Chad's News

In a sign of the times, Encyclopædia Britannica will no longer be available in printed volumes, after the 2010 print run sells out. The company will still publish a digital encyclopedia, but even that will only account for about 15% of their revenue, with education products bringing in the other 85%. I guess encyclopedias still have their place, but, in a world with Wikipedia and Google, they’re becoming less relevant.

Thanks to Josh for this link.

Update: Now that Britannica has made this announcement, there’s been a huge surge in sales of the remaining print versions, from collectors hoping to make an investment and from people seeing a last chance to purchase a keepsake.

Link: http://money.cnn.com/…

Imagine if you can, Bruce Lee playing ping pong. But just to make it fair, he uses nunchucks instead of a paddle. The linked video is hilarious.

Thanks to Garrett for this link.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/…

I’m amazed at the lengths that cryptography experts will go to in order to uncover weaknesses in a particular encryption scheme. (Chad’s News readers may recall this post where the hacker used acid and an electron microscope to reveal the circuitry of an encrypted microchip.) This time a vulnerability was found in OpenSSL, which is used by just about everyone. The researchers modified the power supply in such a way that it caused a one-bit error, and from that error they were able to obtain four bits of the 1024-bit secret key. They continued to produce the errors until they had enough data to piece together the entire key.

Taking note of the date of the linked article (March 2010), I’m guessing they’ve fixed this problem in OpenSSL. And while the method might work on other implementations, as well as on older hardware that still uses an unpatched version of OpenSSL, I don’t really see this as being an issue for the normal Chad’s News reader.

Thanks to Josh for this topic.

Link: http://www.theregister.co.uk/…
(via Engadget)

Many Chad’s News readers are probably familiar with OpenOffice, the free alternative to Microsoft Office that was originally owned by Sun Microsystems (and then Oracle after it purchased Sun). But have you heard about LibreOffice? According to the linked article, LibreOffice started out as a free, open-source version of OpenOffice that was created when Oracle didn’t seem interested in continuing OpenOffice development.

Should users switch from OpenOffice to LibreOffice? I can’t say. (Here at the Chad’s News Network Command Center, we still use StarOffice 5.2, the precursor to OpenOffice.) But a quick view of the OpenOffice website shows that Oracle has donated it to Apache, so it’s no longer under Oracle’s control. The linked article doesn’t seem to take this fact into account.

Link: http://www.komando.com/…

As I understand it, back in the early days, the Internet was a group of connected networks, but not every network was connected to every other one. So traffic might travel through several of those networks in order to get from one computer to another. Nowadays things are somewhat different, and you even hear people talking about an Internet backbone—something which most definitely did not used to exist.

The linked article explains how it all works via peering and transit. A significant part of the backbone turns out to be co-location facilities where multiple networks connect together via internet exchange points. Thus many networks, and especially the major ones, tend to be interconnected. And you don’t see traffic going through as many intermediate networks as you might have in the days of yore.

For those on Windows machines, the following command shows the route that your data takes to get to the chadsnews.com server:
   tracert chadsnews.com
Under Unix/Linux use this command instead:
   traceroute chadsnews.com

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

How would you respond if you were interviewing for a job and they asked you for your Facebook username and password? Or what if they just asked you to log in during the interview, so they could check your info? It’s happening in the real world, right now.

Link: http://apnews.myway.com/…
(via Kim Komando)

Bitcoin is a digital currency first issued in 2009. The system uses peer-to-peer networking and cryptography, without a central authority. Bitcoins are created by a process called “mining”, where users perform work and receive Bitcoins as payment. To prevent long-term inflation, the total number of Bitcoins will cap at 21 million. And yes, you can actually use Bitcoins to purchase stuff from some retailers who accept them.

Bitcoin is, however, having some problems. Hackers have had some success (link 1, link 2) at stealing the digital currency, and there’s also a piece of malware that uses compromised computers to mine Bitcoins. (Note that these hackers aren’t attacking Bitcoins themselves, which are protected by strong cryptography; instead, they’re going after the software that people use to manage their Bitcoins.) Of more import is the wildly-fluctuating exchange rate against the dollar. What’s the point of purchasing Bitcoins with cash, only to subsequently have their value plummet? Of course, this is a problem with any currency, but Bitcoins have had some severe drops.

Update: Not everyone agrees with my assessment that Bitcoin is failing. See the comments for details.

Update #2: I’ve modified the title of this post, as well as the first sentence of the second paragraph, to do away with the notion that Bitcoin is failing. I still think, however, that it has been having problems.

Link #1 (Bitcoin explained): http://arstechnica.com/…

Link #2 (Bitcoin articles at Ars Technica): https://www.google.com/…

Neutrinos are nearly massless particles that can easily go through most materials. Neutrinos routinely zip through massive bodies such as the Earth without touching anything. In fact, billions of them pass through our body every second. As such, neutrinos would be a perfect communications medium—no cables, no satellites, and if you wanted to contact the other side of the planet, you’d just point the beam through the Earth. One could just as easily contact the far side of the Moon or one of the other planets.

This sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but researchers have managed to send a short neutrino-based message through 780 feet of rock. The implications are staggering, but the experiment was only proof-of-concept, and the technology is nowhere near the point that it can be effectively used for real-world communications. But still…

Link: http://www.rochester.edu/…
(via Kim Komando)

Don’t know how long this offer will last, but Amazon is selling the MP3 version of the Guns N’ Roses Greatest Hits album for a mere 25 cents.

Thanks to Pam Cooper for this topic.

Update: Unfortunately the offer is no longer valid—the album is back to its regular price.

Link: www.amazon.com/…

Samsung has released a new type of smartphone, one that’s a hybrid phone/tablet and which also allows you to use a stylus (in addition to your fingers). It’s called the Galaxy Note and is a throwback to the pre-smartphone PDA days. I could be wrong, but I don’t really see it becoming all that popular.

Thanks to Donna Cloman for this link

Link: http://online.wsj.com/…

Windows 8 is being touted as a “generational” change to the Windows product line, much in the same way that Windows 95 was. The linked article gives a brief synopsis of what we can expect to see. The major hurdle appears to be that every Windows user will have to learn a radically new interface—we’ll see how that works out.

Link: http://www.techrepublic.com/…