Planet Labs Unveils Plan To Launch 28 Nanosats on Antares’ 1st Cargo Run

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SAN FRANCISCO — Planet Labs is seeking to revolutionize the Earth imaging industry with a constellation of 28 nanosatellites designed to offer frequent, low-cost images of any point on the globe. By providing high-resolution imagery quickly and inexpensively, the company’s founders hope to expand dramatically the customer base for Earth imagery and the use of that information to address humanitarian, environmental and business concerns

via Planet Labs Unveils Plan To Launch 28 Nanosats on Antares’ 1st Cargo Run | SpaceNews.com.

Confessions of a cyber warrior

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I’ve been a longtime friend to one cyber warrior. On condition of anonymity, he agreed to be interviewed about what he does for a living and allowed me to record our conversation on a device he controlled, from which I transcribed our conversation. I was able to ask clarifying questions the next day.

via In his own words: Confessions of a cyber warrior | Security – InfoWorld.

US agency baffled by modern technology, destroys mice to get rid of viruses

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EDA’s CIO, fearing that the agency was under attack from a nation-state, insisted instead on a policy of physical destruction. The EDA destroyed not only (uninfected) desktop computers but also printers, cameras, keyboards, and even mice. The destruction only stopped—sparing $3 million of equipment—because the agency had run out of money to pay for destroying the hardware.

via US agency baffled by modern technology, destroys mice to get rid of viruses | Ars Technica.

And you want these people in charge of economic development?

Why I’m not paying the Troll Toll

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Lodsys is seeking a percentage of revenue from the time they sent me the letter to the time their patent expired. Usually they request around 1% of your in-app-purchases. My company made about $500 with in-app-purchase during this time period and 1% of that is $5. What? I’m getting sued for $5? Given it cost Lodsys $350 to file the lawsuit I assumed they would ask for more than that. And they did.

Lodsys offered to settle with my company for $3,500. If I pay them off, what is stopping the next troll from knocking on my door? Nothing. And I’ve heard that if you pay a troll to go away it can lead to more trolls showing up.

via Why I’m not paying the Troll Toll | Todd Moore.

This passage seems like an appropriate response.

It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation
To call upon a neighbour and to say: –
“We invaded you last night–we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away.”

And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you’ve only to pay ‘em the Dane-geld
And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!

It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say: –
“Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away.”

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.

It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say: –

“We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that pays it is lost!”

–Rudyard Kipling

Serval Mesh

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Serval Mesh is an Android app that provides voice calls, text messaging and file sharing between mobile phones using WiFi, without the need for a SIM or any other infrastructure like mobile cell towers, WiFi hotspots or Internet access.

Via The Serval Project Wiki

The Enron E-mails’ Immortal Life

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This research has had widespread applications: computer scientists have used the corpus to train systems that automatically prioritize certain messages in an in-box and alert users that they may have forgotten about an important message. Other researchers use the Enron corpus to develop systems that automatically organize or summarize messages. Much of today’s software for fraud detection, counterterrorism operations, and mining workplace behavioral patterns over e-mail has been somehow touched by the data set.

via The Enron E-mails’ Immortal Life | MIT Technology Review.

How Facebook threatens HP, Cisco, and more with its “vanity free” servers

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Facebook, Amazon, and Google are all very picky about their server hardware, and these tech giants mostly build it themselves from commodity components. Frank Frankovsky, VP of hardware design and supply chain operations at Facebook, was instrumental in launching the Open Compute Project because he saw the waste in big cloud players reinventing things they could share. Frankovsky felt that bringing the open-source approach Facebook has followed for software to the hardware side could save the company and others millions—both in direct hardware costs and in maintenance and power costs.

via How Facebook threatens HP, Cisco, and more with its “vanity free” servers | Ars Technica.

The OCP hardware designs are “open” at a higher level. This way anyone can use standards-based components to create the motherboards, the chassis, the rack-mountings, the racks, and the other components that make up servers.

Motorola Is Listening

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Most subsequent connectivity to both services (other than downloading images) is proxied through Motorola’s system on the internet using unencrypted HTTP, so Motorola and anyone running a network capture can easily see who your friends/contacts are (including your friends’ email addresses), what posts you’re reading and writing, and so on. They’ll also get a list of which images you’re viewing, even though the actual image download comes directly from the source.

via Motorola Is Listening – Projects – Beneath the Waves.

The Underhanded C Contest

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The goal of the contest is to write code that is as readable, clear, innocent and straightforward as possible, and yet it must fail to perform at its apparent function. To be more specific, it should do something subtly evil. Every year, we will propose a challenge to coders to solve a simple data processing problem, but with covert malicious behavior. Examples include miscounting votes, shaving money from financial transactions, or leaking information to an eavesdropper. The main goal, however, is to write source code that easily passes visual inspection by other programmers.

via The Underhanded C Contest.