Math whizzes of ancient Babylon figured out forerunner of calculus

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During that interval, Jupiter’s motion across the sky appears to slow. (Such erratic apparent motion stems from the complex combination of Earth’s own orbit around the sun with that of Jupiter.) A graph of Jupiter’s apparent velocity against time slopes downward, so that the area under the curve forms a trapezoid. The area of the trapezoid in turn gives the distance that Jupiter has moved along the ecliptic during the 
60 days. Calculating the area under a curve to determine a numerical value is a basic operation, known as the integral between two points, in calculus. Discovering that the Babylonians understood this “was the real ‘aha!’ moment,” Ossendrijver says.

Source: Math whizzes of ancient Babylon figured out forerunner of calculus | Science | AAAS

After cuneiform died out around 100 C.E., Babylonian astronomy was thought to have been virtually forgotten, he notes. It was left to French and English philosophers and mathematicians in the late Middle Ages to reinvent what the Babylonians had developed.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope

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If JWST works as expected, it’s carrying enough fuel on-board that it should operate from 2018 through 2028, and although it’s never been done, the potential exists for a robotic (or crewed, if the technology gets developed by then) re-fueling mission to L2, which could increase the telescope’s lifetime by another decade. Just as Hubble’s been in operation for 25 years and counting, JWST could give us a generation of revolutionary science if things work out as well as they could. It’s the future of astronomy, and after more than a decade of hard work, it’s almost time to come to fruition. The future of space telescopes is almost here!

Source: The Future Of Astronomy: NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope – Forbes

Newegg sues patent troll that dropped its case

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“We just don’t believe Rosewill’s products and customers infringed on valid patent claims,” said Cheng. “Minero’s case does not have merit, and its patent is not only expired but would suck even if it wasn’t expired. Now that they have started the litigation, it would be irresponsible for Newegg to not finish it.”

Source: Newegg sues patent troll that dropped its case | Ars Technica

Blocking Shodan

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One of the most popular services to shine light on and enumerate the darkest corners of the Internet is Shodan. It’s a portal-driven service through which subscribers can query its vast database of IP addresses, online applications and service banners that populate the Internet. Behind the scenes, Shodan’s multiple servers continually scan the Internet, enumerating and probing every device they encounter and recording the latest findings.

Source: Blocking Shodan

On one hand, you might empathize with many organizations on the receiving end of a Shodan scan. Their Internet-accessible systems are constantly probed, their services are enumerated, and every embarrassing misconfiguration or unpatched service is catalogued and could be used against them by evil hackers, researchers and journalists.

Is Blockchain the most important IT invention of our age?

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Like records of land ownership. Creating and maintaining incorruptible registers of land titles is a huge – and mostly unsolved – problem for developing countries. So when the government of Honduras launched an investigation into whether a blockchain-based land registry could solve it, the non-geek world sat up and began to take notice. The unmistakable message was that this technology could be much more useful than merely securing cryptocurrencies. It might actually turn out to be one of the biggest IT inventions of our time.

Source: Is Blockchain the most important IT invention of our age? | John Naughton | Opinion | The Guardian

Docker’s Unikernel Purchase and the Changing Role of the OS

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It isn’t really as if the operating system ceases to exist. More to the point, it ceases to be a separate entity from the compiled application. A unikernel, therefore, is an indivisible unit of computing logic. As a microservice, it carries the promise of unlimited scalability. And as a virtual machine, it is designed to run under the Xen Type 1 (hardware-level) hypervisor.

Source: Docker’s Unikernel Purchase and the Changing Role of the OS

Amid court battle, Yosemite park plans to change some iconic names

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Bid farewell to some of Yosemite National Park’s most iconic names.In an extraordinary move, the National Park Service announced Thursday that it was changing the names of The Ahwahnee hotel, Curry Village and other beloved park sites. The move, officials say, was forced on them by an intellectual property dispute with the park’s departing concessions company.

Source: Amid court battle, Yosemite park plans to change some iconic names | The Sacramento Bee

Yahoo releases massive research dataset

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The data release, part of the company’s Webscope initiative and announced on Yahoo’s Tumblr blog, is intended for researchers to use in validating recommender systems, high-scale learning algorithms, user-behaviour modelling, collaborative filtering techniques and unsupervised learning methods.

Source: Yahoo releases massive research dataset

From: Yahoo Releases the Largest-ever Machine Learning Dataset for Researchers

Today, we are proud to announce the public release of the largest-ever machine learning dataset to the research community. The dataset stands at a massive ~110B events (13.5TB uncompressed) of anonymized user-news item interaction data, collected by recording the user-news item interactions of about 20M users from February 2015 to May 2015.

Big Ball of Mud

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These patterns explore the forces that encourage the emergence of a BIG BALL OF MUD, and the undeniable effectiveness of this approach to software architecture. What are the people who build them doing right? If more high-minded architectural approaches are to compete, we must understand what the forces that lead to a BIG BALL OF MUD are, and examine alternative ways to resolve them.

A number of additional patterns emerge out of the BIG BALL OF MUD. We discuss them in turn. Two principal questions underlie these patterns: Why are so many existing systems architecturally undistinguished, and what can we do to improve them?

Source: Big Ball of Mud

Verizon Routing Millions of IP Addresses for Cybercrime Gangs

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Because spammers can’t easily obtain new IP addresses through legitimate means, they frequently resort to stealing IP address blocks that are dormant and aren’t being utilized by the rightful owners. There is a thriving black market in IP addresses; spammers don’t care whether the source of their IP addresses is legitimate or even legal. A cybercriminal that can steal a large IP address block (for example, a /16 or 65,536 IP addresses) can generate thousands of dollars per month.

Source: Verizon Routing Millions of IP Addresses for Cybercrime Gangs