This week the United States Air Force (archived) unveiled a new program attempting to address what they describe as a "critical shortage" of pilots for their unmanned aircraft. In their desperation the Air Force is offering up front retention bonuses of up to seventy thousand United States dollars with an equal amount of bonus pay spread out over the duration of a retained pilot's nine year contract. The Air Force is also directing graduates of its undergraduate pilot training programs increasingly to roles involving unmanned aircraft. The atypical nine year contracts, along with the substantial monetary incentives being offered to retain drone pilots suggests that the United States Air Force could be facing problems supplying manpower to operate their drone fleet well into the future.
Category Archives: News
Limits of Moore's Law Challenge Intel – Questions About Future Performance
There are numerous reports out today highlighting chip maker Intel's struggles in transitioning from a 14 nanometer to a 10 nanometer manufacturing process. Intel is addressing this challenge by introducing a third generation of chips produced on a 14 nm process. Traditionally Intel delivers two generations of chips at each node size. The first is a shrink of the previous generations chips followed by chips with architectural changes at the same node size, followed by a process shrink. This pattern of Intel's is typically referred to as "Tick" and "Tock" releases at each node size. Continue reading
Darkode Goes Dark: Members Charged as "Cybercriminals"
Reports are coming in that an investigation led by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. Attorney's Office in Pittsburgh, and supported by the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) and Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3), has resulted in the shut down of online forum Darkode.com and the arrest of 12 people in connection with the invitation-only web portal.1
Tsinghua Unigroup Flirts With Acquisition of DRAM Maker Micron
Chinese state owned enterprise Tsinghua Unigroup is rumored to be flirting with an acquisition of Micron Technology, the last maker of DRAM based in the United States. At the moment prevailing wisdom in the mainstream financial press appears to be that the US Treasury's "Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States" would block a sale to the state owned enterprise and if they don't the Department of Defense would likely block Tsinghua Unigroup or any Chinese firm from purchasing Micron. Continue reading
New Java Zero Day Discovered Targeting NATO
Trend Micro reports a zero-day vulnerability in Oracle's Java version 8 being used against NATO and United States Department of Defense targets. This incident further illustrates the stupidity of using the web browser as a run time for executing strange code as well as the special sort of idiocy that is running strange Java code.
Transaction Fee Market Develops Amid Surge in Transaction Volume
This week a flood of transactions which has alternately been called a spam attack or a stress test has forced Bitcoin users to adapt to a competitive transaction fee market for the first time since early 2013 when blocksize was consistently near default soft limit of 250 kilobytes. Numerous Bitcoin users and businesses are adapting to the flood of transactions by increasing their own transaction fees. At the present there are more than seventy megabytes of unconfirmed transactions leading to more naive users on Reddit and other social media to revert to speculating about blocksize hardforks which would merely amplify the problems this sort of flooding attack poses. Continue reading
Most Serene Republic Begins Advertising Public Blockchain Seed Nodes
In preparation for potential improvements to the Bitcoin reference client, citizens of Bitcoin's Most Serene Republic have begun establishing high availability Bitcoin nodes located in datacenters and hosted on dedicated hardware to serve as publicly advertised seed nodes from which Bitcoin users may sync their blockchains and more peers. The improvements to the foundation's reference implementation which spurred this move are the removal of all Domain Name System code from the client to allow an entirely statically built bitcoind as well as the removal of the legacy IRC initial peer discovery mechanism to reduce the attack surface bitcoind presents. Continue reading
Another Post BIP 66 Fork Dies after 3 Blocks
A second fork has followed the initial post BIP 66 fork further highlighting the continued danger of so called "soft" forking changes to the consensus code of Bitcoin network clients. The second fork persisted from 21:50 through to 23:40 on July 5th, 2015. Implementing the rather non-controversial change proposed by BIP 66 to enforce strict DER encoding on ECDSA signatures has without a doubt increased the fragility of the Bitcoin network such that users of all Bitcoin clients ought to consider waiting beyond the traditional 6 mined blocks before considering a transaction confirmed. Unless all major miners begin mining with fully validating node software, this instability is likely to continue indefinitely into the future with users of the latest versions of "Bitcoin Core" at risk of finding themselves stranded, maybe even permanently on the short side of an enduring fork.
Greek Finance Minister Varoufakis Resigns in Failure
Greek banks continue to struggle beneath the onerous burden of financial debt imposed by their left-leaning welfarist government and as such are teetering on the brink of insolvency.1 Despite a slew of highly restrictive capital controls and out-of-the-blue "bank holidays" designed to maintain some modest levels of liquidity in the face of branch and ATM queues across the country, the condition of Greece's banks is less than ideal and quite possibly insufficient for long-term survival. Continue reading
The prospect of Greek debt default isn't just weighing down the local economy either. Inextricably intertwined as the global fiat economy is, the Euro has taken some damage, as have a number of stock markets around the world, as many are wondering aloud whether Greece is the canary in the coalmine of paper promises. ↩
French TV Venture CANAL+ Hacked, Suppresses News with DMCA
TorrentFreak reports major French television Canal+ hits Github with DMCA complaint after experiencing a severe AWS breach. The hacker, who ran the “hooperp” Github repository, was able to steal “all the data and codes” regarding its new CRM project “Kiss deploy”, before using the server’s key to mine Bitcoin. Legal counsel for Canal+ revealed: Continue reading