Steam becoming available for Linux is quite significant for the future of gaming on the OS. Steam holds a lot of sway with developers and publishers, and they will be more inclined to support Linux as a platform if they intend to launch a game through Steam. So this is great news for any gamers who don’t run a machine on Windows or Mac.
via Steam for Linux will launch in 2012 – Video Games Reviews, Cheats | Geek.com.
The 29-foot, solar-powered craft had an original mission of 270 days.
The Air Force said the second mission was to further test the technology but the ultimate purpose has largely remained a mystery.
The vehicle’s systems program director, Lieutenant-colonel Tom McIntyre, told the Los Angeles Times in December: ‘We initially planned for a nine-month mission. Keeping the X-37 in orbit will provide us with additional experimentation opportunities and allow us to extract the maximum value out of the mission.’
It kind of looks like the space shuttle from the picture.
According to Symantec’s Security Response team, the Snack module sniffs NetBIOS requests on the local network. NetBIOS name resolution allows computers to find each other on a local network via peer-to-peer, opening up an avenue for spoofing.
“When clients attempt to resolve a computer name on the network, and in particular make WPAD (Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Protocol) requests, Flamer will claim it is the WPAD server and provide a rogue WPAD configuration file (wpad.dat),” Symantec noted. “NetBIOS WPAD hijacking is a well-known technique and many publicly available hack tools have implemented the technique.”
via Flame Malware Hijacks Windows Update Mechanism | SecurityWeek.Com.
This is why automatic Windows updates should always be off. Only update manually when you know your network is secure.
The constellations have shifted again. Oracle has just sued Lodsys, seeking to invalidate four of its patents. The complaint actually claims noninfringement and invalidity.
via Groklaw – Oracle Sues Lodsys! ~pj – Updated, Complaint as text.
It seems that Lodsys has been going after Oracle customers, and they in turn have been asking Oracle to indemnify them. Lodsys, methinks, has made a mistake. One doesn’t go after Oracle’s money. No. No. Never a good plan. I suspect Oracle will go for damages, tripled, and all their expenses, legal fees, etc. when this is over. That’s what that long list of prior art is saying to me, that it’s war. Also, note that DLA Piper US is also on the case. That’s another signal that Oracle intends to prevail, all other things being equal. When you have to add “US” to your law firm name, it’s because you are global. Here’s what DLA Piper says about itself:
They have 2.4-meter (7.9 feet) mirrors, just like the Hubble. They also have an additional feature that the civilian space telescopes lack: A maneuverable secondary mirror that makes it possible to obtain more focused images. These telescopes will have 100 times the field of view of the Hubble, according to David Spergel, a Princeton astrophysicist and co-chair of the National Academies advisory panel on astronomy and astrophysics.
The surprise announcement Monday is a reminder that NASA isn’t the only space enterprise in the government — and isn’t even the best funded.
via NASA gets two military spy telescopes for astronomy – The Washington Post.
Facebook is liberating a large collection of libraries that it uses internally for C++ development. The code is available from a public GitHub repository where it is distributed as open source under the permissive Apache Software License.
via Facebook releases internal C++ libraries as open source | Ars Technica.
Lua has been used in many industrial applications (e.g., Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom), with an emphasis on embedded systems (e.g., the Ginga middleware for digital TV in Brazil) and games (e.g., World of Warcraft). Lua is currently the leading scripting language in games. Lua has a solid reference manual and there are several books about it. Several versions of Lua have been released and used in real applications since its creation in 1993. Lua featured in HOPL III, the Third ACM SIGPLAN History of Programming Languages Conference, in June 2007.
via Lua: about.
Microsoft certification authority signing certificates added to the Untrusted Certificate StoreWhile these security issues are not Flame-specific, and could be used in other forms of unrelated malware, Microsoft was able to identify components of the Flame malware that had been signed with a certificate that ultimately chained up to the Microsoft Root Authority.
via Microsoft Certificate Was Used to Sign “Flame” Malware | SecurityWeek.Com.
Microsoft did not say what algorithm was exploited in order to generate the rogue certificates, though SecurityWeek did reach out to Microsoft for comment and we will update the story if a response is recieved.
ARM doesn’t manufacture the chips itself. It licenses its designs to companies such as Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Nvidia, who in turn outsource manufacture of the chips to foundry companies like Taiwan’s TSMC.
This year’s Computex should be a big event for ARM. Microsoft has developed the first version of its Windows PC OS that runs on ARM-based processors, called Windows RT, and vendors are expected to show the first ARM-based tablets running the new software.
The spreading of a trend or behavior in a social network is a very active area of research. One very important model of trend spreading is the “tipping” model. With tipping, an individual in a network adopts a trend if at least half (or some other proportion) of his or her friends have previously done so. An important problem in viral marketing is to find a “seed set” of individuals in the social network. If all members of a “seed set” in a social network initially adopt a certain trend, then a cascade initiates through the tipping model which results in the entire population adopting that trend. So, if a viral marketer wants to provide free samples of a product to certain individuals, a seed set is likely a good place to start.
via Online Social Networks can be Tipped by as Little as 0.8% of their Population | The Central Node.
Our work, “Large Social Networks can be Targeted for Viral Marketing with Small Seed Sets,” will be presented at the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM) as a full paper this August