CYRUS

Terrorists Mock Bids to End Use of Social Media Photo A pro-Islamic State group that creates a new account when Twitter suspends the old one threatened Jack Dorsey, above, and Dick Costolo, the current and former chief executives of Twitter.   Credit Richard Drew/Associated Press Advertisement Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Share Thi Continue reading the main story SAN FRANCISCO — In the hours after 14 people were killed in San Bernardino, Calif., a familiar voice celebrated the attacks on  Twitter : “California, we have already arrived with our soldiers. Decide how to be your end, with knife or bomb.” That comment was posted from the 335th Twitter account of a pro-Islamic State group that calls itself Asawitiri Media. Twitter has repeatedly tried to cut off the authors of the account, most recently known to its thousands of followers as @TurMedia335, @TurMedia334 and @TurMedia333. As soon as Twitter suspends one ac...

LAW & DISORDER   /  CIVILIZATION &  According to leaked documents from the Ministry of Interior the French government is considering two new pieces of legislation: a ban on free and shared Wi-Fi connections during a state of emergency, and measures to block Tor being used inside France. The documents were seen by the French newspaper  Le Monde . According to the paper, the new bills could be presented to parliament as soon as January 2016. The new laws are presumably in response to the attacks in Paris last month where 130 people were murdered. The first proposal, according to  Le Monde , would forbid free and shared Wi-Fi during a state of emergency. The new measure is justified by way of a police opinion, saying that it's tough to track people who use public hotspots. The second proposal is a little more gnarly: the Ministry of Interior is looking at blocking and/or forbidding the use of Tor completely. Blocking people fro...

IncludeOS is a Unikernel written from scratch in C++, designed for x86 hardware virtualization, with no dependencies except for the virtual hardware. Read more on the wiki. It's a research prototype! IncludeOS is not production ready, not feature complete, and very much a work in progress. However, it has been shown to outperform Linux virtual machines in terms of CPU usage by 5-20%, and memory usage by orders of magnitude, running a simple DNS service (both platforms ran the same binary). Preliminary performance results and a (now outdated) overview of IncludeOS will appear in an IEEE CloudCom 2015 paper, titled  IncludeOS: A resource efficient unikernel for cloud services . Apreprint is available here, but for any citations please refer to the publications seciton in the Wiki. IncludeOS is free software, with "no warranties or restrictions of any kind". Note:   Anything may change at any time. The public API should not be...

Why the Public Can't Read the Press Nuts-and-bolts Washington coverage has shifted to subscription-based publications, while the capitol’s traditional outlets have shrunk. Jonathan Ernst / Reuters B ack in 2009, I had a job with a Washington, D.C.-based newsletter called  Water Policy Report . It wasn’t exactly a household name, but I was covering Congress, the federal courts, and the Environmental Protection Agency—a definite step up from the greased-pig-catching contests and crime-blotter stories I had chased at a community newspaper on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, my first job out of college. One of my responsibilities at the newsletter was to check the  Federal Register —the official portal that government agencies use to inform the public about regulatory actions. In December of that year I noticed an item that said that the Environmental Protection Agency had decided that existing pollution controls for offshore oil-drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico ...