Virtual AGC Home Page

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The Apollo spacecraft used for lunar missions in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s was really two different spacecraft, the Command Module (CM) and the Lunar Module (LM).  The CM was used to get the three astronauts to the moon, and back again.  The LM was used to land two of the astronauts on the moon while the third astronaut remained in the CM, in orbit around the moon.

via Virtual AGC Home Page.

The Virtual AGC project provides a virtual machine which simulates the AGC, the DSKY, and some other portions of the guidance system.  In other words, if the virtual machine—which we call yaAGC—is given the same software which was originally run by the real AGCs, and is fed the same input signals encountered by the real AGCs during Apollo missions, then it will responds in the same way as the real AGCs did.  The Virtual AGC software is free of charge, can be obtained for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, or as open source software source code so that it can be studied or modified.

What Michael Lewis Gets Wrong About High-Frequency Trading

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The idea that retail investors are losing out to sophisticated speed traders is an old claim in the debate over HFT, and it’s pretty much been discredited. Speed traders aren’t competing against the ETrade guy, they’re competing with each other to fill the ETrade guy’s order. While Lewis does an admirable job in the book of burrowing into the ridiculously complicated system of how orders get routed, he misses badly by making this assumption.

via What Michael Lewis Gets Wrong About High-Frequency Trading – Businessweek.

Turkey Hijacking IP addresses for popular Global DNS providers

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BGP hijack
Using the Turk Telekom looking glass we can see that AS9121 (Turk Telekom) has specific /32 routes for these IP addresses. Since this is the most specific route possible for an IPv4 address, this route will always be selected and the result is that traffic for this IP address is sent to this new bogus route.

via Turkey Hijacking IP addresses for popular Global DNS providers.

Intel unveils tiny $99 MinnowBoard Max open SBC

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The MinnowBoard Max will go on sale early in the third quarter. Two versions will be offered initially: a $99 entry-level model, with a 1.46GHz single-core E3815 SoC and 1GB RAM; and a $129 model, equipped with a 1.33GHz dual-core E3825 SoC and 2GB RAM. Additional details will soon be available at Minnowboard.org as well as at CircuitCo’s MinnowBoard product page.

via Intel unveils tiny $99 MinnowBoard Max open SBC ·  LinuxGizmos.com.

An Adaptation From ‘Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt,’

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The trouble with the stock market — with all of the public and private exchanges — was that they were fantastically gameable, and had been gamed: first by clever guys in small shops, and then by prop traders who moved inside the big Wall Street banks. That was the problem, Puz thought. From the point of view of the most sophisticated traders, the stock market wasn’t a mechanism for channeling capital to productive enterprise but a puzzle to be solved. “Investing shouldn’t be about gaming a system,” he says. “It should be about something else.”

via An Adaptation From ‘Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt,’ by Michael Lewis – NYTimes.com.

The same system that once gave us subprime-mortgage collateralized debt obligations no investor could possibly truly understand now gave us stock-market trades involving fractions of a penny that occurred at unsafe speeds using order types that no investor could possibly truly understand. That is why Brad Katsuyama’s desire to explain things so that others would understand was so seditious. He attacked the newly automated financial system at its core, where the money was made from its incomprehensibility.

Update:  For some highly technical information on High Frequency Trading I was pointed to this set of articles from ACM, Association of Computing Machinery.

Software upgrade at 655 million kilometres

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Although Rosetta and MIDAS spent 957 days in hibernation, the MIDAS team back on Earth were busy learning how best to use MIDAS with tests on the Flight Spare (the identical twin instrument). As a result we have made a number of tweaks and enhancements to the software ready for our encounter with comet 67P/CG. After the passive checkout we know that we’re in good shape, so the next step is to upload and apply the software patches. The new software was tested both on the Flight Spare and on an instrument/processor simulator developed by the institute.

via Software upgrade at 655 million kilometres | Rosetta – ESA’s comet chaser.

oVirt 3.4 Release Notes

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oVirt is an open source alternative to VMware vSphere, and provides an excellent KVM management interface for multi-node virtualization.

To find out more about features which were added in previous oVirt releases, check out the oVirt 3.3 release notes, oVirt 3.2 release notes and oVirt 3.1 release notes. For a general overview of oVirt, read the oVirt 3.0 feature guide and the about oVirt page.

via oVirt 3.4 Release Notes.

The Mining Algorithm And CPU Mining – All About Bitcoin Mining: Road To Riches Or Fool’s Gold?

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One of the most difficult problems in computer science is reversing a secure hash (finding an input text for a given output, the digital signature). Let me explain this problem in simple terms. Let’s assume the wealthy but terminally ill Alice wrote her will and stored it on her computer. Knowing that a computer can be hacked and the will can be altered, Alice digitally signed her will with the secure hash algorithm SHA-256. She then emailed the digital signature to all her friends, allowing them to check the validity of the document. Bob wants to hack into the computer and change Alice’s will so that he becomes the sole beneficiary, but he faces a problem: he needs to change the will in such a way that the widely distributed SHA-256 signature stays the same. Otherwise, everybody realizes that the will has been forged. This is the computationally difficult problem of reversing or brute-forcing SHA-256, or finding an input that matches a predefined output. Satoshi famously decided that in order to find a new block, people all over the world need to compete in reversing SHA-256, turning block creation into a global lottery.

via The Mining Algorithm And CPU Mining – All About Bitcoin Mining: Road To Riches Or Fool’s Gold?.

Once very popular among Bitcoin miners, but now somewhat dated, the Radeon HD 5830 card boasts 1120 stream processing units. But that doesn’t mean it literally has 1120 separate cores. Rather, the GPU employs 224 SIMD cores, each of which sports five ALUs operating in parallel (VLIW5).

The DIY drone that tracks your devices just about anywhere

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The researchers behind an earlier version of Snoopy that tracked only Wi-Fi signals have already used it to track more than 42,000 unique devices during a single 14-hour experiment in 2012 at the King’s Cross train station in London. They have also unleashed Snoopy in a variety of other environments over the past two years, including at several security conferences. By taking careful notice of the Wi-Fi networks the devices have previously accessed (and continue to search for), the researchers were able to detect likely relationships among users. Four devices that hailed an SSID that the researchers geolocated to a London branch of one of the UK’s largest banks, for instance, were presumed to belong to coworkers of the financial institution.

via Meet Snoopy: The DIY drone that tracks your devices just about anywhere | Ars Technica.

This is why devices should default to wifi being off and only turned on when a user wants to use a public wifi.  Devices with wifi on will try and get an IP address via DHCP from any open wifi or wifi with a well known SSID — which can be spoofed by anyone.  This usually isn’t a problem.  The most they get is the layer 2 MAC address of the device which is unique.  This could be put into a database and used for tracking.

Sometimes devices will spill IP addresses through ARP requests  on networks they think they are still on and this can be problematic.

‘What’s Oculus Rift?’ And Other Questions About Facebook’s New Foray Into Virtual Reality

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But if Oculus is so great, then why do people seem so surprised that Facebook has acquired it?

Partly it’s that Oculus, despite its popularity among gamers and its buy-in from the tech community, is still a small start-up. (It got its start on Kickstarter, where, in a 2012 campaign that sought $250,000 in funding, it raised more than $2 million. It remains one of Kickstarter’s most successful campaigns.) And, furthermore, Oculus has been focused on what many have seen as a niche technology for a niche demographic—hard-core gamers 

via ‘What’s Oculus Rift?’ And Other Questions About Facebook’s New Foray Into Virtual Reality – Megan Garber – The Atlantic.