“Terrorists can make these guns and do some horrible things to an individual and then walk away scott-free, and that is something that is really dangerous,” said Yee.
via Sen. Leland Yee Proposes Regulations On 3-D Printers After Gun Test « CBS Sacramento.
Snapchat moves “upward of 150 million photos through the service on a daily basis.” Compared to Facebook’s Instagram, which moves 40 million photos a day, that is a lot of photos moved for such a new company. The app differs in the fact that images and videos are ephemeral rather than permanent, something that is attractive to teens and young adults.
via Snapchat – 4-30-13.
I suspected the ephemeral nature of Snapchat was a mirage but surprised at how simple they made it. It is impossible to do what Snapchat claims because a simple screen grabbing app on the receiving end could also capture any photo or chat blurb before expiration. I am surprised at how large Snapchat has become. Here’s a pertinent blurb as to where the expired image files are stored. The original article gets into more detail.
Each of the images within the received_image_snaps folder had a .nomedia extension appended to the end of the file name. For example, the name of the file figure 3 is “h1a81hurcs00h1365528700423.jpg.nomedia”. This was likely done to prevent the images stored within this directory from being placed in the gallery or from being scanned by the media store. AccessData’s Forensic Toolkit recognized the .nomedia extension that was appended to the end of the file name and ignored it, displaying the images.
Goldman later learned that Bloomberg staffers could determine not only which of its employees had logged into Bloomberg’s proprietary terminals but also how many times they had used particular functions, insiders said.
I doubt this will end well for some people.
In a much awaited en banc decision, the Federal Circuit has affirmed the patent ineligibility of Alice Corp’s claims to a computerized method, a computer-readable medium containing computer instructions, and a computer system that implements those instructions.
via CLS Bank v. Alice Corp: Court Finds Many Software Patents Ineligible – Patent Law Blog (Patently-O).
Also from: Federal Circuit, en banc, rules in CLS Bank ~pj Updated
The Federal Circuit. OMG. We’ve worked hard for so many years to get to this point, I almost can’t believe it. And I suppose it’s possible it could be appealed, but this is proof of what I’ve always told you, that education is never a waste. Judge Rader is very upset, I gather. He has written a dissent. But he didn’t prevail. And I’m sure he gave it his best effort. OMG. This is a new day.
Original opinion here. (pdf)
The space station uses chilled liquid ammonia to cool down the power systems on its eight giant solararray panels. A minor leak of this ammonia was first noticed in 2007, and NASA has been studying the issue ever since. In November 2012 two astronauts took a spacewalk to fix the problem, rewiring some coolant lines and installing a spare radiator due to fears the original radiator was damaged by a micrometeorite impact.
via Space Station Leaking Vital Coolant, NASA Says | Weather Underground.
Update: Astronauts Complete Spacewalk to Repair Ammonia Leak
A little more than 2 1/2 hours into the spacewalk, Cassidy and Marshburn removed the 260-pound pump controller box from the P6 truss and replaced it with a spare that had been stowed nearby on the port-side truss, or backbone of the station. Mission Control ran the new pump while the spacewalkers watched for any ammonia snowflakes, but so far there have been no new signs of a leak. Long-term monitoring of the pump will be required to determine whether the pump replacement has fixed the leak.
While these techniques are widely used and understood, they work primarily with a model of the abstract sound produced by an instrument or object, not a model of the instrument or object itself. A more recent approach is physical modeling- based audio synthesis, where the audio waveforms are generated using detailed numerical simulation of physical objects or instruments.
via Realtime GPU Audio – ACM Queue.
There are various approaches to physical modeling sound synthesis. One such approach, studied extensively by Stefan Bilbao,1 uses the finite difference approximation to simulate the vibrations of plates and membranes. The finite difference simulation produces realistic and dynamic sounds (examples can be found at http://unixlab.sfsu.edu/~whsu/FDGPU). Realtime finite difference-based simulations of large models are typically too computationally-intensive to run on CPUs. In our work, we have implemented finite difference simulations in realtime on GPUs.
“This is basically the same pattern that a lot of advanced malware is taking today,” says Srinivas Kumar, CTO of TaaSERA. By taking a multi-stage approach and going after server-side vulnerabilities at legitimate sites, the attackers can be assured that unsuspecting visitors to the site are more likely to trust links redirecting to malware-laden sites, he says.
via Department Of Labor Attack Points To Industry Weaknesses — Dark-Reading
Apparently the Department of Labor’s site was hosting links to malware. Usually users get hacked by sites hosting compromised advertisements.
Potential collisions are flagged for monitoring if there’s simply a high probability of conjunction. Typically, the probability goes down after a couple of additional days of tracking, but in rare cases this doesn’t happen (and, in a few, the probability went up with further monitoring). When the probability doesn’t go down, the software can calculate a maneuver that will reduce the probability of collision to an acceptable level. The solution will take into account other potential hazards as well as mission requirements—some Earth-monitoring satellites can’t orbit above a certain altitude and still perform their jobs.
via Saving Fermi: NASA’s system for avoiding collisions with space junk | Ars Technica.
Bcache is a Linux kernel block layer cache. It allows one or more fast disk drives such as flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) to act as a cache for one or more slower hard disk drives.
Hard drives are cheap and big, SSDs are fast but small and expensive. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could transparently get the advantages of both? With Bcache, you can have your cake and eat it too.
via bcache.
Active measures, like those employed by Nmap, are unfortunately not available when doing passive analysis of live traffic or when analyzing previously captured network traffic. Passive analysis requires much more subtle variations in the network traffic to be observed, in order to identify a computer’s OS. A simple but effective passive method is to inspect the initial Time To Live (TTL) in the IP header and the TCP window size (the size of the receive window) of the first packet in a TCP session, i.e. the SYN or SYN+ACK packet.