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posted by janrinok on Saturday October 11 2014, @09:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the different-things-eat-different-things dept.

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2014/october/how-sauropods-fed.html
Full Text: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/281/1795/20142114.full

Large, plant-eating dinosaurs would have needed a huge amount of food to survive, yet still lived in groups and alongside each other, even though there would have been limited plant growth to go around. New research has found that two similar species, Camarasaurus and Diplodocus, could coexist as they fed on different types of plants: Camarasaurus on leaves and branches and Diplodocus on softer plants like ferns.

The sauropods — large, long-necked plant-eating dinosaurs such as Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus — dominated the land between 210 and 65 million years ago. They were the largest land animals of all time, with the biggest weighing 80 tonnes (more than 11 elephants) and would have needed vast amounts of food.

Despite this, multiple sauropod species often lived alongside each other. The most notable example is the community of the Late Jurassic Morrison Formation, a distinctive sequence of sedimentary rock in the western United States from which over 10 species of sauropod are known.

How so many giant herbivores could have coexisted has long been a mystery: even the highly diverse faunas seen in modern Africa only support one truly gigantic species, the elephant. This is made even more puzzling by the harsh, semi-arid environment of the Morrison Formation during the Jurassic, which would have limited plant growth.

“Our results show that although neither could chew, the skulls of both dinosaurs were sophisticated cropping tools. Camarasaurus had a robust skull and strong bite, which would have allowed it to feed on tough leaves and branches. Meanwhile, the weaker bite and more delicate skull of Diplodocus would have restricted it to softer foods like ferns. However, Diplodocus could also have used its strong neck muscles to help it detach plant material through movements of the head. This indicates differences in diet between the two dinosaurs, which would have allowed them to coexist.”

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 11 2014, @09:53PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 11 2014, @09:53PM (#104879)

    "Check out the traffic jam over by the ferns."

    "Yeah, one time I tried one, it tastes awful and then my neck hurt."

  • (Score: 1) by Megahard on Saturday October 11 2014, @10:13PM

    by Megahard (4782) on Saturday October 11 2014, @10:13PM (#104885)

    Just check out a Vegas buffet. Also features some of the largest land animals.

  • (Score: 1) by fatuous looser on Saturday October 11 2014, @10:26PM

    by fatuous looser (2550) on Saturday October 11 2014, @10:26PM (#104886)

    No stance in coexistence.

    Feel free to delete this message.

    We don't need it hangin' around longer than nec.

  • (Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Saturday October 11 2014, @10:43PM

    by wonkey_monkey (279) on Saturday October 11 2014, @10:43PM (#104889) Homepage

    Sauropods Had Different Eating Styles

    That's a weird way of putting it. The main thing is that they had different diets.

    It sounds like the difference in diets was determined because of the difference in eating styles, but the actual cause and effect would have been the other way around. The "eating styles" would have come about because of the differing diets.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 11 2014, @11:29PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 11 2014, @11:29PM (#104895)

    I was perusing the SoylentNews source code on GitHub when I noticed something very peculiar!

    I direct your attention toward this code:
    https://github.com/SoylentNews/slashcode/blob/master/Slash/DB/MySQL/MySQL.pm#L1683 [github.com]

    # If we tried to authenticate and failed, log this attempt to
    # the badpasswords table.
    if (!$uid_verified) {
    $self->createBadPasswordLog($uid_try, $passwd);
    }

    I'm not a Perlist, but if my interpretation of that code as a Visual Basicer is right, then it is logging bad password attempts, is not it?

    The createBadPasswordLog() method is located at:
    https://github.com/SoylentNews/slashcode/blob/master/Slash/DB/MySQL/MySQL.pm#L1692 [github.com]

    When I look deep inside its innards, I see the following code:
    https://github.com/SoylentNews/slashcode/blob/master/Slash/DB/MySQL/MySQL.pm#L1713 [github.com]

    $self->sqlInsert("badpasswords", {
    uid => $uid,
    password => $password_wrong,
    ip => $ip,
    subnet => $subnet,
    realemail => $realemail,
    } );

    So again, if my Perlism is not incorrect, I am led to believe that it insults the wrong password to a "badpasswords" table in the DB.

    I think I have sought out and found the schema for this table:
    https://github.com/SoylentNews/slashcode/blob/master/sql/mysql/slashschema_create.sql#L175 [github.com]

    #
    # Table structure for table 'badpasswords'
    #
    DROP TABLE IF EXISTS badpasswords;
    CREATE TABLE badpasswords (
    uid mediumint(8) UNSIGNED NOT NULL DEFAULT 0,
    ip varchar(15) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
    subnet varchar(15) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
    password varchar(20) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
    ts timestamp NOT NULL,
    realemail VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
    INDEX uid (uid),
    INDEX ip (ip),
    INDEX subnet (subnet)
    ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_unicode_ci;

    Like I said, I'm not a Perlist so maybe my interpretation of this code is totally wrong.

    But if I am not in the wrong, does not that mean that if I was dumb enough to have an account and I entered a password that was almost correct but let us say I typed one letter wrong, would that not log my almost correct password in the clear to the DB?

    Like let's say my username was ImADumbFuckWithAnAccount and my real password was MyPenisBurnsBadly. In my haste to log in to post a comment I mistype my password and I enter MyPeenisBurnsBadly. Would not my wrong but very close to being right password now be logged in the DB? Could not somebody with access to the database view this wrong but almost very close to being right password?

    This does not harm me of course because I know better than to create an account! But not everyone is smart like that. What if there is some poor soul (probably a systemd user, too) who uses the same password in multiple places, including important stuff like an email account or a banking account?

    Does not this render the "badpasswords" table potentially dangerous? Like almost as dangerous as unhashed actual passwords? Can a site administrator confirm if this is a concern upon which we need to be worried?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 12 2014, @12:14AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 12 2014, @12:14AM (#104908)
    • (Score: 2) by tibman on Sunday October 12 2014, @07:24AM

      by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Sunday October 12 2014, @07:24AM (#104994)

      Do you have an account? maybe someone would like to gift you a sub?

      --
      SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 13 2014, @02:26PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 13 2014, @02:26PM (#105560)
      It's a problem. But if you're doing things right it shouldn't matter that much.

      You shouldn't be using the same password on soylentnews as the passwords you use for more important sites (banks, webmail etc). And you should be using different passwords for those important sites (and if possible different usernames too).

      Same goes for other stuff. You should do things so that you don't care that Facebook/Slashdot/Soylentnews etc are storing your passwords in the clear. You should in fact operate on the assumption that they or someone with access to their systems (NSA etc) are.

      You could use the same short password for Slashdot and Soylentnews if you don't care that your account gets pwned (you can just create another one).

      I personally don't bother with making long passwords - just look at the news. Why waste your time typing those extra characters when websites get hacked so often and turn out to be storing your passwords in the clear. The hackers are more likely to hack the sites and get your passwords in the clear or unsalted/weakly salted than they are to brute force your passwords over the network. And even if they brute force your password from the hashes it doesn't matter if you aren't using the same password for anything important.

      This discovery supports my policy.
  • (Score: 5, Informative) by paulej72 on Saturday October 11 2014, @11:48PM

    by paulej72 (58) on Saturday October 11 2014, @11:48PM (#104900) Journal

    Shit, damn, fuck, who in their right mind thought this was a good idea. I am looking into this and will fix this if I find it is storing raw passwords. The code is there so a user can be notified if someone is trying to hack their account, which has a noble purpose, but not if it is doing what it seems to be doing here.

    I want everyone to know that this is code that came with Slash not something we wrote for SN, but it will be fixed.

    --
    Team Leader for SN Development
    • (Score: 2) by paulej72 on Saturday October 11 2014, @11:51PM

      by paulej72 (58) on Saturday October 11 2014, @11:51PM (#104901) Journal
      Posed to the parent not the comment: http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=4332&cid=104895 [soylentnews.org]
      --
      Team Leader for SN Development
    • (Score: 2) by paulej72 on Saturday October 11 2014, @11:59PM

      by paulej72 (58) on Saturday October 11 2014, @11:59PM (#104902) Journal
      I have good news and bad news. The good news is the badpassword table is trimmed periodically. It seems to only have a couple of days of of info in it at any one time. The bad news it is does save some passwords as an unhashed value. I am going to delete the passwords and push out a fix not to save the passwords any more.
      --
      Team Leader for SN Development
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 12 2014, @12:02AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 12 2014, @12:02AM (#104904)

        Mighty fine show, Sir! Your speed with which this problem will be addressed is commendable!

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by paulej72 on Sunday October 12 2014, @12:23AM

        by paulej72 (58) on Sunday October 12 2014, @12:23AM (#104910) Journal
        The badpassword table has been sanitized, and I have tested the Slashcode fix to insert a blank password in the table instead. I will be merging the code into the master repo soon and will deploy to production soon after.
        --
        Team Leader for SN Development
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 12 2014, @12:31AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 12 2014, @12:31AM (#104914)

          A million thank-yous!

        • (Score: 3, Informative) by paulej72 on Sunday October 12 2014, @01:05AM

          by paulej72 (58) on Sunday October 12 2014, @01:05AM (#104918) Journal

          Deployed fix to code, and re-sanitized the badpassword table. All should be good now, but if you want to have a look: https://github.com/SoylentNews/slashcode/pull/358/files [github.com].

          --
          Team Leader for SN Development
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 12 2014, @01:28AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 12 2014, @01:28AM (#104928)

            Jolly good show! Jolly good fix!

            • (Score: 3, Funny) by aristarchus on Sunday October 12 2014, @03:57AM

              by aristarchus (2645) on Sunday October 12 2014, @03:57AM (#104968) Journal

              Hold on just a minute there! Now I am used to threads being hijacked by the Anti-systemd People's Front of lUnix, but now we have sauropods eating logs of bad passwords? What does that leave for the Therapods and the Pterapods?

              • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday October 12 2014, @06:24PM

                by maxwell demon (1608) Subscriber Badge on Sunday October 12 2014, @06:24PM (#105164) Journal

                Well, that makes a nice new excuse: "Sorry, I lost my homework because my sauropod ate my password!"

                --
                The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.