In a test, the researcher’s system was able to churn through 348 billion NTLM password hashes per second. That renders even the most secure password vulnerable to compute-intensive brute force and wordlist (or dictionary) attacks. A 14 character Windows XP password hashed using LM NTLM (NT Lan Manager), for example, would fall in just six minutes, said Per Thorsheim, organizer of the Passwords^12 Conference.
via Update: New 25 GPU Monster Devours Passwords In Seconds | The Security Ledger.
It’s all run by a controller that’s centralized but also includes a federated piece distributed to each switch. The setup is similar to the way OpenFlow gets deployed, but the inner workings are very different (and no, OpenFlow itself isn’t supported yet). Plexxi uses algorithms and a global view of the network to decide how to configure the network.
In other words, rather than programming route tables, the controller looks at the needs of the workloads and calculates how the network ought to be getting used. Some of this can even happen automatically.
On Tuesday, Coursera, which works with high-profile colleges to provide massive open online courses, or MOOC’s, announced its employee-matching service, called Coursera Career Services. Some high-profile tech companies have already signed up—including Facebook and Twitter, according to a post on Coursera’s blog, though officials would not disclose how much employers pay for the service. Only students who opt into the service will be included in the system that participating employers see, a detail stressed in an e-mail message that Coursera sent to its nearly two million past or present students on Tuesday.
Technologies at issue relate to electronic devices for wireless communications and data transfer including Radio Frequency (RF) technology and in some cases standardized communication protocols including GSM, GPRS, EDGE, W-CDMA, LTE, and 802.11 Wi-Fi standards, Ericsson said in the filing.
GFW is not perfect, however. Some Chinese technical professionals can bypass it with a variety of methods and/or tools. An arms race between censorship and circumvention has been going on for years, and GFW has caused collateral damage along the way.
via Splinternet Behind the Great Firewall of China – ACM Queue.
VPN (virtual private network) and SSH (secure shell) are the most powerful and stable tools for bypassing all surveillance technologies, although the basic ideas are the same as with the aforementioned tools: proxies and encrypted channels. The only difference is that VPN and SSH depend on a private host (or virtual host) or an account outside of China, instead of open, free proxies. Only technical professionals are able to set up such hosts or accounts, and most of them are not free. Commercial or public VPN services will be blocked by IP address and/or domain names if they are popular enough. In fact, the domain names *vpn.* are all blocked (such as vpn.com, vpn.net, vpn.org, vpn.info, vpn.me, vpn.us, vpn.co).
This effect has been confirmed empirically by a team of marketing researchers who tracked three businesses for a year after they offered a social coupon. All three companies lost money the month they offered the coupon and will have difficulty earning it back. According to analysis done by the two researchers,
V. Kumar and Bharath Rajan, the companies would need 15, 18, and 98 months (almost eight years) to earn back their lost profits. The reason? “The three businesses had difficulty retaining most of the new customers who were attracted to the coupon offers,” the two researchers wrote in the MIT Sloan Management Review.
via Why Groupon and Living Social Are Doomed – The Daily Beast.
The first MySQL vulnerability, a stack-based buffer overflow, would allow an authenticated database user a chance to cause the MySQL daemon to crash, and then execute code with the same privileges as the user running MySQL. A heap-based overflow vulnerability, separate from the previous flaw, could be used to do the same thing – again the damage could be caused by an authenticated database user.
via Security Researcher Discloses New Batch of MySQL Vulnerabilities | SecurityWeek.Com.
While the 1 percent share for Windows 8 is completely expected, it’s interesting to note that less than half of users have chosen to stick with the default IE10 browser: just 0.51 percent. Everyone else appears to be using Chrome, Firefox, or yet another browser.
via Windows XP Drops Below 40% Market Share, Windows 8 Passes 1%.
The approval was finally given and the systems interconnected, then Papworth, sitting in front of a personal computer, tapped out the greeting “Merry Christmas” and sent it via SMS to Vodafone Director Richard Jarvis.
The text-messaging era was born.
via Happy bday! SMS txt msgs turn 20 – Computerworld.
Perhaps it’s no surprise then that in late 1995, three years after Papworth’s first text message, users were only sending an average of one text every two and a half months.
Here is a typical problem: A passenger on the sixth floor wants to descend. The closest car is on the seventh floor, but it already has three riders and has made two stops. Is it the right choice to make that car stop again? That would be the best result for the sixth-floor passenger, but it would make the other people’s rides longer.
via Theresa Christy of Otis Elevator: Making Elevators Go | Creating – WSJ.com.