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🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 History 🔗 Computing 🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science

In cryptography, the EFF DES cracker (nicknamed "Deep Crack") is a machine built by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in 1998, to perform a brute force search of the Data Encryption Standard (DES) cipher's key space – that is, to decrypt an encrypted message by trying every possible key. The aim in doing this was to prove that the key size of DES was not sufficient to be secure.

🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Moon 🔗 Solar System

A transient lunar phenomenon (TLP) or lunar transient phenomenon (LTP) is a short-lived light, color, or change in appearance on the surface of the Moon. The term was created by Patrick Moore in his co-authorship of NASA Technical Report R-277 Chronological Catalog of Reported Lunar Events, published in 1968.

Claims of short-lived lunar phenomena go back at least 1,000 years, with some having been observed independently by multiple witnesses or reputable scientists. Nevertheless, the majority of transient lunar phenomenon reports are irreproducible and do not possess adequate control experiments that could be used to distinguish among alternative hypotheses to explain their origins.

Most lunar scientists will acknowledge transient events such as outgassing and impact cratering do occur over geologic time. The controversy lies in the frequency of such events.

🔗 Physics

The Kelvin water dropper, invented by Scottish scientist William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) in 1867, is a type of electrostatic generator. Kelvin referred to the device as his water-dropping condenser. The apparatus is variously called the Kelvin hydroelectric generator, the Kelvin electrostatic generator, or Lord Kelvin's thunderstorm. The device uses falling water to generate voltage differences by electrostatic induction occurring between interconnected, oppositely charged systems. This eventually leads to an electric arc discharging in the form of a spark. It is used in physics education to demonstrate the principles of electrostatics.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer Security 🔗 Computer Security/Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

In information security and programming, a buffer overflow, or buffer overrun, is an anomaly where a program, while writing data to a buffer, overruns the buffer's boundary and overwrites adjacent memory locations.

Buffers are areas of memory set aside to hold data, often while moving it from one section of a program to another, or between programs. Buffer overflows can often be triggered by malformed inputs; if one assumes all inputs will be smaller than a certain size and the buffer is created to be that size, then an anomalous transaction that produces more data could cause it to write past the end of the buffer. If this overwrites adjacent data or executable code, this may result in erratic program behavior, including memory access errors, incorrect results, and crashes.

Exploiting the behavior of a buffer overflow is a well-known security exploit. On many systems, the memory layout of a program, or the system as a whole, is well defined. By sending in data designed to cause a buffer overflow, it is possible to write into areas known to hold executable code and replace it with malicious code, or to selectively overwrite data pertaining to the program's state, therefore causing behavior that was not intended by the original programmer. Buffers are widespread in operating system (OS) code, so it is possible to make attacks that perform privilege escalation and gain unlimited access to the computer's resources. The famed Morris worm in 1988 used this as one of its attack techniques.

Programming languages commonly associated with buffer overflows include C and C++, which provide no built-in protection against accessing or overwriting data in any part of memory and do not automatically check that data written to an array (the built-in buffer type) is within the boundaries of that array. Bounds checking can prevent buffer overflows, but requires additional code and processing time. Modern operating systems use a variety of techniques to combat malicious buffer overflows, notably by randomizing the layout of memory, or deliberately leaving space between buffers and looking for actions that write into those areas ("canaries").

🔗 Biography 🔗 Systems 🔗 Biography/arts and entertainment

John Gall (September 18, 1925 – December 15, 2014) was an American author and retired pediatrician. Gall is known for his 1975 book General systemantics: an essay on how systems work, and especially how they fail..., a critique of systems theory. One of the statements from this book has become known as Gall's law.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Microsoft 🔗 Reference works

Microsoft Encarta was a digital multimedia encyclopedia published by Microsoft Corporation from 1993 to 2009. Originally sold on CD-ROM or DVD, it was also later available on the World Wide Web via an annual subscription – although later many articles could also be viewed free online with advertisements. By 2008, the complete English version, Encarta Premium, consisted of more than 62,000 articles, numerous photos and illustrations, music clips, videos, interactive content, timelines, maps, atlases and homework tools.

Microsoft published similar encyclopedias under the Encarta trademark in various languages, including German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese and Japanese. Localized versions contained contents licensed from national sources and more or less content than the full English version. For example, the Dutch version had content from the Dutch Winkler Prins encyclopedia.

In March 2009, Microsoft announced it was discontinuing both the Encarta disc and online versions. The MSN Encarta site was closed on October 31, 2009, in all countries except Japan, where it was closed on December 31, 2009. Microsoft continued to operate the Encarta online dictionary until 2011.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Business

A format war describes competition between mutually incompatible proprietary formats that compete for the same market, typically for data storage devices and recording formats for electronic media. It is often characterized by political and financial influence on content publishers by the developers of the technologies. Developing companies may be characterized as engaging in a format war if they actively oppose or avoid interoperable open-industry technical standards in favor of their own.

A format war emergence can be explained because each vendor is trying to exploit cross-side network effects in a two-sided market. There is also a social force to stop a format war: when one of them wins as de facto standard, it solves a coordination problem for the format users.

User:Diikiw/Wiikid, formerly Wikiid, is an article that was created on the web site Wikipedia in 2008. It is notable in its attempt to become the first Wikipedia page to gain notoriety solely for the fact that it was a page on Wikipedia; this was intended to spark a debate as to whether or not Wikipedia could be considered a source notable enough to allow a page’s permanent entry on the site. It can be looked at both as metahumor and as a piece of postmodern art.

🔗 China 🔗 Mythology 🔗 Taoism

Erlang Shen (二郎神), or Erlang is a Chinese God with a third truth-seeing eye in the middle of his forehead.

Er-lang Shen may be a deified version of several semi-mythical folk heroes who help regulate China's torrential floods dating variously from the Qin, Sui, and Jin dynasties. A later Buddhist source identifies him as the second son of the Northern Heavenly King Vaishravana.

In the Ming semi-mythical novels Creation of the Gods and Journey to the West, Erlang Shen is the nephew of the Jade Emperor. In the former, he assists the Zhou army in defeating the Shang. In the latter, he is the second son of a mortal and Jade emperor's sister. In the legend, he is known as the greatest warrior god of heaven.

🔗 Statistics

The Erlang distribution is a two-parameter family of continuous probability distributions with support ${\displaystyle x\in [0,\infty )}$. The two parameters are:

• a positive integer ${\displaystyle k,}$ the "shape", and
• a positive real number ${\displaystyle \lambda ,}$ the "rate". The "scale", ${\displaystyle \mu ,}$ the reciprocal of the rate, is sometimes used instead.

The Erlang distribution with shape parameter ${\displaystyle k=1}$ simplifies to the exponential distribution. It is a special case of the gamma distribution. It is the distribution of a sum of ${\displaystyle k}$ independent exponential variables with mean ${\displaystyle 1/\lambda }$ each.

The Erlang distribution was developed by A. K. Erlang to examine the number of telephone calls which might be made at the same time to the operators of the switching stations. This work on telephone traffic engineering has been expanded to consider waiting times in queueing systems in general. The distribution is also used in the field of stochastic processes.