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Submission + - Is there a "standard" way of formatting a number ? 8

Submitted by Pieroxy
Pieroxy writes: I recently created a small open source project to monitor one's computer "essential" metrics: Conkw.

As I was writing it I had to come up with a way for users to format a number. I needed a small string the user could write to describe exactly what they want to do with their number. Some examples can be: write it as a 3-digit number suffixed by SI prefixes when the numbers are too big or too small, display a timestamp as HH:MM string, or just the day of week, eventually cut to the first three characters, do the same with a timestamp in milliseconds, or nanoseconds, display a nice string out of a number of seconds to express a duration ("3h 12mn 17s"), pad the number with spaces so that all numbers are aligned (left or right), force a fixed number of digits after the decimal point, etc.

In other words, I was looking for a "universal" way of formatting numbers and failed to find any kind of standard online. Do Slashdot readers know of such a thing or should I create my own?

Submission + - Japan is developing wooden satellites (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Joe2020
Joe2020 writes: First was it origami with which Japan delighted space engineers and provided inspiration in the construction of satellites. Now Japan is aiming to use wood in space to reduce the impact of satellites on our atmosphere, which could mean the wood-working classes at school are going to pay off for space engineers, too.
As funny as it sounds at first, is it a much needed step. With tens of thousands of planned Low-Earth-Orbit satellites all destined to burn up in our atmosphere in the next decade is it important to preserve our environment as early as possible and not just after the pollution becomes visible.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/bus...

Submission + - OpenPGP Keyserver Attack Ongoing

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: There’s an interesting and troubling attack happening to some people involved in the OpenPGP community that makes their certificates unusable and can essentially break the OpenPGP implementation of anyone who tries to import one of the certificates.

The attack is quite simple and doesn’t exploit any technical vulnerabilities in the OpenPGP software, but instead takes advantage of one of the inherent properties of the keyserver network that’s used to distribute certificates. Keyservers are designed to allow people to discover the public certificates of other people with them they want to communicate over a secure channel. One of the properties of the network is that anyone who has looked at a certificate and verified that it belongs to another specific person can add a signature, or attestation, to the certificate. That signature basically serves as the public stamp of approval from one user to another.

Last week, two people involved in the OpenPGP community discovered that their public certificates had been spammed with tens of thousands of signatures--one has nearly 150,000--in an apparent effort to render them useless. The attack targeted Robert J. Hansen and Daniel Kahn Gillmor, but the root problem may end up affecting many other people, too.

Matthew Green, a cryptographer and associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, said that the attack points out some of the weaknesses in the entire OpenPGP infrastructure.

"PGP is old and kind of falling apart. There's not enough people maintaining it and it's full of legacy code. There are some people doing the lord's work in keeping it up, but it's not enough," Green said. "Think about like an old hospital that's crumbling and all of the doctors have left but there's still some people keeping the emergency room open and helping patients. At some point you have to ask whether it's better just to let it close and let something better come along.

"I think PGP is preventing the development of better stuff and the person who did this is clearly demonstrating this problem."

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