Downloading Software Safely Is Nearly Impossible
Let’s say you have a brand-new Windows laptop and you’re just oh, so happy. You’re pretty sure the NSA did not interdict it during shipment, and thus that it comes only with the flaky goatware Micr...
Dear Google, am I pregnant? - Charlie's Diary
Now it appears that PA Consulting staff uploaded the entire hoard to Google servers based outside the UK ?a process that took weeks, as the data came to them archived on 27 DVDs (making it on the order of 125Gb, after compression).
Hasnain says:
"I'm asking because it now appears that management consultants PA Consulting acquired the hospital admission and treatment records of every NHS patient in England and Wales (all 47 million of them). This is almost certainly inappropriate, and comes at a point when the roll-out of the care.data national health statistics database is on hold for six months over concerns about who would be able to access it and whether the records could be de-anonymized. Now it appears that PA Consulting staff uploaded the entire hoard to Google servers based outside the UK—a process that took weeks, as the data came to them archived on 27 DVDs (making it on the order of 125Gb, after compression)."
Posted on 2014-03-03T18:26:30+0000
Pycoder's Weekly - Top Python Projects of 2013
We are doing something a little different this week. This issue is a round of all the Top Python projects of 2013 as determined by you(your clicks in our 2013 issues). So take a look as there are plenty of great things to see here! Did we miss anything or do you have some suggestions for projects th...
Hasnain says:
I'm a bit late to the party, but this is a pretty cool list of projects/libraries/frameworks for anyone that develops in Python.
Posted on 2014-03-03T18:24:22+0000
Dismantling Fukushima: The World's Toughest Demolition Project - IEEE Spectrum
Taking apart the shattered power station and its three melted nuclear cores will require advanced robotics
Hasnain says:
"A radiation-proof superhero could make sense of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in an afternoon. Our champion would pick through the rubble to reactor 1, slosh through the pooled water inside the building, lift the massive steel dome of the protective containment vessel, and peek into the pressure vessel that holds the nuclear fuel. A dive to the bottom would reveal the debris of the meltdown: a hardened blob of metals with fat strands of radioactive goop dripping through holes in the pressure vessel to the floor of the containment vessel below. Then, with a clear understanding of the situation, the superhero could figure out how to clean up this mess."
Posted on 2014-03-03T01:49:21+0000
New partition function record: p(10^20) computed
The partition functionp(n) counts the number of partitions of n, i.e. the number of ways n can be written sum of positive integers when disregarding the order of the terms. For example, 4 has the five distinct partitions 4, 3+1, 2+2, 2+1+1, 1+1+1+1, so p(4) = 5. This week, I set a new record by comp...
Hasnain says:
"The full number is not currently available for download, as it is 4.6 GB in packed binary format."
Posted on 2014-03-03T01:01:58+0000
How Academia and Publishing are Destroying Scientific Innovation: A Conversation with Sydney...
Left to right: Hugh Huxley, John Kendrew, Max Perutz, Francis Crick, Fred Sanger, Sydney Brenner.
Hasnain says:
I think every person with an interest in academia should read this. There's so much in there that I can't even decide what to pick out to quote.
"SB: The thing is to have no discipline at all. Biology got its main success by the importation of physicists that came into the field not knowing any biology and I think today that’s very important.
I strongly believe that the only way to encourage innovation is to give it to the young. The young have a great advantage in that they are ignorant. Because I think ignorance in science is very important. If you’re like me and you know too much you can’t try new things. I always work in fields of which I’m totally ignorant."
Posted on 2014-02-28T23:20:23+0000
An analysis of Facebook photo caching
Meet the engineers who code Facebook
Hasnain says:
This is an interesting analysis, and they link to the paper for people who want the details.
Posted on 2014-02-28T21:26:06+0000
How to turn a phone into a covert bugging device? Infect the printer
James Bond-style attack underscores growing vulnerability of embedded software.
ImperialViolet - TLS Symmetric Crypto
At this time last year, the TLS world was mostly running on RC4-SHA and AES-CBC. The Lucky 13 attack against CBC in TLS had just been published and I had spent most of January writing patches for OpenSSL and NSS to implement constant-time CBC decoding. The RC4 biases paper is still a couple of week…
http://www.uvm.edu/~pdodds/files/papers/others/1976/robinson1976a.pdf
uvm.edu
Hasnain says:
"Fashions in Shaving and Trimming of the Beard: The men of the Illustrated London News, 1842-1972:
This research note presents sample-derived measures of comparative frequencies over time (1842-1972) for changing modes in men's facial barbering."
Posted on 2014-02-27T19:15:31+0000