Economist - Slashdot User

Homebrew Cray-1 140

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday August 31, 2010 @01:00PM from the when-i-was-a-child dept.

egil writes "Chris Fenton built his own fully functional 1/10 scale Cray-1 supercomputer. True to the original, it includes the couch-seat, but is also binary compatible with the original. Instead of the power-hungry ECL technology, however, the scale model is built around a Xilinx Spartan-3E 1600 development board. All software is available if you want to build one for your own living room. The largest obstacle in the project is to find original software."

Comment What Linux needs to hit mainstream is (Score 1) 710

by Economist on Tuesday May 05, 2009 @06:55PM (#27839339) Attached to: Shuttleworth Says Ubuntu Can't Just Be Windows

... a good powerpoint viewer. One that supports all powerpoint slideshows perfectly, no matter how much multimedia is embedded. A lot of home users receive annoying powerpoint presentations with some stupid joke or something, and they LIKE it.

They aren't supported very well in linux. Some are, many are not. Especially when sound is embedded. And Average Joe will open a presentation, notice it isn't what it is on Windows, and then believes Linux is no good.

Submission + - MD5 proven ineffective for app signatures (win.tue.nl)

Submitted by

prostoalex

on Sunday December 02, 2007 @12:22AM

prostoalex writes: "Marc Stevens, Arjen K. Lenstra, and Benne de Weger have released their paper 'Vulnerability of software integrity and code signing applications to chosen-prefix collisions for MD5', which describes a reproducible attack on MD5 algorithm to fake software signatures. Researchers start off with two simplistic Windows applications — HelloWorld.exe and GoodbyeWorld.exe, and apply a known prefix attack that makes md5() signatures for both of the applications identical. Is it the end of signed software? Not quite, researchers point out: "For abusing a chosen-prefix collision on a software integrity protection or a code signing scheme, the attacker should be able to manipulate the files before they are being hashed and/or signed. This may mean that the attacker needs insider access to the party operating the trusted software integrity protection or code signing process. An attacker with such access can most probably do more harm anyway, without the need for chosen-prefix collisions, to get official digital signatures on malware.""

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