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Future Proofing Your Building: Where HVAC and Sustainability Come Together

With cost reduction, sustainability enablement, increased comfort and performance benefits, VRF systems allow commercial buildings to gain a competitive advantage by reducing their carbon footprint and providing custom comfort to occupants.




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Nmap 26th Birthday Announcement: Version 7.94

Posted by Gordon Fyodor Lyon on Sep 01

Dear Nmap community,

Today is Nmap’s 26th birthday, which reminded me that I hadn’t yet
announced our Nmap 7.94 release from May. And it’s a great one! The biggest
improvement was the Zenmap and Ndiff upgrades from the obsolete Python 2
language to Python 3 on all platforms. Big thanks to Daniel Miller, Jakub
Kulík, Brian Quigley, Sam James, Eli Schwartz, Romain Leonard, Varunram
Ganesh, Pavel Zhukov, Carey Balboa, and Hasan Aliyev for...




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Npcap Celebrates its 10th Anniversary In Space!

Posted by Gordon Fyodor Lyon on Oct 05

Dear Nmap community,

Last month we celebrated Nmap's 26th birthday and today I'm happy to share
another big milestone: Our Npcap driver for capturing and sending raw
packets on Windows turned 10 this year! From humble beginnings as a
security and modernization patch for the discontinued WinPcap project,
Npcap has become an indispensable component for both Nmap and Wireshark.
And it's used by hundreds of other software products and...




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Nmap 7.95 released: OS and service detection signatures galore!

Posted by Gordon Fyodor Lyon on May 05

Dear Nmap Community,

I just arrived in San Francisco for the RSA conference and am delighted to
announce our Nmap Version 7.95 release! I'm most excited that we finally
tackled our backlog of OS and service detection fingerprint submissions.
We're not talking about dozens or hundreds of them-we processed more than
6,500 fingerprints!

For OS detection, we added 336 signatures, bringing the new total to 6,036.
Additions include iOS 15...




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How Many Homeowners Know What a Heat Pump Does?

A recent survey shows homeowners are unfamiliar with what an HVAC heat pump can accomplish.




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Heat Pumps and Refrigerant Changes driving Climate Change Efforts

This e-book includes a summary of sustainable HVAC developments, in particular of heat pumps and refrigerant changes to address climate change.




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ACCA Panel: Brace For Change

Industry experts are telling contractors to stay informed and get involved with the new regulations that are likely to impact everyone this coming year




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Heat Pump RTUs Taking Center Stage in Expanding Market

As heat pump technology advances and begins its march into colder climates, industry experts are expecting rooftop units to continue to gain popularity in both new construction and retrofits.




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New Company, Quilt, Launches Ductless Heat Pump

Quilt, a newly launched company, has introduced a ductless heat pump that they say simplifies the installation and rebate process, while offering transparent pricing.




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Pascal Plans to Build A Better Heat Pump

The startup, Pascal, plans to build a better heat pump based on solid refrigerants that will deliver higher efficiencies at lower costs, while eliminating all refrigerant emissions.”




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Air-to-Water Heat Pump Innovations Driving Efficiency, Safety, and Performance in Residential Heating and Cooling

To meet the ambitious environmental goals being proposed at all levels of government, residential air-to-water heat pumps are emerging as a transformative solution to lower carbon emissions, enhance energy efficiency, and reduce utility bills.




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Heat Pumps Experiencing a Renaissance in Maine

As more homeowners are ditching oil heaters and moving to heat pumps, the rest of the country can learn from the cold-climate success story.




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A Favorite in Many Countries, Inverter Heat Pumps Offer Consistency and Energy Savings

Variable-speed heat pumps, which dominate the heat pump market in many countries, are getting more attention in the U.S. The NEWS asked several manufacturers about the benefits of the technology.




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The Time is Now for HVAC Contractors to Install and Repair All-Electric Heat Pumps

All-electric options have come a long way since their inception, and there’s never been a better time to get on board.




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California Musician Pens Love Song to Heat Pumps

“(I’m Your) Heat Pump” is a soft, funky, R&B love song told from the perspective of a heat pump that depicts just what a heat pump can provide to its users.




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Advances in Heat Pump Rooftop Units for Cold Climates

The DOE's new Rooftop Accelerator program encourages manufacturers to develop efficient commercial rooftop heat pumps for cold climates, which could reduce GHG emissions and energy costs by up to 50%.




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Cashing In on Heat Pumps: A Primer on Incentives, Rebates, and Tax Credits

With “heat pump” and “incentives” almost being synonymous at this point, contractors need to understand the basics to ensure customers are receiving the benefits.




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Troubleshooting Puzzle: An Electric Furnace That’s Not Performing

The equipment in this month’s troubleshooting problem is an electric furnace that has been in service for at least ten years and has no service history.




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Department of Energy May Bump Up Furnace Standards

Two major HVAC industry organizations have weighed in on a DOE proposal that would phase out noncondensing gas furnaces for consumer use beginning in about six years.




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Three Ways Contractors Can Make High-End Furnaces ‘Sell Themselves’

If contractors in colder climates focus on educating their customers on what new higher-efficiency furnaces bring to the table, often times the furnaces will sell themselves.




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Basic Furnace Maintenance and Troubleshooting

The ACHR NEWS visited Flame Furnace in Warren, Michigan to learn how to do maintenance and basic troubleshooting on a furnace.




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BlocPower Announces $150M in Financing for Building Decarbonization in Low-Income Communities

BlocPower, a climate technology company focused on greening America's buildings, announced a fundraising round of $150 million, including more than $24 million of Series B corporate equity led by VoLo Earth Ventures and $130 million of debt financing led by Goldman Sachs.





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Peterman Brothers Charity Showdown Supports Indianapolis-Area Community Organizations

Throughout March, voters will help the staff at Peterman Brothers select four charity partner organizations for 2023.




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Judge Overturns Berkeley Gas Infrastructure Ban

The decision is a win for the California Restaurant Association, which challenged the ban that took effect in 2020. The city has not decided whether to appeal.




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Mandating High-Efficiency Furnaces Will Limit Consumer Choice, Critics in HVAC Industry Say

Residential gas furnaces must all have a minimum AFUE of 95% beginning in five years. Some in the HVAC industry say the new Department of Energy rule will ultimately hurt homeowners.




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Industry Reacts to Gas Furnace Mandate

This winter, HVAC contractors might be dealing with a wetter winter than years past, coupled with more snowfall than maybe most people would like.




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Tips for Residential Heating Combustion Analysis

The biggest tip is that combustion analysis should be the first and last thing completed during any heating appliance repair.




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Hydronic Furnaces are Changing the Forced Air Heating Game

Using water to transfer heat energy into the home can minimize or even eliminate the issues of dry air and loud operation.




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How a Fan Center Works

For technicians who run across older furnaces where air conditioners were later added, it pays to know how a fan center operates.




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Improving Home Comfort and Energy Efficiency with the Navien NPF Series Hydro-furnace

A homeowner in Pickering, Ontario works with an experienced HVAC pro to improve comfort, efficiency, and energy savings with a high-efficiency hydronic forced-air furnace upgrade.




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NPCAP 1.60 high CPU usage with pcap filter that does not pass anything (Win10)

Posted by Vladimir Soldatov on Sep 17

Hi guys,

I've a setup (Win10, Intel X520, NPCAP 1.60) with relatively high traffic
around 700 Mbit/s and I am trying to test the following cases:
1. Capture everything with empty pcap filter and just print stats with some
period calculating captured data size
2. Capture nothing with an intentionally created filter that does not match
the received traffic at all.
3. Capture some subset of traffic like 10%.

In all the cases, CPU usage...




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CISA and NSA Release Enduring Security Framework Guidance on Identity and Access Management

Posted by CISA on Mar 21

Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) - Defend Today, Secure Tomorrow

You are subscribed to Cybersecurity Advisories for Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. This information
has recently been updated, and is now available.

CISA and NSA Release Enduring Security Framework Guidance on Identity and Access Management [...




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Re: LLMs and refusals

Posted by Jason Ross via Dailydave on Jul 25

It's likely this is going to happen anyway, the new Mistral just dropped
and seems to perform roughly on par with llama3 and gpt4o, so the next wave
of fine tuned versions like dolphin are almost certainly coming soon.

OpenAI also has announced free fine tuning of gpt4o mini until late
September (up to 2m tokens/day) so it may be possible to fine tune around
some of its guardrails for a reasonable cost.




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Re: LLMs and refusals

Posted by David Manouchehri via Dailydave on Jul 28

Breaking down a prompt into multiple steps works pretty well for us. e.g.
first we get generic mean reasons:

[image: image.png]

Then I just shove the mean reasons into the system message (you can do this
with another LLM call instead in real life, I just cheated by copy pasting
since there's already too many screenshots in this email):

[image: image.png]

This is with gpt-4o-2024-05-13 above, but you can see below it works with
Llama 3.1...




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PRANA Hack and Leak Report Release

Posted by Dave Aitel via Dailydave on Aug 02

Cordyceps Analysis Report on PRANA Network Hack and Leak Operation:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oOJbBTUwyK85ZKYAAdwWqxk-sMvqrBqzJYX1oziTFu4/edit?usp=sharing

Lately I've been reading a lot of academic papers, mostly the Research
Handbook on Cyberwarfare
<https://www.elgaronline.com/edcollchap/book/9781803924854/book-part-9781803924854-6.xml>.
Some of them are good papers! JD Work has a paper in it! But also some of
them get...




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Persistence and Strategic Effects

Posted by Dave Aitel via Dailydave on Aug 15

Before there were words, calculated as the softmax of a list of possible
tokens, there were just vectors of nano-electrical potential in cells
soaked in a hormonal brew of electrolytes, operating on a clock cycle of
"slow, but fast enough". In this sense, as we now know
<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10472538/>, we generate words
and we know, in our heads, what we are, in the same way as we generate
limbs, with each...




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Re: Persistence and Strategic Effects

Posted by the grugq via Dailydave on Aug 16

Cyber is Calvinball.

I gave a talk back in 2015 [1] which I think has held up rather well. My argument was that cyber is evolving in
unpredictable ways as we learn more about the domain. That the current state of the art has huge blind spots we aren’t
even thinking about. The next year was, of course, the 2016 disinformation campaign fed by cyber loot.

I feel that a great deal of cyber war literature is based on knowledge derived from...




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sboms and LLMs

Posted by Dave Aitel via Dailydave on Sep 11

People doing software security often use LLMs more as orchestrators than
anything else. But there's so many more complicated ways to use them in our
space coming down the pipe. Obviously the next evolution of SBOMs
<https://www.cisa.gov/resources-tools/resources/cisa-sbom-rama> is that
they represent not just what is contained in the code as some static tree
of library dependencies, but also what that code does in a summary fashion...




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Re: sboms and LLMs

Posted by Isaac Dawson via Dailydave on Sep 12

Well this is rather timely! Although I'm not sure using an LLM for the
behavioral aspect is entirely necessary. I've been working on an
experimental system that does just what you talk about for dependencies (
https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/application_security/dependency_scanning/experiment_libbehave_dependency.html,
pre-alpha!). My solution uses static analysis because I'm a fan of
determinism.

Snark aside, looking at behaviors...




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Re: sboms and LLMs

Posted by Adrian Sanabria via Dailydave on Sep 12

We've been talking about and giving "Beyond the SBOM" presentations for a
while now, but to your point, I don't see anyone actually doing it.

If Solarwinds said "here's a script that will lock down your host firewall
to just the outbound access our tools need to update themselves", that
would be amazing, and would have saved everyone some time and trouble a few
years ago.

[image: image.png]
And Biden's EO...




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Developing Clairvoyance

Posted by Dave Aitel via Dailydave on Sep 30

As you know, humans like to invent comfort words. One of my favorites is
"luck". The theory being that yes, the universe has dice, but they are
loaded in your favor. Properly used, these words are a spell - they allow
us to have courage when a sober mind would quail. But when you become a
professional, you have to give up these crutches. Only poor poker players
believe in "luck".

In computer science, and especially in machine...




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Grace Hopper and the Rebirth of US Conferences

Posted by Dave Aitel via Dailydave on Oct 10

I spent some time watching all the Grace Hopper videos on the youtubes, as
I prepared for what up North is a horrible storm, but here in Miami is, so
far, a breezy and clear day. You can hear her talk about how subroutines
used to be literal handwritten pages of instructions in notebooks. When you
wanted SIN or COS you would go over to whoever had the notebook with the
working version, and copy it out into your code.

It was this experience that...




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Hacking the Edges of Knowledge: LLMs, Vulnerabilities, and the Quest for Understanding

Posted by Dave Aitel via Dailydave on Nov 02

[image: image.png]

It's impossible not to notice that we live in an age of technological
wonders, stretching back to the primitive hominids who dared to ask "Why?"
but also continually accelerating and pulling everything apart while it
does, in the exact same manner as the Universe at large. It is why all the
hackers you know are invested so heavily in Deep Learning right now, as if
someone got on a megaphone at Chaos...




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Episode 4: Scripting Languages

In this Episode, Alexander and Markus talk about scripting languages. Topics include the definition of what a scripting language is, typical usage scenarios, performance issues, programming styles and IDE support. In later Episodes we will talk about more specific topics, such as dynamic typing, reflection, functional programming as well as specific languages such as Ruby.




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Episode 7: Error Handling

This week, Arno and Markus take a look at error handling at the architectural level. They discuss the different kinds of errors, the groups of people who need to know about them and proven high-level approaches. Later episodes will investigate more technical aspects of error handling, such as idioms for using exceptions or a discussion of checked vs. unchecked exceptions.




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Episode 8: Interview Eric Evans

Eric Evans is the author of the well known Domain-Driven Design book. In his day job he works as a consultant and coach for his own company, Domain Language. In this interview, Eric talks about the essential building blocks of domain-driven design as well as about a set of best practices on how to address complex projects. In a third part, he elaborates on the relationship of domain-driven design and MDSD/MDA.




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Episode 9: Remoting Pt.1 and Listener Feedback

This Episode as well as the next one take a look at remoting infrastructures such as CORBA, .NET Remoting or Webservices. In this first part we will take a look at why remote communication is necessary in the first place, what remoting middleware can do for you as well as which other middleware technologies exist in addition to OO-RPC systems, such as messaging middleware. Finally, we conclude with a brief overview of what the broker pattern can do for us in the context of remoting middleware.




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Episode 16: MDSD Pt. 3, Hands-On

This episode provides a hands-on guided tour through a simple model-driven software project. It is based on an actual code sample (see link below) and takes a look at the typical steps of real-life code generation: prototypical implementation, defining the metamodel, reading a model into a metamodel instance, writing templates and validating the model. The example for the episode uses openArchitectureWare as a generator environment, but the overall approach is tool independent. This episode is the first in a new category "code/technology" that discusses technical concepts based on actual code. Please give feedback whether you find this format useful or not.




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Episode 17: Feedback and Roadmap

This is a short episode that outlines the upcoming episodes and interviews, as well as reports on some listener feedback.




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Episode 18: Resource Management

In this episode Michael and our guest Prashant Jain talk about patterns for resource management. Efficient management of resources is critical in the execution of any kind of software. Ranging from embedded software in a mobile device to software in a large enterprise server, it is important that the resources, such as memory, threads, file handles, or network connections, are managed efficiently to allow the systems to function properly and effectively. Michael and Prashant discuss various patterns, such as Lazy Acquisition, Caching, Leasing and Evictor and explain when, why, and how to apply them for effective resource management.