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Comment Re:Super cool (Score 2) 54

by hebcal (#57706690) Attached to: ISS Marks 20 Years Orbiting Earth With Longest Timelapse Ever Made In Space
You're not seeing orbit precession in this video. The ground track "moves" from orbit to orbit primarily because the earth is spinning underneath a relatively stable orbit. It is true that the orbit is precessing, but it's happening much slower than you can see here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... notes that it's -3.7 degrees PER DAY. ...Whereas what is most obvious in this video is that the first orbit passes over Italy and the second over France, which is due to the -22.5 degree PER ORBIT spin of the earth below the ISS.

Comment Re:A bit of an essay... (Score 2) 637

by hebcal (#52258015) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How Do You Create A Highly-Secure Password?

On the back end, if you must store passwords, make sure they are hashed using a modern secure algorithm (AES-256, SHA-2 or SHA-3) and salted, and do that as soon as possible in your back-end processes. No, your users do not need a way to recover >

No. Use one of

  • PBKDF2
  • bcrypt
  • scrypt

instead. See: http://security.stackexchange....

Comment Rationale (Score 5, Informative) 566

by hebcal (#44228943) Attached to: HTTP 2.0 Will Be a Binary Protocol

The rationale for http-2.0 is available in the http-bis charter. Quoting the spec:...

As part of the HTTP/2.0 work, the following issues are explicitly called out for consideration:

  • * A negotiation mechanism that is capable of not only choosing between HTTP/1.x and HTTP/2.x, but also for bindings of HTTP URLs to other transports (for example).
  • * Header compression (which may encompass header encoding or tokenisation)
  • * Server push (which may encompass pull or other techniques)

It is expected that HTTP/2.0 will:

  • * Substantially and measurably improve end-user perceived latency in most cases, over HTTP/1.1 using TCP.
  • * Address the "head of line blocking" problem in HTTP.
  • * Not require multiple connections to a server to enable parallelism, thus improving its use of TCP, especially regarding congestion control.
  • * Retain the semantics of HTTP/1.1, leveraging existing documentation (see above), including (but not limited to) HTTP methods, status codes, URIs, and where appropriate, header fields.
  • * Clearly define how HTTP/2.0 interacts with HTTP/1.x, especially in intermediaries (both 2->1 and 1->2).
  • * Clearly identify any new extensibility points and policy for their appropriate use.

Comment Re:New features (Score 1) 205

by hebcal (#39042793) Attached to: LibreOffice 3.5 Released

There's still a number of key combinations that Calc is missing (most noticeably ctrl-D to copy cell above), and the background color tool is still horribly designed (only contains colors too dark for use as a background, and it does not remember the last chosen color). It's simple stuff like this that keeps people on Excel.

Ctrl-D Works fine in 3.5.0rc3. I just tried it.

The background colors do, indeed, stink. The funny part about the background color setter is that it changes the menubar icon to the last set color, but there doesn't seem to be a way to re-invoke it with the same color.
Handhelds

Palm Pre Is Out, Time For Discussion 283

Posted by timothy from the post-pre-is-later dept.
caffiend666 writes "Palm Pre is out, let's discuss the status and compare stories. The first day seems to have gone as well as expected, with many selling out before noon. I bought the second at the local Sprint store, and so far I like it. Much more one-hand friendly than the iPhone. I haven't gotten the main apps to sync with Linux, but the media portion functions much like a thumb-drive with my Fedora-8 Linux system. For the Pre-verts out there, here's some Palm Pre dismantling pictures."
Censorship

Microsoft's Bing Refuses Search Term "Sex" In India 355

Posted by timothy from the back-to-spontaneous-generation dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently Microsoft is censoring search results for Bing in India and other countries. If you try to search for the term 'sex,' along with lots of variations, from India using Microsoft's new search engine, an error message is returned that says, 'the search sex may return sexually explicit content. To get results, change your search terms.' There's no preference setting or toggle-on-or-off choice; you simply cannot search for the term 'sex' in India if you are using Bing. While a user still can change their country and try the non-Indian version of Bing, this seems like an unnecessary step and unnecessary censorship on the part of Microsoft. Apparently Google has no problem with Indians searching for the term 'sex.'"
Privacy

9th Circuit Says Feds' Security Checks At JPL Go Too Far 139

Posted by timothy from the and-you-thought-that-documents-were-sensitive dept.
coondoggie writes with an excerpt from Network World which explains that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals "this week ruled against the federal government and in favor of employees at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in their case which centers around background investigations known as Homeland Security Presidential Directive #12 (Nelson et al. vs NASA). The finding reaffirms the JPL employees claims' that the checks threaten their constitutional rights. The stink stems from HSPD #12 which is in part aimed at gathering information to develop a common identification standard that ensures that people are who they say they are, so government facilities and sensitive information stored in networks remains protected." At issue in particular: an employee's not agreeing to "an open ended background investigation, conducted by unknown investigators, in order to receive an identification badge that was compliant with HSPD#12" was grounds for dismissal.
Security

Hacker Jeff Moss Sworn Into Homeland Security Advisory Council 139

Posted by Soulskill from the different-kind-of-expertise dept.
Wolfgang Kandek writes "Hacker Jeff Moss, founder of computer security conferences DEFCON and Black Hat, has been sworn in as one of the new members of the Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC) of the DHS. Moss, who goes by the handle 'the Dark Tangent' says he was surprised to be asked to join the council and that he was nominated to bring an 'outside perspective' to its meetings. He said, 'I know there is a new-found emphasis on cybersecurity, and they're looking to diversify the members and to have alternative viewpoints. I think they needed a skeptical outsider's view because that has been missing.'"

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