calling for the company to be broken up, saying that CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “focus on growth led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks,” and that he should be held accountable for his company’s mistakes.

Now, Facebook has responded an op-ed of its own, saying that its size isn’t the real problem and that its success as a platform shouldn’t be punished.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Blocking Encryption Of Files/Backups 2

Submitted by CaptainDork
CaptainDork writes: I'm a retired IT guy and ransomware was not a huge thing 3-5 years ago (at least few victims were self-reporting) and I'm very curious about protection schemes. In my, now ancient, world we did not encrypt anything — anywhere. Seems to me the trick would be to mark certain places as "unencryptable," similar to long-time attributes like "hidden," "system," "read-only," ect.

Do solutions exist that would mark local data folders and backup drives as "unencryptable," and if not, do you think it could be done? If so, how?

Submission + - New Intel Firmware Boot Verification Bypass Enables Low-Level Backdoors (csoonline.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: At the Hack in the Box conference in Amsterdam this week, researchers Peter Bosch and Trammell Hudson presented a new attack against the Boot Guard feature of Intel's reference UEFI implementation, Tianocore. The attack, which can give an attacker full, persistent access, involves replacing a PC's SPI flash chip with one that contains rogue code, reports Lucian Constantin for CSO. 'Even though such physical attacks require a targeted approach and will never be a widespread threat, they can pose a serious risk to businesses and users who have access to valuable information,' writes Constantin. Intel has patches available for Tianocore, but as we all remember from the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, distributing UEFI patches isn't an easy process.
Privacy

Submission + - Twitter-shaming can cost you your job - whether you're giving or receiving (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
tsamsoniw
tsamsoniw writes: "Hoping to strike a blow against sexism in the tech industry, developer and tech evangelist Adria Richards took to Twitter to complain about two male developers swapping purportedly offensive jokes at PyCon. The decision has set into motion a chain of events that illustrate the impact a tweet or two can make in this age of social networking: One the developers and Richards have since lost their jobs, and even the chair of PyCon has been harassed for his minor role in the incident."
User Journal

Journal Journal: New Territory Mapped in Stem Cell Transplantation

Journal by stemceller
Transplant research has taken another step forward at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) where scientists have discovered a gene with properties that allow for the successful engraftment of stem cells from human bone marrow into mice. Researchers hope further studies will lead to the development of a therapy so more children with blood diseases can receive bone marrow transplantation.

Feed Engadget: AMD to launch Phenom on November 19th? (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

AMD is apparently getting ready to launch its new Phenom processor on November 19th, according to DailyTech. The chipmaker's media guide for the launch seems to have been leaked early, and it's got some interesting info in it regarding the Phenom and the next-gen Radeon. We already knew most of the Phenom deets, but it looks like the supporting RD790 chipset is also ready to go, along with three versions of the RV670 Radeon HD 3800 series. The low-end 3850 is actually a revised version of the existing Radeon HD 2900 with a die shrink from 80nm to 55nm, but the top-end Radeon HD 3870 is a new design with a 100MHz clock bump to 775MHz. All the cards feature support for Quad Crossfire and AMD's Triple Play Physics system, but don't feature any of the rumored hardware video decoders that had been rumored. Unless something changes, we should be seeing all this stuff on the 19th -- which is probably when we'll know about pricing as well.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Comment NetBSD (Score 1) 407

by telemonster (#16016982) Attached to: The Future of NetBSD
Friends and myself have moved most of our FreeBSD boxes to NetBSD. As FreeBSD has grown bulky and fat (like many linux distros), NetBSD was there to fall back on. NetBSD feels and acts like UNIX in a world where everyone wants to act like Windows.

If I'm running a web server, a shell host, or any type of internet server I don't want X windows and a bunch of other garbage. I expect the install to be small and tight.

The documentation for NetBSD is clear and good. Things are precise. When I search for answers to Linux issues, there is so many distros and versions and garbage in the way between me and what I'm looking for.

We are running NetBSD on modern hardware. The hardware support has been fine by me, from oddball USB sound adaptors used to feed live 24x7x365 audio feeds, to notebook computers with various PCMCIA cards acting as a network bridge, to P4 and AMD systems running high usage shell and web hosts for friends, NetBSD does what we want.

There are some flaws, yes. But no more than other operating systems. A Journaling file system would be nice, but other than that... We are happy.

People say "Why run NetBSD when there are other choices." Why run Linux? If it gets the job done, and does it well, I'm happy. I run Linux too, mainly for machines that need desktops (closed source video card drivers), and Java stuff.

Hey NETBSD, how about a donation jar so the community can donate to fund the development of a good journaling file system?

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