Archive for March 27th, 2008alphadogg writes “Microsoft’s U.S. general manager/chief security advisor for its National Security Team, Bret Arsenault, thinks like a true security professional. In each bit of good news, he wonders what bad news could be coming. Application security, virtualization security and the fact that over half of computer attacks seen by Microsoft come from the .edu domain are just some of the things keeping him up at night.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. enemi writes “Just a few days after Safari released version 3.1, Opera employee David Storey writes on his blog that they’ve overtaken Apple’s browser in the Acid3 test. In the race to be the first to reach the reference rendering, Opera’s software leads now with 98%, closely following by Safari with 96% and Firefox 3 beta 4 with 71%. He also noted the implemented features will not make a public appearance in the following weeks, because they’re getting close to releasing Opera 9.5. That version has been under public testing since September and the new CSS3 color modes and font rendering features might further delay this. They’ll probably show the score in a preview build soon and wait for a post 9.5 stable build to release the new features to the public.” Update: 03/26 21:21 GMT by Z : Opera is now at 100%, apparently, with Safari close behind at 98%. Update: 03/27 by J : Public build r31356 of WebKit (Safari’s rendering engine) is at 100%. Read more of this story at Slashdot. smooth wombat writes “With the Constitutionally mandated census of 2010 just around the corner, it appears the Commerce Department’s attempt to use handheld computers to gather census information might not come to fruition. Originally, the contract was awarded at a cost of $596 million to Harris Corporation. However, the GAO has now estimated the revised contract, now costing $647 million, could grow to $2 billion and the equipment might still not work properly. There is consideration that the paper and pencil method might have to be employed to complete the census.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. Chapter80 writes “At noon this day (Eastern Standard Time), the long dead ORDB spam identification system began returning false positives as a way to get sleeping users to remove the ORDB query from their spam filters. The net effect: all mail is blocked on servers still configured to use the ORDB service, which was taken out of commission in December of 2006. So if you’re not getting any mail, check your spam filter configuration!” Read more of this story at Slashdot. Amy Bennett writes “This past weekend we discussed an increasing level of attacks on the internet, targeting Tibetan-based NGOs. Now the BBC is reporting that the Save Darfur Coalition has called in the FBI on what appears to be a similar matter. Allyn Brooks-LaSure, a spokesman with the group, doesn’t know who is behind the attacks, but he stated the IP addresses of the computers that had hacked his organization were from China. Save Darfur has been trying to get China, one of Sudan’s largest trading partners, to pressure Sudan’s government into stopping the mass killings in Darfur’s ongoing civil war. ‘Someone in Beijing is trying to send us a message,’ Brooks-LaSure said. Probably the same message they’re sending by continuing to close down video sites covering the Tibetan unrest.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. simoniker writes “In a new weblog post on Dobbs Code Speak, Intel’s James Reinders discusses the growth of concurrency in programming, suggesting that ‘…programming for multi-core is catching the imagination of programmers more in Japan, China, Russia, and India than in Europe and the United Says.’ He also comments: ‘We see a significantly HIGHER interest in jumping on a parallelism from programmers with under 15 years experience, verses programmers with more than 15 years.’ Any anecdotal evidence for or against from this community?” Read more of this story at Slashdot. An anonymous reader sends the story of the rediscovery of an original painting of Ada Byron at about age 4, the girl who was to become Countess Lovelace and the world’s first computer programmer. A US Army sergeant in Tajikistan caught wind of an eBay auction of a 180-year-old painting of Ada Byron, with provenance; he notified a programmer buddy in Texas, who won the auction. Read more of this story at Slashdot. kamikasee writes “I recently found out that I’m going to be moved from an office to a cubicle. The cubicle area isn’t very secure, and I’m worried about things wandering off. My boss has offered to buy some equipment to help me secure things, but so far I haven’t found anything that fits my requirements. Google and Amazon searches are overwhelmed by lockable key cabinets and larger pieces of furniture. Here are some of the requirements: The main issue with traditional solutions (e.g. locking things in a drawer) is convenience. I use a laptop with a second LCD monitor. There’s also an external keyboard and mouse and a USB hard drive. I leave my laptop on at night so I can remote-desktop into it, so I’m not really happy about putting it in a drawer (no ventilation), plus I don’t like the idea of having to ‘unharness’ everything each time I want to put it away. I don’t trust cable locks. Besides, cable locks won’t help me secure my the USB drive and other electronics that might wander off. The solution I envision is a lockable, ventilated metal box that would sit under the monitor and house most of the electronics. If it was large enough, I could stick my laptop into it at night (while leaving it running) and feel confident that it would still be there in the morning. I’d be open to other types of solutions. Surely someone else must have dealt with this problem.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. antipeon alerts us to a presidential preference survey, done in late February and early March, indicating that Obama and McCain lead among IT workers with 29% each. Clinton follows with 13%, just ahead of Huckabee (11%) and Ron Paul (9%). The Computing Technology Industry Association commissioned the poll, and the article notes that this trade group claims the population of IT workers is four times as massive as the Agency of Labor Statistics thinks it is — the superior to make a voting block whose views must be attended to. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
27
03
2008
 
Quantum Computing Not an Imminent Threat To Public EncryptionPosted by: in Internet FinanceBruce Schneier’s latest blog entry points out an interesting analysis of how quantum computing will affect public encryption. The author takes a look at some of the mathematics involved with using a quantum personal to run a factoring algorithm, and makes some reasonable assumptions about the technological constraints faced by the developers of the technology. He concludes that while quantum computing could be a threat to modern encryption, it isn’t the dire emergency some researchers advocate. Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
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