Hackers Publish German Minister's Fingerprint | Threat Level from Wired.com
Topic: Technology
8:22 pm EDT, Apr 1, 2008
To demonstrate why using fingerprints to secure passports is a bad idea, the German hacker group Chaos Computer Club has published what it says is the fingerprint of Wolfgang Schauble, Germany's interior minister.
According to CCC, the print of Schauble's index finger was lifted from a water glass that he used during a panel discussion that he participated in last year at a German university. CCC published the print on a piece of plastic inside 4,000 copies of its magazine Die Datenschleuder that readers can use to impersonate the minister to biometric readers.
Database management systems are 20 years out of date and should be completely rewritten to reflect modern use of computers.
Oracle and SQL Server come from an age when online transaction processing dominated and required techniques such as multi-threading and transaction locking.
Persistent storage is unnecessary ...
Abandon SQL; use Ruby.
Note that the paper under review here is actually from last September. It has become "news" again because of the authors' recent criticism of Google (and MapReduce, specifically).
When you use a system often, you tend to fall into set usage patterns. Sometimes, you do not start the habit of doing things in the best possible way. Sometimes, you even pick up bad practices that lead to clutter and clumsiness. One of the best ways to correct such inadequacies is to conscientiously pick up good habits that counteract them. This article suggests 10 UNIX command-line habits worth picking up -- good habits that help you break many common usage foibles and make you more productive at the command line in the process. Each habit is described in more detail following the list of good habits.
Dial-Tone Phreak: Joybubbles | The Lives They Lived
Topic: Technology
9:44 am EST, Dec 30, 2007
NYT pays tribute to Joybubbles.
The boy decided to talk back to the phone. Not to other people, not right away: to the phone line itself, and in its own language. At 7, with his perfectly pitched ear, he heard through the receiver the tone that controlled long-distance connections, 2,600 cycles per second. “I started whistling along with it,” he said, “and all of a sudden the circuit cut off, and I did it again, and it cut off again. And gradually . . . I figured out — back in the mid-’50s — just how to do it.”
Jason Epstein, co-founder of the New York Review of Books:
"Try to read a serious book on that," he said of the Kindle. "You won't be able to, I don't think."
This is true.
...
"The real things that will be lost will be the discoveries that can be made in a bookstore, that wonderful wandering where you find precisely what you didn't know you were looking for."
Walter Kirn: "I think that what people who are mourning the book are really mourning is reading. They see the book as a totem of their melancholy over the disappearance of solid reading culture.
Flot is a pure Javascript plotting library for jQuery. It produces graphical plots of arbitrary datasets on-the-fly client-side.
The focus is on simple usage (all settings are optional), attractive looks and interactive features like zooming.
Although Flot is easy to use, it is also advanced enough to be suitable for Web 2.0 data mining/business intelligence purposes which is its original application.
Can you imagine trying to find things on the Internet without a search engine? Now you can navigate the complexity of your data center with IT Search. Splunk is the IT Search engine that indexes and lets you search, navigate, alert and report on IT data from any application, server or network device. Securely access logs, configurations, scripts and code, message, traps and alerts, activity reports, stack traces and metrics across thousands of components, from one place, all in real time.
