Facebook is now experimenting with a storage prototype that uses racks of Blu-ray discs instead of hard drives. The discs are held in groups of 12 in locked cartridges and are extracted by a robotic arm whenever they’re needed.
One rack contains 10,000 discs, and is capable of storing a petabyte of data, or one million gigabytes.
via Why Facebook is stockpiling Blu-ray discs – Aug. 21, 2014.
In plain English: Take photos of a race, tag and sort by bib number and date, and search for photos based on that tag via the Internet. That’s it.
We’re having a hard time seeing how this patent “promotes the progress of the sciences and the useful arts” given that it seems to be a patent on numerical sorting and searching. Indeed, the Supreme Court recently ruled that claims that simply add “do it on a computer” to an abstract idea are not even eligible for patent protection. We think the patent clearly fails this test. (It’s also likely not infringed). But because it can take months (and even years) for the court to even consider those issues, they will likely never be decided. Patent litigation is expensive, so many small businesses can’t afford to fight back no matter how weak the patent. That’s part of the problem. Companies can get 20 year “monopolies” after an average of 19 hours of review by the Patent Office. And because the cost to get a patent can be orders of magnitude less than the cost to defend against it, there is an incentive for people to get patents in order to later force defendants into settlement.
via Cost of Defending Against A Troll Is More Than Just A Bridge Toll | Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The researchers monitor changes in shared memory and are able to correlate changes to what they call an “activity transition event,” which includes such things as a user logging into Gmail or H&R Block or a user taking a picture of a check so it can be deposited online, without going to a physical CHASE Bank. Augmented with a few other side channels, the authors show that it is possible to fairly accurately track in real time which activity a victim app is in.
There are two keys to the attack. One, the attack needs to take place at the exact moment the user is logging into the app or taking the picture. Two, the attack needs to be done in an inconspicuous way. The researchers did this by carefully calculating the attack timing.
via UCR Today: Hacking Gmail with 92 Percent Success.
The researchers created three short videos that show how the attacks work. They can be viewed here: http://bit.ly/1ByiCd3.
Consider this: A single fiber-optic strand the diameter of a human hair can carry 101.7 terabits of data per second, enough to support nearly every Netflix subscriber watching content in HD at the same time. And while technology has improved and capacity has increased, costs have continued to decline. A few more shelves of equipment might be needed in the buildings that house interconnection points, but broadband itself is as limitless as its uses.
We’ll never realize broadband’s potential if large ISPs erect a pay-to-play system that charges both the sender and receiver for the same content. That’s why we at Netflix are so vocal about the need for strong net neutrality, which for us means ISPs should enable equal access to content without favoring, impeding, or charging particular content providers. Those practices would stunt innovation and competition and hold back the broader development of the Internet and the economic benefits it brings.
via How to Save the Net: Don’t Give In to Big ISPs | Magazine | WIRED.
This is the reason we have opposed Comcast’s proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable. Comcast has already shown the ability to use its market position to require access fees, as evidenced by the Netflix congestion that cleared up as soon as we reached an agreement with them. A combined company that controls over half of US residential Internet connections would have even greater incentive to wield this power.
people without health insurance can potentially get treatment by using medical data of one of the hacking victims.Halamka, who also runs the “Life as a healthcare CIO” blog, said a medical record can be worth between US$50 and $250 to the right customer — many times more than the amount typically paid for a credit card number, or the cents paid for a user name and password.
via Why would Chinese hackers want hospital patient data? | ITworld.
The images are available to the public through The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth, the most complete online collection of images of Earth taken by astronauts. This database contains photographs beginning with those taken during Mercury missions in the early 1960s up to recent images from the station, with more added daily. As of August 2014, the collection included a total of nearly 1.8 million images, more than 1.3 million of them from the space station. Approximately 30 percent of those were taken at night.
via Space Station Sharper Images of Earth at Night Crowdsourced For Science | NASA.
Lost at Night requires the most skill, seeking to identify cities in images encompassing a circle 310 miles around. “We don’t know which direction the astronaut pointed the camera, only where the station was at the time the image was taken,” explains Sanchez. “Some images are bright cities but others are small towns. It is like a puzzle with 300,000 pieces.”
This reflects how today’s internet, despite its potential as a Democratizing Tool, is controlled by the few. Look at mobile—most apps have to go through Apple and Google’s not-always transparent approval process to be placed on their app stores and become visible to millions of smartphone users. The featured petitions on Change.org, currently a private “B” corporation, (a voluntary, non-binding certification which means they met the nonprofit B Lab’s standards for social and environmental performance) are similarly controlled not by its millions of users but its CEO and founder Ben Rattray, and, according to a spokesperson, a global “Leadership Team.”
via Who’s Getting Rich Off Profit-Driven ‘Clicktivism’ | Motherboard.
Apple issues developer certificates to those who want to do internal distributions of their own applications. Those certificates can be used to self-sign an application and provision it.
Wang’s team found they could sneak a developer provisioning file onto an iOS device when it was connected via USB to a computer. A victim doesn’t see a warning.
That would allow for a self-signed malicious application to be installed. Legitimate applications could also be removed and substituted for look-alike malicious ones.
via The biggest iPhone security risk could be connecting one to a computer – Computerworld.
Three House members—Mike Coffman (R-Colo.), Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), and Cory Gardner (R-Colo.)—have sent a memo to NASA demanding that the agency investigate what they call “an epidemic of anomalies” with SpaceX missions.
via Congress and SpaceX: Red tape ties up private space..
That’s why this whole thing looks to me to be a transparent attempt from members of our Congress to hinder a privately owned company that threatens their own interests.
Sometimes things go wrong, and instances can go down in unexpected ways. Even if the instance has disappeared, OpenStack might still think it’s there. If this happens, one way to deal with it is to delete these phantom instances directly from OpenStack’s database. This guide will show you how to do that with a simple script.