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Living Room / Re: Google execs may go to prison!
« on: November 26, 2009, 07:18 PM »
*sigh* I thought the circus was supposed to come to town periodically, not take up permanent residence.
Ehtyar.
Ehtyar.
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Internet only OS ? No wayThat's the whole idea of Chrome OS, to cater only for online Google stuff. If you want an offline OS you can chose literally any other OS
Why they have no plan for offline people or software in mind ?-mahesh2k (November 25, 2009, 09:55 PM)
It's an Apple-like limitation, to ensure it runs really snappy I imagine.The OS does not support hard drives, just SSDs (solid state devices)Sounds like a preeeeetty arbitrary and artificial limit, considering that SSDs use exactly the same connectors and protocol as standard hard drives...-zridling (November 19, 2009, 10:41 PM)-f0dder (November 20, 2009, 09:02 AM)
so, where is the script for updating my scripts?Most of the frequently (recently) updated scripts contain code to notify you of updates. The Download From YouTube script april mentioned is a good example.
- without such ascriptfeature, I cannot be too impressed with Greasemonkey itself.-Curt (November 25, 2009, 06:46 AM)
| Hi all. I've decided to take a new approach to the news. Instead of going through the week's news of a Sunday and picking out what I consider to be the most relevant headlines, this week's news is a collection of what I found most interesting from news articles I came across throughout the past week. Please let me know what you think over the next few weeks  As usual, you can find last week's news here. |
The public debut of Google Chrome OS today has the press abuzz over the potential of the new web-based operating system. And now that it’s open sourced, you have the chance to try it out for yourself. Unfortunately, most people aren’t ready to undertake the daunting task of actually taking Google’s recently open-sourced code and turning that into a bootable computer. So we’ve put together a step-by-step guide to doing this, for free, in around 15 minutes (depending on how long it takes to download the OS itself). No, this won’t get your computer booting Chrome OS natively (and frankly, you probably wouldn’t want to yet anyway). But it will get it up and running in a virtual machine using the free software VirtualBox, which is available for Macs, PCs, and Linux.
First the 10.6.2 update to Snow Leopard wasn't compatible with Intel Atom processors. Then it was. Then it wasn't again when it was finally released to the masses. Fortunately for the netbook-loving Mac OS X fans out there, the OSx86 scene is only too happy to offer a patched version of mach_kernel to enable booting 10.6.2 on netbooks once more.
The kernel is the deep-down part of Mac OS X that generally handles direct communication between the OS and hardware. Speculation swirled that Apple was actively trying to keep Mac OS X from being installed on inexpensive Atom-based netbooks. However, chances are it was more likely a result of optimizations that didn't take into account Atom processors, since Apple doesn't use them in any shipping products.
One of the original "Star Trek" television episodes involves patients at a facility for the criminally insane. One of the inmates quotes some lines from Shakespeare and announces that she wrote it yesterday. Another character tells her that it had been written by the bard in the past. The woman replies, "Which does not alter the fact that I wrote it again yesterday!"
I suppose in the computer industry it is particularly difficult these days to have a truly original idea, even if you arrive at your idea independent of prior work. I had that experience several years ago. I had just finished a 16-bit CPU design based loosely on Caxton Foster's Blue machine in his excellent (albeit dated) book Computer Architecture. (Yes, I do have strange hobbies.) Like Foster's original, my machine has what I think of as a 1970's minicomputer architecture -- its very similar to a DEC or DG or HP machine from that era. I was contemplating starting a new project using some sort of RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) architecture. RISC's advantages are well known. Simplifying the CPU core by reducing the complexity of the instruction set allows faster speeds, more registers, and pipelining to provide the appearance of single cycle execution. RISC has been so popular that even your PC today probably uses a RISC core that is emulating a non-RISC processor!
Despite a bit of controversy in Russia, Infinity Ward's Modern Warfare 2 has taken the video game world by storm, and now it is breaking sales records across the entire entertainment industry. The title reportedly generated $550 million in sales during the first five days available, beating all other video game launches and raking in more cash than any movie in the same timeframe.
By comparison, the current worldwide box-office record-holder is Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which earned $394 million in its first five days. The Dark Knight holds the US box-office record with $203.8 million. The title has even successfully trounced Grand Theft Auto IV, which pulled in $500 million over the first five days of sales.
The Pirate Bay has kyboshed its tracker technology and replaced it with a decentralised peer-to-peer network that all modern clients can hook up to.
The so-called distributed hash table (DHT) allows freeloaders to circumnavigate use of a tracker in order to download torrents. Instead, they connect to a DHT network to find other peers.
The Pirate Bay said today it had adopted the DHT option because a more decentralised system of handling tracking and distributions of torrent files means that "BitTorrent will become less vulnerable to downtime and outages."
).The retooled Jaguar supercomputer blew away the competition on the latest list of the 500 fastest computers in the world, clocking an incredible 1.759 petaflops — 1,759 trillion calculations per second.
The machine, housed at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, added two more cores with the aid of almost $20 million in stimulus spending. With the new processors, the Cray XT5 plowed past the Top500 competition. It’s more than 69 percent faster than the previous record holder, Los Alamos National Laboratory’s IBM Roadrunner, and is more than twice as powerful as the third-fastest computer on the list.
"Star Trek" fans know there were two pilots for the original series.
The first, "The Cage," was rejected by NBC for being "too cerebral" (ah, some things never change).
The second, "Where No Man Has Gone Before," replaced the actor who played the captain with William Shatner and was more action driven. That pilot had an alternate version which was largely lost and has never aired. Apparently, a film collector in Germany acquired the print and "recently brought it to the attention" of CBS/Paramount. CBS is now releasing this version on Blu-ray Dec. 15.
That's right kids! Whether you've been naughty or nice, all of the audio and video from DEF CON 17 is now available for download! You can get it by heading to the DEF CON 17 Archive Page, and check out all of the awesome talks you want.
In the USA, our government has discovered that it can get around its constitutional "checks and balances" by allowing (possibly encouraging) private entities* to perform actions and collect information the government is not allowed to legally collect on it's own.The moment I read that, I understood. Sorry for the confusion Hertz Man.-40hz (November 16, 2009, 10:31 PM)
Sorry Hertz Man, I must have missed your post. F0d Man is indeed correct, it is basically a collection of freely available tools with a front-end so that some cop who can barely operate a computer can collect "forensic" evidence in the field and cart it back to someone who knows what the f they're doing. Really very disappointing#7 - Nice to see Microsoft has developed their very own backdoor exploit for Windows.From what I heard from people who took a look at this, it's mostly a collection of SysInternals tools and a frontend - big f'ing deal. Haven't bothered to look at it myself though (considering that I don't exactly have legitimate access to it), so it could be worse.
I know I'll sleep better at night knowing such a thing exists. Especially since it will only be made available to duly authorized members of the law enforcement community - whom experience has shown we can completely trust to never abuse such technologies.-40hz (November 15, 2009, 03:52 PM)-f0dder (November 16, 2009, 05:20 PM)
#5 is nice - thumbs up to anything giving twitter a bad nameI don't know that I'd go that far, but definitely a thumbs-up to anything that highlights Twitter's security holes.-f0dder (November 16, 2009, 05:20 PM)
| Hi all. Enjoy As usual, you can find last week's news here. |
If you didn't heed previous warnings to secure your jailbroken iPhone, you may be in for some serious trouble. Computer security firm Intego has identified the first known truly malicious code which targets jailbroken iPhones with default root passwords.
The latest in a string of recent attacks, iPhone/Privacy.A uses a technique similar to previous hacks. The malware scans for phones on a given network with an open SSH port, then attempts to log in using the default root password that is the same on all iPhones. Unlike the previous versions, which merely replaced the wallpaper image to alert users that they have been cracked, the new version silently copies personal data—"e-mail, contacts, SMSs, calendars, photos, music files, videos, as well as any data recorded by any iPhone app." It then sends the data back to the machine running the software.
On the Chromium blog, Mike Belshe and Roberto Peon write about an early-stage research project called SPDY ("speedy"). Unhappy with the performance of the venerable hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), researchers at Google think they can do better.
The main problem with HTTP is that today, it's used in a way that it wasn't designed to be used. HTTP is very efficient at transferring an individual file. But it wasn't designed to transfer a large number of small files efficiently, and this is exactly what the protocol is called upon to do with today's websites. Pages with 60 or more images, CSS files, and external JavaScript are not unusual for high-profile Web destinations. Loading all those individual files mostly takes time because of all the overhead of separately requesting them and waiting for the TCP sessions HTTP runs over to probe the network capacity and ramp up their transmission speed. Browsers can either send requests to the same server over one session, in which case small files can get stuck behind big ones, or set up parallel HTTP/TCP sessions where each must ramp up from minimum speed individually. With all the extra features and cookies, an HTTP request is often almost a kilobyte in size, and takes precious dozens of milliseconds to transmit.
Intel and AMD are fierce competitors in the world of chipmaking, but in recent years they've taken the fight to the courtroom. AMD has sued Intel for antitrust violations (allegations that have been picked up by a number of governments), while Intel fired back by claiming that AMD had violated a licensing agreement for x86 technology. This morning, however, the two companies made a surprise announcement: they've reached an agreement that settles all legal issues between them.
The statement is short on information; both companies will flesh out the details during press/analyst calls later this morning. However, it does have a few eye-popping details, first and foremost among them a cash payment: Intel will be handing $1.25 billion over to AMD. The agreement also includes limits on Intel's business practices; these aren't specified in the statement, but undoubtedly limit the rebates and bulk buying agreements that Intel has used in the past to keep OEMs from jumping ship to AMD.
A man who served 15 years for the gruesome murder of a famous German actor is taking legal action against Wikipedia for reporting the conviction.
Attorneys took the action on behalf of Wolfgang Werlé, one of two men to receive a life sentence for the 1990 murder of Walter Sedlmayr. In a letter sent late last month to Wikipedia officials, they didn't dispute their client was found guilty, but they nonetheless demanded Wikipedia's English language biography of the Bavarian star suppress the convicted murder's name because he is considered a private individual under German law.
Drive-by exploit writers have been spotted using a popular Twitter command to send web surfers to malicious sites, a technique that helps conceal the devious deed.
The microblogging site makes application programming interfaces (APIs) such as this one available so legitimate websites can easily plug into the top topics being tweeted. As the concerns and opinions of Twitter users change over time, so too will the so-called top 30 trending topics.
Microsoft has said its new policy of requiring users to accept third party cookies to log out of Hotmail improves security.
Some readers who contacted El Reg said it raises the risk that accounts will be compromised on public machines, while others who do not allow third party cookies simply found the error message when they tried to log out irritating.
Microsoft's point-and-click "computer forensics for cops" tool has leaked onto the web.
COFEE (Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor) is designed to allow law enforcement officers to collect digital evidence from a suspect's PC without requiring any particular expertise. Using the technology - which recovers a list of processes running on an active computer at the scene of an investigation - involves inserting a specially adapted USB stick into a computer.
Grabbing data from a PC without interfering with the machine is no substitute for a detailed examination by experts where something amiss is discovered, but still attractive to the computer crime authorities. It allows police to search a computer's internet history, analyse systems and data stored and even decrypt passwords, without having to transport the machine to a lab. It does this in a fraction of the time the process would normally require.
The processes we use to obtain fuel, from pumping fossil fuels up from beneath the ocean to harvesting crops to turn into ethanol, create many environmental and practical concerns. These types of fuel work fine with the current generation of cars, but hydrogen has sometimes been touted as the fuel of the future. A publication in Nature Nanotechnology describes how researchers have found a way to use the photosynthetic machinery of a bacteria to produce the hydrogen equivalent of up to 79 gallons of gas per-acre, per-day. Their technique involved capturing the electrons produced during photosynthesis and binding them to some strategically placed protons.
The production of fuel has accelerated lately, from waiting millions of years for fossil fuels to waiting a few days or weeks for biomass-derived fuels such as ethanol. However, biomass fuels still present some difficulties: the fuel produced relative to the land area required is pretty small (the equivalent of a little more than a gallon of gas per acre), the conversion to ethanol requires a distilling period, and all the materials for making the fuel must be harvested, handled, and transported, all of which requires a significant energy expenditure.
I haven't taken a look at the language yet, but i think it's a bad sign that it has such a pretentious and, worst of all, search-engine-unfriendly name. That name virtual guarantees you would have an extremely difficult time searching for help on the language (unless of course the company that controls the dominant search engine can bias search results.. oops.. conflict of interest anyone?) Seriously though, that is an extremely stupid and spoiled-brat-like decision to make regarding naming a language.I have to say Mouse Man that I totally understand where you're coming from. Having installed Windows 7 at RC as my primary desktop OS, I have suffered greatly at the hands of those who would create a product that doesn't handle searches well. I feel your pain!!-mouser (November 12, 2009, 12:15 AM)
It is an interesting choice to release a language with compilers available for only Linux and OS X .. I would have expected a Windows installer to be the first thing they would make sure to offerAgreed, though porting it from gcc to MinGW will probably be a bitch. Since they already had it for gcc I suppose they expect to (or someone to) port it now anyway..
-Jibz (November 12, 2009, 02:47 AM)
I have been working on a programming language, also called Go, for the last 10 years. There have been papers published on this and I have a book.
I would appreciate it if google changed the name of this language; as I do not want to have to
change my language!"-rgdot (November 12, 2009, 12:47 AM)
very interesting find rgdot. now the normal way big corporations deal with such problems is just to throw money and job offers at the people they infringe on and then just keep on truckin'. let's see if google is any different..If that. I'd imagine Google could easily get away with not giving a crap, there was a project called "go" on Google Code when they chose the name after all.-mouser (November 12, 2009, 12:54 AM)
