LinuxSecurity.com: Updated tomcat6 packages that fix multiple security issues are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having [More...]

Nerval's Lobster writes "Nate Silver feels a little odd about his fame. That's not to say that he hasn't worked to get to his enviable position. Thanks to his savvy with predictive models, and the huge readership platform provided by The New York Times hosting his FiveThirtyEight blog, he managed to forecast the most recent presidential election results in all 50 states. His accuracy transformed him into a rare breed: a statistician with a household name. But onstage at this year's SXSW conference, Silver termed his fame 'strange' and 'out of proportion,' and described his model as little more than averaging the state and national polls, spiced a bit with his algorithms. "It bothered me that this was such a big deal," he told the audience. In politics, he added, most of the statistical analysis being conducted simply isn't good, which lets someone like him stand out; same as in baseball, where he made his start in predictive modeling. In fields with better analytics, the competition for someone like him would be much fiercer. He also talked about, despite a flood of data (and the tools to analyze it) in the modern world, we still face huge problems when it comes to actually understanding and using that data. 'You have a gap between what we think we know and what we really know,' he said. 'We tend to be oversensitive to random fluctuations in the data and mistake the fluctuations for real relationships.'"

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LinuxSecurity.com: Updated kernel-rt packages that fix several security issues and three bugs are now available for Red Hat Enterprise MRG 2.3. The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having [More...]

LinuxSecurity.com: An updated thunderbird package that fixes one security issue is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and 6. The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having [More...]

Crashes YouTube and Facebook at the same time - report

Iranian authorities have blocked the use of most virtual private network (VPNs) to stop people in the country from circumventing the government's internet filter, three months before the country holds its presidential election.…

LinuxSecurity.com: Updated java-1.5.0-ibm packages that fix several security issues are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and 6 Supplementary. The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having critical [More...]

quantr writes in with a story about backlash to Amazon's request for ownership of new top-level domain names. "Large and small companies are vying for control of an array of new Internet domain names, but Amazon.com Inc.'s plans are coming under particular scrutiny. Two publishing industry groups, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, are objecting to the online retailer's request for ownership of new top-level domain names that are part of a long-awaited expansion of the Web's addressing scheme. They argue that giving Amazon control over such addresses—which include '.book,' '.author' and '.read'—would be a threat to competition and shouldn't be allowed. 'Placing such generic domains in private hands is plainly anti-competitive,' wrote Scott Turow, Authors Guild president, to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, the nonprofit that oversees the world's Internet domain names. 'The potential for abuse seems limitless.'"

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Left mobile devices open to man-in-the-middle attacks for MONTHS

Apple has finally enabled secure App Store logins for mobile users, months after the issue was first reported to the consumer electronics giant.…

 tecmint: GoAccess is an interactive and real time web server log analyzer program that quickly analyze and view web server logs.

We shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight in electromagnetic fields

England's world-famous White Cliffs of Dover have squared up to invading forces for centuries - but visitors to the seafront are warned to expect a more modern-day incursion: French mobile networks armed with steep roaming charges.…

A while ago you had the chance to ask paleontologist Dr. Robert Bakker a wide variety of questions. Instead of answering them individually, Dr. Bob decided to write a lengthy piece that covers most of your inquiries, and includes personal stories and some of his philosophy. The first part is a narrative about his childhood conversion to fossil studies and how his paleo-CSI approach developed. We'll post the second half, covering his training in the history of theology and how it intersects with his science, tomorrow.

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Another $50m bullet in the chamber. Who's going to buy it before it fires?

Funding for data-battling upstart Actifio is mushrooming: it's just scooped another $50m from investors eager to take part in what looks likely to be a lucrative stock-market debut in a year or two.…

Zothecula writes "In the Spider-Man comics and movies, the famous hero's 'Spider Sense' warns him of incoming danger, which proves to be just as important a superpower as slinging webs and climbing walls. Now a group of researchers at the University of Illinois in Chicago may have found a way to replicate such superhuman perception that doesn't involve any radioactive spiders. Using a collection of sensors placed all over the body, the group has designed a 'SpiderSense' suit that detects objects in the environment and warns the wearer when anything gets too close."

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 ITwire: Mark Shuttleworth has limited time to reach his goals with Ubuntu.

Antiprism polyhedron modelling software is a set of programs for creating, transforming, analyzing, and visualizing polyhedra.

Release Notes: This release includes new models (isohedral kite-faced polyhedra, crown polyhedra) and evaluation of mathematical expressions for program arguments.

Tags: Scientific/Engineering, Visualization, Mathematics, multimedia, Graphics, 3D Modeling

Licenses: MIT/X

xCHM is a cross-platform GUI frontend for CHMLIB, written with wxGTK. It is able to display the topics tree, work with displayed pages history, print the current page, work with bookmarks, change fonts and fast search through all the pages of the loaded .chm document. Being indirectly dependent on GTK+, the possibility of changing GTK+ skins makes xCHM theme-friendly.

Release Notes: This version adds a full screen mode and Greek translation.

Release Tags: features

Tags: multimedia, Graphics, Viewers

Licenses: GPL

How many times have you heard, "there's an app for that"? But sometimes, there actually isn't "an app for that", or the apps that do exist don't meet your needs. As Linux users, we tend to like to scratch our own itches, and if that means we write some code to do it, so be it. more>>

Survey - Redmond so busy pushing Win 8, some IT directors didn't get the memo

A large number of Microsoft customers are in for a rude awakening on 8 April 2014.…

theodp writes "GeekWire wonders if the 'Bezos Beep' could replace the smartphone bump for mobile content sharing. A newly-published patent application listing Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos as sole inventor describes the use of audio signals to share content and communicate between devices, eliminating the need for NFC chips and facilitating the simultaneous sharing of content with multiple people via a remote server. From the patent application: 'For example, a first device can emit an encoded audio signal that can be received by any capable device within audio range of the device. Any device receiving the signal can decode the information included in the signal and obtain a location to access the content from that information.'"

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Siege is a regression test and benchmark utility. It can stress test a single URL with a user defined number of simulated users, or it can read many URLs into memory and stress them simultaneously. The program reports the total number of hits recorded, bytes transferred, response time, concurrency, and return status. Siege supports HTTP/1.0 and 1.1 protocols, GET and POST directives, cookies, transaction logging, and basic authentication. Its features are configurable on a per user basis.

Release Notes: This release fixes a header bug. When you assign an Accept: header with the -H/--header command line options, it will override the default Accept header.

Release Tags: Stable

Tags: Internet, Web, Site Management, Benchmark

Licenses: GPL