funny – Page 234 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

81% of Tor Users Can Be De-anonymized By Analysing Router Information

An anonymous reader writes A former researcher at Columbia University’s Network Security Lab has conducted research since 2008 indicating that traffic flow software included in network routers, notably Cisco’s ‘Netflow’ package, can be exploited to deanonymize 81.4% of Tor clients. Professor Sambuddho Chakravarty, currently researching Network Anonymity and Privacy at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, uses a technique which injects a repeating traffic pattern into the TCP connection associated with an exit node, and then compares subsequent aberrations in network timing with the traffic flow records generated by Netflow (or equivalent packages from other router manufacturers) to individuate the ‘victim’ client. In laboratory conditions the success rate of this traffic analysis attack is 100%, with network noise and variations reducing efficiency to 81% in a live Tor environment. Chakravarty says: ‘it is not even essential to be a global adversary to launch such traffic analysis attacks. A powerful, yet non- global adversary could use traffic analysis methods [] to determine the various relays participating in a Tor circuit and directly monitor the traffic entering the entry node of the victim connection.’ Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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81% of Tor Users Can Be De-anonymized By Analysing Router Information

Ubisoft Points Finger At AMD For Assassin’s Creed Unity Poor Performance

MojoKid (1002251) writes “Life is hard when you’re a AAA publisher. Last month, Ubisoft blamed weak console hardware for the troubles it had bringing Assassin’s Creed Unity up to speed, claiming that it could’ve hit 100 FPS but for weak console CPUs. Now, in the wake of the game’s disastrous launch, the company has changed tactics — suddenly, all of this is AMD’s fault. An official company forum post currently reads: “We are aware that the graphics performance of Assassin’s Creed Unity on PC may be adversely affected by certain AMD CPU and GPU configurations. This should not affect the vast majority of PC players, but rest assured that AMD and Ubisoft are continuing to work together closely to resolve the issue, and will provide more information as soon as it is available.” There are multiple problems with this assessment. First, there’s no equivalent Nvidia-centric post on the main forum, and no mention of the fact that if you own an Nvidia card of any vintage but a GTX 970 or 980, you’re going to see less-than ideal performance. According to sources, the problem with Assassin’s Creed Unity is that the game is issuing tens of thousands of draw calls — up to 50, 000 and beyond, in some cases. This is precisely the kind of operation that Mantle and DirectX 12 are designed to handle, but DirectX 11, even 11.2, isn’t capable of efficiently processing that many calls at once. It’s a fundamental limit of the API and it kicks in harshly in ways that adding more CPU cores simply can’t help with. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What the characters from South Park look like in real life

If you ever wondered what the characters of South Park looked like in real life in the minds of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, wonder no more. Last night’s crazy episode revealed what Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny would look like if they weren’t just cartoons made of shapes and circles but actual humans instead. Read more…

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What the characters from South Park look like in real life

Denmark Faces a Tricky Transition To 100 Percent Renewable Energy

HughPickens.com writes Justin Gillis writes in the NYT that Denmark is pursuing the world’s most ambitious policy against climate change, aiming to end the burning of fossil fuels in any form by 2050 — not just in electricity production, as some other countries hope to do, but in transportation as well. The trouble is that while renewable power sources like wind and solar cost nothing to run, once installed, as more of these types of power sources push their way onto the electric grid, they cause power prices to crash at what used to be the most profitable times of day. Conventional power plants, operating on gas or coal or uranium, are becoming uneconomical to run. Yet those plants are needed to supply backup power for times when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining. With their prime assets throwing off less cash, electricity suppliers in Germany and Denmark have applied to shut down a slew of newly unprofitable power plants, but nervous governments are resisting, afraid of being caught short on some cold winter’s night with little wind. “We are really worried about this situation, ” says Anders Stouge, the deputy director general of the Danish Energy Association. “If we don’t do something, we will in the future face higher and higher risks of blackouts.” Environmental groups, for their part, have tended to sneer at the problems the utilities are having, contending that it is their own fault for not getting on the renewables bandwagon years ago. But according to Gillis, the political risks of the situation also ought to be obvious to the greens. The minute any European country — or an ambitious American state, like California — has a blackout attributable to the push for renewables, public support for the transition could weaken drastically. Rasmus Helveg Petersen, the Danish climate minister, says he is tempted by a market approach: real-time pricing of electricity for anyone using it — if the wind is blowing vigorously or the sun is shining brightly, prices would fall off a cliff, but in times of shortage they would rise just as sharply. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Denmark Faces a Tricky Transition To 100 Percent Renewable Energy

Researchers Demonstrate Electrically Activated Micro-Muscles

mpicpp sends news of research at the University of Michigan in which a self-assembling chain of particles can be used as tiny, electrically-activated muscles. The team started with particles similar to those found in paint, with diameters of about a hundredth the width of a strand of hair. They stretched these particles into football shapes and coated one side of each football with gold. The gilded halves attracted one another in slightly salty water—ideally about half the salt concentration in the sports drink Powerade. The more salt in the water, the stronger the attraction. Left to their own devices, the particles formed short chains of overlapping pairs, averaging around 50 or 60 particles to a chain. When exposed to an alternating electric field, the chains seemed to add new particles indefinitely. But the real excitement was in the way that the chains stretched. … While the force generated by the fibers is about 1, 000 times weaker than human muscle tissue per unit area, it may be enough for microbots. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Researchers Demonstrate Electrically Activated Micro-Muscles

Tor Project Mulls How Feds Took Down Hidden Websites

HughPickens.com writes: Jeremy Kirk writes at PC World that in the aftermath of U.S. and European law enforcement shutting down more than 400 websites (including Silk Road 2.0) which used technology that hides their true IP addresses, Tor users are asking: How did they locate the hidden services? “The first and most obvious explanation is that the operators of these hidden services failed to use adequate operational security, ” writes Andrew Lewman, the Tor project’s executive director. For example, there are reports of one of the websites being infiltrated by undercover agents and one affidavit states various operational security errors.” Another explanation is exploitation of common web bugs like SQL injections or RFIs (remote file inclusions). Many of those websites were likely quickly-coded e-shops with a big attack surface. Exploitable bugs in web applications are a common problem says Lewman adding that there are also ways to link transactions and deanonymize Bitcoin clients even if they use Tor. “Maybe the seized hidden services were running Bitcoin clients themselves and were victims of similar attacks.” However the number of takedowns and the fact that Tor relays were seized could also mean that the Tor network was attacked to reveal the location of those hidden services. “Over the past few years, researchers have discovered various attacks on the Tor network. We’ve implemented some defenses against these attacks (PDF), but these defenses do not solve all known issues and there may even be attacks unknown to us.” Another possible Tor attack vector could be the Guard Discovery attack. The guard node is the only node in the whole network that knows the actual IP address of the hidden service so if the attacker manages to compromise the guard node or somehow obtain access to it, she can launch a traffic confirmation attack to learn the identity of the hidden service. “We’ve been discussing various solutions to the guard discovery attack for the past many months but it’s not an easy problem to fix properly. Help and feedback on the proposed designs is appreciated.” According to Lewman, the task of hiding the location of low-latency web services is a very hard problem and we still don’t know how to do it correctly. It seems that there are various issues that none of the current anonymous publishing designs have really solved. “In a way, it’s even surprising that hidden services have survived so far. The attention they have received is minimal compared to their social value and compared to the size and determination of their adversaries.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Tor Project Mulls How Feds Took Down Hidden Websites

Mozilla Updates Firefox With Forget Button, DuckDuckGo Search, and Ads

Krystalo writes: In addition to the debut of the Firefox Developer Edition, Mozilla today announced new features for its main Firefox browser. The company is launching a new Forget button in Firefox to help keep your browsing history private, adding DuckDuckGo as a search option, and rolling out its directory tiles advertising experiment. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Multi-Process Comes To Firefox Nightly, 64-bit Firefox For Windows ‘Soon’

An anonymous reader writes with word that the Mozilla project has made two announcements that should make hardcore Firefox users very happy. The first is that multi-process support is landing in Firefox Nightly, and the second is that 64-bit Firefox is finally coming to Windows. The features are a big deal on their own, but together they show Mozilla’s commitment to the desktop version of Firefox as they both improve performance and security. The news is part of a slew of unveilings from the company on the browser’s 10th anniversary — including new Firefox features and the debut of Firefox Developer Edition. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Multi-Process Comes To Firefox Nightly, 64-bit Firefox For Windows ‘Soon’

Apple Releases iMessage Deregistration Utility

tlhIngan writes When moving from an iPhone to something else, if you were an avid user of iMessage, you may find your messages missing, especially from iOS-using friends. Indeed, it has been such a problem that there are even lawsuits about it. While Apple has maintained that users can always switch off iMessage, that only works if you still have your iOS device. Unless one also has other iOS devices or a Mac, they may not even realize their friends have been sending messages that are queued up on Apple’s services via iMessage. Well, that problem has been resolved with Apple creating a deregistration utility to remove your phone number from the iMessage servers so friends will no longer send you texts via iMessage that you can no longer receive. It’s a two-step process involving proof of number ownership (via regular SMS) before deregistration takes place. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Apple Releases iMessage Deregistration Utility

Pitivi Video Editor Surpasses 50% Crowdfunding Goal, Releases Version 0.94

kxra writes With the latest developments, Pitivi is proving to truly be a promising libre video editor for GNU distributions as well as a serious contender for bringing libre video production up to par with its proprietary counterparts. Since launching a beautifully well-organized crowdfunding campaign (as covered here previously), the team has raised over half of their 35, 000 € goal to pay for full-time development and has entered “beta” status for version 1.0. They’ve released two versions, 0.94 (release notes) being the most recent, which have brought full MPEG-TS/AVCHD support, porting to Python 3, lots of UX improvements, and—of course—lots and lots of bug fixes. The next release (0.95) will run on top of Non Linear Engine, a refined and incredibly more robust backend Pitivi developers have produced to replace GNonLin and bring Pitivi closer to the rock-solid stability needed for the final 1.0 release. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Pitivi Video Editor Surpasses 50% Crowdfunding Goal, Releases Version 0.94