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Comment If you really want simple and effective: rcs+$Id$ (Score 1) 325

I still use RCS because it has the in-line markup to keep track of the revision you have. And is so simple to set-up and use that a 1 page cheat-sheet is usually enough for most people that can type without looking at their fingers. Put it on a ZFS filesystem and take hourly snapshots. Don't worry about network access, since that is how you are going to loose your repo. People can login to a server to edit and rsync to make remote copies. Easy and safe (using ssh for example). I always display the $Id$ string in the version output for each module under -V or --version: that means you can know for sure that you have the latest version before you test/release.

Submission + - Debian dropping Linux Standard Base (lwn.net)

Submitted by basscomm
basscomm writes: For years (as seen on Slashdot) the Linux Standard Base has been developed as an attempt to reduce the differences between Linux distributions in an effort significant effort. However, Debian Linux has announced that they are dropping support for the Linux Standard Base due to a lack of interest.

If [Raboud's] initial comments about lack of interest in LSB were not evidence enough, a full three months then went by with no one offering any support for maintaining the LSB-compliance packages and two terse votes in favor of dropping them. Consequently, on September 17, Raboud announced that he had gutted the src:lsb package (leaving just lsb-base and lsb-release as described) and uploaded it to the "unstable" archive. That minimalist set of tools will allow an interested user to start up the next Debian release and query whether or not it is LSB-compliant—and the answer will be "no."

Submission + - Linus: "2016 Will Be the Year of the ARM Laptop" (softpedia.com)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Linus Torvalds took the stage at the latest LinuxCon 2015 that took place in Dublin, Ireland, and talked about a number of things, including security and the future for Linux on ARM hardware. There is nothing that will blow your mind, but there are a couple of interesting statements nonetheless. Chromebooks are slowly taking over the world and a large number of those Chromebooks are powered by ARM processors. "I'm happy to see that ARM is making progress. One of these days, I will actually have a machine with ARM. They said it would be this year, but maybe it'll be next year. 2016 will be the year of the ARM laptop," said Linus excitedly. He also explained that one of the problems now is actually finding people to maintain Linux. It's not a glorious job, and it usually entails answering emails seven days a week. Finding someone with the proper set of skills and the time to do this job is difficult.

Submission + - Linux Foundation: Security Threatens 'Golden Age' Of Open Source

Submitted by Mickeycaskill
Mickeycaskill writes: The executive director Linux Foundation has outlined its plans to improve open source security, which could otherwise threaten a 'golden age' which has created billion dollar companiesand seen Microsoft and Apple among others embrace open technologies.

The organisation launched the Core infrastructure Initiative (CII), a body backed by 20 major IT firms, last year and is investing millions of dollars in grants, tools and other support for open source projects that have until now been underfunded.

This was never move obvious than following the discovery of the Heartbleed Open SSL bug last year.

“Almost the entirety of the internet is entirely reliant on open source software,” he said. “We’ve reached a golden age of open source. Virtually every technology and product and service is created using open source.

“Heartbleed literally broke the security of the Internet. Over a long period of time, whether we knew it or not, became dependent on open source for the security and Integrity of the internet.”

“We want to find the projects on the Internet that are broken and fix them. We have raised a multi-million fund to provide grants to projects to help them out."

“We’re not talking about some new technology product or service, we’re talking about your privacy, your security. We believe creating a more secure, more robust Internet is good for all of us.”

Submission + - Cosmic Mystery Solved? Possible Dark Matter Signal Spotted (space.com)

Submitted by TaleSlinger
TaleSlinger writes: Astronomers may finally have detected a signal of dark matter, the mysterious and elusive stuff thought to make up most of the material universe.

While poring over data collected by the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton spacecraft, a team of researchers spotted an odd spike in X-ray emissions coming from two different celestial objects — the Andromeda galaxy and the Perseus galaxy cluster.

  "The signal's distribution within the galaxy corresponds exactly to what we were expecting with dark matter — that is, concentrated and intense in the center of objects and weaker and diffuse on the edges," [assuming that dark matter consists of sterile neutrinos] study co-author Oleg Ruchayskiy, of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, said in a statement.

"With the goal of verifying our findings, we then looked at data from our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and made the same observations," added lead author Alexey Boyarsky, of EPFL and Leiden University in the Netherlands.

  Researchers have proposed a number of different exotic particles as the constituents of dark matter, including weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), axions and sterile neutrinos, hypothetical cousins of "ordinary" neutrinos (confirmed particles that resemble electrons but lack an electrical charge).

The decay of sterile neutrinos is thought to produce X-rays, so the research team suspects these may be the dark matter particles responsible for the mysterious signal coming from Andromeda and the Perseus cluster.

Submission + - BGP Hijacking Continues, Despite the Ability to Prevent It 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: BGPMon reports on a recent route hijacking event by Syria. These events continue, despite the ability to detect and prevent improper route origination: Resource Public Key Infrastructure. RPKI is technology that allows an operator to validate the proper relationship between an IP prefix and an Autonomous System. That is, assuming you can collect the certificates. ARIN requires operators accept something called the Relying Party Agreement. But the provider community seems unhappy with the agreement, and is choosing not to implement it, just to avoid the RPA, leaving the the Internet as a whole less secure.

Submission + - IBM Researchers: Old Laptop Batteries Can Power Slums

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi writes: Old laptop batteries still have enough life in them to power homes in slums, researchers have said. An IBM study analysed a sample of discarded batteries and found 70% had enough power to keep an LED light on more than four hours a day for a year. Researchers said using discarded batteries is cheaper than existing power options, and also helps deal with the mounting e-waste problem. The concept was trialled in the Indian city of Bangalore this year. The adapted power packs are expected to prove popular with street vendors, who are not on the electric grid, as well as poor families living in slums. The IBM team created what they called an UrJar — a device that uses lithium-ion cells from the old batteries to power low-energy DC devices, such as a light. The researchers are aiming to help the approximately 400 million people in India who are off grid.

Submission + - scientists discover diamond nanothreads (cnn.com)

Submitted by sokol815
sokol815 writes: Penn State University scientists discovered diamond nanothreads can be created from benzene when compressed. The compression brings the benzene molecules into a highly reactive state. It was expected that the molecules would create a non-ordered glass-like material, but due to the slow speed of decompression used, the benzene molecules ordered themselves into a naturally repeating crystal. The experiment took place at room-temperature. Early results indicate that these nanothreads are stronger than previously produced carbon nanotubes, and may have applications throughout the engineering industry.

Submission + - IEEE Guides Software Architects Toward Secure Design (threatpost.com)

Submitted by msm1267
msm1267 writes: The IEEE's Center for Secure Design debuted its first report this week, a guidance for software architects called "Avoiding the Top 10 Software Security Design Flaws." Developing guidance for architects rather than developers was a conscious effort the group made in order to steer the conversation around software security away from exclusively talking about finding bugs toward design-level failures that lead to exploitable security vulnerabilities.
The document spells out the 10 common design flaws in a straightforward manner, each with a lengthy explainer of inherent weaknesses in each area and how software designers and architects should take these potential pitfalls into consideration.

Comment Remove the ransom note excuse with Deparse (Score 5, Interesting) 536

If you don't like ransom notes (which perl programs may become over time) use this trick: get perl to reformat the code with a this command:

$ perl -MO=Deparse ransom.pl >better.pl

Most of the time that removes the crazy from the script. I just got a large legacy code-base and that little trick made my life much better. If the perl code works, then you are just looking for work to do. Newer is not always better.

Submission + - Evidence Of A Correction To The Speed of Light

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: In the early hours of the morning on 24 February 1987, a neutrino detector deep beneath Mont Blanc in northern Italy picked up a sudden burst of neutrinos. Three hours later, neutrino detectors at two other locations picked up a second burst. These turned out to have been produced by the collapse of the core of a star in the Large Magellanic Cloud that orbits our galaxy. And sure enough, some 4.7 hours after this, astronomers noticed the tell-tale brightening of a blue supergiant in that region, as it became a supernova, now known as SN1987a. But why the delay of 7.7 hours from the first burst of neutrinos to the arrival of the photons? Astrophysicists soon realised that since neutrinos rarely interact with ordinary matter, they can escape from the star's core immediately. By contrast, photons have to diffuse through the star, a process that would have delayed them by about 3 hours. That accounts for some of the delay but what of the rest? Now one physicist has the answer--the speed of light through space requires a correction. As a photon travels through space, there is a finite chance that it will form an electron-positron pair. This pair exists for only a brief period of time and then goes on to recombine creating another photon which continues along the same path. This is a well-known process called vacuum polarisation. The new idea is that the gravitational potential of the Milky Way must influence the electron-positron pair because they have mass. This changes the energy of the virtual electron-positron pair, which in turn produces a small change in the energy and speed of the photon. And since the analogous effect on neutrinos is negligible, light will travel more slowly than them through a gravitational potential. According to the new calculations which combine quantum electrodynamics with general relativity, the change in speed accounts more or less exactly for the mysterious time difference. Voila!

Comment Asymmectric networks would be very useful. (Score 1) 79

by ksbraunsdorf (#43393283) Attached to: German Scientists' Visible Light Network Hits 3Gbps
At the library I want to see a list of all the titles in print from my favorite authors, I just use the local WiFi to get the data. For larger downloads I ask on the WiFi, but get the data over the visible light network. So I can see the text of all those books, DRM allowing. Or watch a lecture on the Great Bustard. At airports, my PDA/phone gets all the flight updates on an endless loop, via the visible light network. At Home Depot I'm offered product information and How To videos. I'd love to see the view from the cockpit in real-time while I was flying. If we build really high capacity broadcast networks (like the over-the-air TV used to be), then we'll find uses for them we've never thought about at all. This may even make a computer useful in a class room. I don't believe most of this requires encryption. Mostly an asymmetric network gets us video and large data requests over a cheap, local, and very limited range network. If you want encryption for small slices of data, us the WiFi to do a key exchange.

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