Bid farewell to some of Yosemite National Park’s most iconic names.In an extraordinary move, the National Park Service announced Thursday that it was changing the names of The Ahwahnee hotel, Curry Village and other beloved park sites. The move, officials say, was forced on them by an intellectual property dispute with the park’s departing concessions company.
Source: Amid court battle, Yosemite park plans to change some iconic names | The Sacramento Bee
The data release, part of the company’s Webscope initiative and announced on Yahoo’s Tumblr blog, is intended for researchers to use in validating recommender systems, high-scale learning algorithms, user-behaviour modelling, collaborative filtering techniques and unsupervised learning methods.
Source: Yahoo releases massive research dataset
From: Yahoo Releases the Largest-ever Machine Learning Dataset for Researchers
Today, we are proud to announce the public release of the largest-ever machine learning dataset to the research community. The dataset stands at a massive ~110B events (13.5TB uncompressed) of anonymized user-news item interaction data, collected by recording the user-news item interactions of about 20M users from February 2015 to May 2015.
These patterns explore the forces that encourage the emergence of a BIG BALL OF MUD, and the undeniable effectiveness of this approach to software architecture. What are the people who build them doing right? If more high-minded architectural approaches are to compete, we must understand what the forces that lead to a BIG BALL OF MUD are, and examine alternative ways to resolve them.
A number of additional patterns emerge out of the BIG BALL OF MUD. We discuss them in turn. Two principal questions underlie these patterns: Why are so many existing systems architecturally undistinguished, and what can we do to improve them?
Source: Big Ball of Mud
Because spammers can’t easily obtain new IP addresses through legitimate means, they frequently resort to stealing IP address blocks that are dormant and aren’t being utilized by the rightful owners. There is a thriving black market in IP addresses; spammers don’t care whether the source of their IP addresses is legitimate or even legal. A cybercriminal that can steal a large IP address block (for example, a /16 or 65,536 IP addresses) can generate thousands of dollars per month.
Source: Verizon Routing Millions of IP Addresses for Cybercrime Gangs
Overall, Ormandy wrote that he found over 70 APIs exposed to the Internet, not all of which he had investigated for security issues. He suggested Trend should hire an external consultancy to audit the code.
Source: Trend Micro flaw could have allowed attacker to steal all passwords
Wi-Fi HaLow extends Wi-Fi into the 900 MHz band, enabling the low power connectivity necessary for applications including sensor and wearables. Wi-Fi HaLow’s range is nearly twice that of today’s Wi-Fi, and will not only be capable of transmitting signals further, but also providing a more robust connection in challenging environments where the ability to more easily penetrate walls or other barriers is an important consideration.
Source: Wi-Fi Alliance® introduces low power, long range Wi-Fi HaLow™ | Wi-Fi Alliance
While these are mainly examples of using antivirus vulnerabilities to evade detection, there’s also a demand for remote code execution exploits affecting antivirus products and these are being sold by specialized brokers on the largely unregulated exploit market.
Among the emails leaked last year from Italian surveillance firm Hacking Team there is a document with exploits offered for sale by an outfit called Vulnerabilities Brokerage International. The document lists various privilege escalation, information disclosure and detection bypassing exploits for multiple antivirus products, and also a remote code execution exploit for ESET NOD32 Antivirus with the status “sold.”
Source: Antivirus software could make your company more vulnerable
I’m migrating this web server to a more modern Fedora from Fedora 14 and there have been problems. Had to ditch the new MariaDB for community mysql because the former cannot read in a common SQL file describing this simple WordPress database without marking it corrupt. See:
MySQL to MariaDB migration: handling privilege table differences when using mysqldump
Community mysql works well and all databases read in like SQL should. There have been memory leak problems bringing down services at random times which might be an OS problem or httpd problem so I’m getting ready to rebuild on a modern CentOS distro which should be more stable. I don’t feel like debugging this since it should just work when installed. The latest crash was SELinux which activated itself after a reboot and it doesn’t like anything running on its system.
The Fedora 14 VM has been rock solid since 2010 and I’ll still use it as a backup. I wanted to create a VM in VirtualBox and Fedora 14 is too old to build from scratch. This modern Fedora seems very unreliable.
tl;dr This site will be under construction and may fall over every now and then.
I get a lot of questions from aspiring programmers on what’s the best tool or languages to learn. It’s almost always a premature question to ask. I used to come up with answers like “depending on what you’re building” or “pick a beginner friendly community” or “invest in a growing language”. I think all of these are good answers, but it doesn’t really matter that early on in a programmer’s learning journey. It’s all the same when you’re essentially learning how to compute. Furthermore, these sort of answers enable the culture of tooling obsession.
Faisall had upgraded the dinosaurs using the game currency Dino Bucks without realising it was charging him in real money.
Source: Boy, 7, racks up £4,000 on dad’s iPad playing Jurassic World game | Metro News