10% of Amplify Tablets Broke in Their First Month, One North Carolina School District Reports

Posted on October 14, 2013 by mea

This tablet was always intended to go into schools, and that is why it was supposed to have been built with a layer of Gorilla Glass over the screen. This was in the contract that GCS signed, and it was also mentioned prominently in the early news coverage of this tablet. According to the school district, none of the Amplify tablets that they bought had that protective layer, which might help explain why so many tablets broke.

Or to put it another way, the absence of Gorilla Glass is a sign that someone cut corners on the build quality for this production run. Given that there were also complaints about misfitted cases and defective power supplies, I am not terribly surprised.

via 10% of Amplify Tablets Broke in Their First Month, One North Carolina School District Reports – The Digital Reader.

As I reported when the Amplify tablet debuted in March of this year, this tablet is NewsCorp’s “solution” to the “problem” of education:

Thieves allegedly install keyloggers to capture credit cards at Nordstrom

Posted on October 12, 2013 by mea

The keyloggers the thieves used imitate the look and design of PS/2 keyboard connectors, priced around $30-40. They are connected in series with a keyboard cord, between the computer and the keyboard, to intercept data transmitted between the two.

via Thieves allegedly install keyloggers to capture credit cards at Nordstrom | Ars Technica.

Scientific Data Has Become So Complex, We Have to Invent New Math to Deal With It

Posted on October 11, 2013 by mea

Scientists like DeDeo and Vespignani make good use of this piecemeal approach to big data analysis, but Yale University mathematician Ronald Coifman says that what is really needed is the big data equivalent of a Newtonian revolution, on par with the 17th century invention of calculus, which he believes is already underway. It is not sufficient, he argues, to simply collect and store massive amounts of data; they must be intelligently curated, and that requires a global framework.

via Scientific Data Has Become So Complex, We Have to Invent New Math to Deal With It – Wired Science.

Among the most notable insights Euler gleaned from the puzzle was that the exact positions of the bridges were irrelevant to the solution; all that mattered was the number of bridges and how they were connected. Mathematicians now recognize in this the seeds of the modern field of topology.

Russian Topol missile test spotted from ISS

Posted on October 11, 2013 by mea

This matches. The missile has three stages (like the old Saturn V rockets that took humans to the Moon), and what the astronauts saw may have been a fuel dump from the second stage or the last of the fuel leaking away after the booster phase was complete. In space, the cloud would expand more or less freely, moving rapidly as it traveled along with the booster in its path. In the photo, you can see a slight streaking to the cloud, most likely due to motion.

via Russian Topol missile test spotted from ISS..

Original tweet from astronaut Mike Hopkins here.

Targeted Advertising Considered Harmful

Posted on October 10, 2013 by mea

What happens, though, if sellers try to reduce the load that advertising carries, by “efficiently” targeting some users and not others? As a member of the audience, the more likely it is that the ad you’re seeing is custom-targeted to you, the less information the advertiser is able to convey. With good enough targeting, you could be the one poor loser who they’re trying to stick with the last obsolete unit in the warehouse.

via Targeted Advertising Considered Harmful.

Today, though, we have different norms and technologies around security. A .EXE in email will get quarantined, filtered, or buried under layers of warnings.

The same thing is happening with privacy problems. Browser developers are steadily closing the bugs that make creepy tracking possible. And yes, that makes some advertising techniques obsolete, the same way that corporate virus checkers killed off the animated .EXE Christmas card business.

But if you want to send customers a holiday greeting, you still can. And after the web fixes its privacy bugs, you’ll still be able to advertise. It will just work better.

Jekyll

Posted on October 10, 2013 by mea

Jekyll is a simple, blog-aware, static site generator. It takes a template directory containing raw text files in various formats, runs it through Markdown (or Textile) and Liquid converters, and spits out a complete, ready-to-publish static website suitable for serving with your favorite web server. Jekyll also happens to be the engine behind GitHub Pages, which means you can use Jekyll to host your project’s page, blog, or website from GitHub’s servers for free.

via Welcome.

Scientists who took chemistry into cyberspace win Nobel Prize

Posted on October 9, 2013 by mea

Chemical reactions occur at lightning speed as electrons jump between atomic nuclei, making it virtually impossible to map every separate step in chemical processes involving large molecules like proteins.

Powerful computer models, first developed by the three scientists in 1970s, offer a new window onto such reactions and have become a mainstay for researchers in thousands of academic and industrial laboratories around the world.

via Scientists who took chemistry into cyberspace win Nobel Prize – chicagotribune.com.

The Linux Backdoor Attempt of 2003

Posted on October 9, 2013 by mea

What did the change do? This is where it gets really interesting. The change modified the code of a Linux function called wait4, which a program could use to wait for something to happen. Specifically, it added these two lines of code:

if ((options == (__WCLONE|__WALL)) && (current->uid = 0)) 
     retval = -EINVAL;

via The Linux Backdoor Attempt of 2003.

Setting the user ID to zero is a problem because user ID number zero is the “root” user, which is allowed to do absolutely anything it wants—to access all data, change the behavior of all code, and to compromise entirely the security of all parts of the system. So the effect of this code is to give root privileges to any piece of software that called wait4 in a particular way that is supposed to be invalid. In other words … it’s a classic backdoor.

The check should have been current -> uid == 0. Sneaky!

The great Verizon FiOS ripoff

Posted on October 8, 2013 by mea

After decades of demanding and getting rate hikes and tax breaks in return for promising to deliver broadband internet access to schools, libraries, hospitals and every home and business in their territories, Verizon is now making it clear that it is no longer expanding FiOS, its fiber optic cable service.

via The great Verizon FiOS ripoff.

America is 15th or 33rd in the world in broadband, depending on which international or research group you believe. The failure to properly upgrade the PSTN, and the con of FiOS expenditures, has cost a large swath of America — from Massachusetts through Virginia and the old GTE territories, such as parts of California — a generation of technology, innovation and GDP growth.

New York Just Subpoenaed Airbnb to Hand Over Its User Data