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Submission + - Message for AMD: Open PSP Will Improve Security, Hinder Intel

Submitted by futuristicrabbit
futuristicrabbit writes: AMD has faced calls from Edward Snowden, Libreboot and the Reddit community to release the source code to the AMD Secure Processor (PSP), a network-capable co-processor which some believe has the capacity to act as a backdoor. Opening the PSP would not only have security benefits, but would provide AMD with a competitive advantage against rival chipmaker Intel. Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD, is reportedly seriously considering the change, and the community is working hard to make sure she makes the right decision.
Privacy

Angry Brazilian Whacks NASA To Put a Stop To ... Er, the NSA 90

Posted by samzenpus from the horseshoes-and-hand-grenades dept.
An anonymous reader writes "From the Register, "Multiple NASA websites were defaced last week by a Brazilian hacktivist who may have misread the sites' URLs, because he wasn't protesting about the US space agency giving joyrides to inhuman stowaways – he was protesting against NSA spying. 'BMPoC' hit kepler.arc.nasa.gov and 13 other sites with messages protesting against US spying on Brazil, as well as a possible US military intervention in Syria. It's hard to believe anyone would confuse the NSA spy agency with NASA, the space agency, except for satirical purposes or to mock script kiddies in some way, so we can only guess that the hackers behind the attack hit NASA because it's a US government agency whose systems are noted for being insecure.""
Australia

Creeping Government Surveillance Now Without Warrants 78

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the no-privacy-down-under dept.
CuteSteveJobs writes "The Age reports on creeping Australian government surveillance, beginning with the first operation launched on a baseless rumor. Six decades later the still-unaware victim read five months of transcripts with deep distress. Two decades ago few Australians would have consented to carrying a government-accessible tracking device, but phone and tablet data accessible without a warrant includes historic and real-time location data. In 2010-2011 there were 250,000 warrantless accesses by Federal agencies including ASIO, AFP, the Tax Office, Defence, Immigration, Citizenship, Health, Ageing, and Medicare. This is 18 times the rate of similar requests in the U.S."
Hardware Hacking

Magical Chinese Hard Drive 347

Posted by Soulskill from the finally-a-use-for-old-flash-drives dept.
jamax writes "From TFA: 'A Russian friend .... works at a hard-drive repair center in a Russian town, located near the Chinese border. A couple of days ago a customer brought a broken 500GB USB-drive that he had bought in a Chinese store across the river, for an insanely low price. But the drive was not working: if you, say, save a movie onto the drive, playing the saved movie back resulted in replaying just the last 5 minutes of the film.' Apparently, the contents of the external HDD box included: two nuts, glued to the inner surface of the box with a 128MB flash drive wedged between them (image). And it was a clever hack, too — if ever an attempt was made to write a file that's too large, it got cycled — rewriting itself over and over from the beginning, while leaving the existing files intact. And it reported everything correctly — file sizes and all!"
GNU is Not Unix

100% Libre, Trisquel 4.5 STS 'Slaine' Released 207

Posted by timothy from the good-enough-for-rms dept.
Aldenissin writes "Trisquel 4.5 Slaine comes with a new boot manager for the live images, an improved installer which showcases the project highlights, and new programs like the Remmina remote desktop client, the social network client Gwibber or the backup tool Deja-dup. The web browser received several changes to improve attributes like speed by enabling http pipelining and other methods, privacy with blocking third party cookies and moving to Duck Duck Go search engine — both as default, and usability with the preinstalled FlashVideoReplacer plugin that allows watching videos from YouTube, Vimeo and many others. The main packages include: Linux-libre 2.6.35, Xorg 7.5, GNOME 2.32, Mozilla based web browser 3.6.15 and OpenOffice.org 3.2. Slaine is based on Ubuntu 10.10, and as always with Trisquel, it contains just free software. Available are 32 and 64 bit flavors, and being an STS release it will be supported for a year. This release will be the "live" operating system included in the Free Software Foundation member cards from now on, in replacement of Trisquel 4.0."
GNU is Not Unix

Submission + - GNU Savannah Site Compromised (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: A site belonging to the Savannah GNU free software archive was attacked recently, leading to a compromise of encrypted passwords and enabling the attackers to access restricted project material.

The compromise was the result of a SQL injection attack against the savannah.gnu.org site within the last couple of days and the site is still offline now. A notice on the site says that the group has finished the process of restoring all of the data from a clean backup and bringing up access to some resources, but is still in the middle of adjusting its security settings.

Comment Re:Animated quaternion (Score 1) 255

by _bernie (#30116592) Attached to: "Mandelbulb," a 3D Mandlebrot Construct, Discovered

Not to rain on your parade ... but the article's mandelbrot looks a hell of a lot more detailed.

We're comparing a power 8 version of the generlized Mandelbrot formula (Zn+1=Zn^k + C, with k=8) against a power-2 quaternion Julia.

In the epilogue, the author admits that there's less variety in the Mandelbulb-8 than even in the classic Mandelbrot.

Comment Animated quaternion (Score 4, Interesting) 255

by _bernie (#30112292) Attached to: "Mandelbulb," a 3D Mandlebrot Construct, Discovered

The common Mandelbrot set is really a 2-dimensional slice of a 4-dimensional object identified by both the combination of the complex numbers Z0 and C in the canonical Zn+1 = Zn^2 + C. The mandelbrot set lives in the plane where Z0 = 0 + 0i, while the Julia sets live on infinitely-many-squared orthogonal planes in the remaining two dimensions, each one intersecting Mandelbrot's plane in a single point of complex coordinates C.

Visualizing this hyperspace monster was made easy by POV-Ray. It took my computer two week of computation to render 80 seconds of animated 3D slices of a the quaternion. Check out the scene source.

/me looks forward for a real-time Julia4D explorer.
Communications

Skype For Linux To Be Open-Sourced "In the Nearest Future" 175

Posted by Soulskill from the more-or-less dept.
rysiek writes "Seems like there might be a revolution in the works, as far as VoIP software for Linux is concerned. After mailing Skype support about Skype providing Mandriva RPM packages, Olivier Faurax got an answer which suggests that the Linux Skype client will be open-sourced. After asking for verification of whether that was the case, the tech support answer claimed it is going to happen, and that it's supposed to happen 'in the nearest future.' Now, this probably only means the client (the underlying protocol will probably be handled by a binary-only library), but even if that's the case, it seems like there is still reason to celebrate."
Sci-Fi

Star Trek Premiere Gets Standing Ovation, Surprise Showing In Austin 437

Posted by Soulskill from the set-phasers-to-awesome dept.
MrKaos writes "Proving that science fiction can still be great entertainment, J.J. Abrams appears to have impressed Star Trek fans at the official world premiere of Star Trek, who gave the film a five-minute standing ovation at the Sydney Opera House in Australia today. Meanwhile, mere hours beforehand, flummoxed fans at the Alamo Drafthouse theater in Austin, TX, deceived into thinking they were seeing a special, extended version of Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, were pleasantly surprised when a disguised Leonard Nimoy greeted them and announced they would be seeing the new film in its entirety. ILM's influence on the film is reported as visually stunning, and lucky Australian fans are scheduled to see the movie first, as it opens a day before the American release."

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Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?

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