Month: November 2014

The red-hot nickel ball is our all-time favorite destroyer of basically anything on the planet, transforming everything from Velveeta to Peeps into sticky, bubbling cauldrons of processed-chemical goo. Now the ball is rolling in the other direction with a liquid nitrogen-cooled nickel ball that’s up to all sorts of fun.

First watch the super-cooled nickel ball take a swim in a hot tub, followed by a plunge in a cold bath. I don’t want to spoil it, but the super-cooled nickel ball is full of surprises!

Now watch as the super-cooled nickel ball is dipped into honey:

At first it’s hard to see exactly what’s going to happen, but the end result is pretty amazing. We can’t wait to see what other tricks can be performed with cold balls. [CarsandWater]

via Gizmodo
Super-Cooled Nickel Ball Is Even Better Than Red Hot Nickel Ball

If you’re not one to break the rules when it comes to your entertainment, the Motion Picture Association of America has created an official site for finding out where you can watch, buy, or stream movies and TV shows legally.

The site is similar to Can I Stream It, but also includes theaters that you can find new movies at, a huge selection of TV shows and the channels you can find them on, and tells you where you can buy the movie or show if it’s not on any streaming services. Additionally, WhereToWatch is ad-free and lets you set alert notifications for when the content you’re interested becomes available from your preferred provider. There is no app, but the site is designed to work on any sized device. The site is still in beta, so there might be a few hiccups, but you can check it out at the link below.

WhereToWatch Beta | WhereToWatch

via Lifehacker
WhereToWatch Shows You Where You Can Watch Movies and TV Shows Legally

Yesterday was Veteran’s Day, the U.S. holiday where we Yanks honor the members of our military, past and present (and get our annual Band of Brothers fix on TV). The timing of the holiday is based on Armistice Day’s 11-11-11—that’s the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of the year, which in 1918 marked the official cessation of World War I hostilities.

Commissioned to design a Veteran’s Day memorial for Anthem, Arizona, Phoenix-based artist Renee Palmer Jones took heed of both the "11" timing and the Arizona sun. As she writes:

At precisely 11:11 a.m., each year on 11-11, the sun aligns through the elliptical holes in each of the five marble pillars (each representing a branch of the the U.S. military) in order to perfectly illuminate a round mosaic inlaid into the bricks; that of the Great Seal of the United States. The symbolism of the five pillars standing in formation in order to protect the United States and to complete the solar illumination is representative of U.S. military personnel working together in all regards, in the security and defense of American citizens.

The project was designed by Palmer Jones, engineered by Jim Martin Oscar Oliden and Steve Rusch and constructed by the Haydon Building Corporation.

(more…)
via Core77
Brilliant Monument Design Casts Perfect Solar Spotlight Once a Year

via kottke.org
The Great War

Someone made a Star Wars-themed parody of the catcall video that went viral last month and it’s even better than the original: This one didn’t edit out the white guys and left only blacks and latinos. Males from the galaxy far far away can all be creepy and gross regardless of race or affiliation—just like in this galaxy.

This is SPLOID, a blog of delicious brain candy. Join us on Facebook

via Gizmodo
Princess Leia walking in NYC being harassed by dicks from all the galaxy

InRange TV performs an interesting test on WWII exploding ammunition. Both German and Russian snipers were authorized to use explosive spotter-type rifle ammunition on human targets. Watch their video below to see how effective they really were compared to standard ball ammunition. http://ift.tt/10WoEpH
via AllOutdoor.com
VIDEO: Testing WWII Exploding Ammunition

A SaaS product needs to use security measures you might not ordinarily use in an on-premises solution. In particular, it’s important that all sensitive data be secured. Encryption plays an important role in information security. At VividCortex, we encrypt data in-flight and at-rest, so your sensitive data is never exposed.
We use Go and MySQL extensively at VividCortex and thought other Go programmers might be interested to see how we’ve integrated encryption into our services layer (APIs).
Encryption Techniques
At a high level, you can think of two kinds of data encryption inside of MySQL or any similar data store. I’ll oversimplify for purposes of illustration. You can:
Store the data in MySQL as normal, but encrypt the container that holds MySQL. Usually this means storing MySQL’s data on an encrypted disk volume. The protection? Broadly speaking, if someone gains access to a backup disk, they can’t see your data.
Encrypt the data before sending it to MySQL. In this case the security boundary is pushed out further: even if someone gets access to the server, and can run SQL commands, they can’t see your data.
Each of these has advantages and disadvantages. These include ease of use, programmer overhead, ability to inspect (e.g. recovering from backups), searchability and indexability, and so on. There are a lot of things to consider here. Just a few:
Will data be exposed if backups are unencrypted? (Our backups are encrypted, by the way.)
Are sensitive values possibly in cleartext in query logs?
Will sensitive values be visible in status commands like SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST?
At VividCortex we err on the side of safety and security, rather than favoring convenience. There’s a fairly simple question that does a pretty good job of illustrating our goal: if someone succeeds in a SQL injection attack against our databases, will they see any sensitive data in cleartext? The answer needs to be “no.” This is a higher standard than on-disk encryption. It means that someone has to get access to the keys for the particular data they’re trying to decrypt, in order to see anything other than garbage. And those keys are not present or accessible on the database servers in any form, not even in-memory.
Making It Convenient
Convenience is important. If it’s too hard to do encryption, there’s an increased risk that it won’t be done. Fortunately, Go’s elegant interfaces for the database/sql package make the burden transparent to the programmer!
We learned how to do this from Jason Moiron’s excellent blog post on the Valuer and Scanner interfaces. Please read that if you haven’t yet.
To implement transparent encryption and decryption, we created a custom data type that implements the Valuer and Scanner interfaces. The implementation is straightforward and quite similar to Jason’s example of compressing and decompressing, except that we used encryption libraries instead.
Now our code is incredibly simple to use with encrypted values. All we do is define a variable of our custom type. For example, instead of
var password string
err = rows.Scan(&password)
We simply use
var password EncryptedValue
err = rows.Scan(&password)
It’s similarly simple to insert values encrypted into the database. Magic! This is why I often say that Go’s design, although it seems minimalistic at first, is actually very advanced and powerful.
"Go feels under-engineered because it only solves real problems." Exactly. http://t.co/18LhLT0ALB #golang— VividCortex (@VividCortex) September 18, 2014
Nuts And Bolts
The code is small. The exact details of all the code are not all that important for this blog post; much of it is about things that are out of scope here. The gist of it, though, is that we store values as byte arrays:
the first byte is an indicator of the version of our encryption algorithm used, so there’s a clear migration path for changes
the next four bytes indicate which key we used to encrypt this value, so we have 4 billion possible keys
the rest is the encrypted payload
We can even change this in the future. For example, we can switch on the first byte’s value, if we want, to determine whether the key ID is in the next 4 bytes, or if it’s something more, such as the next 8 bytes. So we can easily expand the number of keys we can indicate. We can also, if we ever hit version 255, use that to indicate that the version number continues in the next byte. This is a standard trick used, among other places, by the MySQL wire protocol.
The result is that we have a simple and future-proof way to encrypt values.
Alternative Approaches
In addition to the approaches we’ve mentioned, there are several others. There are commercial projects designed to help ease the encryption and decryption techniques you might otherwise wrap around MySQL and perhaps fumble in some ways. There are encryption functions inside of MySQL, but educate yourself about those before using them. There’s more, too, but you should be able to find all you need with a search.
Conclusions
By using Go’s built-in interfaces, we created a solution for transparently encrypting values in our database so that it’s never in the database in cleartext, either on-disk or in-memory. The code is super-easy for programmers to use, which improves our security posture automatically. All sensitive data gets encrypted in-flight and at-rest, and an attacker would have to have extensive access to our systems (e.g. SQL injection won’t suffice) to be able to decrypt the data.
We highly recommend that you use the standard Go interfaces for the power they give you. And please, ask your SaaS providers, including us, hard questions about security and how it’s implemented. Every service needs to be secure to make the Internet a safer place.
Click here to register for a webinar with more insights on incorporating Go and MySQL. Pic Cred
via Planet MySQL
Encrypting Data In MySQL With Go

When the weather gets cooler, it’s time to turn off the air conditioners. AC units need protection from leaves and other debris, though. Instead of an expensive cover, a piece of plywood does the trick.

Over at Quicken Loans’ Zing blog, they say the secret to protect your AC unit is to just cover the top:

Get a large square of plywood and set it on top of the system. Put a brick or a large rock on top of that to keep it in place, and voila! You’re done. This will help keep any falling leaves, snow or ice out of your system while preventing damage from snow and sleet.

That’s it. No step three. No covering the unit. You see, by covering the unit so tightly, you wind up trapping in a lot of the things you’re trying to keep out, like moisture, condensation and any residual debris. Think about it this way: the unit was made to stay outside, so don’t worry about protecting it from the outside.

It may not look pretty, but it’s inexpensive and easy to install.

How to Winterize Your Air-Conditioning Unit the Right Way | ZING Blog

Photo by ActiveSteve.

via Lifehacker
Cover Your Air Conditioner With Plywood to Protect It For the Winter