The Insider News

CodeProject[^]:

Welcome to our continuing series of Code Project interviews in which we talk to developers about their backgrounds, projects, interests and pet peeves. In this installment we talk to Hal Rottenberg, who claims to not actually be a programmer. We’ll see about that…

Troy Hunt[^]:

It doesn’t matter how many pages you’re loading securely or how many padlock icons or vendor certifications you drop on the site, one you start sending auth cookies around insecurely, you’re toast. It’s completely pointless to secure those banking details in transit but then let the auth cookie which can load the financial data back up float around in the clear. That is a very insufficient use of HTTPS indeed.

philliphaydon.com[^]:

Everyone has their own opinions about what Microsoft is doing with Open Source Software, whats working, whats not, that isn’t the point of this post. This is about what I would like to see, and why.

RubySource[^]:

By now, you should begin to see the benefits of using something like Vagrant. I can now create a reproducible enviroment using nothing more than a text file included in the repository of my application. No more “works on my machine”, no more hair pulling.... If you are a Chef fan, Puppet die hard or a simple shell purist, you can provision services with Vagrant.

Buddy Lindsey[^]:

You need to find a phrase in over 200 files worth of code. Manual searching is not a feasible option. If you are like me you know about grep, but it has always made you nervous. It is so powerful reading the man page was like a tech manual for an engine. Fortunately, getting the benefits of grep with little pain is easy, once you finally figure it out.

siavosh's blog[^]:

Concurrency: avoid it if you can. If not, then remember that with great power comes great responsibility.

CNET News[^]:

In the common retelling of Apple's history, it was Steve Jobs' and Steve Wozniak's second computer, the Apple II, that launched their fledgling company toward stratospheric growth and financial success. The machine's triumph as a single platform for business software, games, artistic tools -- and more -- set the stage for the later debut of the first Mac, and later OS X and iDevices. What many forget -- or may not even know -- is that when the Apple II was introduced at the inaugural West Coast Computer Faire in April, 1977, it suffered from what, in retrospect, was a glaring shortcoming: It had no disk drive.

net-security.org[^]:

The arrival of widespread public Wi-Fi access across London Underground has been broadly welcomed by the general public, particularly those with smartphones and tablets who want to maintain internet access inside stations in order to continue to use their devices.... However, the use of any open, public Wi-Fi connection poses substantial risks to data and device security. The advent of Bluetooth a few years ago saw the growth of Bluejacking, where open Bluetooth connections on handsets were hijacked or bombarded with unwanted messages. Widespread use of Wi-Fi-enabled devices in a small enclosed area such as a Tube platform risks the devices and their related data traffic being targeted by opportunist hackers.

Joel on Software[^]:

The fastest growing industry in the US right now, even during this time of slow economic growth, is probably the patent troll protection racket industry. Lawsuits surrounding software patents have more than tripled since 1999.... What does this sound like? Yes, it’s a textbook case of a protection racket. It is organized crime, plain and simple. It is an abuse of the legal system, an abuse of the patent system, and a moral affront.

Wired.com[^]:

Everybody knows a computer is a machine made of metal and plastic, with microchip cores turning streams of electrons into digital reality. A century from now, though, computers could look quite different. They might be made from neurons and chemical baths, from bacterial colonies and pure light, unrecognizable to our old-fashioned 21st century eyes. Far-fetched? A little bit. But a computer is just a tool for manipulating information. That's not a task wedded to some particular material form. After all, the first computers were people, and many people alive today knew a time when fingernail-sized transistors, each representing a single bit of information, were a great improvement on unreliable vacuum tubes.

Henri Bergius in Berlin, Germany[^]:

iPad is three years old now, and many tech blogs are writing stories to reflect what has changed. More than 100 million of them have been sold, alongside other popular tablets like the Kindle Fire and Nexus 7. But originally the reception was quite sceptical. Many made the argument that the tablet was "just a big iPod Touch or iPhone"... The funny thing about this argument is that — while the skepticism was misplaced — the core point was true: The iPad is just a big iPhone. Or to put it the other way, the iPhone is just a pocket-sized iPad.