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How Would an Astronaut Falling Into a Black Hole Die? 412

Posted by Soulskill
from the probably-heart-attack dept.

Comment: Re:Not worth it. (Score 2) 260

by deAtog (#39884399) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: DIY NAS For a Variety of Legacy Drives?
Generally, yes it's not worth the time or the effort. However, if you're serious about taking advantage of your old drives, I'd suggest using RAID on top of LVM. LVM will allow you to group drives of different sizes together to form a logical volume. You can then use software RAID to ensure data integrity. Over time, as drives fail, you can replace failed drives with new ones and rebuild the failed logical volume. A simple Samba server should suffice for your file sharing needs.

+ - New Lenovo x220 laptops are shipping with defects->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Users of recently produced Lenovo x220 notebooks and x220 tablets are finding defects with their mSATA interfaces, preventing them from running an mSATA SDD + 2.5" HDD for the 'speed + storage' sweet spot. The stock laptops do not offer an mSATA drive, so this issues is popping up with users putting in Intel/Renice/MyDigitalSSD third party drives — however all laptops are likely affected, whether the owners know it or not. The issue is not related to bios updates and may need a hardware fix. Ouch."
Link to Original Source

+ - Photovine: Google's next big thing?->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Back on 7th june, google filed a USPTO application for the name Photovine. The application cites a service dedicated to the transmission of images over telecommunication networks, wireless networks and internet. Unsurprisingly, the internet giant also purchased the corresponding domain name...

Read here: http://www.timesofcommerce.com/#ixzz1Pp3CT7ad"

Link to Original Source

Comment: Re:Wasn't this the whole point of CALEA? (Score 1) 174

by deAtog (#35952074) Attached to: Does Wiretapping Require Cell Company Cooperation?

If you're on a company network and you want to have a network performing okay while bittorrent clients are present on it, you'll need DPI.

That's complete nonsense. Bittorrent and other peer to peer networks are definitely bandwidth intensive, but you don't need DPI to maintain performance on a network. A properly configured QoS should be more than enough to balance things out. Simply prioritizing the outbound data by source address alone would ensure that anyone trying to perform bandwidth intensive tasks gets their fair share. IP protocols were designed to deal with bandwidth restrictions but also to use as much as possible. It's therefore possible that a few HTTP downloads could congest an entire network in the same way a bittorrent client does. This is becoming even more common with modern browsers which use multiple connections to try and retrieve data faster from remote servers.

The only thing DPI provides is the ability to restrict access to specific protocols based solely on packet content. If encryption is used, DPI is useless as it cannot differentiate between the traffic. The end result is a never ending war between software developers and network administrators. The final outcome has yet to be decided.


+ - Samsung Keylogger Stories a False Alarm->

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 (1100399) writes "The panic that arose yesterday about Samsung allegedly shipping laptops that contained a pre-installed keylogger turns out to have been a complete mistake after further investigation by security researchers and the company itself. In fact, the controversy was the result of a false positive from one commercial antimalware suite and nothing else.

Several outlets reported on Wednesday that Samsung laptops had been found to contain a keylogger known as StarLogger right out of the box from the factory. However, upon closer inspection by security companies, the folder on the laptops that supposedly contained the malware was actually a directory that is part of Windows' multi-language support."

Link to Original Source

+ - Japan Suspends Efforts to Prevent Nuclear Meltdown 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes "The Christian Science Monitor reports that Japan has suspended efforts to prevent damaged reactors from melting down at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant as a surge in radiation has made it too dangerous for workers to operate. "The workers cannot carry out even minimal work at the plant now," says chief government spokesman Yuko Edano, referring to workers who had been dousing the reactors with seawater in a frantic effort to cool down their rising temperatures. "Because of the radiation risk, we are on standby.""

+ - Linux 2.6.38 Released->

Submitted by darthcamaro
darthcamaro (735685) writes "The new Linux 2.6.38 kernel is now out and it's got a long list of performance improvements that should make Linux a whole lot faster. The kernel includes support for Transparent Huge Pages, Transmit Packet Steering (XPS),a utomatic process grouping, and a new RCU (Read/Copy/Update)-based path name lookup.

"This patch series was both controversial and experimental when it went in, but we're very hopeful of seeing speedups," James Bottomley, distinguished engineer at Novell said. "Just to set expectations correctly, the dcache/path lookup improvements really only impact workloads with large metadata modifications, so the big iron workloads (like databases) will likely see no change. However, stuff that critically involves metadata, like running a mail server (the postmark benchmark) should improve quite a bit."


Link to Original Source

Comment: Re:Yes, SHA1 security is questionable.. (Score 1) 217

by deAtog (#34254142) Attached to: Cracking Passwords With Amazon EC2 GPU Instances
You and the author of the article both seem to be missing one important aspect of password hashing. You're never supposed to apply a particular hashing algorithm directly to a password. Instead the user's password should be combined with some salt(random data) and then hashed. The resulting hash can still be brute forced, but any resulting hashes can't be used as collisions for other stored hashes as they require a different known salt to be used. In other words, while it took the author 49 minutes he only had to compute 6^n number of hashes where n is the number of possible characters per position (lowercase, uppercase, numeric?). If each hashed password had a different known salt appended, he would have had to compute 14 * 6^n number of hashes. This is an order of magnitude larger than the original time. Of course, this only applies if the salt is known. If the salt is unknown during the brute-force it's practically impossible to discover the original password.

Comment: $10,000 (Score 1) 16

by deAtog (#30818744) Attached to: Honest $10,000 SPAM

Sadly it seems a lot of people still think $10,000 is a briefcase full of cash. Lets break it down shall we.. Assuming they used standard US bills we get the following:

  1. $10,000 = $100 x 100 bills = 1 stack of 100, $100 bills
  2. $10,000 = $50 x 200 bills = 2 stacks of 100, $50 bills
  3. $10,000 = $20 x 500 bills = 5 stacks of 100, $20 bills
  4. $10,000 = $10 x 1000 bills = 10 stacks of 100, $10 bills
  5. $10,000 = $5 x 2000 bills = 20 stacks of 100, $5 bills
  6. $10,000 = $1 x 10000 bills = 100 stacks of 100, $1 bills

At 0:14 when they open the case you can clearly see several stacks marked as $100, some as $50, and some as $5. If the briefcase truly has $10,000 in it, the stacks marked with $100 bills must be filled with something other than $100 bills as a single stack would equal the amount the briefcase was said to hold. Given the variety of bills in the case, it appears they went to a lot of trouble to convince us that they gave away $10,000 USD. The reality is they probably didn't, and that the entire thing was just as staged as the briefcase full of cash.

Comment: Re:And who ... (Score 1) 297

by deAtog (#29845349) Attached to: FCC Begins Crafting Net Neutrality Regulations
I completely agree. Remove the word "lawful" from all sections and I'll be much more supportive of their efforts. If all content and application communications were protected under the First Amendment then word "lawful' would only serve to restrict that right in the future by designating specific things as "unlawful". The last thing we need is government overview of what applications or content are considered "lawful".

Comment: Seriously... (Score 2, Insightful) 792

by deAtog (#29435263) Attached to: Congress Mulls Research Into a Vehicle Mileage Tax
I thought gasoline taxes already accounted for this sort of thing. That is the more you drive your car the more tax you pay in taxes. If you're one of those idiots that must drive an 8mpg SUV then you undoubtedly pay more in taxes than someone who drives a midsized or compact car. Is this fair? I think so.

Comment: Re:Science =! Public Policy (Score 1) 899

by jcr (#29420973) Attached to: How To Make Science Popular Again?

I blame the sorry state of US public education, where the science teachers can make the fascinating into something as dull as watching paint dry.

When it comes to schooling, we sure as hell don't get what we pay for.

The missing element is competition at the primary and high school level. We still have competition at the university level, and the USA still has world-class universities. When students have a choice of where to go, incompetence isn't rewarded.

Setting the question of whether government should fund schooling aside, it's quite obvious that granting public schools a monopoly on the disposal of taxpayer funds has been a disaster. When they fail, they beat their chests and demand more funding. It's asinine.

