Does anyone have any thoughts as to why Apache would be targeted like this?
From an email I received from Apache 20 minutes ago (emphasis mine):
We are assuming that the attackers have a copy of the JIRA database, which includes a hash (SHA-512 unsalted) of the password you set when signing up as 'edmazur' to JIRA. If the password you set was not of great quality (eg. based on a dictionary word), it should be assumed that the attackers can guess your password from the password hash via brute force.
The upshot is that someone malicious may know both your email address and a password of yours.
This is a problem because many people reuse passwords across online services. If you reuse passwords across systems, we urge you to change your passwords on ALL SYSTEMS that might be using the compromised JIRA password. Prime examples might be gmail or hotmail accounts, online banking sites, or sites known to be related to your email's domain, cs.umass.edu.
It's really impressive to see a child prodigy, but do they go on to achieve more in life than the "average" smart crowd that goes through a more normal progression?
Malcolm Gladwell addresses this question in his book Outliers. The short answer to your question is no.
He claims that while intelligence is important, being a child prodigy alone won't buy you success. He instead says one need be only sufficiently intelligent, but also be presented the right opportunities and have the drive to put enough hours into practicing their craft. He calls that last part the 10,000 hour rule. In all the successful people he researched/interviewed, he found they went through a period in their lives where they were "made". The Beatles performed over 1,200 times from 1960 to 1964 in Hamburg, Germany. Bill Gates spent his nights and weekends as a teenager messing around in the University of Washington computer lab, an opportunity most did not have at the time. There are other examples given in the book. On the other end of the spectrum, he presented the case of Christopher Langan, "the smartest man in America", who Gladwell says did not achieve the level of success seen in other cases because he did not have the same sort of opportunities growing up.
I imagine you could bend the idea of traditional "success" though and see that last case in other ways.
Richard Clarke spoke at my campus about a month ago and addressed this question. His claim was that United States needs to put forth some doctrine of cyberwarfare deterrence for the same reasons it did with nuclear warfare. His argument was that because of how dependent on computers the world is, cyberwarfare, a relatively unknown beast, has the same potential for the mutually assured destruction that nuclear weapons are capable of.
Is there any evidence of the author trying tougher challenges like union square or handling traffic lights?
Don't know about this particular project, but you might be interested the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge...autonomous navigation including obeying traffic laws.
My friend runs a smaller site and was having a problem with forum spam. He edited the registration page to include a checkbox that said something along the lines of "check this box if you are not a bot". His problems went away instantly. Obviously this does not scale well, but for smaller sites being targeted randomly by automatic spam crawlers, it appears to be very effective.
In short, nodes of b-trees can have many children while nodes of binary trees have at most two. You see the former used in databases indexes where you're primarily waiting on disk operations. It makes sense to have the number of siblings nodes be on the order of the size of a disk block when you're disk-bound, so you end up with nodes having hundreds of children each.
Isn't one of the requirements of obtaining something like a class A network that the 16 million address space be mostly utilized either immediately or in the near future? Maybe tighten these restrictions and/or check up on these organizations more often to help prolong the IPv4 doomsday?
Josem said people could still be confident about playing on online poker sites because, if something untoward happened, it could easily be caught by statistical analysis, precisely as happened in this situation.
Or...cheaters of the future might learn from this and not be so flagrant about using their advantage, instead factoring in what is statistically possible and turning smaller profits, but at a less detectable and therefore safer rate.
.. Slashdot doesn't, not even in the 100 most significant moments. I don't get it.
Well, as much as I prefer Slashdot over Digg (I am here after all), Digg does get almost 25 times more unique visitors than Slashdot according to here.
People who play mathematically optimum poker lose, because they are ignoring the information that is important: What cards does the opponent have?
Who says they're ignoring their opponents' cards? There's more to making optimal decisions than your own cards. I think the general idea is that while you cannot know exactly what your opponent is holding, you can put them on ranges of hands with certain probabilities and then factor that into your calculations. You could say for example that your opponent has a high pocket pair with 40% probability, a drawing hand with 25%, trips with 5%, and garbage with 30%. From there, it's a relatively straight-forward expected value calculation to figure out if you should call that $5 raise on the $20 pot.
The tricky part is correctly estimating the probabilities of those ranges of hands. Does player A have a tendency to call in late position with suited aces? Does player B always raise with AK/AQ/AJ/AT? Does player C steal blinds a lot? All of these factors and more come into play. Humans are good at pattern matching and after enough hours at the table, you're bound to notice a few recurring profitable sequences of actions. Could computers more accurately assign ranges of hands/probabilities? It's certainly possible.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like botnet owners read Ender's Game.
From an email I received from Apache 20 minutes ago (emphasis mine):
I don't know what's worse - that you made that list or that I took the time to read through it all.
Oh well, it probably has someth-[28].
It should also be mentioned that Prof. Kevin Fu was recently named Technology Review's 2009 Innovator of the Year for this work.
Watch out Thottbot...
Malcolm Gladwell addresses this question in his book Outliers. The short answer to your question is no.
He claims that while intelligence is important, being a child prodigy alone won't buy you success. He instead says one need be only sufficiently intelligent, but also be presented the right opportunities and have the drive to put enough hours into practicing their craft. He calls that last part the 10,000 hour rule. In all the successful people he researched/interviewed, he found they went through a period in their lives where they were "made". The Beatles performed over 1,200 times from 1960 to 1964 in Hamburg, Germany. Bill Gates spent his nights and weekends as a teenager messing around in the University of Washington computer lab, an opportunity most did not have at the time. There are other examples given in the book. On the other end of the spectrum, he presented the case of Christopher Langan, "the smartest man in America", who Gladwell says did not achieve the level of success seen in other cases because he did not have the same sort of opportunities growing up.
I imagine you could bend the idea of traditional "success" though and see that last case in other ways.
Excuse me, but real programmers use butterflies.
People apparently have to feel the heat themselves in order to see the wrong in the (insert group) ways.
Richard Clarke spoke at my campus about a month ago and addressed this question. His claim was that United States needs to put forth some doctrine of cyberwarfare deterrence for the same reasons it did with nuclear warfare. His argument was that because of how dependent on computers the world is, cyberwarfare, a relatively unknown beast, has the same potential for the mutually assured destruction that nuclear weapons are capable of.
Don't know about this particular project, but you might be interested the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge...autonomous navigation including obeying traffic laws.
The messages are all identical.
Image FTA: Apple tweets
He was using TiVo.
Unless you're using Dvorak.
WHOOOOOSH
I'll second this.
My friend runs a smaller site and was having a problem with forum spam. He edited the registration page to include a checkbox that said something along the lines of "check this box if you are not a bot". His problems went away instantly. Obviously this does not scale well, but for smaller sites being targeted randomly by automatic spam crawlers, it appears to be very effective.
Sorry to nitpick...
B-tree != Binary tree
In short, nodes of b-trees can have many children while nodes of binary trees have at most two. You see the former used in databases indexes where you're primarily waiting on disk operations. It makes sense to have the number of siblings nodes be on the order of the size of a disk block when you're disk-bound, so you end up with nodes having hundreds of children each.
The language filter is quite primitive. Words like "hello" and "something" become "****o" and "so****ing".
Isn't one of the requirements of obtaining something like a class A network that the 16 million address space be mostly utilized either immediately or in the near future? Maybe tighten these restrictions and/or check up on these organizations more often to help prolong the IPv4 doomsday?
FTA:
Or...cheaters of the future might learn from this and not be so flagrant about using their advantage, instead factoring in what is statistically possible and turning smaller profits, but at a less detectable and therefore safer rate.
Well, as much as I prefer Slashdot over Digg (I am here after all), Digg does get almost 25 times more unique visitors than Slashdot according to here.
People who play mathematically optimum poker lose, because they are ignoring the information that is important: What cards does the opponent have?
Who says they're ignoring their opponents' cards? There's more to making optimal decisions than your own cards. I think the general idea is that while you cannot know exactly what your opponent is holding, you can put them on ranges of hands with certain probabilities and then factor that into your calculations. You could say for example that your opponent has a high pocket pair with 40% probability, a drawing hand with 25%, trips with 5%, and garbage with 30%. From there, it's a relatively straight-forward expected value calculation to figure out if you should call that $5 raise on the $20 pot.
The tricky part is correctly estimating the probabilities of those ranges of hands. Does player A have a tendency to call in late position with suited aces? Does player B always raise with AK/AQ/AJ/AT? Does player C steal blinds a lot? All of these factors and more come into play. Humans are good at pattern matching and after enough hours at the table, you're bound to notice a few recurring profitable sequences of actions. Could computers more accurately assign ranges of hands/probabilities? It's certainly possible.
...this finding sheds new light... How much light can really be shed on it?