oVirt 3.4 Release Notes

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?

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

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

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.

Why the display server doesn’t matter

The result of this is the display server doesn’t matter much to applications because we have pretty good toolkits that already hide all this information from us. And it doesn’t matter much to drivers as they’re providing much the same operations to anything that uses them (i.e. buffer management and passing shaders around).

via Bob’s development blog: Why the display server doesn’t matter.

N.S.A. Breached Chinese Servers Seen as Security Threat

William Plummer, a senior Huawei executive in the United States, said the company had no idea it was an N.S.A. target, adding that in his personal opinion, “The irony is that exactly what they are doing to us is what they have always charged that the Chinese are doing through us.”

via N.S.A. Breached Chinese Servers Seen as Security Threat – NYTimes.com.

Apple rejects Tank Battle 1942 for depicting Germans & Russians as “enemies”

In case you think you’ve read that wrong, I’ll summarise: a World War II-themed game that depicts fighting between two countries that actually fought in WWII breaks the rules. And apparently Drive on Moscow, Panzer Corps, and every single one of Hunted Cow’s other Tank Battle games don’t.

via Apple rejects Tank Battle 1942 for depicting Germans & Russians as “enemies” UPDATED.

Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?

Yes, there are definite reasons why the vi/vim editing model is just superior to any other out there. And you don’t need to be a Unix whiz to use it, either: vim is available for free for almost any platform out there, and there are plug-ins to get the functionality inside all major IDEs.

via Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?.

If you want to research vi/vim editing some more, here are some useful references:

And of course:

How to return to the moon in just four years

In a four-launch scenario, the lander would precede the crew to the moon. The first two launches would be a moon injection stage followed by a lunar lander. These two vehicles would rendezvous in Earth’s orbit before the moon injection stage would send the lander ahead to the moon. The next two Falcon launches would carry a second moon injection stage and then the crew in their capsule/service module. After a similar boost in a moon-injection stage, they would meet up with the lander in lunar orbit.

The rest of the mission would be like the Apollo mission — Americans on the moon, once again taking giant leaps for mankind.

via How to return to the moon in just four years | Fox News.