Micropost

Sometime in late summer I took a break with some of the other engineers and went to a local bar on Castro street in Mountain View. The bar was the St. James Infirmary and it had a 30 foot wonder woman statue inside among other interesting things. At some point in the evening I mentioned that it was sad that Lynx was not going to be able to display many of the HTML extensions that we were proposing, I also pointed out that the only text style that Lynx could exploit given its environment was blinking text. We had a pretty good laugh at the thought of blinking text, and talked about blinking this and that and how absurd the whole thing would be. ...

It’s an accomplishment all the more remarkable given that the story driving the Foundation Trilogy — an epic tale of the fall and rise of future galactic empires —contains virtually none of the usual tropes that are associated with science fiction. The novels span the entire galaxy, but no extraterrestrials make an appearance. It depicts the future history of human society, but it’s neither explicitly a utopian nor dystopian parable. There’s plenty of futuristic technology—from faster-than-light spacecraft to personal force fields—but all of this serves as the background, not the driver, of the plot. In fact, Foundation appears to contradict Asimov’s own definition of science fiction, as a ”branch of literature which deals with the reaction of human beings to changes in science and technology.” In this case, though, Asimov would later explain that he set out to create a genre he called ”social science fiction.” He used the future as a template to explore a pivotal idea that we’ve been asking for centuries: Are there laws of human history as immutable as the laws of physics? ...

More than 12 million routers in homes and small offices are vulnerable to attacks that allow hackers anywhere in the world to monitor user traffic and take administrative control over the devices, researchers said. The vulnerability resides in ”RomPager” software, embedded into the residential gateway devices, made by a company known as AllegroSoft. Versions of RomPager prior to 4.34 contain a critical bug that allows attackers to send simple HTTP cookie files that corrupt device memory and hand over administrative control. Attackers can use that control to read plaintext traffic traveling over the device and possibly take other actions, including changing sensitive DNS settings and monitoring or controling Web cams, computers, or other connected devices. Researchers from Check Point’s malware and vulnerability group have dubbed the bug Misfortune Cookie, because it allows hackers to determine the ”fortune” of an HTTP request by manipulating cookies. » Misfortune Cookie | mis.fortunecook.ie ...

We’ve all heard the ”official conspiracy theory” of the Death Star attack. We all know about Luke Skywalker and his ragtag bunch of rebels, how they mounted a foolhardy attack on the most powerful, well-defended battle station ever built. And we’ve all seen the video over, and over, and over, of the one-in-a-million shot that resulted in a massive chain reaction that not just damaged, but completely obliterated that massive technological wonder. ...

What if your cloud instances could be updated with the same certainty and precision as your mobile phone – with carrier grade assurance that an update applies perfectly or is not applied at all? What if your apps could be isolated from one another completely, so there’s no possibility that installing one app could break another, and stronger assurance that a compromise of one app won’t compromise the data from another? When we set out to build the Ubuntu Phone we took on the challenge of raising the bar for reliability and security in the mobile market. And today that same technology is coming to the cloud, in the form of a new ”snappy” image called Ubuntu Core ...

In October of 2004, a new Linux distro appeared on the scene with a curious name”Ubuntu. Even then there were hundreds, today if not thousands, of different Linux distros available. A new one wasn’t particularly unusual, and for some time after its quiet preview announcement, Ubuntu went largely unnoticed. It was yet another Debian derivative. Today, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, estimates that there are 25 million Ubuntu users worldwide. That makes Ubuntu the world’s third most popular PC operating system. By Canonical’s estimates, Ubuntu has roughly 90 percent of the Linux market. And Ubuntu is poised to launch a mobile version that may well send those numbers skyrocketing again. ...

Una de las principales premisas éticas del ’hacker’, desde los primeros grupos que aparecieron en los años 90 del siglo pasado, es la difusión de información sobre cómo funcionan las redes, los ordenadores y, en general, la tecnología. » II » III » IV » V » VI » VII » Mercé Molist | elmundo.es

La razón por la que eligieron a Miyazaki para el Oscar, que será otorgado en una ceremonia privada en la sala Ray Dolby, del Hollywood & Highland Center, es porque este director ha hecho soñar a muchas personas alrededor del mundo con sus historias, con sus dibujos, con sus encantadores personajes, en fin porque es un grande. » Ivonne Lara | hipertextual.com

¿Conocéis Archive.org? Es una organización sin ánimo de lucro que desde 1996 y con sede en San Francisco, se dedica a recopilar y archivar ”textos, audio, imágenes en movimiento, y software, así como páginas web” para ponerlos a disposición de todos nosotros de forma gratuita. Desde la organización tuvieron la genial idea de recopilar 900 videojuegos Arcade creados desde 1970 a 1990 y ofrecérnoslos gratuitamente, on-line, para deleite y regocijo nuestro. » archive.org » The InternetArcade ...

Desde el punto de vista de la física, un tsunami es sencillamente una onda sostenida por la gravedad terrestre (y no por el viento, como las olas de la playa. Tampoco es correcta la denominación de ”ondas de marea”, ya que no son las mareas la razón de su origen) en aguas poco profundas. » Agatha | eltercerprecog.blogspot.com.es