skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's funny.

It's Windows. Very little Unix anywhere in the DoD over the past few years on new systems; it's mainly legacy, or embedded in products they purchase. There are definitely some Unix server deployments within DoD even now, but they're few and far between.

Blue Screen of Death and all.
Good as any for their use. Follow that the thread on lkml (there is a gmane link in the comments here somewhere) for more discussion on identifying taint-introducing modules.
Like hugh says, this doesn't add up at all.

“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”

C'mon. You're the military. "It just keeps coming back?" So you decide to do a press release about it? Please.

I wouldn't have whined like that when I was de-malwareing neighbourhood PCs at age 13, I would have fixed it. If I can successfully keep malware off the PCs of middle aged parents with teenaged children, then the government capable of developing and operating fleets of unmanned military drones can certainly isolate a network and disable the USB bus.

There is definitely some high level shit going on right here. I doubt we'll know about it for many years, if ever.
I really do find the design creative and well executed, but I think Apple should not officially support it. In my eyes, any variation of a company logo weakens the brand. Yes, Google has a variation of theirs every week it seems, but it's in an environment they control. When you fail to control of you brand, it can degrade to Calvin-peeing-on-Ford stickers. Looking at his past, I think someone as meticulous as Jobs (https://plus.google.com/107117483540235115863/posts/gcSStkKx...) would object to having his image on the logo. What's the first name that comes to mind when you see the Apple logo anyway? Woz? Amelio? Cook?

The Apple brand/identity Jobs created is now a culture/company that is larger than Jobs himself. It has and will continue to outlive him.
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I could easily mean that Apple actually did some research to find out what the average user felt was a confortable horizontal stretch of their thumbs when using a touch based phone with one hand.

Even if that was not the case, companies making phone's these days are forgetting that regardless of the myriad of features that smart phones might have these days, they're still mobile phones... and not small tablets. Mobile phone's should be confortable to use and confortable to keep in your jeans pocket in my opinion.
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This seems about as random and undirected as Stuxnet magically appearing at five Iranian nuclear plants.
Because someone leaked it.

> “We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”

The end of the article says they asked for an official response and were stonewalled.

> The Air Force declined to comment directly on the virus. “We generally do not discuss specific vulnerabilities, threats, or responses to our computer networks, since that helps people looking to exploit or attack our systems to refine their approach,” says Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis, a spokesman for Air Combat Command, which oversees the drones and all other Air Force tactical aircraft. “We invest a lot in protecting and monitoring our systems to counter threats and ensure security, which includes a comprehensive response to viruses, worms, and other malware we discover.”

'The military' doesn't want anyone to know; some individuals inside do.
For boomers it's the tip of the iceberg of technology complaints.
On the speed question, I actually find Perl considerably faster than sed in a lot of use-cases, if there's enough processing to dominate the slightly higher startup costs of Perl.

For example, at one point I had reason to take a gigantic single-line textfile, and break it into lines based on a specific 3-letter pattern that didn't occur anywhere else:

s/ABC/A\nC/g

In whatever sed comes with Debian, this took about 10 minutes, CPU-bound, for a 2-gigabyte file. With Perl: 1.5 minutes, IO-bound. Not too sure why. Maybe sed runs everything through the regex engine, while Perl special-cases constant strings? Perhaps Perl has better buffer management for processing gigabytes of text? I haven't done any real testing.
Ask HN: Does anyone depend on Clickpass to log in?
I'm thinking of getting rid of it. Is that going to inconvenience anyone?
Not very applicable since this isn't a software patent.
I don't mind the ads, as they get out of the way when I read.

Targetted ads can be very useful, for example, when I buy a hotrod magazine I buy it for the ads. However, the current Kindle ads are not targetted at all, none of them seem to have any relationship to things I do buy on Amazon.
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I already got to play with it, its super fun and works just like you want it to. It's versatile enough to go over cracks and stuff in doorways and the video streaming is very smooth. This is an awesome project to back.
We can be cynical about everything or take them at face value. Its our choice. I'll go with face value this time.
More likely it might conflict with Steve Job's funeral. I would imagine some high ranking Google officials are going to be there to pay their respects.
They announced the big "jihad on all USB drives" back in 2009. There were factory shinkwrapped USB drives for sale on base which came pre-loaded with viruses; people would buy those, mark them as Secret, put them on SIPRnet, and then machines would be infected. It was lulztastic, actually.

I think once something hits a large enough scale, they announce it; it's the easiest way to communicate to the affected DoD community (military, contractors, etc.), at which point it is basically public knowledge.
Reading technical books on eReader - advice
I am playing with the idea of buying ereader - Kobo, Sony, Kindle ...

I was wondering which reader would be the best for the job. I assume some of the books would be PDF, mayber convert them to epub.

Anybody to share experience? Is it worth or just stick to reading on laptop?

Thanks
I know how to do exactly one thing in sed, and that's sed 's/blah/blahprime/' somefile.

If sed has capabilities other than that, I don't particularly care... but that's one thing that I need to do frequently which is more painful in awk or python.
> Equating the iPhone to a "jail" is goofy political hyperbole.

Isn't jailbreak an accepted term now to root an iphone?
In order to maintain "Retina" display, they'd need to keep their 300 pixels per square inch or more density. That also doesn't leave them a whole lot of room to bump up the screen size without bumping up the resolution again. They've got some small room to play with in terms of the screen bezel though, so we could see a screen size bump without a resolution bump that still offered both the 300 ppi and the ability to touch all of the screen with one hand. (Think about some of the "iPhone 5" leaked images). Time will tell.
Give me a robot that lets me fight other robots. And can I control this from my iPad rather than a second iPhone?
Ask HN/PG: YC RFS still valid?
I just read through the RFS (http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html), which was written in 2009. I'm not sure if YC is still looking for those types of products. More specifically, there's an item that says "Things built on Twitter".

Recently every investor I talked to didn't like products that are built on top of Twitter, and I wonder if YC's perspective has also changed.
Heart disease is much easier to avoid through diet and exercise. Cancer not so much!
I don't have a problem with Windows Explorer in Windows 8, in itself, except for the way it is so jarringly different than Metro. IMO, it is recreating the X11 problem of too many UI tool kits.

Personally, I think Microsoft should consider creating a Metro based file management system.
There are hundreds of thousands of machines and millions of removable drives. Tracking down every last instance of a piece of malware and then dealing with it is quite hard at that scale. Usually they fall back on policy ("no usb/removable drives")

They're handicapped by a need AND compulsion to use contractors for everything. Actual government employees didn't build drones; they were all developed and in many cases largely maintained and even operated by private contractors, working to government requirements (which themselves are structured to make the contractors inefficient, compared to normal commercial companies). Same thing with networks.
Clarification: It's infecting the control station computers (which I believe are still Windows XP), not the UAVs themselves.
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What does this have to do with SpaceX? They're not DoD and they don't fly drones.
hmmm how bout we patent the act of patent trolling and then sue the trolls for infringement.
Ask HN: What's our generation's "Whole Earth Catalog"?
Like everyone else here, I've been reading a lot about the life of Steve Jobs lately. I feel like I had a pretty good idea of his life and his work since I'm a long time Mac user and Apple fan, but scrounging for the details makes him feel still present.

Anyway, one of the coolest things about him that I'm re-discovering is his motivation from the Whole Earth Catalog. He said in his 2005 Stanford speech that it was his generation's "bible." That got me thinking - what is our generation's "Whole Earth Catalog"?
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Wow can anyone confirm this? I'm surprised that the drones themselves are running windows. If so, I presume it's win CE or a custom variant of?
I skimmed the headings and was briefly interested in reading about this "Epilogue" language that I hadn't heard of before, but it turns out it was actually just an epilogue.
The Kindle 4.0.1 software update ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_l... ) lets you control this.
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Many people complain when the ads are targetted. Google get a lot of flak about that.
mission control at spacex has many windows terminals

What in the...!?!?
Wired article citing anonymous sources != press release
I think some people are still complaining that the App Store does not provide app source code on request.
the quote used from the source seems to mean they don't know anything. a keylogger is benign? by what definition of benign are we operating under here?

downside of things being "off the record" is this could be someone who oveheard two guys talking about something unrelated in the cafeteria, put "two and two" together, and picked up the phone. and since you can't get an official line ... you just run with the rumors and BS
I have used VirtualBox on a linux host with WinXP as the client operating system for about three years, every day. I depend on it for work and have found it to be rock-solid and completely dependable. I really appreciate the contributors to the project. They deserve some love!
Ah. That makes sense if it is so.
A good point. People have been writing for a while about internet becoming more and more transparent as it becomes even more ubiquitous. I remember writing a paper about tv's with integrated imdb 12 years before the first app capable tv came out.

I think the other thing that I like about this sub-field, despite the fact that it's very doable by building on my current skills, is how it would integrate my love for hardware :)
“We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.” Lol. Yes, when all else fails, just assume that the military-grade, impossible-to-erase virus is harmless. Hasn't done any damage yet, right?

This is the problem with rigid hierarchies. Everyone just passes the problem to someone else until the whole thing blows up. In this case, literally.
Not sure technically, but software patents are a subset of methods patents (which I'm guessing this is), but at least very similar to the point where I think it's very applicable to this. The discussion needs to keep going - that petition was a great success, but I'm doubtful that the administration dares to talk about it in anything other than platitudes.
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Wow, as soon as I saw the screenshot I thought: "Beautiful." It kind of reminds me of the Mozilla Raindrop project. That is just a really great UI.
As far as I understand his philosophy, it has nothing to do with paying for software and all to do with your freedom to modify said software whether you paid for it or not to suit your needs.
Complementary personalities. Period.
5 points of karma says null result, but I'll have at least one anecdotal data point for you in a few days.
It's a leak, not an official comment.

The official comment about the incident from the story is:

“We generally do not discuss specific vulnerabilities, threats, or responses to our computer networks, since that helps people looking to exploit or attack our systems to refine their approach,” says Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis, a spokesman for Air Combat Command, which oversees the drones and all other Air Force tactical aircraft. “We invest a lot in protecting and monitoring our systems to counter threats and ensure security, which includes a comprehensive response to viruses, worms, and other malware we discover.”
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I don't think the problem here is their OS, rather it'll be their network structure. So instead, perhaps that should be:

"Oh please tell me they didn't connect directly to the internet".
Those computers have access to every bit of data coming from the UAVs and every bit of control data going to the UAVs. So the fact that the compromised machine is in Nevada and not over Pakistan is pretty close to irrelevant.

Unless you want to make the argument that it's far worse for the ground control systems to be continually reinfected, as they have access to the rest of the air-gapped private network as well.
Gawker on Steve Jobs' other side
If I'm ever in charge of a PC capable of firing guns at people, then at a bare minimum I would disable the USB bus entirely, I probably wouldn't fit a NIC either. I'd also definitely install some of that software that makes the HDD read only and transparently passes through all writes to RAM. Fuckit, if I'm the US military I'd develop such a device in hardware. Send the recorded video/telemetry data to a write-only volume.

It's not that hard.

But anyway, my point was that I don't for a second believe that they're this incompetent, there must be other factors at play.
next up:
"Virus ridden US attack drones strafe US cities"
"Iran strikes back for virus that temporarily crippled nuclear infrastructure"

Though really the drones probably live in middle east so it'd be more like drones would go berserk in a US military bases in middle east and kill troops or attack innocent foreign civilians drumming up more anti American sentiment

"Americans use drone to assassinate Afgan president"
I sincerely hope you enjoy playing with your straw man.

P.s.: Most patent trolls are "little guys", and they are usually suing where the money is.
5 Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs on the impact of Steve Jobs in their lives
Ha good point about shutter clicks.

I wasn't trying to make an assessment of the product though - I was just trying to make about his presentation style. I think he was hoping for a rockstar presentation where everyone would get energetic and excited from the way he presented alone (regardless of the product).

I think the new kindles are cool :)
There are some people who do think freedom and accessibility can coexist; interestingly enough, some of the very people whose work Apple built on (but focusing more on the accessibility part of their work). For example, Alan Kay and Ted Nelson have both long pushed the idea that computer systems can be both hackable and user-friendly / broadly accessible, rather than having to be split into a dichotomy of consumer-appliance versus hackable-nerd-toy.
Okay! Here's what the sysadmins should be doing: Each GCS should be recording the identity & timestamp of each removable drive that is attached to it. Then we'll have a graph of all the connections between the machines. If any GCSes aren't infected (or if we have any information about which machines first showed evidence of the virus) then we might be able to trace out the path of infection. Hopefully it'll lead to patient zero, and they can figure out whether it was intentional (charge w/ treason!) or accidental (500 push-ups).
One solution could be to keep machine images stored, like AMIs, and use a tool like Chef or Puppet to re-deploy a known good configuration. This strategy lends itself to the case where everything is virtualized.

Of course, the source of the infection could be really nefarious. For example, imagine if someone replaced a keyboard with one that delivered a payload (trojan, keylogger, etc) when it is plugged into a computer's USB port? Then reformatting the hard drive does nothing because it will immediately infected again.
Ordered one.

This + Siri opens up some pretty neat possibilities.
It's almost certainly Windows. What would you expect a DoD desktop computer to be running?
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The copyright section of sed(1) suggests that the Debian package sed (I'm running wheezy) is Gnu sed 4.2.1[1]. Plan9 sed is also available in the 9base package. I'm running perl 5.12.4 (also from Debian testing). I don't see any significant difference in speed with vanilla 5.14.1 and the commands I mentioned earlier.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/sed/
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Took a look at the server pane and was a bit frustrated that I couldn't compare them on a grid. It's not at all clear what the difference is between the 1U Jackal and the 1U Jackal Pro, for example.
My tribute of Steve Jobs' beautiful world:
http://www.servicestack.net/thankyou_steve.png
I disagree, and I'm presenting as much evidence for it as you are (i.e. none). In which conference was Apple's finding published? Where can I download a PDF of the paper?
Way cooler.
No. I for one would be comfortable describing those people as douchebags as well.

Larry Ellison, for instance – widely considered a douchebag.

I can't speak for others, but I'm fairly certain the issue are bullshit patents.

>All of these discussions are bullshit - they produce nothing except strife and accomplish nothing.

Complaining is human, and it allows us to get a measure of everyone else's opinions. If you removed griping from HN you wouldn't have much else left.
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A collection of Pieces Written on Steve Jobs
Terrorism is primarily a problem of technology, imho. As things become more automated, they have a capacity to be used for both intended and unintended purposes. If our military relies on drones, it should make sure they can't be used against us :)

But to illustrate my main point, 1000 years ago it was impossible for one man to destroy a lot of people. 500 years ago a man Guy Fawkes could use gunpowder to blow up part of a building. SInce then we invented dynamite, planes, rockets... a society in which technology enables a small group of people to wreak havoc on a large group of people must necessarily have more surveillance/intelligence than one where this is not possible, if it is to ensure the security of its citizens. I mean what is to prevent a person from releasing a contagious virus in the NYC subway or something similar, and the effects to show up only days later? I hate to say it but we don't know where we're going with all this technology's potential for bad things.
Perhaps the fact that our computer systems are now of military importance and the fact that a security hole can mean deaths and international relations disasters will finally lead to people taking a good look at verified computing. Where a virus doesn't mean outsmarting some forgetful C programmer but is mathematically impossible.

Or not, it was just a bug, we'll fix it this one time and pretend it will never happen again. Worse is better, as they say!
It's hard for me to say how representative my non-techie friends are, but nearly all have some understanding that the App Store is tightly controlled by Apple, and not always in ways they agree with (apps being banned or not approved makes mainstream news semi-regularly). They accept it because they still like the iPhone more than the alternatives, but I wouldn't say that they are 100% happy with the way the App Store is run. Some join random "tell apple to unban [thing]" groups on Facebook periodically.
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the NST blows the K3 out of the water in every respect

No wireless, less space than a Nomad.
strcmp (and many other string routines like strlen, strcpy) relies on strings being null terminated. Safe versions (strncmp, strnlen, strncpy) have a parameter for maximum string length.

I am pretty sure that in this particular case it is not passed any user input, so it's kinda safe.
It's much more likely that these inputs will be used as features to train some ML algorithm, rather than that they will actually be used to say "if black then detain".
Tablets are becoming more popular with games
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He has a family that he left behind. His wife and children. If your father just passed away 48 hours ago, would you want to read about how somebody is glad that he's finally gone? I sure wouldn't... It's called respect.
...you pitched a specific name but didn't register the domain names? This is smelling a little fishy now.
This is what I always think whenever I visit John Gruber's blog (daringfireball.net).
The way it works is some AF guy in Nevada remotely controls the drones flying half way across the world.

My guess is it's not the drones themselves running Windows, but the consoles used to communicate with the drones. It makes sense. AF guy gets to work, plugs in his USB drive filled with music and pulls up the drone control program...

Though, now that I think about it, I would be disappointed, but not entirely surprised, if the drones ran Windows also. Sigh.
You can browse website and download files there. So you could set up a simple web server on your machine (since this is HN I going to assume this is easy for you!) and download files there.

It's great that you can browse Project Gutenberg on the device and download the Kindle formatted .mobi files directly and import them. It's like a Free (as in Public Domain) book shop!
It does have Wifi, but not 3G (which I personally I think is overkill for a reading device). You can plug SD cards into it to extend the space, and with books weighing in at a few hundred KB, for the vast majority of people space isn't an issue.
They have tools available for them to do that today. In fact, that's one of the driving forces behind HBSS deployment.
Or the military staff is leaking this to motivate the higher-up who green-lit the contract to exert some pressure, because they have unfortunately-little direct power themselves.
in what has become the US military’s most important weapons system.

Seriously? Already?