sysadmin.ie

Researchers aren’t talking so verification is hard

Microsemi, manufacturer of the ProASIC3 field-programmable gate array (FPGA) that researchers Sergei Skorobogatov and Christopher Woods claim has a highly hackable backdoor, has issued a statement about the attack.…

Will tell users when Great Firewall blocks their searches

Google could be set for another tense showdown with the Chinese government after changing its search experience for users in the People’s Republic in a way that will explicitly notify them when their searches are being blocked by the authorities.…

The first ARM kit

Feature The Acorn Archimedes is 25 years old this month. The first machines based on the company's ARM (Acorn Risc Machine) processor were announced in June 1987, the year after the 32-bit chip itself was launched.…

ananyo writes "From the Nature story: 'The Andromeda galaxy will collide with the Milky Way about 4 billion years from now, astronomers announced today. Although the Sun and other stars will remain intact, the titanic tumult is likely to shove the Solar System to the outskirts of the merged galaxies. Researchers came to that conclusion after using the Hubble Space Telescope between 2002 and 2010 to painstakingly track the motion of Andromeda as it inched along the sky. Andromeda, roughly 770,000 parsecs (2.5 million light years) away, is the nearest large spiral galaxy to the Milky Way.'"

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Boffins develop iron core for anti-cancer drug, drag it to tumours with magnets

A team of researchers in Australia and Scotland has designed an iron core for the anti-cancer drug Cisplatin, so that it can be dragged by magnets to wherever in your body it can do its best work.…

benfrog writes "In a rare show of bipartisan agreement, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle warned this morning that a United Nations summit in December will lead to a virtual takeover of the Internet if proposals from China, Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia are adopted. Called the World Conference on International Telecommunications, the summit would consider proposals including "[using] international mandates to charge certain Web destinations on a 'per-click' basis to fund the build-out of broadband infrastructure across the globe" and allowing ""governments to monitor and restrict content or impose economic costs upon international data flows." Concerns regarding the possible proposals were both aired at a congressional hearing this morning and drafted in a congressional resolution (pdf)."

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Experts warn multinationals to batten down hatches

Security experts have warned multinationals with bases in Hong Kong that they are not immune to cyber attack from China despite the shared sovereignty between the Special Administrative Region (SAR)and its mainland parent.…

Pay-per-byte tech slowly evolving past politics

In the heady days of 2008, when server virtualisation was young-ish and low hanging fruit of physical servers could be found on every rack in data centres and server rooms around the world, VMware slipped out an update to its Lifecycle Manager that included chargeback features.…

Nothing's changed two months on from FLA deal, says group

Apple and Foxconn are yet to make significant changes to labour practices that see Chinese workers work unpaid and excessive overtime,endure bullying and work in unsafe working conditions, according to not for profit group Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM).…

Trailrunner7 writes in with a story about a iOS security guide released by Apple. "Apple has released a detailed security guide for its iOS operating system, an unprecedented move for a company known for not discussing the technical details of its products, let alone the security architecture. The document lays out the system architecture, data protection capabilities and network security features in iOS, most of which had been known before but hadn't been publicly discussed by Apple. The iOS Security guide, released within the last week, represents Apple's first real public documentation of the security architecture and feature set in iOS, the operating system that runs on iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch devices. Security researchers have been doing there best to reverse engineer the operating system for several years and much of what's in the new Apple guide has been discussed in presentations and talks by researchers. 'Apple doesn't really talk about their security mechanisms in detail. When they introduced ASLR, they didn't tell anybody. They didn't ever explain how codesigning worked,' security researcher Charlie Miller said."

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Says brands will use it to swallow online criticism

A new company is planning to operate .sucks as a top-level internet domain, and its CEO says he expects big brands to embrace the concept.…

Flays Finns for fibs, takes aim at MOSAID

Google has lodged a complaint with the European Commission over Microsoft and Nokia’s patent activities.…

An anonymous reader writes "With IT and Data Center consolidation seemingly happening everywhere our small shop is about to receive a corporate mandate to follow suit and preferably accomplish this via virtualization. I've had success with virtualizing low load web servers and other assets but the larger project does intimidate me a little. So I'm wondering: Are there server types, applications and/or assets that I should be hesitant virtualizing today? Are there drawbacks that get glossed over in the rush to consolidate all assets?"

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‘Undark’ matter hidden in plain view

A re-analysis of radio telescope observations from three countries has yielded a surprising result: nearby galaxies harbour one-third more hydrogen than had previously been estimated.…

Champagne corks popping at Google tonight

Google has won a major victory in its legal fight with Oracle over the use of Java in Android after the presiding judge ruled that the APIs under dispute can't be copyrighted.…

Asmodae writes "Judge Alsup in the Oracle vs Google case has finally issued his ruling on the issue of whether or not API's can be copyrighted. That ruling is resounding no. In some fairly clear language the judge says: 'So long as the specific code used to implement a method is different, anyone is free under the Copyright Act to write his or her own code to carry out exactly the same function or specification of any methods used in the Java API.'"

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Lawmakers post the ‘no trespass’ signs

American lawmakers and officials are continuing to give the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) the “hands off our Internet” signal ahead of a key meeting of the body late this year.…

itwbennett writes "In a blog post, Steve Hanov explains how 20 lines of code can outperform A/B testing. Using an example from one of his own sites, Hanov reports a green button outperformed orange and white buttons. Why don't people use this method? Because most don't understand or trust machine learning algorithms, mainstream tools don't support it, and maybe because bad design will sometimes win."

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An anonymous reader writes with this story at Ars Technica: "Three self-taught hackers from the DC949 hacker collective managed to use a combination of techniques to beat ReCaptcha with 99.1% accuracy (better than most humans!)" In short, the hackers skipped the visual part of the Recaptcha system entirely, focusing on the audio alternative, which gave them a few convenient angles of attack. Google responded with changes to the system, but that doesn't minimize their accomplishment.

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MrSeb writes "Microsoft has announced the immediate availability of Windows 8 Release Preview. Unfortunately there isn't a Consumer Preview > Release Preview upgrade path — you'll have to format and perform a clean installation. After downloading the ISO, simply burn Windows 8 RP onto a USB stick or DVD, reboot, and follow the (exceedingly quick and easy) installer. Alternatively, if you don't want to format a partition, ExtremeTech has a guide on virtualizing Windows 8 with VirtualBox. After a lot of fluster on the Building Windows 8 blog, the Release Preview is actually surprisingly similar to the Consumer Preview. Despite being promised a new, flat, Desktop/Explorer UI, Aero is still the default theme in Windows 8 RP. The tutorial that will introduce new users to the brave new Start buttonless Windows 8 world is also missing. Major features that did make the cut are improved multi-monitor support — it's now easier to hit the hot corners on a multi-monitor setup, and Metro apps can be moved between displays — and the Metro version of IE10 now has a built-in Flash plug-in. There will be no further pre-releases of Windows 8: the next build will be the RTM."

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