Born on today’s date in the year 1656, English astronomer and mathematician Edmond Halley was the first to predict the return of a comet. Today, Halley’s Comet – the most famous of all comets – bears his name. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/today-in-science-edmond-halley-nov-8-1656…
Tag: CRACK
Salesforce Transit Center: San Fransisco’s $2.2 Billion Cracks
Slashdot readers jimminy_cricket and Thelasko share a report from Popular Mechanics about how San Francisco’s Salesforce Transit Center went from the Grand Central of the West to a $2.2 billion construction debacle. Here’s an excerpt from the report: Built at a cost of $2.2 billion, the Salesforce Transit Center and Park formed the cornerstone of the Bay Area’s ambitious regional transportation…
Quantum supremacy: What can we do with a quantum computer?
Quantum computers could be used to crack open chemistry’s most elusive problems or help to create new medicines Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2221372-quantum-supremacy-what-can-we-do-with-a-quantum-computer/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…
Ice cliffs in Antarctica might not contribute to extreme sea-level rise in this century
A 2016 study suggested tall ice cliffs along Antarctica’s coast might collapse rapidly under their own weight and contribute to more than 6 feet of sea-level rise by 2100. Now, MIT researchers have found this prediction may be overestimated. Source: https://earthsky.org/earth/ice-cliff-collapse-antarctica-sea-level-rise…
Netflix May Crack Down On Password Sharing
Netflix has always been aware of password sharing and has never seemed to mind it, but that attitude may change as the company says it’s looking into “consumer-friendly ways” to address the issue. When Guggenheim Securities’ Miachael Morris asked about it, Netflix CFO Spencer Neumann said: “We continue to monitor it. “We’re looking at the situation and we’ll [look for] those…
New cracks in Pine Island Glacier are getting longer
The new rifts appeared soon after last year’s major calving of iceberg B46, which is about 3 times the size of New York’s Manhattan island. Satellite monitoring suggests a new iceberg of similar proportions will soon be calved. Source: https://earthsky.org/earth/new-cracks-pine-island-glacier-2019…
Huge Child Porn Ring Busted As Authorities Cite Ability To Crack Bitcoin Privacy
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Federal authorities in the U.S. have unsealed charges against the South Korean operator of a child porn ring that’s been billed as the world’s “largest dark web child porn marketplace.” The child porn site, known as Welcome to Video, charged some users in Bitcoin and authorities say they successfully unmasked those Bitcoin transactions…
China Has Gained the Ability To Spy On More Than 100 Million Citizens Via a Heavily Promoted Official App, Report Suggests
Security researchers believe the Chinese Communist Party’s official “Study the Great Nation” app has a backdoor that could help monitor use and copy data from those who have it installed on their devices. The BBC reports: Released in February, Study the Great Nation has become the most downloaded free program in China, thanks to persuasive demands by Chinese authorities that citizens…
Computer Historians Crack Passwords of Unix’s Early Pioneers
JustAnotherOldGuy shares a report from Boing Boing: Early versions of the free/open Unix variant BSD came with password files that included hashed passwords for such Unix luminaries as Dennis Ritchie, Stephen R. Bourne, Eric Schmidt, Brian W. Kernighan and Stuart Feldman. Leah Neukirchen recovered an BSD version 3 source tree and revealed that she was able to crack many of the…
Should We Build A Publicly-Funded Social Media Platform?
What if the problems with social media just can’t be solved by a for-profit platform? Writing in the New York Times, a former Tumblr executive argues the solution might require the creation of a nonprofit publicly-funded social media platform. The mechanics of how a public social media product would work have been fairly well figured out by now: It would be…