http://www.engadget.com/2013/12/31/nsa-drououtjeep-iphone-hack-details/?ncid=rss_truncated
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Monday, December 30, 2013
Thursday, December 26, 2013
Monday, December 23, 2013
Sunday, December 22, 2013
Friday, December 20, 2013
QNX survives cuts at Blackberry/RIM, called "crown jewel"
Read the last segment for details,
BlackBerry CEO details survival strategy | Mobile - CNET News
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57616170-94/blackberry-ceo-details-survival-strategy/
Thursday, December 19, 2013
RSA Key Extraction via Low-Bandwidth Acoustic Cryptanalysis
http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~tromer/acoustic/
Summary
Many computers emit a high-pitched noise during operation, due to vibration in some of their electronic components. These acoustic emanations are more than a nuisance: they can convey information about the software running on the computer and, in particular, leak sensitive information about security-related computations. In a preliminary presentation, we have shown that different RSA keys induce different sound patterns, but it was not clear how to extract individual key bits. The main problem was the very low bandwidth of the acoustic side channel (under 20 kHz using common microphones, and a few hundred kHz using ultrasound microphones), many orders of magnitude below the GHz-scale clock rates of the attacked computers.
Here, we describe a new acoustic cryptanalysis key extraction attack, applicable to GnuPG's current implementation of RSA. The attack can extract full 4096-bit RSA decryption keys from laptop computers (of various models), within an hour, using the sound generated by the computer during the decryption of some chosen ciphertexts. We experimentally demonstrate that such attacks can be carried out, using either a plain mobile phone placed next to the computer, or a more sensitive microphone placed 4 meters away.
Beyond acoustics, we demonstrate that a similar low-bandwidth attack can be performed by measuring the electric potential of a computer chassis. A suitably-equipped attacker need merely touch the target computer with his bare hand, or get the required leakage information from the ground wires at the remote end of VGA, USB or Ethernet cables.
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
Re: Benchmarking the ODroid XU: A Fast-Clocked Quad A15 ARM Machine
make money. ;-)
Jesse
Monday, December 16, 2013
Sunday, December 15, 2013
Thursday, December 12, 2013
Google Brings AmigaOS to Chrome Via Native Client Emulation
http://m.slashdot.org/story/195515
Google Brings AmigaOS to Chrome Via Native Client Emulation
from the time-machine-always-comes-last dept.
First time accepted submitter LibbyMC writesGoogle's approach to bringing older C software to the browser is demonstrated in bringing the '80s-era AmigaOS to Chrome. 'The Native Client technology runs software written to run on a particular processor at close to the speeds that native software runs. The approach gives software more direct access to a computer's hardware , but it also adds security restrictions to prevent people from downloading malware from the Web that would take advantage of that power.'Chrome users can go straight to the demo.
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
Monday, December 09, 2013
Friday, December 06, 2013
Wednesday, December 04, 2013
New USB connector inbound, set to be smaller and reversible - TechSpot
NOTE: New connectors are not expected until late 2014.
http://www.techspot.com/news/54899-new-usb-connector-inbound-set-to-be-smaller-and-reversible.html
Tuesday, December 03, 2013
Monday, December 02, 2013
Thursday, November 28, 2013
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
ControlByWeb Ethernet I/O
ControlByWeb Ethernet I/O products provide an easy and reliable way to monitor & control devices over a network.
There are a few other alternate products you can check out too:
http://www.controlanything.com/Relay/Relay/ETHERNET_KEY_FOB
There used to be 6bit.com but it looks like they've gone out of business.
http://www.controlbyweb.com/
There are a few other alternate products you can check out too:
http://www.controlanything.com/Relay/Relay/ETHERNET_KEY_FOB
There used to be 6bit.com but it looks like they've gone out of business.
Monday, November 25, 2013
Sunday, November 17, 2013
Friday, November 15, 2013
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Wednesday, November 06, 2013
Monday, November 04, 2013
Saturday, November 02, 2013
Monday, October 28, 2013
Thursday, October 24, 2013
Friday, October 18, 2013
Wednesday, October 16, 2013
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
How To Develop Unmaintainable Software
How To Develop Unmaintainable Software
"Greg Jorgensen specializes in debugging, fixing, maintaining, and extending legacy software systems. His typical client has a web site or internal application that works, more or less, but the original developer isn't available. Greg lists some things you can do in your own software projects to keep him in business. In summary, the list goes as follows: Customize your development environment a lot, don't make it easy for the next programmer to start working on the code. Create an elaborate build and deployment environment and remember to leave out the documentation. Don't bother with a testing/staging server but instead have secret logins and backdoor URLs to test new features, and mix test data with real data in your database. Don't bother with a well-understood framework, write everything from scratch instead. Add dependencies to specific versions of libraries and resources, but don't protect or document those dependencies. For the icing of the cake, use the coolest mix of cutting-edge programming languages."
Monday, October 14, 2013
Thursday, October 10, 2013
Fwd: That grumpy BSD guy: The Hail Mary Cloud And The Lessons Learned
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Bill Crawford
http://bsdly.blogspot.ca/2013/10/the-hail-mary-cloud-and-lessons-learned.html?m=1
http://bsdly.blogspot.ca/2013/10/the-hail-mary-cloud-and-lessons-learned.html?m=1
Friday, October 04, 2013
Sunday, September 29, 2013
Friday, September 27, 2013
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Nokia ’fesses up about its former-CEO’s compensation | Ars Technica
NOTE: This article is about a former Microsoft employee, that was CEO of Nokia, just before the sale of Nokia Business Phone Divison to Microsoft. Appearance of Conflict of Interest.
Monday, September 23, 2013
Platform Connectors
5. Platform Connectors
Automation is the future of convenience. Fortunately, the devices and tools that we depend on are continually getting smarter and more connected. As more of these tools openly provide access to their data through methods like application programming interfaces (APIs), increasing levels of automation can be accomplished that can save us minutes, and in some cases hours, each day.Using tools like IFTTT, Zapier and others, I can automate many of my daily personal and professional tasks. From automatically posting a 'Happy Birthday' message to my Facebook friend on their birthday to automatically adding contacts to my CRM when I receive an email from a potential client, I can streamline many of the tasks that require my incremental attention.This becomes increasingly interesting when you consider the tens of dozens of websites, social tools and hardwares that are supported by these platforms. Things like automatically turning the house lights on or off at a certain time to things like automatically copying photos from Facebook to Dropbox, the concept of streamlined automation can get exciting.For clarification, I consider this a significant innovation because many of the tools and platforms we use have historically had their data in a silo, preventing certain degrees of automation. Now, with platforms being able to communicate with one another, there is an opportunity to take our technology to the next level by letting the automation do the heavy lifting of the small day-to-day duties. The larger opportunities are truly endless and unrealized.So how does your list compare?As stated previously, this list is in no particular order and consists of things derived from my interests and areas that I'm familiar with. Only time will dictate how these things will truly pan out. Part of the reason that envelope-pushing innovations haven't become wildly known is because some are still being hacked on and tweaked within the proverbial garages of todays smartest people. Entrepreneur and angel investor Chris Dixon wrote about this paradigm as well, citing that activities that begin as tinkering and hobbies often take ten or more years to become practical utilities for normal people.Sent from my iPad
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
New Operating System Seeks To Replace Linux In the Cloud
New Operating System Seeks To Replace Linux In the Cloud
Posted by Soulskill
from the chasing-the-penguins-out-of-the-sky dept.
from the chasing-the-penguins-out-of-the-sky dept.
New submitter urdak writes"At CloudOpen in New Orleans, KVM veterans Avi Kivity and Dor Laorrevealed their latest venture, a new open-source (BSD license) operating system named OSv. OSv can run existing Linux programs and runtime environments such as a JVM, but unlike Linux, OSv was designed from the ground up to run efficiently on virtual machines. For example, OSv avoids the traditional (but slow) userspace-kernel isolation, as on the cloud VMs normally run a single application. OSv is also much smaller than Linux, and breaks away from tradition by being written in C++11 (the language choice is explained in in this post)."
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
Friday, September 13, 2013
Thursday, September 12, 2013
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Saturday, September 07, 2013
The US government has betrayed the internet. We need to take it back
The US government has betrayed the internet. We need to take it back
The NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract. We engineers built the internet – and now we have to fix it
• Explaining the latest NSA revelations – Q&A
Government and industry have betrayed the internet, and us.
By subverting the internet at every level to make it a vast, multi-layered and robust surveillance platform, the NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract. The companies that build and manage our internet infrastructure, the companies that create and sell us our hardware and software, or the companies that host our data: we can no longer trust them to be ethical internet stewards.
This is not the internet the world needs, or the internet its creators envisioned. We need to take it back.
And by we, I mean the engineering community.
Yes, this is primarily a political problem, a policy matter that requires political intervention.
But this is also an engineering problem, and there are several things engineers can – and should – do.
One, we should expose. If you do not have a security clearance, and if you have not received a National Security Letter, you are not bound by a federal confidentially requirements or a gag order. If you have been contacted by the NSA to subvert a product or protocol, you need to come forward with your story. Your employer obligations don't cover illegal or unethical activity. If you work with classified data and are truly brave, expose what you know. We need whistleblowers.
We need to know how exactly how the NSA and other agencies are subverting routers, switches, the internet backbone, encryption technologies and cloud systems. I already have five stories from people like you, and I've just started collecting. I want 50. There's safety in numbers, and this form of civil disobedience is the moral thing to do.
Two, we can design. We need to figure out how to re-engineer the internet to prevent this kind of wholesale spying. We need new techniques to prevent communications intermediaries from leaking private information.
We can make surveillance expensive again. In particular, we need open protocols, open implementations, open systems – these will be harder for the NSA to subvert.
The Internet Engineering Task Force, the group that defines the standards that make the internet run, has a meeting planned for early November in Vancouver. This group needs to dedicate its next meeting to this task. This is an emergency, and demands an emergency response.
Three, we can influence governance. I have resisted saying this up to now, and I am saddened to say it, but the US has proved to be an unethical steward of the internet. The UK is no better. The NSA's actions are legitimizing the internet abuses by China, Russia, Iran and others. We need to figure out new means of internet governance, ones that makes it harder for powerful tech countries to monitor everything. For example, we need to demand transparency, oversight, and accountability from our governments and corporations.
Unfortunately, this is going play directly into the hands of totalitarian governments that want to control their country's internet for even more extreme forms of surveillance. We need to figure out how to prevent that, too. We need to avoid the mistakes of the International Telecommunications Union, which has become a forum to legitimize bad government behavior, and create truly international governance that can't be dominated or abused by any one country.
Generations from now, when people look back on these early decades of the internet, I hope they will not be disappointed in us. We can ensure that they don't only if each of us makes this a priority, and engages in the debate. We have a moral duty to do this, and we have no time to lose.
Dismantling the surveillance state won't be easy. Has any country that engaged in mass surveillance of its own citizens voluntarily given up that capability? Has any mass surveillance country avoided becoming totalitarian? Whatever happens, we're going to be breaking new ground.
Again, the politics of this is a bigger task than the engineering, but the engineering is critical. We need to demand that real technologists be involved in any key government decision making on these issues. We've had enough of lawyers and politicians not fully understanding technology; we need technologists at the table when we build tech policy.
To the engineers, I say this: we built the internet, and some of us have helped to subvert it. Now, those of us who love liberty have to fix it.
• Bruce Schneier writes about security, technology, and people. His latest book is Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive. He is working for the Guardian on other NSA stories
Friday, September 06, 2013
Elon Musk Unveils 'Iron Man'-like Design Tech for SpaceX Rockets (Video)
http://www.space.com/22688-elon-musk-iron-man-tech-rockets-video.html
This is the demo leap motion needs to be showing
This is the demo leap motion needs to be showing
Tuesday, September 03, 2013
Saturday, August 31, 2013
Monday, August 26, 2013
Friday, August 23, 2013
Thursday, August 22, 2013
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
Sunday, August 18, 2013
Saturday, August 17, 2013
Thursday, August 15, 2013
Collective IQ
http://www.dougengelbart.org/about/collective-iq.html
Doug Engelbart is amazing and well worth studying his work.
Sunday, August 11, 2013
Writing Hello World Bootloader Tutorial
http://viralpatel.net/taj/tutorial/hello_world_bootloader.php
Apparently part of a:
Apparently part of a:
TAJ OS may be an answer. It is a first operating system developed in India which is totally based on object oriented concept. C++ is the first thing that comes to mind when we hear the word object oriented. And yes, TAJ OS is totally developed in C++, which removes all drawbacks of C language. (sic)
Features of TAJ Operating System
- 32-bit Protected mode Operating System
- Paging enable
- Secure Exception handling
- Interrupt management system
- Work with different kinds of CPU (80386 onwards).
- Fully functional built in keyboard driver
- Total DMA control
- Floppy driver
- Mouse driver
- Fat file system driver
- Multitasking
- Multithreading
- Multiuser
Friday, August 09, 2013
Tuesday, August 06, 2013
Monday, August 05, 2013
Project HiJack
Hijacking power and bandwidth from the mobile phone's audio interface.
Creating a cubic-inch peripheral sensor ecosystem for the mobile phone.
Hendy’s Law (pixels per dollar)
Pixels per dollar. Similarly, Barry Hendy of Kodak Australia has plotted the "pixels per dollar" as a basic measure of value for a digital camera, demonstrating the historical linearity (on a log scale) of this market and the opportunity to predict the future trend of digital camera price, LCD and LED screens and resolution.
Sunday, August 04, 2013
Friday, August 02, 2013
Sajak's law of technology marketing
http://outsideinmarketing.wordpress.com/2009/02/11/sajaks-law-of-technology-marketing/
Sajak's Law states that the time it takes technology vendors to embrace new buzzwords in their marketing literature is cut in half every year.
Following the introduction of a new concept such as SOA by industry thought leaders, there is a mad rush by technology vendors to adopt the new terminology into their messaging and positioning. In an effort to be viewed as the leader in the latest trend, vendors begin bombarding their customers with aggressive promotions around the latest buzzword terms. The process happens so quickly that few customers actually have time to filter the noise to determine the true meaning of new terms. After a few months, the terms cease to have any value, because every vendor claims to have adopted the principles.
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
Fwd: Embedded RTOS E-News
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Embedded News" <embedded_news@mentor.com>
Date: Jul 30, 2013 5:55 PM
Subject: Embedded RTOS E-News
To: "John Sokol" <john.sokol@gmail.com>
From: "Embedded News" <embedded_news@mentor.com>
Date: Jul 30, 2013 5:55 PM
Subject: Embedded RTOS E-News
To: "John Sokol" <john.sokol@gmail.com>
| |||||
Saturday, July 27, 2013
Ballmer admits Microsoft built too many Surface RTs, disappointed with Windows sales | The Verge
The article is about average. The 486 comments (as of Jul-27-2023) have some real meat.
Friday, July 26, 2013
Sunday, July 21, 2013
Fwd: ai takes over internet
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Bill Crawford"
Date: Jul 20, 2013 11:39 PM
Subject: ai takes over internet
"MIT is claiming they can make the Internet faster if we let computers redesign TCP/IP instead of coding it by hand. They used machine learning to design a version of TCP that's twice the speed and causes half the delay, even with modern bufferbloated networks. They also claim it's more 'fair.' The researchers have put up a lengthy FAQ and source code where they admit they don't know why the system works, only that it goes faster than normal TCP."
Saturday, July 20, 2013
Oracle switches Berkeley DB license
Oracle had the right to change the BerkeleyDB license to AGPL, but many will view Oracle's switch as a betrayal of trust
http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/oracle-switches-berkeley-db-license-222097
From the articleFuture versions of Berkeley DB will instead use the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL). This is also a strong copyleft license, but with an important difference. The AGPL says "your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network ... an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version."
Friday, July 19, 2013
Saturday, July 13, 2013
Thursday, July 11, 2013
NOTES on Implementing an Email Parser with Python
The most common method for reading an email message is:
Or you can read the entire file first by doing:
Either way, the email message has been processed for ease of use. The header has been stored in a python dictionary, and the body of the message is in a blob.
The list of available rfc822 headers can be gotten by:
Next, you might want to get the value from a field. The lookup is not case sensative.
And of course you'd like to get the body of the message.
import email
# read a file which has just one message
f = open("mbox",'r')
emailMessage = email.message_from_file(f)
f.close()Or you can read the entire file first by doing:
import email
# Process the message
emailMessage = email.message_from_string(str)
Either way, the email message has been processed for ease of use. The header has been stored in a python dictionary, and the body of the message is in a blob.
The list of available rfc822 headers can be gotten by:
print emailMessage.keys()Next, you might want to get the value from a field. The lookup is not case sensative.
print emailMessage.get('subject')And of course you'd like to get the body of the message.
print emailMessage.payload()Monday, July 08, 2013
Wednesday, July 03, 2013
Tuesday, July 02, 2013
funny photo of random number algorithm
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ted
Debian was producing weak crypto keys for a few years, and nobody noticed.
http://www.gergely.risko.hu/debian-dsa1571/random4.jpg
From: Ted
Debian was producing weak crypto keys for a few years, and nobody noticed.
http://www.gergely.risko.hu/debian-dsa1571/random4.jpg
Monday, July 01, 2013
Teen Faces Years in Prison for ‘Sarcastic Comment’ He Made on Facebook
Stupid is as stupid does.... That's an old saying
"A Texas teen has been jailed since late March for what his father says was just a dumb joke he posted on Facebook.
(...)
http://gawker.com/teen-faces-years-in-prison-for-sarcastic-comment-he-m-598970268
"A Texas teen has been jailed since late March for what his father says was just a dumb joke he posted on Facebook.
(...)
"Someone
had said something to the effect of 'Oh you're insane, you're crazy,
you're messed up in the head,’ to which he replied 'Oh yeah, I'm real
messed up in the head, I'm going to go shoot up a school full of kids
and eat their still, beating hearts,'" recalled Justin's dad Jack. "The next two lines were lol and jk."
But an
unidentified woman in Canada who saw Justin's comment didn't realize it
was supposed to be tongue in cheek, and tracked down (...)
http://gawker.com/teen-faces-years-in-prison-for-sarcastic-comment-he-m-598970268
Sunday, June 30, 2013
Friday, June 28, 2013
Sunday, June 23, 2013
Saturday, June 22, 2013
Friday, June 21, 2013
Skynet, a Tor-powered botnet straight from Reddit
https://community.rapid7.com/community/infosec/blog/2012/12/06/skynet-a-tor-powered-botnet-straight-from-reddit
Thursday, June 20, 2013
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
Monday, June 17, 2013
Saturday, June 15, 2013
Go to statement considered harmful
Link to the (classic) article at the ACM. The abstract follows.
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1241518&coll=ACM&dl=ACM
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1241518&coll=ACM&dl=ACM
To many people, Dijkstra's
letter to the Editor of Communications of the A CM, published in March
1968, marks the true beginning of structured programming. That it
influenced the industry is clear, if for no other reason than for the
articles it spawned, ranging from "IF-THEN-ELSE Considered Harmful," to
"The Else Must Go, Too," to "Programming Considered Harmful."
In form and content, Dijkstra's letter is similar to his 1965 paper, which appears first in this collection. Description of the inverse relationship between a programmer's ability and the density of goto statements in his program is repeated, as is the emphasis on the limited ability of the human brain. Much of the discussion is somewhat theoretical in nature, and the typical COBOL programmer will hunger for some coding examples so that he can see why goto statements make program logic harder to understand.
Echoing his 1965 paper, the last few paragraphs underscore once again why the subject of structured programming stayed out of the mainstream of the data processing industry for so long. As Dijkstra points out, goto statements were a subject of discussion among academicians as far back as 1959. But even today, people whom Dijkstra acknowledges --- names like Wirth, Hoare, Strachey, and Landin --- are not well known to business-oriented or scientificoriented programmers, so it should be no surprise that their ideas have languished for so many years.
In form and content, Dijkstra's letter is similar to his 1965 paper, which appears first in this collection. Description of the inverse relationship between a programmer's ability and the density of goto statements in his program is repeated, as is the emphasis on the limited ability of the human brain. Much of the discussion is somewhat theoretical in nature, and the typical COBOL programmer will hunger for some coding examples so that he can see why goto statements make program logic harder to understand.
Echoing his 1965 paper, the last few paragraphs underscore once again why the subject of structured programming stayed out of the mainstream of the data processing industry for so long. As Dijkstra points out, goto statements were a subject of discussion among academicians as far back as 1959. But even today, people whom Dijkstra acknowledges --- names like Wirth, Hoare, Strachey, and Landin --- are not well known to business-oriented or scientificoriented programmers, so it should be no surprise that their ideas have languished for so many years.
Friday, June 14, 2013
Thursday, June 13, 2013
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Sunday, June 09, 2013
Friday, June 07, 2013
Thursday, June 06, 2013
Sunday, June 02, 2013
CPU speed vs efficiency
I have been tasked with finding a lower power consuming solution while preserving performance.
The chart below is sorted by Total CPU performance but there are also other factors such as can your application use 4 CPU's or will it just be limited to one or two while the rest go unused.
We are currently using an i5-650 that is 73 watts for 2 core at 3.2 GHz. I quick look shows the i3-3225 at 55 watts for what is a slight performance gain of 2 cores at 3.3 Ghz.
I found it interesting that there was such a strong relationship between lower CPU speeds and more efficient operation. I can't help but feel this is more then physics at work but more organizational mandates and a side effect of the way their requirements are put together.
This is across all Intel CPU's after 2006 or so up to the current ones shipped.
Speed is (GHz * Cores) / 21 , the fasted being the i7-3970X 6 cores at 3.5 GHz.
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