This Page Is Anonymous (2013)

This Page Is Anonymous (2013)

SDF lets you register an anonymous user over ssh (which is accessible via the Tor network) and takes cash over mail in order to validate the user. This page was registered in exactly this way: I created a user called “voidnull” over ssh over Tor, then mailed SDF a single dollar bill with no return address. As far as I interpret the rules, there is nothing illicit about using Tor to access SDF, or setting up an anonymous account, so long as no other illicit activity takes place.

Source: voidnull.sdf.org

Clojerl (Clojure for the Erlang VM) 0.5.0 Released

Clojerl (Clojure for the Erlang VM) 0.5.0 Released

Clojerl is an experimental implementation of Clojure on the Erlang VM. Its goal is to leverage the features and abstractions of Clojure that we love (macros, collections, seq, protocols, multimethods, metadata, etc.), with the robustness the Erlang VM provides for building (distributed) systems. The idea in Clojerl is to encourage the Erlang/OTP concurrency model, but support as many Clojure constructs as possible and as far as they make sense in the Erlang VM.

Source: github.com

DNS Cookies – Identify Related Network Flows

DNS Cookies – Identify Related Network Flows

They work with nearly any network application – web browsers, email clients, mobile applications, etc. As with traditional HTTP cookies, DNS cookies can be used to track users on the web. Users sharing a local DNS cache (such as a home router or corporate firewall) will tend to receive the same DNS cookie.

Source: dnscookie.com

Web Single Sign-On, the SAML 2.0 perspective

Web Single Sign-On, the SAML 2.0 perspective

With other applications already in production, the SSO (single sign-on) was already in place across the company. Creating our own sign-on system was not an option, for several reasons:

Several protocols allow to implement a SSO system, but first of all it is good to distinguish two things: Authentication / Authorization. To implement SSO, there are 3 main protocols:

Even though older, SAML is still used a lot in companies and more complicated to set up than OpenID.

Source: blog.theodo.com

This TRS-80

This TRS-80

Ninety percent of online journalism these days is nothing more than wannabe reporters summarizing other people’s assumptions from web sites that know how to game a search engine. At the time, it was very unusual for a local radio station to not have news at least once an hour. If you were lucky enough to be in the presence of a network correspondent, or someone working for one of the broadsheet institutions, you might be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of their special reporter notepads.

Source: wayne.lorentz.me

New York to Approve One of the World’s Most Ambitious Climate Plans

New York to Approve One of the World’s Most Ambitious Climate Plans

New York lawmakers have agreed to pass a sweeping climate plan that calls for the state to all but eliminate its greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, envisioning an era when gas-guzzling cars, oil-burning heaters and furnaces would be phased out, and all of the state’s electricity would come from carbon-free sources. Under an agreement reached this week between legislative leaders and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act would require the state to slash its planet-warming pollution 85 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, and offset the remaining 15 percent, possibly through measures to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Many Democratic-led states have passed laws designed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, in response to the Trump administration’s sustained efforts to loosen or abandon environmental regulations on power plants and vehicles.

Source: www.nytimes.com

Ellen Pao: Our world is LGBTQIA. Your workplace should be too

Ellen Pao: Our world is LGBTQIA. Your workplace should be too

For example, we have heard of employees pushing for religious employee resource groups (ERGs) so that they have company support to discuss removing LGBTQIA rights, such as the right to marry. We recommend against pushing employees to self-identify over their reasonable fears; instead we encourage CEOs to start by making all LGBTQIA employees feel included, even the ones who don’t publicly self-identify. Of course, processes for hiring, managing, compensating, and promoting employees should try to eliminate gender, anti-transgender, sexual orientation, and other biases.

Source: www.range.co

New Twist Found in the Story of Life’s Start

New Twist Found in the Story of Life’s Start

Joyce, now at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., and Jonathan Sczepanski, a postdoctoral researcher, created an RNA enzyme — a substance that copies RNA — that can function in a soup of left- and right-handed building blocks, providing a potential mechanism for how some of the first biological molecules might have evolved in a symmetrical world. Around the same time, scientists were trying to figure out how the building blocks of life — amino acids and nucleic acids — could have spontaneously formed into more complex molecules such as proteins, DNA and RNA. In the decades since Joyce’s 1984 experiment, scientists have proposed myriad ways around the problem, from physical and chemical theories to RNA precursors that lack chirality.

Source: www.quantamagazine.org

Millionaire hacker gets 9 years in death of man building nuclear bunker tunnels

Millionaire hacker gets 9 years in death of man building nuclear bunker tunnels

Hours before the fire broke out in the basement, Khafra texted Beckwitt to warn him it smelled like smoke in the tunnels. Instead of getting Khafra out of the tunnels, Beckwitt told him that he “just switched it all over to another circuit,” according to the prosecutor. His father, Dia Khafra, said during an interview last year that he and his wife tried to persuade their son to stay away from Beckwitt’s tunnels.

Source: www.baltimoresun.com

What happens behind the scenes when we type www.google.com in a browser? (2015)

What happens behind the scenes when we type www.google.com in a browser? (2015)

After sending the request and headers, the web browser sends a single blank newline to the server indicating that the content of the request is done. After parsing the HTML, the web browser (and server) repeats this process for every resource (image, CSS, favicon.ico, etc) referenced by the HTML page, except instead of GET / HTTP/1.1 the request will be GET /$(URL relative to www.google.com) HTTP/1.1. Once the server supplies the resources (HTML, CSS, JS, images, etc.) to the browser it undergoes the below process:

Let’s start, with the simplest possible case: a plain HTML page with some text and a single image.

Source: github.com