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Blackmoore writes:

The Verge -

reports from Dyn indicate the country's infrastructure has suffered a series of major outages over the past 24 hours. As a result, anyone at a North Korean IP would have found it nearly impossible to connect to the web. "I haven’t seen such a steady beat of routing instability and outages in KP before," said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Dyn Research

canopic jug writes:

The Librem 15 is already near halfway to its crowd funding goal. The Librem is a high-end notebook and as free/libre and open source friendly as is technically feasible. It is designed to run entirely with free software while requiring no proprietary drivers. The units are expected to ship in April 2015 if the crowd funding goals are met. Unlike the Yeeloong netbook which was a low-end machine, the Librem is a full high-end notebook and customizable in regards to storage and display. The screen is normally 1920x1080 but can be ordered with 3840x2160 instead. It weighs in at 2kg and the battery is expected to provide up to 8 hours of use.

[Ed. Note - We've run other projects/crowdfunding laptops before, it seems that it would be a shame to not run this. ]

martyb writes:

Found on Ars Technica — "Critical Git bug allows malicious code execution on client machines":

Developers who use the official Git client and related software are being urged to install a security update that kills a bug that could allow attackers to hijack end-user computers.

The critical vulnerability affects all Windows- and Mac-based versions of the official Git client and related software that interacts with Git repositories, according to an advisory published Thursday. The bug can be exploited to give remote code execution when the client software accesses booby-trapped Git repositories.

ghost writes:

As promised, PHK has released an early version of Ntimed, his NTPd replacement. While some are disappointed that it wasn't written in rust or go or haskell, it has the support of the Linux Foundation and even the Network Time Foundation - "Harlan from The Network Time Foundation has agreed to adopt Ntimed and it will run in/with/parallel to the NTPD project." A version 1.0 is expected in Q1 2015.

dlb writes:

According to NPR, Coder Boot Camp "...arose as an elegant solution to a problem of supply and demand."

The author of the article, Anya Kamenetz, states:

This is one of the fastest-growing areas of the job market, and average salaries are high: from $62,500 for a web developer to $93,350 for a software developer. ... At the same time, in just the past five years, the nature of coding itself has changed. Programming languages like JavaScript and Ruby, essential for websites and web browser-based applications, are evolving to be increasingly powerful, even for novices.

She goes on to explain:

The application process for Dev Bootcamp is similar to a job application, and people complete a 9-week, part-time introduction online before they come to campus. And, Dev Bootcamp says, about 95 percent complete the program — that includes those who repeat the first six weeks, which you can do for free.

And she concludes:

All this helps explain their stellar reported job-placement rates.

No job-placement numbers were given in the article, other than stating that "the top programs say they are placing the vast majority of their graduates into jobs earning just under six figures in a rapidly expanding field."

So, 12 weeks to become a web developer, with coding thrown in to "boot"?

"gewg_" writes:

TradePub says:

Linux For Dummies, 9th Edition - eBook (usually $22.99) FREE until 23-Dec-2014! If you want to migrate to Linux, this book is a great way to get there. Detailed Description

Sir Finkus writes:

Shortly after a warning was posted on the Tor blog of potential attempts to disrupt the network, a node operator has reported that several servers running exit nodes were seized in an apparent government raid.

It is unclear whether the recent seizure has any relation to the warning posted on the Tor blog. The operator of the nodes recommends not to use any of his mirrors or relays until he has investigated and provides a signed message verifying their safety.

..and from another source...

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Santa's elves seem to be busy this holiday season. A few days ago, the TOR project blog warned of upcoming attacks against the network, specifically that certain servers (directory authorities) crucial to the security of the TOR network's operations would be seized. Tonight, there are reports of exit nodes being compromised by opponents with physical access to a USB port. The servers in question seem to be on Dutch soil.

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.network.tor.user/34619

Hugh Pickens writes:

Jacob Hodes writes in Cabinet Magazine that there are approximately two billion wooden shipping pallets in the holds of tractor-trailers in the United States transporting Honey Nut Cheerios and oysters and penicillin and just about any other product you can think of. According to Hodes the magic of pallets is the magic of abstraction. "Take any object you like, pile it onto a pallet, and it becomes, simply, a “unit load”—standardized, cubical, and ideally suited to being scooped up by the tines of a forklift. This allows your Cheerios and your oysters to be whisked through the supply chain with great efficiency; the gains are so impressive, in fact, that many experts consider the pallet to be the most important materials-handling innovation of the twentieth century." Although the technology was in place by the mid-1920s, pallets didn’t see widespread adoption until World War II, when the challenge of keeping eight million G.I.s supplied—“the most enormous single task of distribution ever accomplished anywhere,” according to one historian—gave new urgency to the science of materials handling. "The pallet really made it possible for us to fight a war on two fronts the way that we did." It would have been impossible to supply military forces in both the European and Pacific theaters if logistics operations had been limited to manual labor and hand-loading cargo.

To get a sense of the productivity gains that were achieved, consider the time it took to unload a boxcar before the advent of pallets. “According to an article in a 1931 railway trade magazine, three days were required to unload a boxcar containing 13,000 cases of unpalletized canned goods. When the same amount of goods was loaded into the boxcar on pallets or skids, the identical task took only four hours.” Pallets, of course, are merely one cog in the global machine for moving things and while shipping containers have had their due, the humble pallet is arguably "the single most important object in the global economy."

martyb writes:

I don't think of Forbes as a leading place to find astrophysical or cosmological insights, yet I found this article: New Doubt About Dark Matter, by contributor Bruce Dorminey, to be surprisingly well-written and understandable. It reviews the motivations for the apparent need for Dark Matter, several experiments and their results, as well as different perspectives on the proposed conclusions of these studies. It begins:

Tantalizing ‘signals’ from a handful of recent high-energy searches for dark matter are more likely the product of conventional astrophysics than the first tentative detections of the universe’s missing mass, say skeptical astrophysicists.

“A decade ago, no [one] would make these claims without first checking and re-checking that it couldn’t be from some normal astrophysical source,” Stacy McGaugh, an astrophysicist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, told Forbes. “Nowadays, the attitude seems to be that if you don’t immediately recognize what it is, it must be dark matter; [with] no penalty for ‘crying wolf’ over and over again.”

Even so, the theoretical stakes remain high.

That’s because for the better part of a century, cosmological “cold dark matter” has been needed to explain the gravitational dynamics of much of the cosmos’ visible matter; including the rotation rates of massive galaxies like our own.

[...]

The need to invoke dark matter at all stems either from the product of unseen exotic particles that lie well beyond the ken of known physics or is the result of new physics in which gravity behaves differently on the largest scales. Neither scenario is easily tested.

As a curious layman in this field, it appears to me there is a need for something to explain the observed rotation rates of galaxies, dark matter is what has been proposed to explain it, and yet we still have not yet found conclusive proof of it. That, or our understanding of physics at galactic scales is incomplete. Or, could it be something else?

An Anonymous Coward writes:

As long time SoylentNews community member Marand observed during some recent discussion of severe systemd boot problems, it turns out that systemd disables the magic SysRq key.

The magic SysReq key is described at Wikipedia as:

[...] a key combination understood by the Linux kernel, which allows the user to perform various low-level commands regardless of the system's state. It is often used to recover from freezes, or to reboot a computer without corrupting the filesystem.

A Fedora user who logged a bug report for this issue back in 2013 described the problem with systemd's unexpected and harmful default setting:

As systemd depends on many files on a rootfs, in case of any problems with rootfs, it is not able to do its basic function - control processes and (cleanly) shutdown/reboot when crtl-alt-del is pressed on local keyboard. As this is a feature, I'd like to ask to enable the sysrq by default on Fedora, otherwise it is not possible to reboot system even locally in case of emergency situation.

While that Fedora bug report is set to CLOSED NOTABUG, other Linux distros, like Mageia and Debian GNU/Linux, have restored the proper behavior.

Now that this problem has come to light, all Fedora users should evaluate whether or not they need to fix their systems to work around systemd's incorrect default setting. Users of other Linux distributions using systemd should also evaluate their systems, too, in case their distro has not yet fixed this unexpected bug.

martyb writes:

What happens when lava meets snow? Ars Technica has a report and it's not what you might think:

Depending on the context, volcanic eruptions are either terrifying or transfixing—sometimes both, but rarely neither. The opportunity to safely view the otherworldly spectacle of lava rarely fails to ignite a child-like, giddy wonder. The damage currently being done by a lava flows in the Cape Verde Islands, on the other hand, is heart-breaking.

We study these things because they are both lovely and terrible. We want to see a lava flow spill across a snowfield out of curiosity, and we want to better understand the hazards surrounding snow-capped volcanoes out of caution. Benjamin Edwards of Dickinson College and Alexander Belousov and Marina Belousova of Russia’s Institute of Volcanology and Seismology got the opportunity to witness one of these events last year in Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. For nine months, Tolbachik spewed basaltic lava flows that ultimately covered 40 square kilometers, reaching as far as 17 kilometers from their source.

The article describes two kinds of lava flow, their very different behaviors in contact with the snow, and provides a video of these in action. Having never seen a lava flow, I found watching the video to be very interesting — and just as amazing — the sound made as these flows progressed. (I can only imagine what it smelled like!)

I'm interested in whether anyone here has personally witnessed an eruption and/or lava flow and what your experience was like.

Free abstract available at Nature Communications.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Claire Cain Miller writes at the NYT that economists long argued that, just as buggy-makers gave way to car factories, technology used to create as many jobs as it destroyed. But now there is deep uncertainty about whether the pattern will continue, as two trends are interacting. First, artificial intelligence has become vastly more sophisticated in a short time, with machines now able to learn, not just follow programmed instructions, and to respond to human language and movement. At the same time, the American work force has gained skills at a slower rate than in the past — and at a slower rate than in many other countries. Self-driving vehicles are an example of the crosscurrents. Autonomous cars could put truck and taxi drivers out of work — or they could enable drivers to be more productive during the time they used to spend driving, which could earn them more money. But for the happier outcome to happen, the drivers would need the skills to do new types of jobs.

When the University of Chicago asked a panel of leading economists about automation, 76 percent agreed that it had not historically decreased employment. But when asked about the more recent past, they were less sanguine. About 33 percent said technology was a central reason that median wages had been stagnant over the past decade, 20 percent said it was not and 29 percent were unsure. Perhaps the most worrisome development is how poorly the job market is already functioning for many workers. More than 16 percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 are not working, up from 5 percent in the late 1960s; 30 percent of women in this age group are not working, up from 25 percent in the late 1990s. For those who are working, wage growth has been weak, while corporate profits have surged. “We’re going to enter a world in which there’s more wealth and less need to work,” says Erik Brynjolfsson. “That should be good news. But if we just put it on autopilot, there’s no guarantee this will work out.”

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Noted Linux expert Chris Siebenmann has described two catastrophic failures involving systemd.

One of the problems he encountered with systemd became apparent during a disastrous upgrade of a system from Fedora 20 to Fedora 21. It involved PID 1 segfaulting during the upgrade process. He isn't the only victim to suffer from this type of bad experience, either. The bug report for this problem is still showing a status of NEW, nearly a month after it was opened.

The second problem with systemd that he describes involves the journalctl utility. It displays log messages with long lines in a way that requires sideways scrolling, as well as displaying all messages since the beginning of time, in forward chronological order. Both of these behaviors contribute to making the tool much less usable, especially in critical situations where time and efficiency are of the essence.

Problems like these raise some serious questions about systemd, and its suitability for use by major Linux distros like Fedora and Debian. How can systemd be used if it can segfault in such a way, or if the tools that are provided to assist with the recovery exhibit such counter-intuitive, if not outright useless, behavior?

Editor's Comment: I am not a supporter of systemd, but if there are only 2 such reported occurrences of this fault, as noted in one of the links, then perhaps it is not a widespread fault but actually a very rare one. This would certainly explain - although not justify - why there has been so little apparent interest being shown by the maintainers. Nevertheless, the fault should still be fixed.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Sarah LeTrent reports at CNN that NASA just "emailed" the design of a socket wrench to astronauts so that they could print it out in the orbit. The ratcheting socket wrench was the first "uplink tool" printed in space, according to Grant Lowery, marketing and communications manager for Made In Space, which built the printer in partnership with NASA. The tool was designed on the ground, "emailed" to the space station and then manufactured where it took four hours to print out the finished product. The space agency hopes to one day use the technology to make parts for broken equipment in space and long-term missions would benefit greatly from onboard manufacturing capabilities. "I remember when the tip broke off a tool during a mission," recalls NASA astronaut TJ Creamer, who flew aboard the space station during Expedition 22/23 from December 2009 to June 2010. "I had to wait for the next shuttle to come up to bring me a new one. Now, rather than wait for a resupply ship to bring me a new tool, in the future, I could just print it."

Blackmoore writes:

Science Daily - New conversion process turns biomass 'waste' into lucrative chemical products

A new catalytic process is able to convert what was once considered biomass waste into lucrative chemical products that can be used in fragrances, flavorings or to create high-octane fuel for racecars and jets.

A team of researchers from Purdue University's Center for Direct Catalytic Conversion of Biomass to Biofuels, or C3Bio, has developed a process that uses a chemical catalyst and heat to spur reactions that convert lignin into valuable chemical commodities. Lignin is a tough and highly complex molecule that gives the plant cell wall its rigid structure.

"We are able to take lignin -- which most biorefineries consider waste to be burned for its heat -- and turn it into high-value molecules that have applications in fragrance, flavoring and high-octane jet fuels," Abu-Omar said. "We can do this while simultaneously producing from the biomass lignin-free cellulose, which is the basis of ethanol and other liquid fuels. We do all of this in a one-step process."