Author Archives: mea

Presenting Torus: A modern distributed storage system by CoreOS

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The problem of reliable distributed storage is arguably even more historically challenging than distributed consensus. In the algorithms required to implement distributed storage correctly, mistakes can have serious consequences. Data sets in distributed storage systems are often extremely large, and storage errors may propagate alarmingly while remaining difficult to detect. The burgeoning size of this data is also changing the way we create backups, archives, and other fail-safe measures to protect agains

Source: Presenting Torus: A modern distributed storage system by CoreOS

Two-hundred-terabyte maths proof is largest ever

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The puzzle that required the 200-terabyte proof, called the Boolean Pythagorean triples problem, has eluded mathematicians for decades. In the 1980s, Graham offered a prize of US$100 for anyone who could solve it. (He duly presented the cheque to one of the three computer scientists, Marijn Heule of the University of Texas at Austin, earlier this month.) The problem asks whether it is possible to colour each positive integer either red or blue, so that no trio of integers a, b and c that satisfy Pythagoras’ famous equation a2 + b2 = c2 are all the same colour. For example, for the Pythagorean triple 3, 4 and 5, if 3 and 5 were coloured blue, 4 would have to be red.

Source: Two-hundred-terabyte maths proof is largest ever

There are more than 102,300 ways to colour the integers up to 7,825, but the researchers took advantage of symmetries and several techniques from number theory to reduce the total number of possibilities that the computer had to check to just under 1 trillion. It took the team about 2 days running 800 processors in parallel on the University of Texas’s Stampede supercomputer to zip through all the possibilities. The researchers then verified the proof using another computer program.

Fox ‘Stole’ a Game Clip, Used it in Family Guy & DMCA’d the Original

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Whether Fox can do that and legally show the clip in an episode is a matter for the experts to argue but what followed next was patently absurd. Shortly after the Family Guy episode aired, Fox filed a complaint with YouTube and took down the Double Dribble video game clip on copyright grounds. (mirror Daily Motion)

Source: Fox ‘Stole’ a Game Clip, Used it in Family Guy & DMCA’d the Original – TorrentFreak

Google’s Tensor Processing Unit could advance Moore’s Law 7 years into the future

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“We’ve been running TPUs inside our data centers for more than a year, and have found them to deliver an order of magnitude better-optimized performance per watt for machine learning. This is roughly equivalent to fast-forwarding technology about seven years into the future (three generations of Moore’s Law),” the blog said. “TPU is tailored to machine learning applications, allowing the chip to be more tolerant of reduced computational precision, which means it requires fewer transistors per operation. Because of this, we can squeeze more operations per second into the silicon, use more sophisticated and powerful machine learning models, and apply these models more quickly, so users get more intelligent results more rapidly.”

Source: Google’s Tensor Processing Unit could advance Moore’s Law 7 years into the future | PCWorld

IBM Scientists Achieve Storage Memory Breakthrough

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Previously scientists at IBM and other institutes have successfully demonstrated the ability to store 1 bit per cell in PCM, but today at the IEEE International Memory Workshop in Paris, IBM scientists are presenting, for the first time, successfully storing 3 bits per cell in a 64k-cell array at elevated temperatures and after 1 million endurance cycles.

“Phase change memory is the first instantiation of a universal memory with properties of both DRAM and flash, thus answering one of the grand challenges of our industry,” said Dr. Haris Pozidis, an author of the paper and the manager of non-volatile memory research at IBM Research – Zurich. “Reaching 3 bits per cell is a significant milestone because at this density the cost of PCM will be significantly less than DRAM and closer to flash.”

Source: IBM Scientists Achieve Storage Memory Breakthrough

More than 1,200 new planets confirmed using new technique for verifying Kepler data

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The Vespa technique works by comparing the details of a transiting planet signal — specifically its duration, depth and shape — against simulated planetary and false positive signals to indicate the type of signal the candidate most likely is. At the same time, Vespa factors in the projected distribution and frequency of star types in the galaxy from which the signal originated to determine the chances that a planet with the characteristics being analyzed would exist.

Source: Princeton University – More than 1,200 new planets confirmed using new technique for verifying Kepler data

ImageMagick Remote Command Execution Vulnerability

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The vulnerability is very simple to exploit, an attacker only needs a image uploader tool that leverages ImageMagick. During our research we found many popular web applications and SaaS products vulnerable to it (people love gravatars), and we have been contacting them privately to get things patched. Unfortunately, even with all the media attention, not everyone is aware of this issue.

Source: ImageMagick Remote Command Execution Vulnerability – Sucuri Blog

Update From:  ImageMagick Is On Fire — CVE-2016–3714

If you use ImageMagick or an affected library, we recommend you mitigate the known vulnerabilities by doing at least one of these two things (but preferably both!):

  1. Verify that all image files begin with the expected “magic bytes” corresponding to the image file types you support before sending them to ImageMagick for processing. (see FAQ for more info)

  2. Use a policy file to disable the vulnerable ImageMagick coders. The global policy for ImageMagick is usually found in “/etc/ImageMagick”. The below policy.xml example will disable the coders EPHEMERAL, URL, MVG, and MSL.

My ImageMagick policy file is in /usr/lib64/ImageMagick-6.6.4/config/policy.xml  Click the link to get the exact rules to add.  I use ImageMagick with Gallery software but only admin has access to uploading images so this bug doesn’t matter for my use case.

Microsoft’s Naggy Windows 10 Upgrade Prompt Interrupts Meteorologist’s Weathercast

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However, at least for one meteorologist, the Windows 10 upgrade prompt came during an inopportune time — right in the middle of a live weathercast. Metinka Slater, a meteorologist with Des Moines CBS affiliate KCCI 8, was going about her business, giving viewers a rundown of the 12-hour rainfall totals in the area when a nagging Windows 10 upgrade screen popped up, just like it has for thousands (if not millions) of everyday Windows users.

Source: Microsoft’s Naggy Windows 10 Upgrade Prompt Interrupts Meteorologist’s Weathercast

How I Hacked Facebook, and Found Someone’s Backdoor Script

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Here I’d like to explain some common security problems found in large corporations during pentesting by giving an example.

Source: How I Hacked Facebook, and Found Someone’s Backdoor Script | DEVCORE 戴夫寇爾

A brief summary, the hacker created a proxy on the credential page to log the credentials of Facebook employees. These logged passwords were stored under web directory for the hacker to use WGET every once in a while

The Curious Link Between the Fly-By Anomaly and the “Impossible” EmDrive Thruster

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The conceptual problems arise with momentum. The system’s total momentum increases as it begins to move. But where does this momentum come from? Shawyer had no convincing explanation, and critics said this was an obvious violation of the law of conservation of momentum.

Source: The Curious Link Between the Fly-By Anomaly and the “Impossible” EmDrive Thruster

McCulloch says there is observational evidence for this in the form of the famous fly by anomalies. These are the strange jumps in momentum observed in some spacecraft as they fly past Earth toward other planets. That’s exactly what his theory predicts.