The Insider News

ScottGu's Blog[^]:

Today we are releasing a major set of improvements to Windows Azure. Below is a short-summary of just a few of them...

A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering[^]:

If you pay attention to these things, you've heard that there's a new piece of government-issued malware making the rounds. It's called Flame (or sometimes Skywiper), and it's basically the most sophisticated -- or most bloated -- piece of malicious software ever devised.

Bocoup[^]:

The novelty and promise of Third-Party JavaScript are clearly reflected in these far-reaching changes that I witnessed while time travelling. Like with any browser tech, there is a bit of a waiting game we have to play while support catches up. Nevertheless, I feel that it’s in your best interest to have a general idea of the up-and-coming technology.

Throwing Fire[^]:

Time and time again you hear about a company having all of their users' passwords, or "password hashes", compromised, and often there's a press response including one or more prominent security researchers demonstrating how 1000 users had the password "batman", and so on. It's surprising how often this happens considering we've had ways to do password authentication that don't expose users' passwords, or at least makes it significantly harder to crack them, for several decades.

Stevey's Blog Rants[^]:

Please — learn to type. This should be a non-issue, NOT one of the industry's dirty secrets that nobody talks about. Tell your boss you're going to take the time. Get your employer to pay for the software. Have them send you off to a course, if necessary, so you can't weasel out of it. Do whatever it takes.

UNIX Unleashed[^]:

Choosing the right shell to use is an important decision because you will spend considerable time and effort learning to use a shell, and even more time actually using the shell. The right choice will allow you to benefit from the many powerful features of UNIX with minimal effort.

PC Gamer[^]:

John Carmack has been building a virtual reality headset in his spare time. He’s showing it to people behind closed doors at this year’s E3, tucked away inside the Bethesda booth, and described it as “probably the best VR demo the world has ever seen.”

The Economist[^]:

As robots become more autonomous, the notion of computer-controlled machines facing ethical decisions is moving out of the realm of science fiction and into the real world. Society needs to find ways to ensure that they are better equipped to make moral judgments than HAL was.

The Clayman Institute for Gender Research[^]:

Asked to picture a computer programmer, most of us describe the archetypal computer geek, a brilliant but socially-awkward male. We imagine him as a largely noctural creature, passing sleepless nights writing computer code. According to workplace researchers, this stereotype of the lone male computer whiz is self-perpetuating, and it keeps the computer field overwhelming male. It may be surprising, then, to learn that the earliest computer programmers were women and that the programming field was once stereotyped as female.

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency[^]:

Forget Facebook. Forget Groupon. Forget everything you know about Silicon Valley. Because Ponzify isn’t like other tech companies. We don’t promise results. We show them to you, on a piece of paper, that has your name and a monetary figure that increases every month.

The Verge[^]:

Thirty-one. That’s the number of months it took Palm, Inc. to go from the darling of International CES 2009 to a mere shadow of itself, a nearly anonymous division inside the HP machine without a hardware program and without the confidence of its owners. Thirty-one months is just barely longer than a typical American mobile phone contract. Understanding exactly how Palm could drive itself into irrelevance in such a short period of time will forever be a subject of Valley lore.

ThoughtStream.new[^]:

Anders Is 100% Correct. No ifs, ands or buts about it. Maintaining large JavaScript apps is nearly, if not entirely, impossible. But Derick, You Write Large JavaScript Apps... No, actually, I don’t.