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ticho writes:

Software developer Jeremy Bowers has an interesting article about why it's so hard to write secure software. In summary (and I quote):

Let's talk about why it's so hard. My thesis is simple: We write insecure software because our coding environment makes it easier to write insecure software than secure software.

But exploring what it fully means can lead some surprising places. Please join me on a journey as I try to show you why that is not trivially true, but in fact, profoundly true. We do not occasionally pick up insecure tools, like a broken encryption routine or misusing a web framework; we are fish swimming in an ocean of insecurity, oblivious to how steeped in it we are.

What say you, Soylentils? Do you find that your software development environment and/or tools make it difficult to write secure software? What frustrations have you encountered? How have you worked around them?

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frojack writes:

The Washington Post has an update on the story that we've been seeing for the last several years, namely that the Cavendish banana may become extinct.

Apparently, its starting to get serious. It has happened before.

Now it is the Cavendish, the banana that replaced the Gros Michel as the world's top banana export, representing 99 percent of the market that is in danger of going extinct. A more detailed story here.

Will modern genetic science be able to head off this extinction?

Consider that Bill Gates got in trouble when he started tinkering with bananas last year.

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Justin Case writes:

Will "they" like it when "we" have a crowdsourced database of where and when congressmen, judges and cops go throughout their work day?

Does this level the playing field? Open yet another can of worms? Both?

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"gewg_" writes:

The Register reports

One of the key players in Prenda Law, a troll group that seeded smutty films onto file-sharing networks and then harassed the downloaders for payment, has been told he must sell his house and possessions to cover his creditors' bills.

In 2013 the civil courts found that Paul Hansmeier and two associates had set up Prenda Law with the intent of using copyright enforcement law to trawl pornography downloaders and make them pay for films the company had put online themselves.

The judge in that case delivered an epic Star Trek-themed smack down for the firm, telling the attorneys that they would "boldly probe the outskirts of law", but that their enterprise relied on deception and their lawyer had lied to the court.

The three were ordered to pay fines and damages that now stand at $2.9M, but they have prevaricated ever since. Hansmeier had filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy, meaning he could pay off the amount in small increments from his salary.

But on Thursday, Minnesota Judge Kathleen Sanberg changed this [PDF][1] to Chapter 7, meaning he has to sell off all assets to pay his debt. That includes his house, any vehicles, and assets that can be found by the court.

[1] Link in article is to an intermediate page. The page content is also behind a script.

See our previous Prenda stories.

Also covered on Ars Technica which notes:

"Here, the debtor has a pattern and practice of dishonesty with the courts," US Bankruptcy Judge Kathleen Sanberg said during the Thursday hearing. She ordered Hansmeier to convert his Chapter 13 (wage earner's plan) bankruptcy filing to a Chapter 7 (liquidation). Under Chapter 13, Hansmeier could have paid his creditors much more slowly.

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Phoenix666 writes:

How do you stop a child, especially one who has experienced significant adversity, from growing up to be a psychopath? Responsive, empathetic caregiving -- especially when children are in distress -- helps prevent boys from becoming callous, unemotional adolescents, according to a new Tulane University study of children raised in foster care.

The research, which was published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry , is the first to show that an intervention can prevent the precursors to psychopathy. The destructive condition affects approximately 1 percent of the population and is characterized by callous interpersonal interactions and lack of guilt or empathy.

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"gewg_" writes:

FOSS Force reports

Phoenix-based Symple PC, which offered refurbished "web workstations" running Ubuntu for $89, has evidently ridden off into the night of no return. Since at least August 24, the company's website has said the product is "No Longer [Available]", although the website remains operational. Numerous attempts to contact the company for clarification have gone unanswered.

The venture was the brainchild of Jason Spisak, whose history with Linux and FOSS goes back to being the co-founder and marketing director [of] Lycoris, which made news in 2003 when Walmart offered the Linux distro preinstalled on $199 PCs.

[...] The Symple PCs sought to be more than merely refurbished discarded desktops with fresh installations of Linux. Because they where built using a variety of used components, the specs on individual machines varied, but all met a minimum requirement of at least 2 GB RAM, 80 GB SATA hard drive or larger, and a 2.8 GHz P4 processor or faster. They came enclosed in a new case built entirely of recycled materials, were "rigorously" bench tested to find faulty components, and were covered by a one year full replacement warranty. Although the company was targeting SMBs, they also offered to ship single units to consumers.

Evidently, the testing wasn't rigorous enough, as the product seemed to be plagued with dependability issues from the start. Almost immediately after we published our first article on the desktops, we began to hear stories from consumers about Symple PCs that died after only a couple of days use. However, the company stood behind [its] warranty and immediately shipped replacement units.

Spisak also showed that his heart was in the right place. In early May, after learning from one of Ken Starks' columns on FOSS Force that Starks' nonprofit Reglue had lost a major supplier of used computers because he wouldn't transition from using Linux boxes to Microsoft Surface Pro or Windows, Spisak [pledged]

[...] my company would like to match that $1000 donation in Symple PCs to make up for any shortfall Ken is experiencing from them this year

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Phoenix666 writes:

An accessible primer on photonics:

With this article, I want to show you a nice way to understand the basic operation principles of lasers – either for your own pleasure or when you try to explain it to beginners.

We begin by asking a seemingly unrelated question: How can we store light? Could we put some amount of light into some suitable kind of bucket, with which we could carry it around and use it later on?

An essential problem with storing light is that it moves away so fast. A relatively straightforward idea is to confine the light with some mirrors, which prevents it from escaping. In the simplest case, we would just use two highly reflecting mirrors in parallel, so that a light beam can be captured between those:
simple resonator

Such an optical arrangement is called an optical resonator. Ideally, the light would be perfectly reflected by the mirrors and circulate there forever.

One can easily imagine a number of problems with that approach, which however we will solve step by step.

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darkfeline writes:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/12/8-players-8-projectors-8-bits-and-just-one-nintendo-entertainment-system/

To connect eight controllers to the NES, they used an Arduino-based multiplexer. Video output from the NES is fed through an upscaler, to get the output up to a solid 576p at 50Hz. Audio output goes directly from the NES to the room's sound system.

Next, the upscaled video is fed into a "tracking PC." This PC is running some custom software that takes incoming video frames and copies them into a new, much wider output buffer. The software looks at the background of each frame as it comes in and tries to line it up with the previous frame, stitching them together into a panorama. This sounds quite simple until you remember that a) the background can move very quickly or slowly, depending on the player, and b) in most side-scrolling games the player can also go backwards.

Once the tracking PC is done working its magic, the video output is sent to a media server, which in turn drives eight projectors (two for each wall). Because each wall has a slightly different aspect ratio, and the media servers stretch the output image slightly to cover the entire space, the tracking PC also has a real-time "GPU algorithm" to correct the distortion. The end result, as you can see throughout this story, is a very sharp rendition of Super Mario Bros, Castlevania, and other NES classics.

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ticho writes:

Ted Dziuba has an interesting opinion piece about DevOps phenomenon:

I've got to hand it to the Agile development guys — they were really good at liberating money out of organizations that all had trouble with something inherently difficult. The geniuses who developed Scrum and Extreme Programming executed masterfully; selling books and training; and they made some serious bank doing it. If you hang around Silicon Valley long enough, you know to applaud the hustle. It's the classic Rainmaker scam. You pay a man to make it rain on your crops, and when it rains, he takes the credit. If it doesn't rain, he comes up with an excuse that involves you paying more money.

So, given that, I'm befuddled by the Devops movement. It's got the potential to make a handful of people a lot of money in the same way that Agile did, but nobody is really executing on it. It's proper snake oil with all the trimmings: prescription of "culture change", few and vague concrete steps for implementation, and most of all, the promise to solve an age old problem.

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"gewg_" writes:

At CounterPunch, playwright Chris Welzenbach makes it clear that almost all movies "based on" Philip K. Dick works have not been true to the author's originals.
He notes an exception before reviewing the latest try.

One bright spot is Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly (2006), which closely adheres to Philip K. Dick's 1977 novel--a dark dystopic journey into madness. Linklater employs a technique called interpolated rotoscope to present the action from an animated remove and uses a subdivision pocked by neglect as the film's location, and does actually capture Philip K. Dick's nightmarish conception.

Now comes Amazon's "adaptation" of his 1962 novel, The Man In The High Castle, produced by Ridley Scott and developed by Frank Spotznitz. An alternative history set in 1962, The Man In The High Castle imagines a world where Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan won the Second World War and the former U.S. has been divvied up into the Pacific States, controlled by Japan, the Rocky Mountain States, ostensibly under Japanese control but where actual authority remains ambiguous, and the United States, composed of the midwest and the eastern states, that is firmly under the Nazi Reich.

In its original form, The Man in the High Castle is an intriguing examination of the I-Ching and the role fate plays in deciding human affairs. By contrast, Frank Spotznitz's television series is Spy v. Spy with swastikas and rising suns.

Spoiler alert: Welzenbach goes into great detail about the 10-part series and its differences from the book.

Previous: Ridley Scott Will Produce Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle" for TV

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frojack writes:

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was busy explaining to a stock holders meeting that the company's plan to improve the Windows Phone's sales was to appeal to Windows developers by allowing them to write universal applications that work on computers, phones and tablets, targeting a larger array of devices than just Microsoft's handsets.

Steve Ballmer, still a major stock holder, blurts out

He was possibly right, but the outburst was about as welcome as a cactus in an outhouse.

The Application market for Windows phone is a mess. If it is free, Facebook, Skype, Twitter, it gets downloaded. If the developer charge much of anything at all, apps just don't sell. And developers just aren't spending any time developing for Windows Mobile.

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"gewg_" writes:

Quartz reports:

Mud houses all but disappeared from the world in the 20th century, thanks to industrialization and the advent of commercial building materials. But the homes, which have seen a small revival in recent years, still offer many advantages: They're sturdy, naturally insulated, surprisingly durable, and sustainable. And most of all, they're extremely cheap.

That's why the Italy-based World's Advanced Saving Project (WASP) is trying to bring mud back as a popular building material--with a modern twist. At a three-day rally event in Italy's Ravenna province [in September], WASP debuted what it calls the globe's biggest 3D mud printer, which fuses new technology with ancient building techniques to produce affordable, green homes.

At 12 meters (40 feet) tall, the BigDelta printer is comprised of a lightweight, collapsible steel frame and a suspended printing nozzle. Clay is pushed and rotated through the nozzle, layer by layer. The printer uses only water, dirt, clay, and plant fibers to make earthen dwellings--and by using locally dug-up materials, avoids expensive shipping and materials costs.

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darkfeline writes:

From Popular Science:

In a series of recently published papers, including a paper published this week in the Journal of Applied Physics, researchers from North Carolina State University announced that they have created a new form of carbon, called Q-carbon.

Pure carbon (without additional elements, such as oxygen, mixed in) has a few distinct solid forms that it can take. The first is graphite, in which the carbon atoms line up to form thin sheets. Graphite is thin and flakey, used to make graphene and pencil lead. The other phase of carbon occurs when carbon atoms form a rigid crystal lattice, the building blocks of diamonds, which are used in industry and, of course, jewelry.

"We've now created a third solid phase of carbon," Jay Narayan, lead author of the paper, said in a statement. "The only place it may be found in the natural world would be possibly in the core of some planets."

Narayan and his team created Q-carbon by putting amorphous carbon on a base layer of a hard substance (either sapphire, glass, or plastic) then shooting lasers at it. Amorphous carbon, for the record, is carbon that doesn't have a defined structure--it's probably got a bit of graphite or diamond, but no unifying structure, so it doesn't count as a 'solid phase of carbon'. The lasers fused the amorphous carbon into a crystalline structure harder than diamond; Q-carbon.

The researchers were able to create layers of Q-carbon between 40 and 500 nanometers thick (that's less than 0.0005 millimeters at the largest). The new substance is ferromagnetic, meaning it can be magnetized, and can glow when exposed to electric fields. Eventually this material could lead to new super-thin yet durable displays or screens, but that day is a long way off. For now, researchers are still learning about the basic properties of this new material.

The cited papers can be found on AIP.org.
Research Update: Direct Conversion of Amorphous Carbon into Diamond at Ambient Pressures and Temperatures in Air
Novel Phase of Carbon, Ferromagnetism, and Conversion into Diamond

More coverage from the NC State News

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"gewg_" writes:

Akkana reports via the Shallow Thoughts blog

I went to a night sky photography talk on Tuesday. The presenter talked a bit about tips on camera lenses, exposures; then showed a raw image and prepared to demonstrate how to process it to bring out the details.

His slides disappeared, the screen went blank, and then ... nothing. He wrestled with his laptop for a while. Finally he said "Looks like I'm going to need a network connection", left the podium, and headed out the door to find someone to help him with that.

I'm not sure what the networking issue was: the nature center has open wi-fi, but you know how it is during talks: if anything can possibly go wrong with networking, it will, which is why a good speaker tries not to rely on it. And I'm not blaming this speaker, who had clearly done plenty of preparation and thought he had everything lined up.

Eventually they got the network connection, and he connected to Adobe. It turns out the problem was that Adobe Photoshop is now cloud-based. Even if you have a local copy of the software, it insists on checking in with Adobe at least every 30 days. At least, that's the theory. But he had used the software on that laptop earlier that same day, and thought he was safe. But that wasn't good enough, and Photoshop picked the worst possible time--a talk in front of a large audience--to decide it needed to check in before letting him do anything.

Someone sitting near me muttered "I'd been thinking about buying that, but now I don't think I will." Someone else told me afterward that all Photoshop is now cloud-based; older versions still work, but if you buy Photoshop now, your only option is this cloud version that may decide ... at the least opportune moment ... that you can't use your software any more.

[...] I talked to the club president afterward and offered to give a GIMP talk to the club some time soon, when their schedule allows.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Japan's Akatsuki spacecraft, whose name means 'dawn', gets a second chance to rise on 7 December. Exactly five years after it failed to slip into orbit around Venus, Akatsuki will fire its engines and try again.

The spacecraft has spent the past half-decade orbiting the Sun, on its way to catch up with Venus. "It's been quite a long period of waiting," says Masato Nakamura, project manager at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Institute of Space and Astronautical Science in Sagamihara.

Just before 9 a.m. Japan time on 7 December, engineers will command Akatsuki to fire four of its thrusters simultaneously. The engines will run for around 20 minutes, aiming to nudge the spacecraft onto the correct trajectory for capture by Venus's gravity.

[...] Akatsuki was launched in May 2010 on a mission to study Venus's ever-changing atmosphere, which rotates at up to 100 metres per second — much faster than the planetary surface below it. The spacecraft carries five cameras, ranging from infrared to ultraviolet wavelengths to study different atmospheric features, including the lightning thought to flash through Venus's acidic clouds.

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