Month: June 2016

(credit: xkcd)

Linux developers are going to have more than one choice for building secure, cross-distribution applications.

Ubuntu's "snap" applications recently went cross-platform, having been ported to other Linux distros including Debian, Arch, Fedora, and Gentoo. The goal is to simplify packaging of applications. Instead of building a deb package for Ubuntu and an RPM for Fedora, a developer could package the application as a snap and have it installed on just about any Linux distribution.

But Linux is always about choice, and snap isn't the only contender to replace traditional packaging systems. Today, the developers of Flatpak (previously called xdg-app) announced general availability for several major Linux distributions, with a pointer to instructions for installing on Arch, Debian, Fedora, Mageia, and Ubuntu.

(credit: Jonathunder)

Imagine a $50 million diamond heist that isn't investigated by any police body, and more than four days later, the broken vault that made the whole thing possible remains unfixed and suffers follow-on attacks by a group of marauding copycats. In essence, that's what's happening to an elite group of investors holding Bitcoin rival Ethereum, and the events threaten the very survival of the fledgling cryptocurrency.

The ransacked jeweler in this parable is The DAO, a crowdfunded investment fund that relies on highly specialized computer code and Ethereum to automatically execute investment decisions made by its members. On Friday, thieves exploited a software bug that allowed them to transfer more than 3.6 million "ether"—the base unit of the Ethereum currency—out of The DAO's coffers. The digital loot made up more than a third of The DAO's 11.5 million ether endowment. The seized booty is valued at anywhere from $45 million (based on the plummeting value of ether following the attack) to as high as $77 million (based on pre-attack exchange rates).

In the days following the theft, there have been at least a half-dozen copycat attacks (for instance, as documented here and here) that combined have purloined more than 785 ether. While the smaller attacks don't pose the same devastating blow, they underscore a problem that's vexingly hard to fix. As long as the flaw remains active, The DAO and the Ethereum currency are at risk of additional attacks that could further sink its viability. (Note: as this story was close to going live, there were indications that at least some of the follow-on attacks were being carried out by whitehat hackers who in essence are attempting to save Ethereum from itself.)

Forecast models are measured by their anomaly correlation scores, and the GFS model (black line) now ranks fourth among global models. (credit: Cliff Mass)

The forecasting supremacy of the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts and its global weather prediction model is well documented. This most glaringly reached the American public when only the European forecast model correctly predicted Hurricane Sandy would turn toward the northeastern United States in 2012, rather than remaining out to sea. For several years, the United States and its global forecasting system (GFS) have been struggling to catch up.

But as the United States' forecasting enterprise has more or less stayed the same, other nations are now equaling and passing the GFS model. Perhaps the most well accepted method of measuring a model's accuracy is by scoring its "anomaly correlation," a measure of its ability to accurately predict observations (a score of 1 is perfect). For the northern hemisphere during the last two months, as measured at the 500mb level of the atmosphere (about 5.5km above the Earth's surface), the European model scores by far the highest, at .905. It is followed by the United Kingdom's model (.870), Canadian model, (.868) and finally the GFS (.857).

On Tuesday, Cliff Mass, a University of Washington atmospheric scientist who closely tracks the forecast model "wars," wrote about the GFS model's poor performance relative to other nations. He concluded: "It is not that U.S. global (numerical weather prediction) is getting less skillful, but that other nations are innovating and pushing ahead faster. This situation could be greatly improved within a year, but to do so will require leadership, innovation, and a willingness to partner with others in new ways."

Enlarge / The next-generation iPhone could look a lot like the 6S and 6S Plus, according to a new report. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

If you were hoping for an all-new iPhone design this fall, The Wall Street Journal says you may be disappointed. Aside from the oft-rumored and controversial decision to remove the standard 3.5mm headphone jack, this year's iPhones will allegedly share a lot in common with the iPhone 6 and 6S.

According to the usual, shadowy "people familiar with the matter," the new iPhone design will be about a millimeter thinner than the current iPhone 6 and 6S design, and the removal of the headphone jack will improve the phone's waterproofing. Otherwise, though, the phones will be similar to the 6 and 6S design, and they'll retain the same 4.7 and 5.5-inch screen sizes. A more extensive overhaul, including an edge-to-edge OLED display and the elimination of the Home button, could follow for the iPhone's 10th birthday in 2017.

Apple has redesigned the iPhone every other year since the iPhone 3G came out in 2008. The 3GS changed the internals but kept the same external design, and the iPhone 4 and 4S, 5 and 5S, and 6 and 6S maintained the same cadence. Outliers like the iPhone 5C and SE aside, retaining an iPhone 6-style design for the third year in a row would be a big break from tradition. As in the "S" years, Apple would need to lean on performance and camera improvements along with some other big hardware addition—Siri in the 4S, TouchID in the 5S, 3D Touch in the 6S—to sell the phone to upgraders and new users.