Sysinternals Suite
The entire set of Sysinternals Utilities rolled up into a single download.
Just a shout out to an excellent set of PC diagnostic tools since I had to recently download and use tcpview.exe.
China Demands All New Homes Install Fiber Optic Networks
According to a new report from the state-run paper China Daily, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is ordering all newly built residences to install fiber optic connections in any city or county “where a public fiber optic telecom network is available.”
via China Demands All New Homes Install Fiber Optic Networks.
Huawei shows off phone with monster 6.1-inch screen
Running Android 4.1 with a custom Huawei user interface, the phone is dust- and water-resistant, as was demonstrated on stage when Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei’s consumer business group, poured water over the phone’s screen with no apparent problem. He also dropped it on stage, on purpose, to demonstrate toughness.
Java 0day Mass Exploit Distribution
There appears to be multiple ad networks redirecting to Blackhole sites, amplifying the mass exploitation problem. We have seen ads from legitimate sites, especially in the UK, Brazil, and Russia, redirecting to domains hosting the current Blackhole implementation delivering the Java 0day.
Alcatel-Lucent Buys Optical Specialist
Alcatel-Lucent has acquired Wavelength Selective Switch (WSS) specialist Capella Photonics Inc. for an undisclosed sum.
ACM Classic: Reflections on Trusting Trust
The moral is obvious. You can’t trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.) No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code. In demonstrating the possibility of this kind of attack, I picked on the C compiler. I could have picked on any program-handling program such as an assembler, a loader, or even hardware microcode. As the level of program gets lower, these bugs will be harder and harder to detect. A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect.
Nanostructures Boost Battery Life Fivefold
Some of the most promising battery chemistries—which, in theory, could store several times more energy than today’s lithium-ion batteries and cost much less—have a fatal flaw. They can’t be recharged very often before they stop working, making them useless for applications such as electric vehicles. Now researchers at Stanford have created novel nanostructures that greatly increase the number of times one of these chemistries can be recharged, even to levels high enough for many commercial applications.
via Nanostructures Boost Battery Life Fivefold | MIT Technology Review.
Gov’t will open up radio spectrum to improve Wi-Fi
The Wi-Fi traffic jam was predictable, just as it’s predictable that there will be a mobile spectrum crunch, he said. 195 MHz of new spectrum will be opened up, all in the 5 GHz band, which has less interference but shorter ranges than the 2.4 GHz band. Opening up more spectrum has the potential to alleviate Internet-use congestion, particularly at crowded places like public Wi-Fi access points.
via FCC’s Genachowski: Gov’t will open up radio spectrum to improve Wi-Fi | Ars Technica.
The Billion-Dollar Startup: Inside Obama’s Campaign Tech
The Obama campaign tended to hire senior developers, which meant nearly everyone on the team had an extensive skillset. They worked in weeklong sprints, with the goal of releasing new software every week. They were determined to remain technology agnostic, building apps in a variety of languages—Ruby on Rails, Java, PHP backed by Kohana. The management and engineering teams worked in close physical proximity, helping close the feedback loop: if something was going drastically wrong, the path to fixing it started with a ten-yard walk to another cubicle and smacking the responsible party in the back of the head.
via The Billion-Dollar Startup: Inside Obama’s Campaign Tech.
In a perfect world, the Romney campaign would have led its volunteers through several dry runs on Orca before Election Day; but someone had decided to keep the major parts of the software a secret for as long as possible. As a result, Orca proved toothless against Narwhal and the other Obama apps.
Nokia’s MITM on HTTPS traffic from their phone
From the tests that were preformed, it is evident that Nokia is performing Man In The Middle Attack for sensitive HTTPS traffic originated from their phone and hence they do have access to clear text information which could include user credentials to various sites such as social networking, banking, credit card information or anything that is sensitive in nature.
via Nokia’s MITM on HTTPS traffic from their phone « Treasure Hunt.