The Insider News

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...

All this[^]:

Even if you never visit the Google Reader site itself, there’s a good chance the feed readers you do use—NetNewsWire, Reeder, Vienna, whatever—use Google Reader to sync the status of feed subscriptions across your devices. And if you’re a blogger, the same is true of most of the subscribers to your site’s feed—Google Reader has become almost everyone’s master subscription list.

Github[^]:

Technical writing should teach someone how to do something. The easiest path to this is to be clear. A good start is by answering a couple implicit questions your reader will have. Why should I care? What new thing will I be able to do?

Google Apps update alerts[^]:

As we announced last year, we support the latest version of Google Chrome (which automatically updates whenever it detects that a new version of the browser is available) as well as the current and prior major release of Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on a rolling basis. Each time a new version of one of these browsers is released, we begin supporting the update and stop supporting the third-oldest version.

Computer[^]:

On the occasion of the presentation of the Computer Society's and Hitachi's inaugural Tsutomu Kanai Award for distributed computing, Computer visited recipient Ken Thompson at Lucent's Bell Labs. We were interested in learning about Thompson's early work on Unix and his more recent work in distributed computing. We were especially interested in learning about the creative process within Bell Labs and his sense of where computer science was heading.

DailyJS[^]:

JavaScript has two parents: Scheme and Self. We can thank Self for all of the object-orientedness of JavaScript and indeed we do in our code and our tutorials. However, Scheme played just as important a role in the language’s design, and we would do ourselves ill to overlook JavaScript’s functional heritage.

Hal's (Im)Perfect Vision[^]:

As you may know this week Microsoft killed off the Forefront brand, killed some of the Forefront products, and renamed others to reflect their real strategic alignment. This is the natural outcome of a process that started about four years ago, and most specifically two and half years ago, as the economic downturn and resulting budget cuts at Microsoft collided with its ambitions in the security products space.

TechHive[^]:

The iPhone 5 is the latest smartphone to hop on-board the LTE (Long Term Evolution) bandwagon, and for good reason: The mobile broadband standard is fast, flexible, and designed for the future. Yet LTE is still a young technology, full of growing pains. Here’s an overview of where it came from, where it is now, and where it might go from here.

Rainer Brockerhoff[^]:

People keep asking why Apple didn’t opt for the micro-USB connector. The answer is simple: that connector isn’t smart enough. It has only 5 pins: +5V, Ground, 2 digital data pins, and a sense pin, so most of the dock connector functions wouldn’t work – only charging and syncing would. Also, the pins are so small that no current plug/connector manufacturer allows the 2A needed for iPad charging. Note that this refers to individual pins; I’ve been told that several devices manage to get around this by some trick or other, but I couldn’t find any standard for doing so.

Vimeo[^]:

Since 2005 we showed a prototype of this film at the end of our talks. Some people suggested to put it online, so we made a new, complete one: it shows each and every Unicode 6.0 character. 109.242 characters in total.

AnandTech[^]:

Given Apple's reliance on fully licensed ARM cores in the past, the expected performance gains and unpublishable information that started all of this I concluded Apple's A6 SoC likely featured two ARM Cortex A15 cores. It turns out I was wrong. But pleasantly surprised. The A6 is the first Apple SoC to use its own ARMv7 based processor design. The CPU core(s) aren't based on a vanilla A9 or A15 design from ARM IP, but instead are something of Apple's own creation.