In a Feb. 9 letter obtained by The Courier-Journal, however, an attorney for Time Warner Cable said the company has serious concern that such a change will negatively impact their business.
Category Archives: Current Events
Gravitational Waves Detected, Confirming Einstein’s Theory
That faint rising tone, physicists say, is the first direct evidence of gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein predicted a century ago (Listen to it here.). And it is a ringing (pun intended) confirmation of the nature of black holes, the bottomless gravitational pits from which not even light can escape, which were the most foreboding (and unwelcome) part of his theory..
Source: Gravitational Waves Detected, Confirming Einstein’s Theory – The New York Times
“Everything else in astronomy is like the eye,” he said, referring to the panoply of telescopes that have given stargazers access to more and more of the electromagnetic spectrum and the ability to peer deeper and deeper into space and time. “Finally, astronomy grew ears. We never had ears before.”
World’s largest solar plant goes live, will provide power for 1.1M people
CSP uses either lenses or parabolic mirrors to concentrate the sun’s light onto a small point where water or another substance is heated.
The heat is used to create steam, which runs a turbine that produces electricity. In the Noor CSP, concave mirrors focus on molten salt, heating it anywhere from 300 degrees to 660 degrees Fahrenheit.
Source: World’s largest solar plant goes live, will provide power for 1.1M people
Currently, the Noor CSP can generate 160 megawatts (MW). But as additional phases are completed, in two years it’s expected to generate more than 500MW — enough power to meet the needs of 1.1 million Moroccans.
Newegg sues patent troll that dropped its case
“We just don’t believe Rosewill’s products and customers infringed on valid patent claims,” said Cheng. “Minero’s case does not have merit, and its patent is not only expired but would suck even if it wasn’t expired. Now that they have started the litigation, it would be irresponsible for Newegg to not finish it.”
Source: Newegg sues patent troll that dropped its case | Ars Technica
Yahoo releases massive research dataset
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.
On the Juniper backdoor
To sum up, some hacker or group of hackers noticed an existing backdoor in the Juniper software, which may have been intentional or unintentional — you be the judge! They then piggybacked on top of it to build a backdoor of their own, something they were able to do because all of the hard work had already been done for them. The end result was a period in which someone — maybe a foreign government — was able to decrypt Juniper traffic in the U.S. and around the world.
And all because Juniper had already paved the road.
Source: A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering: On the Juniper backdoor
One of the most serious concerns we raise during these meetings is the possibility that encryption backdoors could be subverted. Specifically, that a backdoor intended for law enforcement could somehow become a backdoor for people who we don’t trust to read our messages. Normally when we talk about this, we’re concerned about failures in storage of things like escrow keys. What this Juniper vulnerability illustrates is that the danger is much broader and more serious than that.
SpaceX Falcon 9 Returns to Flight, Sticks Landing at Cape Canaveral
Employees at SpaceX’s Hawthorne, California headquarters cheered emphatically as a bright orange speck blazed into view on video screens tracking the landing. Just before touchdown, the first stage deployed its landing legs and came into view against the darkened Cape Canaveral sky. The rocket settled onto the landing pad and the single center engine shut down, marking a giant leap forward in SpaceX’s quest for reusable rocketry.
Source: SpaceX Falcon 9 Returns to Flight, Sticks Landing at Cape Canaveral
Two More Self-Signed Certs, Private Keys Found on Dell Machines
Dell Foundation Services installs the cert and its purpose is to quicken online support engagements with Dell staff. The certificate, Dell said, allows online support to identify the PC model, drivers, OS, hard drive and more.”
So far, eDellroot has been found on Dell XPS 15 laptops, M4800 workstations, and Inspiron desktops and laptops.
“It means attackers are de facto certificate authorities, free to generate man-in-the-middle certs, or just direct phishing sites that won’t get flagged as illegitimate,”
Encrypted Messaging Apps Face New Scrutiny Over Possible Role in Paris Attacks
Security experts counter that such arguments ignore the fact that even end-to-end encrypted technology leaves a trail of metadata behind that can be used to parse who is talking to whom, when and where. “Encryption is really good at making it difficult to hide the content of communications, but not good at hiding the presence of communications,” said Matt Blaze, a computer security expert at the University of Pennsylvania.
Source: Encrypted Messaging Apps Face New Scrutiny Over Possible Role in Paris Attacks
AMD lawsuit over false Bulldozer chip marketing is bogus
AMD is facing a lawsuit over claims that it misrepresented the core counts of its eight-core Bulldozer products, but the lawsuit’s technical merit seems extremely weak.
Source: AMD lawsuit over false Bulldozer chip marketing is bogus | ExtremeTech
This lawsuit essentially asks a court to define what a core is and how companies should count them. As annoying as it is to see vendors occasionally abuse core counts in the name of dubious marketing strategies, asking a courtroom to make declarations about relative performance between companies is a cure far worse than the disease. From big iron enterprise markets to mobile devices, companies deploy vastly different architectures to solve different types of problems.