Calxeda’s ARM server tested

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At first sight, the relatively low performance per core of ARM CPUs seems like a bad match for servers. The dominant CPU in the server market is without doubt Intel’s Xeon. The success of the Xeon family is largely rooted in its excellent single-threaded (or per core) performance at moderate power levels (70-95W). Combine this exceptional single-threaded performance with a decent core count and you get good performance in almost any kind of application. Economies of scale and the resulting price levels are also very important, but the server market has been more than willing to pay a little extra if the response times are lower and the energy bills moderate.

via AnandTech | Calxeda’s ARM server tested.

As usual another thorough review from Anandtech.  Below is another interesting architectural tidbit.

CalxedaSoc_575px

Let’s start with a familiar block on the SoC (black): the external I/O controller. The chip has a SATA 2.0 controller capable of 3Gb/s, a General Purpose Media Controller (GPMC) providing SD and eMMC access, a PCIe controller, and an Ethernet controller providing up to 10Gbit speeds. PCIe connectivity cannot be used in this system, but Calxeda can make custom designs of the “motherboard” to let customers attach PCIe cards if requested.

A New Molten-Salt Reactor Could Halve the Cost of Nuclear Power

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The new reactor design, which so far exists only on paper, produces 20 times as much power for its size as Oak Ridge’s technology. That means relatively small, yet powerful, reactors could be built less expensively in factories and shipped by rail instead of being built on site like conventional ones. Transatomic also modified the original molten-salt design to allow it to run on nuclear waste.

via A New Molten-Salt Reactor Could Halve the Cost of Nuclear Power | MIT Technology Review.

In the event of a power outage, a stopper at the bottom of the reactor melts and the fuel and salt flow into a holding tank, where the fuel spreads out enough for the reactions to stop. The salt then cools and solidifies, encapsulating the radioactive materials. “It’s walk-away safe,” says Dewan, the company’s chief science officer. “If you lose electricity, even if there are no operators on site to pull levers, it will coast to a stop.”

VMware targets rival “bookseller” Amazon with its own public cloud

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The public cloud confirmed today by VMware marks the first time the company will become an IaaS provider itself, analysts said. Unlike platform-as-a-service, which puts the focus on providing simplified tools to application developers, IaaS clouds let customers (or require them to) manage the underlying infrastructure such as the operating system and virtualization tools.

via VMware targets rival “bookseller” Amazon with its own public cloud | Ars Technica.

BackTrack successor Kali Linux launched

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Outwardly, Kali looks the same as the previous version of BackTrack. But dig a little deeper, according to founder Mati Aharoni, and that’s where the similarities end.

“It boots like BackTrack, but when you look deeper into Kali, you see all these amazing new features that just weren’t available in BackTrack,” Aharoni told SC speaking ahead of the launch in Amsterdam.

via BackTrack successor Kali Linux launched – Applications – SC Magazine Australia – Secure Business Intelligence.

From Kali’s site comes this:

What’s New in Kali Linux

From an end user perspective, the most obvious change would be the switch to Debian and an FHS-compliant system. What this means is that instead of having to navigate through the /pentest tree, you will be able to call any tool from anywhere on the system as every application is included in the system path. However, there’s much hidden magic in that last sentence. I’ll quickly list some of the new benefits of this move.

Backtrack has been a very useful resource for me and prominently listed in the Tools section on this site.  One of the main features that I gleaned from this release is support for ARM.   I haven’t poked around the site or created a Kali VM to play with yet.  Will report whatever I observe later.

Re-architecting for world domination

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Buytaert, who is also the founder of Drupal services firm Acquia, has ambitious goals for Drupal, as it continues to shift away from purely a content management system towards a unified Web platform that organisations can standardise on to build Web-based services, for both internal and customer-focussed sites.

via Drupal 8: Re-architecting for world domination – open source, cms, content management, drupal – Computerworld.

Photonics Fire Up Radical Core Router Startup

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Compass-EOS claims it can eliminate that step and just keep throwing routers at the problem, so to speak. Each router treats neighboring Compass-EOS routers as if they were its own line cards.

There’s a distance limitation, of course: about 200 meters. That’s still long enough that two routers, working in conjunction, can be on different floors of a building.

via Light Reading – Photonics Fire Up Radical Core Router Startup.

Meet the men who spy on women through their webcams

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And if even this handholding isn’t enough, more successful ratters sometimes rent out slaves they have already infected. In other cases, they simply hand them off to others in a “Free Girl Slave Giveaway.”

Calling most of these guys “hackers” does a real disservice to hackers everywhere; only minimal technical skill is now required to deploy a RAT and acquire slaves. 

via Meet the men who spy on women through their webcams | Ars Technica.

‘Bezos Beep’ could replace the smartphone bump for mobile content sharing

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For example, if the user of an e-reader or smartphone wants to share a book or picture with someone else, that person’s phone will transmit an audible signal that can be received and decoded by other devices within earshot. The decoded signal contains information (such as a URL) allowing the receiving device to download the shared content from a remote server.

via ‘Bezos Beep’ could replace the smartphone bump for mobile content sharing – GeekWire.

LOL.  Someone reinvented the 300 baud modem.

Five Ways To Better Hunt The Zebras In Your Network

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There are a lot of decent threat sources out there today, and inexpensive tools that can be used to combine them with firewall data, he says.

“For someone that is low on budget, you can perform this with existing log aggregation tools, but I would not try to do this by hand,” Brazil says, who is a big proponent of security information and event monitoring (SIEM) systems.

via Five Ways To Better Hunt The Zebras In Your Network – Dark Reading.