The vast distance to Pluto – some 4.7bn km – means bit rates are extremely slow, and it will take a full 16 months for everything seen in the next few days to trickle back to Earth.
Closest approach to Pluto on Tuesday is set for exactly 11:49:59 GMT (12:49:59 BST; 07:49:59 EDT).
From there, the Helium system then replaces the original bit-rotted components with the re-optimized ones. The net result: Helium can improve the performance of certain Photoshop filters by 75 percent, and the performance of less optimized programs such as Microsoft Windows’ IrfanView by 400 to 500 percent.
“We’ve found that Helium can make updates in one day that would take human engineers upwards of three months,” says Amarasinghe. “A system like this can help companies make sure that the next generation of code is faster, and save them the trouble of putting 100 people on these sorts of problems.”
Source: Computer program fixes old code faster than expert engineers | MIT News
Having the ability to automatically fix bad code is like when they introduced auto focus on cameras to automatically fix bad focus or auto tunes to fix bad singing. The downside might be that development chooses to do less code reviews releasing more bad code into the wild relying on these automatic techniques to fix everything.
Here’s another article recently published by MIT News about this concept.
Remarkably, the system, dubbed CodePhage, doesn’t require access to the source code of the applications whose functionality it’s borrowing. Instead, it analyzes the applications’ execution and characterizes the types of security checks they perform. As a consequence, it can import checks from applications written in programming languages other than the one in which the program it’s repairing was written.
Source: Automatic bug repair | MIT News
We have found that the damage that could be caused by law enforcement exceptional access requirements would be even greater today than it would have been 20 years ago. In the wake of the growing economic and social cost of the fundamental insecurity of today’s Internet environment, any proposals that alter the security dynamics online should be approached with caution. Exceptional access would force Internet system developers to reverse forward secrecy design practices that seek to minimize the impact on user privacy when systems are breached. The complexity of today’s Internet environment, with millions of apps and globally connected services, means that new law enforcement requirements are likely to introduce unanticipated, hard to detect security flaws.
Mr Hocking, who led the new work, commented: “The important thing about our algorithm is that we have not told the machine what to look for in the images, but instead taught it how to ‘see’.”
Source: Analysing galaxy images with artificial intelligence: astronomers teach a machine how to ‘see’
The new work appears in “Teaching a machine to see: unsupervised image segmentation and categorisation using growing neural gas and hierarchical clustering”, A. Hocking, J. E. Geach, N. Davey & Y. Sun. The paper has been submitted to Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Preparations are ongoing to resume the originally planned science operations on July 7 and to conduct the entire close flyby sequence as planned. The mission science team and principal investigator have concluded that the science observations lost during the anomaly recovery do not affect any primary objectives of the mission, with a minimal effect on lesser objectives.
Source: NASA’s New Horizons Plans July 7 Return to Normal Science Operations
The move does not mean that there are no IPv4 addresses left, but that requests will have to be smaller to be accommodated or applicants will have to wait for blocks of address space to be returned.
Source: IPv4 address stock dwindles as North American database runs dry – IT News from V3.co.uk
The dwindling amount of IPv4 addresses means that their worth is increasing, something the UK government is hoping to cash in on by selling off around 17 million unused addresses that could be worth millions of pounds.
In order to simplify our TLS implementation and as part of our support for strong encryption for everyone, we are pleased to announce availability of a new Open Source implementation of the TLS protocol: s2n. s2n is a library that has been designed to be small, fast, with simplicity as a priority. s2n avoids implementing rarely used options and extensions, and today is just more than 6,000 lines of code. As a result of this, we’ve found that it is easier to review s2n; we have already completed three external security evaluations and penetration tests on s2n, a practice we will be continuing.
Source: Introducing s2n, a New Open Source TLS Implementation – AWS Security Blog
If you are interested in using or contributing to s2n, the source code, documentation, commits and enhancements are all publically available under the terms of the Apache Software License 2.0 from the s2n GitHub repository.
Glantz explained that the first step in the assembly of his IT infrastructure is to have a well-defined Standard Operating Environment (SOE). The SOE includes a definition of the hardware platforms used as well as the Linux and application software that is installed. There is also an installation and configuration management layer that helps enforce the SOE across the distributed Ikea IT footprint. Additionally, Glantz has defined a lifecycle-management plan that describes the lifecycle of how Linux will be used at Ikea for the next seven years.”
It’s not enough just to have documents, you have to have systems driving how technology works,” Glantz said.
Source: Ikea Patched for Shellshock by Methodically Upgrading All Servers
Essentially what the UC San Diego researchers did was to develop a system (frequency comb) that acts a bit like a concert conductor, which is the person responsible for tuning multiple instruments in an orchestra to the same pitch at the beginning of a concert.
The engineers then used this comb to synchronize the frequency variations of the different streams of optical information (optical carriers), which can compensate in advance for the crosstalk interference (this will be familiar to those who have been reading about FTTC / VDSL2 Vectoring technology on copper cables) that can occur between multiple communication channels within the fibre optic cable. The frequency comb also ensures that the crosstalk interference is reversible.
Source: Scientists Have Broken One of the Biggest Limits in Fibre Optic Networks – ISPreview UK
The updated document, Recommendation for Random Number Generation Using Deterministic Random Bit Generators, describes algorithms that can be used to reliably generate random numbers, a key step in data encryption.
Source: NIST revises key computer security publication on random number generation