Not as SPDY as You Thought

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Previous benchmarks tout great benefits, ranging from making pages load 2x faster to making mobile sites 23% faster using SPDY and HTTPS than over clear HTTP. However, when testing real world sites I did not see any such gains. In fact, my tests showed SPDY is only marginally faster than HTTPS and is slower than HTTP.

Why? Simply put, SPDY makes HTTP better, but for most websites, HTTP is not the bottleneck.

via Guy’s Pod » Blog Archive » Not as SPDY as You Thought.

If you’re a website owner, the first thing you should do is adjust your expectations. Switching your site to SPDY will move you forward, but it will not make your site much faster. To get the most out of SPDY, you should work to reduce the number of domains on your page, and to address other front-end bottlenecks. Doing so is a good move anyway, so you wouldn’t be wasting your time.

Air Force space vehicle comes in for a landing

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6/16/2012 – WASHNGTON (AFNS) — The Air Force’s unmanned, reusable space plane landed in the early morning of June 16 at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., a successful conclusion to a record-setting test-flight mission that began March 5 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla.

The X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle, one of two such vehicles, spent 469 days in orbit to conduct on-orbit experiments, primarily checkout of the vehicle itself.

via Air Force space vehicle comes in for a landing.

Congrats Air Force!

US-CERT Vulnerability Note VU#649219 – SYSRET 64-bit operating system privilege escalation vulnerability on Intel CPU hardware

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A ring3 attacker may be able to specifically craft a stack frame to be executed by ring0 (kernel) after a general protection exception (#GP). The fault will be handled before the stack switch, which means the exception handler will be run at ring0 with an attacker’s chosen RSP causing a privilege escalation.

via US-CERT Vulnerability Note VU#649219 – SYSRET 64-bit operating system privilege escalation vulnerability on Intel CPU hardware.

Details from Red Hat

RHSA-2012:0720-1 & RHSA-2012:0721-1: It was found that the Xen hypervisor implementation as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 did not properly restrict the syscall return addresses in the sysret return path to canonical addresses. An unprivileged user in a 64-bit para-virtualized guest, that is running on a 64-bit host that has an Intel CPU, could use this flaw to crash the host or, potentially, escalate their privileges, allowing them to execute arbitrary code at the hypervisor level. (CVE-2012-0217, Important)

QubesOS

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Qubes is an open source operating system designed to provide strong security for desktop computing. Qubes is based on Xen, X Window System, and Linux, and can run most Linux applications and utilize most of the Linux drivers. In the future it might also run Windows apps. [more]

via Home.

Architecture page here.

Qubes lets the user define many security domains implemented as lightweight Virtual Machines (VMs), or “AppVMs”. E.g. user can have “personal”, “work”, “shopping”, “bank”, and “random” AppVMs and can use the applications from within those VMs just like if they were executing on the local machine, but at the same time they are well isolated from each other. Qubes supports secure copy-and-paste and file sharing between the AppVMs, of course.

Nokia seeks more leverage in the forever mobile patent war

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Chief among the ITC complaint was patent 5,570,369, a power saver designed for the GSM system and based on TDMA technology. Although, on the surface, ‘369 appears to have been tossed in the recycle bin with other 2G relics, the 1996 patent helps serve as a warning shot to competitors recycling Nokia’s technology. At the same time it reveals a possible ulterior motive to stop Google’s momentum. HTC seems to be straight in the crosshairs of Nokia’s legal assault, with three relevant – and curious – phones singled out in the ITC complaint. HTC’s Sensation 4G, Amaze 4G and Inspire 4G are all driven by Android. While similar phones based on the Windows Phone platform were missing from Nokia’s accusations.

via Nokia seeks more leverage in the forever mobile patent war | Patexia.com.

Nokia’s Linux-based Meltemi platform melts amid layoffs; Qt still afloat

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Meltemi was a Linux-based operating system that was intended to be Nokia’s successor to the S40 feature phone platform. Used in conjunction with the Qt development toolkit, Meltemi was going to be the cornerstone of Nokia’s strategy for connecting the “next billion” smartphone users.

via Nokia’s Linux-based Meltemi platform melts amid layoffs; Qt still afloat | Ars Technica.

It’s worth noting that the Qt toolkit is widely supported by other parties. Nokia’s decision to relicense Qt under the permissive LGPL has made it possible for other smartphone vendors to adopt it as part of their platform. HP was using Qt in webOS and RIM is currently using it as the basis for the development toolkit in its next-generation Blackberry operating system.

Oracle Berkeley DB

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Oracle Berkeley DB is the industry-leading open source, embeddable storage engine that provides developers a fast, reliable, local database with zero administration. Oracle Berkeley DB is a library that links directly into your application. Your application makes simple function calls, rather than sending messages to a remote server, eliminating the performance penalty of client-server architectures.

via Oracle Berkeley DB.

We’ve combined the strengths of SQLite with the strengths of Berkeley DB. If you choose the SQL API then the Berkeley DB APIs are completely hidden, your program is written to use the SQLite APIs. Because this is a full SQL database engine you are free to use JDBC, ODBC or any other compatible access layer as well.

This DB is called db4.  I needed to yum install db4-devel to compile squidguard to use this database.