GNOME 3.8 Is Dropping Its Fallback Mode

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Matthias Clasen on the behalf of the GNOME Release Team has announced that they have decided to eliminate GNOME’s “fallback mode” with the upcoming 3.8 release that allowed a “GNOME classic” mode that didn’t depend upon OpenGL/3D rendering and was more like the GNOME2 traitional desktop.

via [Phoronix] GNOME 3.8 Is Dropping Its Fallback Mode.

Now for GNOME users without a proper GPU and drivers, if you want to still use GNOME, you will need to use LLVMpipe for a software-accelerated experience of the GNOME Shell.

Gnome has totally gone off the rails.  Luckily there is a fork for Gnome called Mate.  Mate is supposed to be shipped with Fedora 18.  I have used Mate in a Linux Mint virtual machine and it works well.  I tried loading it into a Fedora 17 VM many months ago and it had problems but I’m sure all of that will get worked out.  IMHO, Gnome has become a product of hubris.  I’ve tried to use it and just can’t deal with the constant context switching to do simple tasks like opening a terminal window.

Coursera, edX, and MOOCs Are Changing the Online Education Business

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Online education isn’t new—in the United States more than 700,000 students now study in full-time “distance learning” programs. What’s different is the scale of technology being applied by leaders who mix high-minded goals with sharp-elbowed, low-priced Internet business models. In the stories that will follow in this month’s business report, MIT Technology Review will chart the impact of free online education, particularly the “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, offered by new education ventures like edX, Coursera, and Udacity, to name the most prominent (see “The Crisis in Higher Education”).

via Coursera, edX, and MOOCs Are Changing the Online Education Business | MIT Technology Review.

Will they succeed and create something truly different? If they do, we’ll have the answer to our question: online learning will be the most important innovation in education in the last 200 years.

From:  MOOCs will eat academia

MOOCs will al­most cer­tainly hol­low out the teach­ing com­po­nent of uni­ver­si­ties as it stands today. I don’t see any­thing on the hori­zon that will re­verse this tide. In most tech­ni­cal fields, the nuts and bolts tech­ni­cal in­ter­view and on-the-job learn­ing and per­for­mance mon­i­tor­ing long ago re­placed any faith in de­grees as cre­den­tials. That leaves very few fields, such as law, where you ab­solutely do need the de­gree as a cre­den­tial.

Hadoop Corona

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Hadoop Corona is the next version of Map-Reduce. The current Map-Reduce has a single Job Tracker that reached its limits at Facebook. The Job Tracker manages the cluster resource and tracks the state of each job. In Hadoop Corona, the cluster resources are tracked by a central Cluster Manager. Each job gets its own Corona Job Tracker which tracks just that one job. The design provides some key improvements:

via hadoop-20/src/contrib/corona at master · facebook/hadoop-20 · GitHub.

Persistent Threat Detection on a Budget

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It’s staggering to me how few security teams have gotten wise to regularly interrogating the logs from their recursive DNS servers. In many ways DNS logging can be considered sprinkling flour on the floor to track the footsteps of the culprit who’s been raiding the family fridge. Each step leaves a visible impression of where and how the intruder navigated the kitchen, and their shoe size.

via Persistent Threat Detection on a Budget « Damballa.

To turn on logging in bind use:

# rndc querylog

This puts all DNS queries into /var/log/messages.  Just grep for named and pipe that into some custom perl script or whatever to run against a blacklist.

# grep named /var/log/messages  |  run_my_blacklist_script.pl

The Web Won’t Be Safe or Secure until We Break It

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If the user is logged in, then the image file loads successfully, which causes the executions of loggedIn. If the user is not logged in, then notLoggedIn is executed. The result is an ability to test easily and invisibly whether a visitor is logged in to a particular Web site that a Web developer does not have a relationship with. This login-detection technique, which leverages CSRF, can be applied to online banks, social networks, Web mail, and basically anything else useful to an attacker. The attacker behind http://coolwebsite/ just has to find the URLs that respond in a Boolean state with respect to login.

via The Web Won’t Be Safe or Secure until We Break It – ACM Queue.

Browser intranet hacking allows Web-site owners to access the private networks of their visitors, which are probably behind network firewalls, by using their browsers as a launch point. This attack technique is painfully simple and works equally well on enterprises and home users, exposing a whole new realm of data.

Obama Wins: How Chicago’s Data-Driven Campaign Triumphed

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For all the praise Obama’s team won in 2008 for its high-tech wizardry, its success masked a huge weakness: too many databases. Back then, volunteers making phone calls through the Obama website were working off lists that differed from the lists used by callers in the campaign office. Get-out-the-vote lists were never reconciled with fundraising lists.

via Obama Wins: How Chicago’s Data-Driven Campaign Triumphed | TIME.com.

The new megafile didn’t just tell the campaign how to find voters and get their attention; it also allowed the number crunchers to run tests predicting which types of people would be persuaded by certain kinds of appeals.

Chinese smartphone vendors cut Apple out of top five in shipments for Q3

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The big surprise was the rise of Yulong Computer Telecommunication Scientific which took third place. Yulong sells smartphones under the brand name Coolpad. The company is largely unknown outside China, but has seen its shipments in the country steadily increase as a result of its broad product profile and low-end handsets, which reach prices below US$100, said Nicole Peng, an analyst with Canalys.

via Chinese smartphone vendors cut Apple out of top five in shipments for Q3 – Huawei, consumer electronics, smartphones, iPhone, ZTE, Android, Lenovo, Apple, samsung – Computerworld.

Samsung laying groundwork for server chips, analysts say

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The faster 64-bit processors will appear in servers, high-end smartphones and tablets, and offer better performance-per-watt than ARM’s current 32-bit processors, which haven’t been able to expand beyond embedded and mobile devices. The first servers with 64-bit ARM processors are expected to become available in 2014.

via Samsung laying groundwork for server chips, analysts say – servers, Samsung Electronics, hardware systems, Components, processors – Computerworld.

“Samsung is a lead partner of ARM’s new Cortex A50 processors. However, we’re not in a position to comment on our plans for how we’ll use the Cortex A50 as part of our Exynos product family,” said Lisa Warren-Plungy, a Samsung Semiconductor spokeswoman, in an e-mail.

Welcome to the Ruby Ranch Internet Cooperative Association

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The Coop was founded in 2001 because at the time, no one offered DSL or cable modem Internet access in our neighborhood, and because the voice telephone service to the neighborhood is of such poor quality that it was (and is) not possible to get modem connections faster than about 26K bits per second. The Coop is a Colorado nonprofit corporation and is federally tax-exempt under 501(c)(12).

The Coop’s launch of service in 2002 was made possible only by loans from “angels,” neighborhood residents who chose to lend money to the Coop with no assurance the loans would ever be repaid. The Coop reached a milestone in the first quarter of 2004 successfully repaying (ahead of schedule, and with interest) all of the “angel” loans. The Coop is now debt-free.

via Welcome to the Ruby Ranch Internet Cooperative Association.