The Insider News

SpiderLabs Anterior[^]:

Recently, while scrounging around our spam traps, I spotted this ordinary piece of malicious spam. It uses a very simple social engineering trick. So out of curiosity, I downloaded the file and checked out what it does.

Pingdom[^]:

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) has been around since 1988, which makes it ancient in Internet terms. And although it’s still used by hundreds of thousands of users around the world, IRC has seen a dramatic downturn in usage. We have talked to the creator of IRC, and others, about why the once so widely used technology has seemingly fallen out of favor with so many users.

iVPN.net[^]:

It may only be April, but 2012 has already seen a worrying number of legislative acts hit the headlines that threaten online privacy. From the entertainment industry-backed SOPA in the USA, to the UK’s surveillance state-issued CCDP, 2012 has seen governments and industries across the western world try to put the brakes on the vibrant, free-thinking, online ecology that has grown over the last decade.

Ars Technica[^]:

Steve Barnet is hiring, but not for an ordinary IT job. Barnet is looking to fill what may be the coolest Unix administrator job opening in the world—literally. Plenty of IT jobs exist in extreme and exotic locales, but the WIPAC IT team runs what is indisputably the world’s most remote data center: a high-performance computing cluster sitting atop a two-mile thick glacier at the South Pole.

TechCrunch[^]:

Sure, Microsoft is still making plenty of money — billions — off of their consumer goods. But the decent quarterly numbers they reported last week in some ways mask what is really happening: Microsoft is slowing morphing into a full-on enterprise company.

NYTimes.com[^]:

Hillman Curtis, a former rock musician who became a prominent first-generation Web designer and a visionary figure in the Internet’s evolution from a predominantly text-based medium to the multimedia platform it is today, died on Wednesday at his home in Brooklyn. He was 51.

The Code Project[^]:

Post developer and IT-related news to the Insider News for a chance to win an Amazon gift card.

Need for Air[^]:

If you build a website, you will want your own domain name, which means you will need to manage your Domain Name System (DNS). While there is nothing very complicated here, the info is scattered across the Internet, so I decided to write a “cheat sheet”-like tutorial which will hopefully save you some time!

Ars Technica[^]:

When I think about the iPad as a sysadmin's tool, I don't think about it in terms of can/can't. Obviously, the iPad can be a sysadmin tool. Heck, I used Windows Mobile 6 phones as sysadmin tools. It wasn’t a lot of fun, but if you were really far from a laptop, tin cans with string, or a sharp stick and soft dirt, you could do it.

Two Lives Left[^]:

Presenting Cargo-Bot. The first game programmed entirely on iPad using Codea. Cargo-Bot is a puzzle game where you teach a robot how to move crates. Sounds simple, right?

Math ∩ Programming[^]:

Here's a thorough and rigorous introduction to the study of the complexity of strings. What we would really love to do is be able to look at a string of binary digits and decide how “random” it is. And yet, by the immutable laws of probability, we cannot speak of how random one particular outcome of an experiment is. We need a new notion that overcomes this difficulty.

Queness[^]:

Firefox, thanks in part to the indespensible Firebug extension, has long been a crucial tool for web developers. But Chrome is fast, sleek and has its own vast array of free extensions. Here are a few that make it equally useful for web devs.

BBC[^]:

The ZX Spectrum is 30 years old. The successor to Sir Clive Sinclair's ZX81 - at the time the world's best selling consumer computer - it introduced colour "high resolution" graphics and sound.

iotic.com[^]:

This is the story of the creation of a new font, Avería: the average of all the fonts on my computer. The field of typography has long fascinated me, and I love playing with creative programming ideas, so it was perhaps inevitable that the idea came to me one day of “generative typography”.