The Insider News

DataGenetics[^]:

There are 10,000 possible combinations that the digits 0-9 can be arranged to form a 4-digit pin code. Out of these ten thousand codes, which is the least commonly used? If you were given the task of trying to crack a random credit card by repeatedly trying PIN codes, what order should you try guessing to maximize your chances of selecting the correct number in the shortest time? If you had to make predication about what the least commonly used 4-digit PIN is, what would be your guess?

Mashable[^]:

Circumstances have led to a de-facto monopolized market, Susan Crawford argues. According to a newly released study by the New America Foundation, “In the future, consumers wishing to subscribe to higher speed Internet services will likely face a near monopoly from cable providers, as telephone providers have halted wide-scale upgrades of their networks.” To make matters worse, major cable companies don’t compete with each other in local markets, which they have effectively divided up. The result, as the study concludes, is that in many places, you will soon only have one choice when connecting to the Internet.

NYTimes.com[^]:

Inspired by a pillar of antiquity, the Library of Alexandria, Brewster Kahle has a grand vision for the Internet Archive, the giant aggregator and digitizer of data, which he founded and leads. “We want to collect all the books, music and video that has ever been produced by humans,” Mr. Kahle said. As of Tuesday, the archive’s online collection will include every morsel of news produced in the last three years by 20 different channels, encompassing more than 1,000 news series that have generated more than 350,000 separate programs devoted to news.

GeekWire[^]:

Today, the Redmond-based company officially unveiled the new pricing scheme for Office 365. Pricing is simple: $8.33 per month, $99.99 per year (billed annually). It’s an example of the company’s shift toward subscription-based pricing. Instead of simply launching a product for one computer, and requiring multiple licenses for each device, Microsoft’s shift to the cloud is allowing for a more robust experience, plus upgrades to future Office versions as long as users continue to pay the subscription fee.

iFixit[^]:

The Kindle Fire HD has landed on the doorstep of iFixit. Naturally, we've embarked on the epic voyage of exploring the electronic innards of the Kindle Fire HD. What will we find? Follow along as we methodically break down each component.

Scott Hanselman[^]:

Software doesn't work. I'm shocked at how often we put up with it. Here's just a few issues - literally off the top of my head - that I personally dealt with last week.

Vimeo[^]:

We’ll explore the evolution of CSS’s layout capabilities from CSS 1 to CSS 3 and beyond. Along the way we’ll talk about why equal-height columns were such big a problem, what the CSS Working Group is currently working on, and what challenges are presented by taking print design capabilities and translating them for the Web.

Boris Smus[^]:

When developing in a particular environment, say Android or Cocoa, we are subconsciously aware that the APIs are essentially fixed and beyond our control. The web, however, is built by many different companies and individuals, giving consumers of the platform (web developers) a unique chance to also become contributors to its evolution. Rather than griping about how broken something on the web is, remember that you can play a part in fixing it!

Jacques Mattheij[^]:

To make it easier to figure out what you consider to be programming I’ve made a handy little list in ascending order of what I think is easy and what I think is complex. For the record, I think that all of these except the first are programming. Programming to me is defined as making some agent perform a task, no matter whether or not that agent is a computer or simply another person.

New Scientist[^]:

One goal of scientific publication is to share results in enough detail to allow other research teams to reproduce them and build on them. However, many recent reports have raised the alarm that a shocking amount of the published literature in fields ranging from cancer biology to psychology is not reproducible. Pharmaceuticals company Bayer, for example, recently revealed that it fails to replicate about two-thirds of published studies identifying possible drug targets.

.net magazine[^]:

One of the most common questions I get asked is how to get started with data visualisations. Beyond following blogs, you need to practise – and to practise, you need to understand the tools available. In this article, I want to introduce you to 20 different tools for creating visualisations: from simple charts to complex graphs, maps and infographics. Almost everything here is available for free, and some you have probably installed already.

Read Write Web[^]:

Microsoft is updating all of its major product lines this year, with the new Windows 8, Office, Windows Server and Internet Explorer releases, plus ongoing updates to the software used by its Xbox gaming platform. But while Ballmer called the year “epic,” he appears ready to if not jettison those products, at least subsume them in a new wave of devices around which Microsoft can develop platforms. “I think when you look forward, our core capability will be software, [but] you’ll probably think of us more as a devices-and-services company,” Ballmer told the Times. “Which is a little different. Software powers devices and software powers these cloud services, but it’s a different form of delivery...."

ITworld[^]:

Since free software is so pervasive these days, it might not be very hard to find something within a company's product portfolio that depends greatly on free or open source software. Once discovered, all it takes is a claim of license violation like this one to shut down that software. Red Hat's legal-fu is massive, because it's using the fact that there is still a lot of non-compliance of the GPL out there to its clear advantage.

Ars Technica[^]:

Researchers have uncovered active malware attacks that exploit a critical and previously unknown vulnerability in the latest versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. The attacks are being waged by the same malware group that recently exploited a separate, zero-day vulnerability in Oracle's Java software framework. The attacks install the Poison Ivy backdoor trojan when unsuspecting people browse a booby-trapped website using a fully patched version of Windows XP running the latest versions of IE 7 or IE 8...