Controls keep NSA spy programs legal, director tells Black Hat audience
- Jul
- 31
A skeptical but mostly respectful crowd of Black Hat security attendees Wednesday listened intently as National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander defended controversial U.S. surveillance programs in a keynote address.
read moreKorora Linux: More Than Just Another Fedora Clone
- Jul
- 31
Korora Linux has the potential to grow in popularity among users looking for a better, more user-friendly Linux distro that reaches beyond Fedora’s enterprise appeal. Korora 19, released on July 2, is an interesting Linux OS based on Fedora, the community version of parent company Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux. Korora is packed with lots of additional packages, however.
MIT didn’t ask feds to prosecute Swartz
- Jul
- 30
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology never sought a federal prosecution of Aaron Swartz, the programming prodigy who was charged with stealing millions of academic papers from an online archive at MIT, according to a report by the institute.
read moreCreating a $99 Parallel Computing Machine is Just as Hard as it Sounds
- Jul
- 30
Ten months ago, the chipmaker Adapteva unveiled a bold quest—to create a Raspberry Pi-sized computer that can perform the same types of tasks typically reserved for supercomputers. And… they wanted to sell it for only $99. A successful Kickstarter project raised nearly $900,000 for the so-called “Parallella,” and the company got to work with a goal of shipping the first devices by February 2013 and the rest by May 2013.
As so often happens, the deadlines slipped, but Adapteva has done what it set out to do. Last week, the company shipped the first 40 Parallellas and says it will ship all 6,300 computers ordered through the Kickstarter by the end of August. Anyone who didn’t back the Kickstarter can now pre-order for delivery in October.
The first version of the board was finished in January, but it cost $150 to produce. “After that it was iterating time after time to get the bill of materials down to something we wouldn’t be losing $50 per board on,” Adapteva CEO and founder Andreas Olofsson told Ars.
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Couchbase’s Bob Wiederhold: Riding High on Big Data With NoSQL
- Jul
- 30
NoSQL might well be called “the little database engine that could.” It is quietly proving it is on track as Big Data transitions to cloud-based data storage and management. NoSQL is increasingly considered a viable alternative to relational databases, but it is still a relatively small category in a growing world of database technologies.
Bogus Chrome, Firefox extensions pilfer social media accounts
- Jul
- 30
Trend Micro has found two malicious browser extensions that hijack Twitter, Facebook and Google+ accounts.
read moreUnfaithfully Yours: The Linux Version
- Jul
- 29
The dog days of summer may best be endured at a leisurely pace, but for those of us here in the sweltering Northern reaches of the Linux blogosphere, that simply hasn’t been an option. Far from being the lazy month many typically expect, July has brought not only a fiery debate over codes of conduct among kernel programmers but also the launch of Canonical’s ambitious Ubuntu Edge crowdfunding campaign.
Apple restores key parts of dev site after attack
- Jul
- 27
Apple has restored key sections of its developer website, including the download center, more than a week after it took the portal offline.
read moreTop hacker dies days before scheduled Black Hat talk
- Jul
- 26
Noted hacker Barnaby Jack, known for exposing vulnerabilities in ATM machines and medical devices, died in San Francisco Thursday, just days before he was scheduled to speak on deadly security shortcomings in medical implants at next week’s Black Hat s…
read moreUS will not seek death penalty for Edward Snowden
- Jul
- 26
The U.S. will not seek the death penalty for Edward Snowden, the former intelligence contractor responsible for leaking documents revealing classified government surveillance programs, according to a recent letter from attorney general Eric Holder.
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