Month: December 2015

(credit: Ilya Schurov , Computerra Weekly (Creative Commons))

Ian Murdock, founder of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution project, has died at the age of 42. His death, announced in a blog post by Docker CEO Ben Golub, came after an apparent encounter with police and a statement posted on Murdock's Twitter feed that he was going to commit suicide, though no cause of his death has been given.

Murdock, born in Germany in 1973, founded Debian in 1993 while studying computer science at Purdue University. The distribution gets its name from the combination of his name and that of his then-girlfriend Deborah Lynn. The pair married, and had two children; they divorced in 2007.

Murdock's Debian Manifesto railed at the poor software maintenance of other Linux distributions of the time—and that of Softlanding Linux System (SLS) in particular, bemoaning the lack of attention developers gave to distributions and what he saw as the big cash grabs being made by would-be commercial Linux developers. He outlined Debian's modular architecture approach as well as its adherence to free software philosophy.

(credit: frankieleon)

Examining a national database of health insurance claims, researchers found that 91 percent of patients who suffered a nonfatal overdose of prescription opioid painkillers continued getting prescriptions for opioids following the overdose. And, the researchers found, overdose survivors who kept taking high dosages of an opioid—including morphine, oxycodone, and hydrocodone—were twice as likely to have another overdose within two years.

The findings, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, follow news earlier this month from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that drug overdoses, opioid overdoses in particular, have reached epidemic levels. The fact that patients surviving opioid overdoses are still being prescribed opioids is “highly concerning,” the authors of the new study wrote.

In a press release, lead author Marc LaRochelle of Boston Medical Center said that "[t]he intent of this study is not to point fingers but rather use the results to motivate physicians, policy makers and researchers to improve how we identify and treat patients at risk of opioid-related harms before they occur."

Cisco Nexus switches. (credit: pchow98)

Cisco has finally quashed a long-running lawsuit brought by an Israeli patent-holding company called Commil USA. The case took a surprising number of detours, including a trip to the Supreme Court last year that looks almost unnecessary in hindsight.

In an opinion (PDF) published Monday, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said that Cisco's non-infringement argument should have won the day at trial, and there was no justification for a jury's $64 million verdict against the networking giant. The opinion overturns the verdict, leaving Commil with nothing to show for a case it has pursued since 2007.

Monday's decision puts the Federal Circuit in an awkward position, because they had already considered the case before in 2013. At that time, the three-judge panel chose to punt on the non-infringement argument, simply not ruling on it—yet now the same panel views it as a decisive point in Cisco's favor.

Welcome to Ashley Madison. We're your fembot hosts.

In one of 2015's most sensational hacks, a group called Impact Team dumped the real names and credit card information associated with 39 million accounts from cheater dating site Ashley Madison. And yet, despite the public shaming of prominent men who paid to join the site and several lawsuits against the company, Ashley Madison claims that it has added 4 million members in the months since the hack.

But why would anyone join a cheater site knowing that they risk exposure? Is this a case of the Internet having a ridiculously short memory? Of horniness overcoming good sense? Or is it just another trick played by a company whose brand has become synonymous with using bots to plump up its membership numbers?

Company reps refuse to disclose how they came to the 4 million number, saying merely "we do not have any updates to share." What we know is that the Ashley Madison database and source code show that the company had created at least 70 thousand fake female profiles called "engagers" to chat up curious men who joined the site for free. Bots created by developers at Ashley Madison would use these fake profiles to send men messages and e-mails—which the men could only read if they signed up for a paid account. Apparently, the bots were so successful that they accounted for 59 percent of conversions to paid accounts (see the "engager vs. female" chart in this article).

PC gamers were dismayed on Christmas Day to find that Valve's popular (and arguably essential) Steam store had gone haywire before becoming entirely inaccessible. Logged-in users were seeing account data that didn't belong to them, with partial credit card numbers, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, billing addresses, and purchase histories all visible. This happened for a period of about an hour and a half, from 14:50 to 16:20 EST on Christmas Day, after which the service went down entirely.

Valve has published an explanation of what happened and why. Steam routinely suffers from denial of service attacks. On Christmas Day, this traffic exploded. The Steam Store was already busy, due to the Winter Sale, and the denial of service attacks pushed the load to 20 times the normal load.

To handle the load of the attack, Valve's Web caching partner rolled out an updated configuration that resulted in personal, authenticated pages being cached and subsequently served to users they didn't belong to. After about 90 minutes the error was spotted. The Steam Store was taken offline entirely, the cache configuration was repaired, and the erroneously cached data was purged. Normal operation resumed thereafter.