How much do you trust popular websites to maintain your data and online privacy? In this week's poll you can rank them using the Borda Count voting method.

Instructions:

1. In the box next to each item, put your choice of rank. The site you trust the most earns a "1", the site you trust just a bit less gets a "2", a site you trust even less gets a "3", etc. So "1" is the site you find most trustworthy.
2. You don't have to rank all 8; you can just rank the ones you have an opinion about. But since there are only 8 choices, you can't input a number higher than that (ie, it's impossible to rank something 9th place in a contest with only 8 places).
3. Simply be careful not to duplicate numbers!
   Have fun!

[Post edited by zafiro17 2014-04-28 13:54 to clarify the instructions.]

Plenty of updates this week! Nearly every single source file and database table was modified this week to help further the distributed goal of the Pipecode project. More information on this will be given over the following weeks as more functionality gets merged to live.

• Comment Reply Notification - You now get an internal email notification sent to you when someone replies to one of your comments.
• UID to ZID - Usernames and Identification are now shown in an email style format (username@pipedot.org)
• Clickable Bare Links - Bare links will now automatically be wrapped with the correct HTML tags to make them clickable.
• Consistent Newlines - Posts with blockquote/ul/ol/li/pre HTML tags should now have better newline handling.
• Servers upgraded from Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to 14.04 LTS.

Can you make money by writing a book? Carter Phipps shares his experiences in publishing his first book. He describes advances, self-publication, and book promotion - all very relevant information for someone looking to start writing their own masterpiece.

Here are some of the highlights from the latest resupply mission by SpaceX to the ISS:

• This was the 3rd NASA contracted resupply mission for SpaceX
• It was the 5th flight for the SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft
• The Dragon freighter berthed to the ISS Harmony module
• Falcon 9's reusable rocket booster stage performed a successful propulsive-return over-water test

Once upon a time, Apache was the undisputed king of webserver software. Over the last few years a relative newcomer, NGINX , has slowly gained ground . Netcraft's monthly Web Server Survey clearly shows a healthy upward usage curve for the software.

Other recent notable events:

• SPDY protocol support updated to version 3.1
• OpenBSD has replaced Apache with NGINX in the base system
• The LibreOffice project switched to NGINX for performance reasons
• CloudFlare moved more than a thousand of the top million sites to NGINX (including the ever important cheezburger.com !)

Compound Interest , a chemistry blog, has posted an infographic guide to spotting bad science. Among the listed things to watch out for are perennial favorites "Correlation & Causation" and "Sample Size Too Small".

The author was inspired to create the guide after running into so many of these gotchas while doing online research for a different article. It is in no way intended to be comprehensive, but instead to act as a brief reminder of what things to be alert for when reading science news articles and research results.

Guides like this might be overly simple for the readership of a site like Pipedot, but I personally find them useful as refreshers, much as I do the excellent TechNyou video series "Critical Thinking" and "This Thing Called Science" which, though aimed at high-schoolers and below, are still a good foundational resource. Then again, I like bright colors and shiny objects.

A very recent firmware analysis from the reverse engineer Eloi Vanderbeken shows that NETGEAR didn't fix the backdoor on port 32764 but instead implemented a knocking feature that is now required to unlock the service.

Summary from the slides: The knocking feature is initiated when a "packet type == 0x201" arrived at "ft_tool" that listens to the Ethernet packets. It only works with EtherType 0x8888 and the payload has to be "45d1bb339b07a6618b2114dbc0d7783e" which is the MD5-hash of the model number DGN1000. If such a packet arrives, the backdoor service /usr/bin/scfgmgr f- is launched.

Ars Technica reports :

The nature of the change, which leverages the same code as was used in the old firmware to provide administrative access over the concealed port, suggests that the backdoor is an intentional feature of the firmware and not just a mistake made in coding. "It's DELIBERATE," Vanderbecken asserted in his presentation.

(Cross posted on Soylentnews)

Video communication, decent but imperfect robots, psychotherapy, self-driving car technology, and processed food: these are some of the things Isaac Asimov predicted would make up modern life in 2014. The year was 1964, and his vision for 50 years into the future turned out to be surprisingly accurate. A few other predictions fell flat, like underwater colonies or human inhabitation of planets other than earth, but you can forgive the author his exuberance at the dawn of the space age. The BBC is running an interesting article looking at Asimov's vision and how it played out in real life .

These days, most teens favor dystopian visions of the future , modern life is resembling dystopia in more than one way , and the world of peace and unity seems farther off than ever.

Who today has the prescience that Asimov did in 1964? Who among the 21st century's authors, film-makers, and thinkers is most thoughtfully envisioning the world that awaits us in 2064? And what lessons do they provide for us to learn?

I've been a Linode customer since they launched their User-Mode-Linux offering in 2003. With decreasing component prices and a little help from Moore's Law, they have repeatedly increased the resources available on their VPS instances. Most upgrades take the form of "Double the RAM" or "Double the disk space" and have allowed the company to stay competitive over the years.

However, their latest "upgrade" reduces the CPU core count from 8 to 2 on the most popular plan, drastically reducing the performance of most webserver workloads. Some users have posted degraded benchmark numbers on the Linode blog that announced the upgrade. They have also removed the discounts on yearly plans, thereby increasing the cost of the hosting plans.

Other aspects of the upgrade are more welcome:

• Doubled RAM
• Same Cost (Unless paying yearly [Grandfathering available if you forgo upgrades])
• Same Storage Space (But now using SSD)
• Same Transfer (Except the lowest plan [Which gets a 50% bump])
• Increased Outgoing Bandwidth (Unless using a Node Balancer or the lowest plan [Which stay the same speeds])

Disclaimer: Both Pipedot and SoylentNews are hosted at Linode.

Ars Technica has a writeup detailing Intellectual Ventures' loss in its case against Capitol One. US District Judge Anthony Trenga declared IV's patents "nothing more than the mere manipulation or reorganization of data." Between this outcome and Google's recent success in getting the venue of its battle with Rockstar Consortium changed from East Texas to California, also covered at Ars Technica, dare we hope the tide is turning for patent trolls?