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AnonTechie writes:

Building a moderately complex Web page requires understanding a whole stack of technologies, from HTML to JavaScript. Now a researcher from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has wrapped these technologies into a single language that could streamline development, speed up performance and better secure Web sites.

The language, called Ur/Web, provides a way for developers to write pages as self-contained programs. It incorporates many of the most widely used Web technologies, freeing the developer from working with each language individually.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2863069/application-development/mit-unifies-web-dev-into-a-single-speedy-new-language-urweb.html

[Related]: http://www.impredicative.com/ur/

[Source]: http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/new-programming-language-coordinates-web-page-components-1223

cafebabe writes:

The Independent reports that:

A British firm could be set to net billions of pounds after making a major breakthrough in cybersecurity. Scientists at Scentrics, working with University College London, say they can guarantee total privacy for emails and text messages. It also means that for the first time laptop and smartphone users will be able to connect to wifi hotspots on the move without worrying about hackers. Only the security services would be able to gain access to the messages, if they needed to. The Scentrics application can be embedded into a mobile handset or computer device, enabling the user to obtain "one-click privacy" at the press of a button. Or it can be downloaded as an app, so the sender can pay a small fee for security every time, for instance, they send an image of family or friends over the internet.

The patent assignee modestly states:

"In terms of British Intellectual Property [IP], it is only dwarfed by the invention of the world wide web itself," said Mr Chandrasekaran. "The internet was born without this in its DNA and we've done it." He explained: "What we've done is to patent the IP for a standards-based, fully automatic, cryptographic key management and distribution protocol for UMTS and TCP/IP." In layman's terms, the company and UCL have found a way of defeating what cryptologists call "the man-in-the-middle attack" or MITM - the ability of someone to hack and intercept an electronic message.

The venture comes from a heavy hitting institution and the people involved seem to be quite connected but the scheme only works by having secure access to a public key infrastructure. Unfortunately, As I previously noted when the last one-step crypto system flamed out (but before the next five went nowhere):

any one-step, hermetically-sealed, silver-bullet solution is poor technology and, in the case of security, is actively dangerous. Although it should never be necessary to pull something to pieces, or understand innards, technology is far from waving a magic wand and having something work 100% of the time. Technology is based upon tiers of leaky abstractions. Therefore, *when* it fails, it needs to be divisible so that debug can proceed. Ideally, technology should be a binary tree of components and faults can be found in the manner that Christmas tree lights can be fixed.

Even when packaged and idiot-proofed, the implication for end users is that anything significant needs to be a multi-step process. For example, install application, install certificates, test certificates. Anything less will have a horrendous corner-case which will be awkward to detect, diagnose or correct. And in the case of security, these corner-cases foreseeably threaten liberty.

Full disclosure: I may or may not be connected to one of the parties mentioned in a previous article.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Kitsap Sun reports at Military.com that the USS Ranger, a 1,050-foot-long, 56,000-ton Forrestal-class aircraft carrier, is being towed from the inactive ship maintenance facility at Puget Sound for a 3,400-mile, around-Cape Horn voyage to a Texas dismantler who acquired the Vietnam-era warship for a penny for scrap metal. “Under the contract, the company will be paid $0.01. The price reflects the net price proposed by International Shipbreaking, which considered the estimated proceeds from the sale of the scrap metal to be generated from dismantling,” said officials for NAVSEA. “[One cent] is the lowest price the Navy could possibly have paid the contractor for towing and dismantling the ship.”

The Ranger was commissioned Aug. 10, 1957, at Norfolk Naval Shipyard and decommissioned July 10, 1993, after more than 35 years of service. It was stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on March 8, 2004, and redesignated for donation. After eight years on donation hold, the USS Ranger Foundation was unable to raise the funds to convert the ship into a museum or to overcome the physical obstacles of transporting the ship up the Columbia River to Fairview, Oregon. As a result, the Ranger was removed from the list of ships available for donation and designated for dismantling. The Navy, which can't retain inactive ships indefinitely, can't donate a vessel unless the application fully meets the Navy's minimum requirements. The Ranger had been in pristine condition, but for a week in August volunteers from other naval museums were allowed to remove items to improve their ships. The Ranger was in a slew of movies and television shows, including "The Six Million Dollar Man," "Flight of the Intruder" and "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" where it stood in for the USS Enterprise carrier. But the Ranger’s most famous role was in the 1980’s Tom Cruise hit, "Top Gun." “We would have liked to have seen it become a museum, but it just wasn’t in the cards,” said Navy spokesman Chris Johnson. “But unfortunately, it is a difficult proposition to raise funds. The group that was going to collect donations had a $35 million budget plan but was only able to raise $100,000.”

ticho writes:

Europe's top court has ruled that obese people can be considered as disabled, meaning that they can be covered by an EU law barring discrimination at work.

The decision on Thursday followed a question from a Danish court, which was reviewing a complaint of unfair dismissal brought by Karsten Kaltoft, a child-minder, against a Danish local authority.

The Court of Justice of the European Union was asked to rule on whether EU law forbids discrimination on the grounds of obesity or whether obesity could be considered a disability. The Luxembourg-based court ruled that EU employment law did not specifically prohibit discrimination on the grounds of obesity, and that the law should not be extended to cover it. However, the court said that if an employee's obesity hindered "full and effective participation of that person in professional life on an equal basis with other workers" then it could be considered a disability.

(According to statistics from the World Health Organisation, based on 2008 estimates, roughly 23 percent of European women and 20 percent of European men were obese.)

ticho writes:

H2O is an optimized HTTP server with support for HTTP/1.x and the upcoming HTTP/2; it can be used either as a standalone server or a library. With this first release, H2O concentrates on serving static files / working as a reverse proxy at high performance.

Built around PicoHTTPParser (a very efficient HTTP/1 parser), H2O outperforms Nginx by a considerable margin. It also excels in HTTP/2 performance.

Together with the contributors [the author] will continue to optimize / add more features to the server, and hopefully reach a stable release (version 1.0.0) when HTTP/2 becomes standardized in the coming months.

(TFA of course explains the second part of the headline - why performance will matter)

Hugh Pickens writes:

Nicholas St. Fluer reports at The Atlantic that according to researchers, our convenient, sedentary way of life is making our bones weak foretelling a future with increasing fractures, breaks, and osteoporosis. For thousands of years, hunter-gatherers trekked on strenuous ventures for food with dense skeletons supporting their movements and a new study pinpoints the origin of weaker bones at the beginning of the Holocene epoch roughly 12,000 years ago, when humans began adopting agriculture. “Modern human skeletons have shifted quite recently towards lighter—more fragile, if you like—bodies. It started when we adopted agriculture. Our diets changed. Our levels of activity changed,” says Habiba Chirchir, A second study attributes joint bone weakness to different levels of physical activity in ancient human societies, also related to hunting versus farming.

The team scanned circular cross-sections of seven bones in the upper and lower limb joints in chimpanzees, Bornean orangutans and baboons. They also scanned the same bones in modern and early modern humans as well as Neanderthals, Paranthropus robustus, Australopithecus africanus and other Australopithecines. They then measured the amount of white bone in the scans against the total area to find the trabecular bone density. Crunching the numbers confirmed their visual suspicions. Modern humans had 50 to 75 percent less dense trabecular bone than chimpanzees, and some hominins had bones that were twice as dense compared to those in modern humans. Both studies have implications for modern human health and the importance of physical activity to bone strength. “The lightly-built skeleton of modern humans has a direct and important impact on bone strength and stiffness,” says Tim Ryan. That's because lightness can translate to weakness—more broken bones and a higher incidence of osteoporosis and age-related bone loss. The researchers warn that with the desk-bound lives that many people lead today, our bones may have become even more brittle than ever before. “We are not challenging our bones with enough loading," says Colin Shaw, "predisposing us to have weaker bones so that, as we age, situations arise where bones are breaking when, previously, they would not have."

Blackmoore writes:

Science Daily - Gecko grippers get a microgravity test flight

Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, are working on adhesive gripping tools that could grapple objects such as orbital debris or defunct satellites that would otherwise be hard to handle.

The gecko gripper project was selected for a test flight through the Flight Opportunities Program of NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate. As a test, researchers used the grippers in brief periods of weightlessness aboard NASA's C-9B parabolic flight aircraft in August.

"Orbital debris is a serious risk to spacecraft, including the International Space Station," said Aaron Parness, a JPL robotics researcher who is the principal investigator for the grippers. "This is definitely a problem we're going to have to deal with. Our system might one day contribute to a solution."

"gewg_" writes:

The (Minneapolis) Star Tribune reports

"The fastest Internet in the world is going to be here in Minneapolis starting this afternoon," said Joe Caldwell, co-CEO of US Internet. "We're talking about a game-changing speed."[1]

The service will cost $400 per month, Caldwell said. The company already offers 1-gigabit-per-second service for $65 per month to the same 30,000 households west of Interstate 35W, and plans to expand its network east of 35W, mostly to neighborhoods south of Lake Street.

[...]By moving eastward with its fiber network's high speeds and lower prices, the upstart US Internet hopes to take business away from Comcast.

[1] 10-gigabits-per-pecond.

Blackmoore writes:

The Economist - Why is everyone so busy?

The predictions sounded like promises: in the future, working hours would be short and vacations long. “Our grandchildren”, reckoned John Maynard Keynes in 1930, would work around “three hours a day”—and probably only by choice. Economic progress and technological advances had already shrunk working hours considerably by his day, and there was no reason to believe this trend would not continue. Whizzy cars and ever more time-saving tools and appliances guaranteed more speed and less drudgery in all parts of life. Social psychologists began to fret: whatever would people do with all their free time?

This has not turned out to be one of the world’s more pressing problems. Everybody, everywhere seems to be busy. In the corporate world, a “perennial time-scarcity problem” afflicts executives all over the globe, and the matter has only grown more acute in recent years, say analysts at McKinsey, a consultancy firm. These feelings are especially profound among working parents. As for all those time-saving gizmos, many people grumble that these bits of wizardry chew up far too much of their days, whether they are mouldering in traffic, navigating robotic voice-messaging systems or scything away at e-mail—sometimes all at once.

"gewg_" writes:

David Akadjian notes at AlterNet

Did Ayn Rand send Christmas cards? According to Scott McConnell's 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand, she did indeed. Unfortunately, none are included in McConnell's 656 page book. Fortunately, with a little help from the Ayn Rand Archives*, we are able to present to you this exclusive, never-before-seen collection of Ayn Rand favorites.

*The representative from the Ayn Rand Archives called me a looter and screamed something unintelligible, so some Christmas cards may be fictionalized representations of actual Ayn Rand Christmas cards.

Some examples of the 21 images and the accompanying quotes:

Image: An innkeeper turning away a man and his wife.
"What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary value." --Ayn Rand

Image: Salvation Army bell ringer
"Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they
cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society." --Ayn Rand

"The Christmas trees, the winking lights, the glittering colors provide the city with a spectacular display which only 'commercial greed' could afford us." --Ayn Rand

"Money is the barometer of a society's virtue." --Ayn Rand

Hugh Pickens writes:

Jorge Lopez writes that as a cat lover he's always wanted an automatic cat litter box and finally found one called the CatGenie, a fully automated self-washing litter box connected to water, electricity and the sewer that cleans itself with water and soap. "It’s the Rolls Royce of cat litter boxes, a hefty device that scoops, cleans, and disposes of the waste all on it’s own. It’s completely automated, even senses when a cat poops and cleans up afterwards." But there's trouble in paradise. "Life with the CatGenie was great, but not quite perfect," writes Lopez after discovering that CatGenie uses a smart cartridge that is only available from the manufacturer. "I found that the “Smart” in SmartCartridge is that it has an RFID chip inside of it to keep track of how much solution it has, and once it runs out, well, you can't refill. I honestly did not believe this and tore one of the cartridges apart, and there it was, looking back at me, a tiny chip holding up it’s little metal finger." Fortunately there are some amazing people helping the CatGenie community who have released products like the custom firmware CatGenious and CartridgeGenius which allows you to use whatever solution you want. "The cost savings is great, but isn't the biggest driver for me, it’s mainly the principle that I don't own the device I paid for, and I'm really tired of having cat litter everything in my home."

Magic Oddball writes:

Every Christmas Eve since 1956, staff at North American Aerospace Defense Command have put on a bit of a show for the nation’s kids by purportedly tracking Santa as he travels in his sleigh and posting official announcements through the media appropriate for the times: radio weather updates, television news, and now the Web. It’s about as incongruous a project as one could imagine for a Cold War-era defense system for detecting incoming attacks and launching potentially-nuclear weapons, and until recently, only a handful of people knew how it came about.

This year, that changed as a trio of siblings contacted NPR’s StoryCorps to tell the tale of how the Continental Air Defense Command Center’s red phone was turned into a Santa Hotline:

“Only a four-star general at the Pentagon and my dad had the number. This was the ’50s, this was the Cold War, and he would have been the first one to know if there was an attack on the United States.” The red phone rang one day in December 1955, and Col. Shoup answered it. “And then there was a small voice that just asked, ‘Is this Santa Claus?’ ”

His children remember Shoup as straight-laced and disciplined, and he was annoyed and upset by the call and thought it was a joke — but then, Terri says, the little voice started crying.

“And Dad realized that it wasn’t a joke,” her sister says. “So he talked to him, ho-ho-ho’d and asked if he had been a good boy and, ‘May I talk to your mother?’ And the mother got on and said, ‘You haven’t seen the paper yet? There’s a phone number to call Santa. It’s in the Sears ad.’ ”

The rest is an amusing, surprisingly heart-warming story that doesn’t even edge near the treacly ‘entertainment’ that tends to take over at this time of year, much to their credit. It also left me thinking: society back then was far stricter, it was believed that the nation could come under nuclear attack at any minute, yet even the the most crucial defense leader and team was able to retain their sense of humor, humanity, and stay genuinely cool under pressure — so why is it that now they appear to have completely lost those traits in our less endangered, more relaxed era?

"gewg_" writes:

Amanda Marcotte notes at AlterNet

We may object to using the holiday as an excuse to push overtly religious songs and prayers on kids in public schools, but the Christmas holiday, despite its religious origins, is accepted by most atheists as a secular holiday and many of us enjoy it as much as the Christians do. In fact, I'd argue there are many advantages to being an atheist, when it comes to celebrating the holidays.

1. Travel flexibility
2. No Christmas mass
3. Sex
4. Creative decorating (a Nativity scene with superhero action figures)
5. Wrapping paper
6. Give me the loot!
7. No praying before the meal
8. "Happy holidays!"
9. Better music. (You can fully admit that "All I Want For Christmas Is You" by Mariah Carey is the best Christmas song, full stop)
10. Better movies

I disagree with her best song selection. The obvious choice is "Five Pound Box Of Money" (Pearl Bailey, 1958).

"gewg_" writes:

Krita is a GPL'd graphics editor with raster, vector, filter, programmatic, group, and file-backed layers. It is based on KDE/Qt and is a part of the Calligra Suite.

Krita.org announces

From January 1st, KO GmbH will no longer be involved with Krita. Until now, the Krita maintainer, Boudewijn Rempt, was employed at KO GmbH. KO GmbH publishes Krita Gemini on Steam and provided commercial support for Krita to VFX studios and artists. While there was growth in the business, it was never enough to keep KO GmbH solvent.

From this point on, the Krita Foundation will support the Krita Studio users. The foundation will provide CentOS and Ubuntu LTS builds, as well as bug fixes and engaging in custom development projects.

New releases of Krita on Steam will also be provided by the Krita Foundation. Proceeds from Steam sales will go directly to the Krita Foundation (minus Valve's cut of course).

tt0264464 writes:

Sarah Meiklejohn, a lecturer at UCL, and an expert on computer security and crypto-currencies was recently part of an academic research team that studied pseudo-anonymity in bitcoin. In particular, they used transaction data to compare “potential” anonymity to the “actual” anonymity achieved by users. A bitcoin user can use many different public keys, but careful research led to a few heuristics that allowed them to cluster addresses belonging to the same user.

Full Story at Orielly.com