
Posts
-
RE: Miscellaneous Tech News
A detailed look at Ubuntu’s new experimental ZFS installer
Let's take a sneak ZFS peek under the hood of Ubuntu Eoan Ermine's latest build.
If you're new to the ZFS hype train, you might wonder why a new filesystem option in an OS installer is a big deal. So here's a quick explanation: ZFS is a copy-on-write filesystem, which can take atomic snapshots of entire filesystems. This looks like sheer magic if you're not used to it—a snapshot of a 10TB filesystem can be taken instantly without interrupting any system process in the slightest. Once the snapshot is taken, it's an immutable record of the exact, block-for-block condition of the filesystem at the moment in time the snapshot was taken. When a snapshot is first taken, it consumes no additional disk space. As time goes by and changes are made to the filesystem, the space required to keep the snapshot grows by the amount of data that has been deleted or altered. So let's say you snapshot a 10TB filesystem: the snapshot completes instantly, requiring no additional room. Then you delete a 5MB JPEG file—now the snapshot consumes 5MB of disk space, because it still has the JPEG you deleted. Then you change 5MB of data in a database, and the snapshot takes 10MB—5MB for the JPEG you deleted and another 5MB for the data that you altered in the database. -
RE: Miscellaneous Tech News
Alexa and Google Home abused to eavesdrop and phish passwords
Amazon- and Google-approved apps turned both voice-controlled devices into "smart spies."
*By now, the privacy threats posed by Amazon Alexa and Google Home are common knowledge. Workers for both companies routinely listen to audio of users—recordings of which can be kept forever—and the sounds the devices capture can be used in criminal trials. Now, there's a new concern: malicious apps developed by third parties and hosted by Amazon or Google. The threat isn't just theoretical. Whitehat hackers at Germany's Security Research Labs developed eight apps—four Alexa "skills" and four Google Home "actions"—that all passed Amazon or Google security-vetting processes. The skills or actions posed as simple apps for checking horoscopes, with the exception of one, which masqueraded as a random-number generator. * -
RE: Miscellaneous Tech News
Hackers steal secret crypto keys for NordVPN. Here’s what we know so far
Breach happened 19 months ago. Popular VPN service is only disclosing it now.
Hackers breached a server used by popular virtual network provider NordVPN and stole encryption keys that could be used to mount decryption attacks on segments of its customer base. A log of the commands used in the attack suggests that the hackers had root access, meaning they had almost unfettered control over the server and could read or modify just about any data stored on it. One of three private keys leaked was used to secure a digital certificate that provided HTTPS encryption for nordvpn.com. The key wasn't set to expire until October 2018, some seven months after the March 2018 breach. Attackers could have used the compromised certificate to impersonate the nordvpn.com website or mount man-in-the-middle attacks on people visiting the real one. Details of the breach have been circulating online since at least May 2018. -
RE: Miscellaneous Tech News
4K projector turns any wall into theater-quality screen from inches away
Vava's 4K projector offers ultra short throw distance and Harman-Kardon speakers.
This is Vava, a 4K definition Ultra Short Throw (UST) home theater projector retailing for $2,700. For those of you not familiar with the term, UST refers to "throw distance"—the amount of space you need between a projector and screen in order to get the desired image size. This projector also features a built-in Harman-Kardon speaker, motion sensors to keep you from blinding yourself by staring into the laser, and plenty of inputs. A few weeks ago, we reviewed Cinemood, a miniature and fairly low-cost portable projector that unfortunately did not really impress us. Vava is the projector we thought we were getting then, and we're happy to report that it impressed us a lot. -
RE: Miscellaneous Tech News
50 years ago today, the Internet was born. Sort of
The precursor to the Internet carried its first login request on October 29, 1969.
On October 29, 1969, at 10:30pm Pacific Time, the first two letters were transmitted over ARPANET. And then it crashed. About an hour later, after some debugging, the first actual remote connection between two computers was established over what would someday evolve into the modern Internet. Funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (the predecessor of DARPA), ARPANET was built to explore technologies related to building a military command-and-control network that could survive a nuclear attack. But as Charles Herzfeld, the ARPA director who would oversee most of the initial work to build ARPANET put it: The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. To build such a system was, clearly, a major military need, but it was not ARPA's mission to do this; in fact, we would have been severely criticized had we tried. Rather, the ARPANET came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and that many research investigators, who should have access to them, were geographically separated from them. -
RE: Miscellaneous Tech News
Rocket Report: Aloha to Hawaii launch site, China tests grid fins
"Use of a commercial launch vehicle would provide over $1.5 billion in cost savings."
Welcome to Edition 2.22 of the Rocket Report! This week, there is a lot of news on medium-sized launchers, as well as the first real estimate for the combined marginal and fixed costs of a Space Launch System flight. Also, I want to note that this report will not publish next week as the author will be taking time off to work on a book project. As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar. -
RE: Miscellaneous Tech News
The ByteCode Alliance wants to bring binary apps into your browser
The Bytecode Alliance aims to promote safe use—and reuse—of untrusted code at speed.
Back in 2015, a consortium including Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and the WebKit project announced WebAssembly. This week, Mozilla, Intel, Red hat, and Fastly announced a new consortium called the Bytecode Alliance, which aims to foster WebAssembly and other "new software foundations" that will allow secure-by-default ways to run untrusted code, either inside or outside the Web browser environment. For many, this raises an obvious question: what is WebAssembly? WebAssembly (wasm) was and is a potentially exciting project, offering a way to run native bytecode inside the browser for potentially very large increases in performance over the Javascript engines in use both then and today. Javascript is frequently misunderstood as a scripting language that is interpreted at runtime. Although it is generally loaded into the browser as source code, it may be either interpreted or compiled to bytecode and executed. Compilation means higher performance execution—particularly inside tight loops—but it also means a startup penalty for the time needed to do the JIT compilation itself. -
RE: Miscellaneous Tech News
Hands-on with AMD’s 32-core, 64-thread Threadripper 3970x
AMD's monstrous new Threadripper hammers Intel everywhere it counts—except AI.
AMD's new 32-core/64-thread Threadripper 3970x continues AMD's 2019 trend of sweeping the field in desktop and server processors. In recent weeks, Ars has tested Threadripper head to head versus Intel's top-of-the-line i9-10980XE High End Desktop (HEDT) CPU, as well as its i9-9900KS gaming CPU. To nobody's surprise, the Threadripper is faster—a lot faster—than either, although with some caveats. When comparing the rest of the Ryzen 3000 line to Intel's 2019 desktop CPU lineup, one of the standout metrics is thermal design power (TDP). Non-threadripper Ryzen 3000 CPUs meet or beat the Intel desktop lineup on performance and TDP, which means quieter, cooler systems that don't cost as much to keep running. All that changes once you leave the "normal" desktop line and go Threadripper. With Threadripper, AMD is clearly far more concerned with raw power than niceties like running quiet or cool. -
RE: Miscellaneous Tech News
Gmail Can Now Send Emails as Attachments
Yes, you read that right, Gmail users can now email emails.
Google decided to make it easier to send emails to other people using Gmail, so it's now possible to add one or more emails as an attachment. Typically, if you want to share an email you've received with someone else the easiest way to do so is to forward the email. However, that's not always suitable, especially when there's multiple email threads to send. Until now, you'd have to download the emails first from Gmail and then add them as an attachment, but not anymore. -
RE: Miscellaneous Tech News
Dad builds Nintendo video game controller for disabled girl
A man has hand-built a custom controller for his disabled daughter so she is able to play video games.
Rory Steel said the Nintendo Switch controller was built for nine-year-old Ava with a Microsoft device and components from eBay for about £110. A video on Twitter of Ava, who is from Jersey, using the device has had more than 800,000 views. Mr Steel said she had given the device a "big thumbs-up" and the attention had been "a little bit surreal". He said Ava, who has hereditary spastic paraplegia which affects her motor controls and speech, made the suggestion after seeing videos online. Teacher Mr Steel, head of the Digital Jersey Academy, built the device with two joysticks and arcade game-style flashing buttons hooked up to a Microsoft Xbox adaptive controller.