Slashdot Mirror

Orome1 quotes a report from Help Net Security: Adding hardware protections to software ones in order to block the ever increasing onslaught of computer malware seems like a solid idea, and a group of researchers have just been given a $275,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to help them work on a possible solution: malware-detecting CPUs. This project, titled "Practical Hardware-Assisted Always-On Malware Detection," will be trying out a new approach: they will modify a computer's CPU chip to feature logic checks for anomalies that can crop up while software is running. "The modified microprocessor will have the ability to detect malware as programs execute by analyzing the execution statistics over a window of execution," Ponomarev noted. "Since the hardware detector is not 100-percent accurate, the alarm will trigger the execution of a heavy-weight software detector to carefully inspect suspicious programs. The software detector will make the final decision. The hardware guides the operation of the software; without the hardware the software will be too slow to work on all programs all the time."

Theovon writes: For quite some time now, "open hardware" enthusiasts have had access to a number of open source CPUs, including OpenRISC. However, it wasn't until recently that there has been any kind of open source GPU. In 2014, the Vertical Research Group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison announced MIAOW. MIAOW is in many ways a clone of the AMD Southern Islands architecture and can even run some of the same binary code. Unfortunately, MIAOW is missing some key components such as video and memory systems, making it not currently possible to implement fully in hardware. For this, Nyuzi comes to the rescue. Nyuzi (formerly Nyami) has been in development since 2010 and is a fully functional open source GPU inspired by Larrabee. Although architecturally different from the SIMT architectures from AMD and Nvidia, researchers at Binghamton University and several other places have already used it to conduct research on GPUs. A paper (PDF) was published in March 2015 about this processor (one of the authors was the original founder of the Open Graphics Project), and Nyuzi (homepage) can be downloaded from GitHub.

Theovon writes: For quite some time now, "open hardware" enthusiasts have had access to a number of open source CPUs, including OpenRISC. However, it wasn't until recently that there has been any kind of open source GPU. In 2014, the Vertical Research Group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison announced MIAOW. MIAOW is in many ways a clone of the AMD Southern Islands architecture and can even run some of the same binary code. Unfortunately, MIAOW is missing some key components such as video and memory systems, making it not currently possible to implement fully in hardware. For this, Nyuzi comes to the rescue. Nyuzi (formerly Nyami) has been in development since 2010 and is a fully functional open source GPU inspired by Larrabee. Although architecturally different from the SIMT architectures from AMD and Nvidia, researchers at Binghamton University and several other places have already used it to conduct research on GPUs. A paper (PDF) was published in March 2015 about this processor (one of the authors was the original founder of the Open Graphics Project), and Nyuzi (homepage) can be downloaded from GitHub.

jan_jes writes: Origami is the Japanese art of paper folding created by Akira Yoshizawa, which can be used to create beautiful birds, frogs and other small sculptures. Last year a team of engineers from MIT and Harvard has developed an origami flat-pack robot (YouTube video) which can fold itself and crawl away without any human intervention. But now a Binghamton University engineer says this technique can be applied to building batteries, too. The battery generates power from microbial respiration, delivering enough energy to run a paper-based biosensor with nothing more than a drop of bacteria-containing liquid. This method should be especially useful to anyone working in remote areas with limited resources. The total cost of this potentially game-changing device is "five cents."

Matthew Skala writes "The 2005 Underhanded C Contest has announced its winners: the team entry from M Joonas Pihlaja and Paul V-Khuong, and the solo entry from Natori Shin. The contest (which appeared on Slashdot in June) tests programmers' ability to hide malicious behaviour in innocent-seeming code, making it a kind of evil shadow twin to the International Obfuscated C Contest."

Matthew Skala writes "The 2005 Underhanded C Contest has announced its winners: the team entry from M Joonas Pihlaja and Paul V-Khuong, and the solo entry from Natori Shin. The contest (which appeared on Slashdot in June) tests programmers' ability to hide malicious behaviour in innocent-seeming code, making it a kind of evil shadow twin to the International Obfuscated C Contest."

martinX writes "The Courier Mail has a story about a San Fran software developer who spins the cube faster than anyone else on the planet: 20 seconds to solve Rubik's Cube. I didn't think anyone still played with them." The winner, Dan Knights, said "It's sort of a dream come true", and credited Jessica Fridrich's cube-solving method as the key to winning, leaving the originator of the method in second place at the World Rubik's Cube Championships in Toronto at the weekend.

An Anonymous Coward in red leather asks: "I mostly use my machine for desktop-user type stuff: web browsing, word processing, game playing, listening to MP3s, and so forth. Out of curiosity and general geekiness, I've tried a fair sampling of Open Source and other alternate OSes just for kicks (SuSe, Red Hat and Slackware Linux, BeOs, FreeBSD). My favorite, so far, has been FreeBSD. It's stable, fast, supports all my hardware (including nifty OSS sound drivers) and the ports tree makes installing new software painless. Yet when I tell my other Open Source type friends (including BSD users and supporters) that FreeBSD is my favorite Desktop operating system, they look at me funny and say, 'FreeBSD is a server operating system, weirdo.' My question is: Why is FreeBSD not considered a valid desktop choice? What would FreeBSD need added to it to make a desktop friendly BSD distribution?" Now I feel that *BSD is as much of a 'desktop system' as Linux. It may not be widely known as such, but still: "Have Desktop. Will Travel", and BSD does have a desktop, right?

burner writes, "After quite a wait, JDK1.2.2 is released for Linux. You can grab the final release from Sun's site. Sun has also put up bios for the Blackdown guys. Sun's been acting pretty flippy lately, but this is great news. I've been using Blackdown's latest release candidates lately, and they're excellent, but now there's a final release. Nice work guys! "

Jonathan C. Masters writes "As you may be aware, a long battle with ATI has been going on to persaude them to release developer information about their TV Tuner products to the Linux community. Well, it's happened! Sorry folkes, there is no Web page yet (I was notified by a mail list). Checkout this page for general info (CT:Seems to be down) and this one for more ." Someday we'll live in a world where specs aren't propriatary.

blalor writes " Zac Sprackett has released a client/daemon package for the NetWinders that allows someone with a PalmPilot with the IR port to do basic administrator and monitoring tasks. Very cool! "

LogicStorm writes "Looks like 3Com is going to give us a waterred down wireless Palm Pilot before we get full interet connectivity. I havne't actually heard of the Eleven though, only the Razor, which isn't mentioned. Could they be the same thing? Also, future plans for the Palm V are mentioned as well. (Looks like they may need to go to something smaller than a AAA battery). Click here for the whole story. "