The Daily Nerd (April 11th, 2014)

The Daily Nerd (April 11th, 2014) #

Serious OpenSSL bug renders websites wide open

A serious vulnerability in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic library has been discovered that allows attackers to steal information unnoticed. Known as the Heartbleed bug, the vulnerability allows anyone on the Internet to read the memory of systems that run vulnerable versions of OpenSSL, revealing the secret authentication and encryption keys to protect the traffic. User names, passwords and the actual content of the communications can also be read.

50 years ago, IBM created mainframe that helped send men to the Moon

System/360 machines were crucial for NASA’s Apollo missions. “Apollo flights had so much information to relay, that their computers had to report in an electronic form of shorthand,” IBM says. “Even in shorthand, however, it took a circuit capable of transmitting a novel a minute to get the information to NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center — now the Johnson Space Center — in Houston, Texas. Receiving this enormous amount of data was a powerful IBM computer whose sole task was to translate the shorthand into meaningful information for Apollo flight controllers. The IBM System/360 computer absorbed, translated, calculated, evaluated, and relayed this information for display. It was one of five System/360 machines used by NASA for the Apollo 11 mission. The same System/360 computer that processed the data for the first lunar landing from 240,000 miles away in Houston also calculated the liftoff data needed by astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin to rendezvous back with the command module piloted by Michael Collins for the flight back to Earth.”

Could This Be The Signal Of Dark Matter? Unsure Scientists Checking This Out

Sometimes a strange signal comes from the dark and it takes a while to figure out what that signal means. In this case, scientists analyzing high-energy gamma rays emanating from the galaxy’s center found an unexplained source of emission that they say is “consistent with some forms of dark matter.” The data came courtesy of NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and was analyzed by a group of independent scientists. They found that by removing all known sources of gamma rays, they were left with gamma-ray emissions that so far, they cannot explain. More observations will be needed to characterize these emissions, they cautioned.