Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001, inventor of the telecommunications satellite and the only reason most geeks can find Sri Lanka on a map, has died shortly after celebrating his 90th birthday.
posted to MetaFilter by Skorgu at 3:15 PM on March 18, 2008 (292 comments)

Whole-disk encryption defeated with canned air. [via.]
posted to MetaFilter by Skorgu at 10:12 AM on February 21, 2008 (92 comments)

Bytecode-based virtual machines are the Next Big Thing in programming. You can run Lisp, Ruby, Python, OCaml, and yes even COBOL on the JVM. Or if you prefer your languages to be a bit more melodic there's J#, A#, P# and F#. Even C/C++ has a bytecode compiler now. That's not to mention languages that have their own VMs like Erlang or that are writing their own like Parrot or PyPy.
posted to MetaFilter by Skorgu at 7:57 AM on December 4, 2007 (62 comments)

NSA@home is a fast FPGA-based SHA-1 and MD5 bruteforce cracker. Based on HDTV equipment from eBay, "It is capable of searching the full 8-character keyspace (from a 64-character set) in about a day in the current configuration for 800 hashes concurrently." Previous well-publicized brute-force attacks include the EFF breaking DES in 56 hours and 1.6TB of md5 hashes you can search online.
posted to MetaFilter by Skorgu at 2:47 PM on September 4, 2007 (53 comments)