As I know many of you know Huawei were investigated by the American Congress and we were given a “clean bill of health”. Well as journalists and analysts said “lots of ifs buts and maybe’s but no evidence of wrongdoing”, or my favourite “a report for vegetarians, no meat”, so in my definition no evidence of wrongdoing is a clean bill of health. Based on this lack of evidence of any wrongdoing, the American Congress said that Huawei should not be allowed into America, so based on all of these revelations, and there will be many more on America, should all other Governments ban American technology companies, especially Cisco and Juniper given their position in critical infrastructures?
a P2P microblogging platform
This paper proposes a new microblogging architecture based on peer-to-peer networks overlays. The proposed platform is comprised of three mostly independent overlay networks. The first provides distributed user registration and authentication and is based on the Bitcoin protocol. The second one is a Distributed Hash Table DHT overlay network providing key/value storage for user resources and tracker location for the third network. The last network is a collection of possibly disjoint “swarms” of followers, based on the Bittorrent protocol, which can be used for efficient near-instant notification delivery to many users. By leveraging from existing and proven technologies, twister provides a new microblogging platform offering security, scalability and privacy features. A mechanism provides incentive for entities that contribute processing time to run the user registration network, rewarding such entities with the privilege of sending a single unsolicited “promoted” message to the entire network. The number of unsolicited messages per day is defined in order to not upset users.
via [1312.7152] twister – a P2P microblogging platform.
Reverse engineering my bank’s security token
The toolset
Reverse engineering Android apps requires a few software tools. Here’s what I used for this project:
- Android SDKProvides the adb command-line tool, which can pull APKs, data files and settings from the phone.
- dex2jarConverts Android’s Dalvik executables into JARs, which are easier to reverse engineer.
- JD, JD-GUIAn excellent Java bytecode decompiler.
- EclipseA Java IDE to validate discoveries during the reverse engineering process.
via Reverse engineering my bank’s security token | Thiago Valverde.
Malicious advertisements served via Yahoo
Clients visiting yahoo.com received advertisements served by ads.yahoo.com. Some of the advertisements are malicious. Those malicious advertisements are iframes hosted on the following domains:
- blistartoncom.org (192.133.137.59), registered on 1 Jan 2014
- slaptonitkons.net (192.133.137.100), registered on 1 Jan 2014
- original-filmsonline.com (192.133.137.63)
- funnyboobsonline.org (192.133.137.247)
- yagerass.org (192.133.137.56)
via Malicious advertisements served via Yahoo | Fox-IT International blog.
The Mathematics of Gamification
At Foursquare, we have a simple, first-principles based method of resolving proposed venue attribute updates. We can gauge each Superuser’s voting accuracy based on their performance on honeypots (proposed updates with known answers which are deliberately inserted into the updates queue). Measuring performance and using these probabilities correctly is the key to how we assign points to a Superuser’s vote.
The Math
Let’s make this more concrete with some math.
via The Mathematics of Gamification | Foursquare Engineering Blog.
Who won the 22nd IOCCC
Here are the names and categories for the winners of the 22nd IOCCC:
IOCCC=International Obfuscated C Code Contest
The source for all the entries should compile and run. I liked this one: Most catty
horizontal_cat concatenates files horizontally and write the output to stdout. Each input file is padded with spaces on the right so that the original text alignments are preserved.
Knights Landing Details
Table 1 shows estimates of the critical characteristics of the 14nm Knights Landing, compared to known details of the 22nm Knights Corner, Haswell, and Ivy Bridge-EP. The estimate of Knights Landing differ from the rumored specifications primarily in the capacity of the shared L2 cache, which is estimated to be 512KB, rather than 1MB. It is possible, although extremely unlikely that the shared L2 cache is 256KB. The analysis also incorporate several other critical factors which were not mentioned in any rumors, specifically cache read bandwidth and the large shared L3 cache. The L3 cache is estimated as eight times the size of the L2 caches or 144MB in the unlikely scenario that the L2 cache is 256KB, then the L3 cache is likely to be proportionately smaller.
China: The Next Space Superpower
“They are having launches, and in the United States we’re in gridlock,” says Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, in Newport, R.I. “The Chinese will have a rover onthe moon, and we’re still developing PowerPoints for programs that don’t get approved by Congress.” That rover is rolling over the regolith right now.
via China: The Next Space Superpower – IEEE Spectrum.
NASA has a couple rovers on Mars.
Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
Abstract. Time travel has captured the public imagination for much of the past century, but little has been done to actually search for time travelers. Here, three implementations of Internet searches for time travelers are described, all seeking a prescient mention of information not previously available. The first search covered prescient content placed on the Internet, highlighted by a comprehensive search for specific terms in tweets on
Twitter.The second search examined prescient inquiries submitted to a search engine, highlighted by a comprehensive search for specific search terms submitted to a popular astronomy web site. The third search involved a request for a direct Internet communication, either by email or tweet, pre-dating to the time of the inquiry. Given practical verifiability concerns, only time travelers from the future were investigated. No time travelers were discovered. Although these negative results do not disprove time travel, given the great reach of the Internet, this search is perhaps the most comprehensive to date.
FAA Selects Six Sites for Unmanned Aircraft Research
In selecting the six test site operators, the FAA considered geography, climate, location of ground infrastructure, research needs, airspace use, safety, aviation experience and risk. In totality, these six test applications achieve cross-country geographic and climatic diversity and help the FAA meet its UAS research needs.