In the following video, Phil Plait of the Bad Astronomy blog (One of our favorite science-related blog here at [GAS]) explains several little known facts about Saturn’s rings, from theories on how they came into existence, to why there is a gap inside them.
To the unaided eye, Saturn doesn’t look like much. It appears to be just another “star” — brighter than most, but still just starlike. In fact, you can see for yourself: over the next few days, go outside right after sunset and look west. You’ll see two of these “stars” very close together. One is Mars, the other Saturn. It’s hard to tell which is which: from a few hundred million kilometers away, Saturn’s signature rings are invisible with just your eye.
That’s too bad. Saturn’s ring system is magnificent, and amazing. But if we can’t go to Saturn to see the rings, the least I can do is bring the rings here to you.
InformationWeek is reporting that Mozilla is already preparing Firefox 3.1 for release in the New Year and Firefox 4 is apparently already being discussed. This despite Firefox 3 only being released less than a few weeks ago. Take that Internet Explorer!
When it comes to discussing features, the big bone of contention is apparently the AwesomeBar (the URL bar that throws up every kind of previous URL when you type in it). It has its fans and its enemies (I’m an enemy and I disabled it on day one). Apparently, Mozilla is convinced that the enemies will eventually come to their senses and come to love it, so they have no plans to remove it. Well I can safely say that I will never come to love it and mine will stay permanently disabled.
As one reader in the InformationWeek article says :
The awesome bar sucks. My biggest problem is that it displays what you have been browsing to anyone looking over your shoulder. Lets imagine you have have been visiting a jobs site. You boss walks up and asks you to pull up something. You create a new tab and start typing ‘www’. You get that far and FF3 displays a huge banner with hotjobs or whatever. What a stupid idea.
What about you? Do you love Firefox’s AwesomeBar? Is it awesome for you? Or is it intensely annoying?
There seems to be a growing trend these days to do everything in Lego. A while ago I showed you a Flickr member recreating famous photos in Lego. But it seems that a couple of years back, someone did the same thing with video games.
My favourite is the Mortal Kombat one, but is it just me or is it unnerving to see the Lego figure grinning when his head has just been ripped off?
At least that’s what they want to make us believe with this picture posted Wednesday by Sepah News, the media arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Since then, the photo has been published in numerous online and offline publications, including The Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times, MSNBC, Yahoo! News and countless others.
But it seems that Iranian State Media have a few Photoshop wizards among their ranks because today, the Associated Press released the same picture, but with a slight difference.
Yep folks, one of my favorite movies of all times, Batman Begins, has just been released on Blu-Ray. Up to now, the title was only available on HD-DVD, but fortunately, some people with a head on their shoulders decided that it would be a good idea to release it on a non-dying HD format.
He’s Batman, he’s tough, he’s cool, and he’ll be hitting the big screen once again next week, so be sure to check him out!
In the following video, the folks from GT list 10 games that they think will make heads turn at E3 2008. There’s really some interesting stuff in there, so if you’re into games (or are just curious about them), take a few minutes to check it out!
For a search engine company, Google has today made a very strange move by starting up a Sims-type virtual reality website where you can set up your own avatars and virtual reality environments. No prizes for guessing what I’ve been doing for the past several hours – yep, pushing a bed up two flights of stairs.
I was initially dismissive of Lively and at Google’s attempts to imitate “The Sims” and “Second Life”, but in the end curiosity got the better of me (as it always does). After trying it out, I have to admit it does have potential and a certain fun factor, but I am still scratching my head wondering why Google of all companies chose to make this. What does Lively have to do with search?
US-CERT, the organization absorbed into the United States Department of Homeland Security in 2004, is keeping the Internet secure by coordinating the efforts of industry leaders and keeping those efforts top-secret. Yesterday, the biggest companies on the Internet, including Cisco, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, came to a decision on security and released patches for the DNS Internet Infrastructure designed to address a fundamental flaw in DNS. This all occurred after a months-long secret collaboration session that included federal government officials.
Their patches address a flaw in DNS that could have allowed an attacker to impersonate any server on the Internet by poisoning a DNS cache. What’s more, this was relatively easy to do. Luckily, the bad guys hadn’t stumbled across the vulnerability yet.
And perhaps more amazing than the world’s largest Internet companies collaborating with the government under a cone of silence is the level of integrity shown by security specialist Dan Kaminsky. While Kaminsky could have sold the vulnerability to the bad guys for top dollar, he turned the information over to the US-CERT team for free.
Dan Kaminsky’s Web site is here and he has a free DNS-testing tool to check your company’s DNS and Internet-provider vulnerability. A majority of DNS providers are still at risk, but should be working on applying patches. Brian Krebs, from the Washington Post, reports that Cox Communications is still vulnerable. Verizon Fios, which serves my home in Virginia, is safe.
Details of the vulnerability remain murky. One thing I can infer, however, is that part of this issue has to do with the fact that DNS is connectionless and unauthenticated. It operates over UDP, which is designed to be fast, and works just like IP telephony and streaming video technologies. When someone makes a request to look up the IP address of a Web site, like GeeksareSexy.Net, their local DNS server is supposed to translate this name back into an IP address that a Web browser can understand. It does so by shooting a UDP packet back to the requester. The problem may lie with the fact that these DNS servers usually reply with a predictable port, which an attacker can guess and subsequently substitute a response of his own.
On Kaminsky’s Web site, Doxpara.com, he suggests that one of the original designers of DNS was spot on when he had insisted that DNS responses should come from a randomized port. “All those years ago, Dan J. Bernstein was right: Source-port randomization should be standard on every name server in production use,” Kaminsky wrote.
Kaminsky also goes on to describe what a huge deal this patch is. It is not simple code replacement. Rather, it is more like upgrading XP to Service Pack 2 or 3.
“To translate the fix strategy into a more familiar domain, imagine large chunks of Windows RPC went from anonymous to authenticated user only, or even all the way to admin only,” Kaminsky wrote. “Or wait, just remember Windows XPSP2. This is a sledgehammer, by design. It cuts off attack surface, without necessarily saying why.”
So how safe is the Internet? While everyone was asleep, what kind of job did our government do to protect the Internet from failure? Kaminsky says things are just fine.
“After an enormous and secret effort, we’ve got fixes for all major platforms, all out on the same day. This has not happened before. Everything is genuinely under control,” Kaminsky said.
I’m pretty proud of what we accomplished here. We got Windows. We got Cisco IOS. We got Nominum. We got BIND 9, and when we couldn’t get BIND 8, we got Yahoo, the biggest BIND 8 deployment we knew of, to publicly commit to abandoning it entirely.
The other day I blogged about Chinese bloggers writing backwards to escape government censors and about Iranian bloggers facing a possible death sentence if they say the wrong thing to annoy Mr “Two Loaves Short Of a Breadbasket” Ahmadinejad. Well today I read that it’s apparently no better in Russia. A blogger there, 28 year old Savva Terentiev, has received a one year suspended jail sentence after local authorities took great exception to what he wrote on his blog.
The actual blog post was extremely inflammatory. Terentiev apparently said that the police were “scum” and that the “police force should be cleaned up by ceremonially burning officers twice a day in a town square.”
Now of course it goes without saying that I utterly condemn such comments. I have relatives in the police back in Great Britain and I have the utmost respect for law enforcement. But by prosecuting Terentiev for his blog post and giving him a suspended jail sentence, this opens the door to a dangerous precedent for free speech on the Internet. Despite the vileness of the opinion, Terentiev still has the right to voice what he thinks and not be prosecuted for it. That’s democracy. You can agree or disagree with him, love him or hate him but he can still say what he wants without ending up in front of a judge.
In Russia, everyone gets their news through state-controlled television, so the Internet is one of the few places where you can get news and opinions which is not controlled by the Kremlin. But now with this conviction and sentence, Russian bloggers are probably now hesitant to post anything for fear of being arrested. What’s next? Criticism of the president leading to a knock on the door?
US-CERT, the organization absorbed into the United States Department of Homeland Security in 2004, is keeping the Internet secure by coordinating the efforts of industry leaders and keeping those efforts top-secret. Yesterday, the biggest companies on the Internet, including Cisco, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, came to a decision on security and released patches for the DNS Internet Infrastructure designed to address a fundamental flaw in DNS. This all occurred after a months-long secret collaboration session that included federal government officials.