Author: Lee Hutchinson

Last year Pixar announced that it would be releasing a “free” (that is, available without cost) version of Renderman, the in-house rendering engine that produces the visuals in all of Pixar’s animated films and many other Hollywood blockbusters. Though the actual release process ran into some delays, it has finally happened: Renderman is now free for non-commercial usage on Windows, OS X, and Linux.

FOSS advocates will take note that the software is free-as-in-beer, not free-as-in-speech—that is, while Renderman can be downloaded and used non-commercially without paying anything, it has not been open-sourced (and we bring the distinction up because that’s what more than half the story’s discussion thread on Slashdot has focused on).

To download Renderman, Pixar requires you to register for a forum account and provide a valid e-mail address. Once that’s done, you are given an installation package which in turn downloads the actual Renderman components appropriate for your operating system and 3D package.

Apple has published its second major security roll-up package of the year, Security Update 2015-002, which contains fixes for multiple versions of OS X stretching from Mountain Lion 10.8.5 to Yosemite 10.10.2. These updates mitigate threats from several different vulnerabilities, but the most notable is a fix that will inoculate Safari users against the so-called “FREAK” SSL/TLS exploit (CVE-2015-0204, although at publication time the Apple page shows CVE-2015-0167 as the CVE ID for FREAK).

First publicized a week ago, the “FREAK” vulnerability can be used by an attacker to force someone’s SSL/TLS connection to a Web server to use a weak 512-bit key, which the attacker can then factor with a relatively trivial amount of work and thereby decrypt and/or modify the supposedly secure connection. The vulnerability affects OS X, iOS, Android, and Windows devices. The acronym “FREAK” stands for “Factoring attack on RSA-EXPORT Keys,” which references the fact that the 512-bit weak keys are so-called legacy “export-grade” keys mandated for use in the 1990s with cryptographic hardware and software built in the US but intended for sale outside of the country.

Before Security Update 2015-002…

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Apple promised a fix within a week, and true to the company’s word, the patch for the vulnerability arrived today. OS X users browsing the Web with updated versions of Chrome and Firefox were already immune (Firefox appeared to be immune to start with, and Chrome was patched last week), but Safari users were open to attack until today. After installing the 2015-002 update, this is no longer the case, and all three mainstream Web browsers on OS X are now secure.

There are three buzzwords that, if we had our way, would be stricken completely from the world: “cloud,” “the Internet of Things,” and “big data.” Each of them was coined in an attempt to elegantly capture a complex concept, and each of them fails miserably. “Cloud” is a wreck of a term that has no fixed definition (with the closest usually being “someone else’s servers”); “Internet of Things” is so terrible and uninformative that its usage should be punishable by death; and then there’s “big data,” which doesn’t appear to actually mean anything.

We’re going to focus on that last term here, because there’s actually a fascinating concept behind the opaque and stupid buzzword. On the surface, “big data” sounds like it ought to have something to do with, say, storing tremendous amounts of data. Frankly it does, but that’s only part of the picture. Wikipedia has an extremely long, extremely thorough (and, overly complex) breakdown of the term, but without reading for two hours, big data as a buzzword refers to the entire process of gathering and storing tremendous amounts of data, then applying tremendous amounts of computing power and advanced algorithms to the data in order to pick out trends and connect dots that would otherwise be invisible and un-connectable within the mass.

For an even simpler dinner party definition: when someone says “big data,” they’re talking about using computers to find trends in enormous collections of information—trends that people can’t pick out because there’s too much data for humans to sift through.

MUNICH—As a perennial fan of “How It’s Made” videos, my visit last month to GE’s Global Research Center in Munich was particularly fascinating. Although the campus is not involved with any actual large-scale manufacturing, the scientists and researchers there do focus on finding ways to take manufacturing processes and make them better. There were endless miniature manufacturing nooks and crannies that we got to poke our noses into over the course of our week.

I came away fixated on carbon fiber. It’s most famously used as a lightweight, high-strength construction material in exotic cars and aircraft, but it’s becoming downright common these days. Today carbon fiber is in bicycles and golf clubs, and you can even get yourself a carbon fiber wallet if you’re so inclined. But its growing presence in everyday life belies its beauty and complexity—there’s nothing common about this increasingly common material.

It takes a lot to make a composite

Carbon fiber is properly described as a “composite material,” a term that is used to describe any substance with multiple components that combine in interesting ways to produce a material with complex, desirable properties. Most of our time on the GE campus was spent in the center’s composite manufacturing lab, and we were surrounded by tons of different composite materials, from glass to metals—but carbon fiber was the thing we focused on.