My friend was telling me about this interesting tidbit people had found at his work when using Microsoft's search engine Bing. Bing keeps a search history for you based on your external IP address. For most this won't be a big deal but if you're at work and going through a proxy, everybody will be sharing the same external IP address. This means you'll have a shared search … [Read more...]
Touring Blue Waters – The National Petascale Computing Facility
The NCSA held a community day yesterday at their new National Petascale Computing Facility located in Champaign, IL which will be the home of the Blue Waters Sustained Petascale Computing super-computer amongst other super computers. When the new hardware comes online next year it will be the world's fastest super-computer yet, powered by IBM's POWER7 systems. With the rest of … [Read more...]
WordPress 3.0 Final is Available
WordPress 3.0 Final has been released and as the engine behind 404 Tech Support, I'm interested in their progress. Dubbed "Thelonious" it's gone through 3 different release candidate versions so hopefully it's well-polished now and plugins have had time to update. 3.0 has been worked on for half a year and includes "1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements". Big new features … [Read more...]
The Backlash for Computer Security Experts
It seems to happen every 6 months or so: Technology companies get mad at security researchers and the terms that get thrown around a lot are 'responsible disclosure'. We just so happen to be in another one of those situations where more than one incident has occurred recently. Last week, a Google employed researcher went public with information regarding a vulnerability he had … [Read more...]
Good in Theory, Poor Execution: A/C in the Home Office
This is one of those occasions where I get to tell you that I was wrong. I tried something and it failed. In theory it was sound, would have saved energy, and improved comfort. The plan was to add a window air conditioner in my office at home. With the weather we've already had before even getting to the hot summer months, it sounded like an ideal setup. Unfortunately, like … [Read more...]