MOBIUS Libraries

Two researchers have developed a new attack on TLS 1.0/SSL 3.0 that enables them to decrypt client requests on the fly and hijack supposedly confidential sessions with sensitive sites such as online banking, e-commerce and payment sites. The attack breaks the confidentiality model of the protocol and is the first known exploitation of a long-known flaw in TLS, potentially affecting the security of transactions on millions of sites.

There is quite a bit of alarming data in what the project has gathered, and one of those pieces of information is that more than 148,000 of the sites surveyed are vulnerable to the BEAST attack, which was developed by researchers Juliano Rizzo and Thai Duong and disclosed last year. Their attack uses what's known as a chosen-plaintext attack against the AES implementation in the TLS 1.0 protocol and enables them to use a custom tool they wrote to steal and decrypt supposedly secure HTTPS cookies. The attacker can then hijack the victim's secure SSL session with a site such as an e-commerce site or online banking site.

I couldn't find a way to link directly to presentations or their materials. Probably the most interesting sessions I attended were: Solving the Complexities of Ebook Record Management in Millennium INN-Reach: Implementing Peer to Peer Functionality Between two INN-Reach Systems The Ebooks presentation was about checking for duplication, quality control, and making sure all the records an institution paid for are present and have valid links. There were a lot of good techniques that could be relayed to our members as a group of best practices. The Peer-To-Peer INN-Reach is a new product that allows two INN-Reach systems to share materials as if they were one. It was a done in Ohio as a response after one consortium added two public libraries and began to see their single INN-Reach server overwhelmed. From what I could tell it works well, with each INN-Reach server able to retain it's own loan rules and identity, but did require all the libraries and pickup locations to be added to both servers, which quickly would present patrons with a very long list of libraries to choose from. I wasn't very clear where the super-union webpac resided; whether on it's own server or produced from both of them. The users that were present seemed happy with it.

It looked at several of the recent themes in the library world such as "Library 2.0" and how they've failed or the ideas have been accomplished better outside of libraries. What I found interesting is it was written by the Vice President of Library Support Services for LSSI, the private company that has started to run many public library systems, so I'm curious what his intent was with this article.

Time Magazine reported on how even Harvard is having trouble affording academic journal subscriptions, and how it may be time for an open access model. Some journals cost up to $40,000 a year, and single articles cost $30-$40.

Harvard also had an Oxford style debate about the future or purpose of libraries. While interesting it didn't really cover anything new:

A tagent from the seed lending library...how would one catalog this?

"When not in circulation, the dogs will be kept in a shared exercise area, where they most commonly play poker together." - Well played.

Lastly, Harvard is also lending dogs now at one of their libraries. This is one of several experiments in lending things other than books (everything from tools to people) but I still question the relevance:

Open Source Bridge is a conference for developers working with open source technologies and for people interested in learning the open source way.

This works amazingly well. The javascript we use to send text messages in the webpacs went from 8.5k to 4.3k. Also this works to combine multiple scripts and optimize them all together.

I love the idea of automatically pushing to production after a new commit is made to master.

This is pretty darn huge.  Keep in mind that Tor says nothing about whether piracy is bad, or whether or not electronic books should be cheaper, or more expensive.  But they do concede with this decision that DRM is more a hindrance than a help.

And why would they do it?  Probably because as it stands, it doesn't work as intended. As people realize that what they're doing isn't buying content so much as leasing it, it's interesting to see how their attitudes have changed towards DRM. 

Unbelievable. And probably delicious.

Because of Moore's Law - the decreasing costs of computing power, we've become a world of Big Data and are now consuming ever more computing power at a rate that exceeds Moore's Law.

I'm just learning of this today. Apparently they are only offering 1GB of free storage, which puts them at half of what Dropbox offers for free. That said, Dropbox is painfully slow at upload and download and Google storage is insanely cheap. I just bought 20GB of storage for my photo archive and it costs me a WHOPPING $5/year - and the extra storage is shared by all my Google apps which I'm guessing will include Drive.