feed on feeds - 2017/08/13 - items 0 to 15

I can't figure out why people are so psyched about the eclipse. There was a very-near-total eclipse in Palo Alto in 1989 or thereabouts. I was there. It got dark. Then it got light. I looked at it in one of those special cards. Yeah there's the eclipse. What's next? I don't get fireworks either however. Maybe it's the same kind of thing.

Part of Trump's comments yesterday about children playing with their parents, more than the usual Trump creep factor.

Iraq's Kurds say they are going ahead with plans to hold a referendum on independence in September.

An anonymous reader quotes Motherboard: If the esoteric programming language Asciidots looks like a mess, it is at least a very different-looking and even aesthetically pleasing mess. Simply, its mechanics and syntax are based on Ascii art... Asciidots is a unique sort of programming language known as a dataflow language. In this sort of language, we can imagine units of data (like our variable x) following a data go-kart track that's interrupted in different places with pit stops that change the value of the data go-kart that's following the track around. One pit stop might add 1 to the variable, while another might chop it in half. At some points, the track might even split, with the data go-kart picking one fork depending on its current value. If, say, it's greater than 2 it might go left; otherwise, it goes right... In Asciidots, the aforementioned go-kart track is represented by lines (|,-,/,\)... Most of the other non-line symbols are mathematical operators, but there are also symbols that direct the program to request input from the user, set values, print values, and change the direction of the unit of data... Under the hood, Asciidots is a Python program. An Asciidots program is just fed into that underlying program and digested into normal Python code, which is then executed. The article includes some examples, and argues that esoteric esolangs like Asciidots force programmers to consider fresh perspectives. And in addition, "it looks really cool."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Another nuclear missile test by Pyongyang is likely, but no US intelligence indicates imminent nuclear war, says Pompeo.

Readers submit all kinds of malware to the Internet Storm Center: executables, documents, emails, ...

This week I took a look at a phishing email submitted by a reader. Going through the headers, I spotted the following:

X-PHISHING-TEST: This is a phishing awareness test conducted by $COMPANY
X-PHISHING-ID: 123456

Ive seen similar headers before: they are used in emails designed to raise security awareness in a company. This email here simulates a phishing email, and these headers are added to flag the email as an awareness exercise, and they are also used to track individual emails.

Headers like these are a bit like the evil bit: there-). Before informing our reader, I did a whois on the domain name of the phishing URL found inside the email body: it was registered by the same company mentioned in the header, and this is indeed a company specialized in security training and awareness. I took special care not to access the URL, as this could put our reader on a list of people who fell for the phishing attempt.

Thus I informed our reader that it was indeed a phishing email, albeit of a special kind: it was a phishing awareness exercise. Later, he confirmed our findings.

Didier Stevens
Microsoft MVP
blog.DidierStevens.com DidierStevensLabs.com

(c) SANS Internet Storm Center. https://isc.sans.edu Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

Slashdot reader #16,185, Esther Schindler writes: "By NASA's rules, not just any computer can go into space. Their components must be radiation hardened, especially the CPUs," reports HPE Insights. "Otherwise, they tend to fail due to the effects of ionizing radiation. The customized processors undergo years of design work and then more years of testing before they are certified for spaceflight." As a result, the ISS runs the station using two sets of three Command and Control Multiplexer DeMultiplexer computers whose processors are 20MHz Intel 80386SX CPUs, right out of 1988. "The traditional way to radiation-harden a spacecraft computer is to add redundancy to its circuits or by using insulating substrates instead of the usual semiconductor wafers on chips. That's expensive and time consuming. HPE scientists believe that simply slowing down a system in adverse conditions can avoid glitches and keep the computer running." So, assuming the August 15 SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch goes well, there will be a supercomputer headed into space -- using off-the-shelf hardware. Let's see if the idea pans out. "We may discover a set of parameters with which a supercomputer can successfully run for at least a year without errors," says Dr. Mark R. Fernandez, the mission's co-principal investigator for software and SGI's HPC technology officer. "Alternately, one or more components of the system will fail, in which case we will then do the typical failure analysis on Earth. That will let us learn what to change to make the systems more reliable in the future." The article points out that the New Horizons spacecraft that just flew past Pluto has a 12MHz Mongoose-V CPU, based on the MIPS R3000 CPU. "You may remember its much faster ancestor: the chip that took you on adventures in the original Sony PlayStation, circa 1994."