Story 2014-03-10

Elephants Can Distinguish Human Voices by Ethnicity

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in science on (#3FF)
story imageThe Los Angeles Times reports elephants distinguish human voices by sex, age, ethnicity according to a new study.

USA Today notes Maasai men, who may hunt the elephants, were treated differently than Kamba men, who are farmers.
When the voice belonged to a Maasai man, the elephants tended to sniff the air and bunch closely together for protection. But when the voice was a Kamba man's, the elephants were more nonchalant. The elephants also reacted with relative calm to the voices of Maasai women and boys, who, unlike Maasai men, generally don't take part in spearing elephants.
Voice of America says the study is available now but does not appear posted on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences site yet.

Sony and Panasonic Teaming Up For New Optical Disk Format

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in storage on (#3FE)
story imageLooks like Sony and Panasonic are teaming up again for the new Archival Disc format. The new disk format will premier at 300 GB with plans to increase to 1 TB using signal processing advancements. Double sided, 3 layers each side, and 405 nm optical wavelength - maybe these new 4K TVs will finally have some 4K source media.

How Not to Write an API

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in code on (#3FD)
While creating an Android App for Criticker, a movie review and recommendation website, this author found some interesting security holes in their API.

Who knew that a LookupPassword function that returned any user's password in plain-text would be a bad idea?

Myths About /dev/urandom

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in code on (#3FC)
story imageThe differences between /dev/random and /dev/urandom have spawned some misconceptions. This article attempts to explain some of the myths surrounding this perplexing random number device.

Also of interest, is a report on weak entropy in key generation, especially during bootup, and another report on the aftermath of Debian's recent OpenSSL vulnerability.