German divers searching the Baltic Sea for discarded fishing nets have stumbled upon a rare Enigma cipher machine used by the Nazi military during World War Two which they believe was thrown overboard from a scuttled submarine.
Thinking they had discovered a typewriter entangled in a net on the seabed of Gelting Bay, underwater archaeologist Florian Huber quickly realised the historical significance of the find.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (wireshark), Fedora (kernel), openSUSE (enigmail), Red Hat (kernel), SUSE (cairo, java-1_7_0-ibm, libvirt, perl-DBD-mysql, and xen), and Ubuntu (batik and isc-dhcp).
Security updates have been issued by Debian (imagemagick), Fedora (curl, glibc, kernel, and thunderbird-enigmail), openSUSE (enigmail, knot, and python), Oracle (procps-ng), Red Hat (librelp, procps-ng, redhat-virtualization-host, rhev-hypervisor7, and unboundid-ldapsdk), Scientific Linux (procps-ng), SUSE (bash, ceph, icu, kvm, and qemu), and Ubuntu (procps and spice, spice-protocol).
Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (lib32-curl, lib32-libcurl-compat, lib32-libcurl-gnutls, libcurl-compat, and libcurl-gnutls), CentOS (firefox), Debian (imagemagick), Fedora (exiv2, LibRaw, and love), Gentoo (chromium), Mageia (kernel, librelp, and miniupnpc), openSUSE (curl, enigmail, ghostscript, libvorbis, lilypond, and thunderbird), Red Hat (Red Hat OpenStack Platform director), and Ubuntu (firefox).
Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (curl and zathura-pdf-mupdf), Debian (libmad and vlc), openSUSE (enigmail), Red Hat (collectd, Red Hat OpenStack Platform director, and sensu), and SUSE (firefox, ghostscript, and mysql).
The 2018 USENIX Enigma conference was held for the third time in January. Among many interesting talks, three presentations dealing with human security behaviors stood out. This article covers the key messages of these talks, namely the finding that humans are social in their security behaviors: their decision to adopt a good security practice is hardly ever an isolated decision.
Subscribers can read on for the report by guest author Christian Folini.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (enigmail, gimp, irssi, kernel, rsync, ruby1.8, and ruby1.9.1), Fedora (json-c and kernel), Mageia (libraw and transfig), openSUSE (enigmail, evince, ImageMagick, postgresql96, python-PyJWT, and thunderbird), Slackware (mozilla), and SUSE (evince).
Security updates have been issued by Debian (bouncycastle, enigmail, and sensible-utils), Fedora (kernel), Mageia (dhcp, flash-player-plugin, glibc, graphicsmagick, java-1.8.0-openjdk, kernel, kernel-linus, kernel-tmb, mariadb, pcre, rootcerts, rsync, shadow-utils, and xrdp), and SUSE (java-1_8_0-ibm and kernel).
Back in July, we collaborated with GCHQ to bring you two fantastic free resources: the first showed you how to build an OctaPi, a Raspberry Pi cluster computer. The second showed you how to use the cluster to learn about public key cryptography. Since then, we and GCHQ have been hard at work, and now we’re presenting two more exciting projects to make with your OctaPi!
Maker level
These new free resources are at the Maker level of the Raspberry Pi Foundation Digital Making Curriculum — they are intended for learners with a fair amount of experience, introducing them to some intriguing new concepts.
Whilst both resources make use of the OctaPi in their final steps, you can work through the majority of the projects on any computer running Python 3.
Calculate Pi
3.14159…ummm…
Calculating Pi teaches you two ways of calculating the value of Pi with varying accuracy. Along the way, you’ll also learn how computers store numbers with a fractional part, why your computer can limit how accurate your calculation of Pi is, and how to distribute the calculation across the OctaPi cluster.
Brute-force Enigma
Decrypt the message before time runs out!
Brute-force Enigma sends you back in time to take up the position of a WWII Enigma operator. Learn how to encrypt and decrypt messages using an Enigma machine simulated entirely in Python. Then switch roles and become a Bletchley Park code breaker — except this time, you’ve got a cluster computer on your side! You will use the OctaPi to launch a brute-force crypt attack on an Enigma-encrypted message, and you’ll gain an appreciation of just how difficult this decryption task was without computers.
Our own OctaPi
GCHQ has kindly sent us a fully assembled, very pretty OctaPi of our own to play with at Pi Towers — it even has eight snazzy Unicorn HATs which let you display light patterns and visualize simulations! Visitors of the Raspberry Jam at Pi Towers can have a go at running their own programs on the OctaPi, while we’ll be using it to continue to curate more free resources for you.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (enigmail, gnupg, libgd2, libidn, libidn2-0, mercurial, and strongswan), Fedora (gd, libidn2, mbedtls, mingw-openjpeg2, openjpeg2, and xen), Mageia (apache-commons-email, botan, iceape, poppler, rt/perl-Encode, samba, and wireshark), and openSUSE (expat, freerdp, git, libzypp, and php7).
Security updates have been issued by Debian (apache2, enigmail, graphicsmagick, ipsec-tools, libquicktime, lucene-solr, mysql-5.5, nasm, and supervisor), Fedora (mingw-librsvg2, php-PHPMailer, and webkitgtk4), Mageia (freeradius, gdk-pixbuf2.0, graphicsmagick, java-1.8.0-openjdk, kernel, libmtp, libgphoto, libraw, nginx, openvpn, postgresql9.4, valgrind, webkit2, and wireshark), openSUSE (apache2, chromium, libical, mysql-community-server, and nginx), Oracle (kernel), Red Hat (chromium-browser and eap7-jboss-ec2-eap), Slackware (squashfs), and Ubuntu (linux-hwe and nss).
For hard drive prices, the race to zero is over: nobody won. For the past 35+ years or so, hard drives prices have dropped, from around $500,000 per gigabyte in 1981 to less than $0.03 per gigabyte today. This includes the period of the Thailand drive crisis in 2012 that spiked hard drive prices. Matthew Komorowski has done an admirable job of documenting the hard drive price curve through March 2014 and we’d like to fill in the blanks with our own drive purchase data to complete the picture. As you’ll see, the hard drive pricing curve has flattened out.
75,000 New Hard Drives
We first looked at the cost per gigabyte of a hard drive in 2013 when we examined the effects of the Thailand Drive crisis on our business. When we wrote that post, the cost per gigabyte for a 4 TB hard drive was about $0.04 per gigabyte. Since then 5-, 6-, 8- and recently 10 TB hard drives have been introduced and during that period we have purchased nearly 75,000 drives. Below is a chart by drive size of the drives we purchased since that last report in 2013.
Observations
We purchase drives in bulk, thousands at a time. The price you might get at Costco or BestBuy, or on Amazon will most likely be higher.
The effect of the Thailand Drive crisis is clearly seen from October 2011 through mid-2013.
The 4 TB Drive Enigma
Up through the 4 TB drive models, the cost per gigabyte of a larger sized drive always became less than the smaller sized drives. In other words, the cost per gigabyte of a 2 TB drive was less than that of a 1 TB drive resulting in higher density at a lower cost per gigabyte. This changed with the introduction of 6- and 8 TB drives, especially as it relates to the 4 TB drives. As you can see in the chart above, the cost per gigabyte of the 6 TB drives did not fall below that of the 4 TB drives. You can also observe that the 8 TB drives are just approaching the cost per gigabyte of the 4 TB drives. The 4 TB drives are the price king as seen in the chart below of the current cost of Seagate consumer drives by size.
Seagate Hard Drive Prices By Size
Drive Size
Model
Price
Cost/GB
1 TB
ST1000DM010
$49.99
$0.050
2 TB
ST2000DM006
$66.99
$0.033
3 TB
ST3000DM008
$83.72
$0.028
4 TB
ST4000DM005
$99.99
$0.025
6 TB
ST6000DM004
$240.00
$0.040
8 TB
ST8000DM005
$307.34
$0.038
The data on this chart was sourced from the current price of these drives on Amazon. The drive models selected were “consumer” drives, like those we typically use in our data centers.
The manufacturing and marketing efficiencies that drive the pricing of hard drives seems to have changed over time. For example, the 6 TB drives have been in the market at least 3 years, but are not even close to the cost per gigabyte of the 4 TB drives. Meanwhile, back in 2011, the 3 TB drives models fell below the cost per gigabyte of the 2 TB drives they “replaced” within a few months. Have we as consumers decided that 4 TB drives are “big enough” for our needs and we are not demanding (by purchasing) larger sized drives in the quantities needed to push down the unit cost?
Approaching Zero: There’s a Limit
The important aspect is the trend of the cost over time. While it has continued to move downward, the rate of change has slowed dramatically as observed in the chart below which represents our average quarterly cost per gigabyte over time.
The change in the rate of the cost per gigabyte of a hard drive is declining. For example, from January 2009 to January 2011, our average cost for a hard drive decreased 45% from $0.11 to $0.06 – $0.05 per gigabyte. From January 2015 to January 2017, the average cost decreased 26% from $0.038 to $0.028 – just $0.01 per gigabyte. This means that the declining price of storage will become less relevant in driving the cost of providing storage.
Back in 2011, IDC predicted that the overall data will grow by 50 times by 2020, and in 2014, EMC estimated that by 2020, we will be creating 44 trillion gigabytes of data annually. That’s quite a challenge for the storage industry especially as the cost per gigabyte curve for hard drives is flattening out. Improvements in existing storage technologies (Helium, HAMR) along with future technologies (Quantum Storage, DNA), are on the way – we can’t wait. Of course we’d like these new storage devices to be 50% less expensive per gigabyte then today’s hard drives. That would be a good start.
A fully functional four-rotor Enigma machine sold for $463,500.
Wow.
The collective thoughts of the interwebz
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