The Insider News

j00ru//vx tech blog[^]:

Several months back we have been playing with different file systems on various system platforms, examining the security posture and robustness of numerous device drivers’ implementations. One of the configurations we spent some time on was the commonly used NTFS on Microsoft Windows – as the file system is rather complex and still largely unexplored, we could expect its device driver to have some bugs to that would be easily uncovered. In addition, it was certainly tempting to be able to simply insert a USB stick, have it automatically mounted by the operating system and immediately compromise it by triggering a vulnerability in ntfs.sys. We had some promising results during the process...

RoughlyDrafted Magazine[^]:

Windows Enthusiast Ed Bott of ZDNet compared the skepticism and apathy facing Windows 8 to the gradual adoption of Windows XP just over a decade ago, making the case that nothing has changed in over ten years and that everything is fine and there’s nothing for Microsoft to worry about. He’s wrong, here’s why.

CNET News[^]:

The software giant asked the exec to deliver a new, quality operating system and do it on time. This week, we'll find out if his sharp elbows and turf fighting were worth it.

PCWorld[^]:

This is a heady time for Microsoft as it rolls out an ambitious OS and polishes off its productivity suite, billed as "the new Office." At the suite's core is Office 2013—the desktop applications. Changes include a sleek appearance that reflects the look of Windows 8, functional improvements, and tie-ins to SharePoint and SkyDrive for storing documents online. In addition, the various components of Office Web Apps improve productivity in the cloud, while Windows 8 Surface RT tablets get their own flavor of Office.

InfoWorld[^]:

An academic paper from law professor Colleen Chien of Santa Clara University looks more closely at the challenges patents pose for startups. She found 40 percent of the respondents to her survey reported trolls causing significant operational impact on their young businesses, including delays in hiring, undesirable changes of strategy, and loss -- or elimination -- of value. She also found that patent trolls were frequently used as a buyer for the patents of failed startups.

Ars Technica[^]:

Windows 8 is a major release, and it is very different from the Windows before it. And yet it's strangely familiar: when you peek under the covers of the new user interface and look at how it all works, it's not quite the revolution that Microsoft is claiming it to be.

All this[^]:

The people who make the hyperlocal weather app, Dark Sky, have opened up their API so regular mortals can access the app’s short-term rainfall forecast. As it happens, there’s more information in the API than is presented in the Dark Sky app itself...

Tobi Lehman[^]:

I am reading Jesse Storimer’s fantastic little book “Working with Unix Processes” right now, and inspiration struck after the second chapter “Processes Have Parents”. When a Unix process is born, it is a literal copy of it’s parent process. For example, if I am typing ls into a bash prompt, the bash process spawns a copy of itself using the fork system call. The parent process (bash) has an id which is associated with the child process (ls). Using the Unix ps command, you can see the parent process id of every process on the system.

Haacked![^]:

In recent times, there’s been some pessimism around .NET open source. There’s the occasional rustle of blog posts declaring that someone is “leaving .NET”. There’s also this perception that with Windows 8, the Windows team is trying its best to relegate .NET into the dustbin of legacy platforms. I don’t necessarily believe that to be the case (intentionally), but I do know that many .NET developers feel disillusioned.

Preshing on Programming[^]:

I’ve been rambling on about lock-free programming subjects such as acquire and release semantics and weakly-ordered CPUs. I’ve tried to make these subjects approachable and understandable, but at the end of the day, talk is cheap! Nothing drives the point home better than a concrete example. If there’s one thing that characterizes a weakly-ordered CPU, it’s that one CPU core can see values change in shared memory in a different order than another core wrote them. That’s what I’d like to demonstrate in this post using pure C++11.

Yuzhikov.com[^]:

Restoration of distorted images is one of the most interesting and important problems of image processing - from the theoretical, as well as from the practical point of view. Why is there almost no means for correction of blurring and defocusing (except unsharp mask) - maybe it is impossible to do this at all? In fact, it is possible - development of a respective mathematical theory started approximately 70 years ago, but like other algorithms of image processing, deblurring algorithms became wide-used just recently.

HoneyMap[^]:

You are looking at the HoneyMap, a real-time world map which visualizes attacks captured by honeypots of the Honeynet Project. Red markers on the map represent attackers, yellow markers are targets (honeypot sensors). Yes, you are looking at real attacks which are captured by our honeypot sensors. Those sensors emulate vulnerable systems and record incoming attacks.

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

Microsoft has created lots of confusion with the introduction of Windows RT, but I think everyone who does understand the difference between Windows RT and Windows 8 is making things worse by the way they are explaining it. Basically the difference is ”Windows 8 runs both existing and new applications while Windows RT only runs new applications”.

ZDNet[^]:

A Facebook friend of mine, who'll remain nameless, taunted me a bit after my, "Windows 8 Tablets: The most successful tablets ever." article, saying that, "Our developers hate it." I told him that his developers need to "Grow up" and get with the program (pun possibly intended). There's no need to cling to the previous version of any operating system, although Windows XP is/was the proverbial bomb, it just makes you look like an anachronist, luddite or someone who refuses to change. Either you have to be mature enough change with the times and be flexible or you need to go flip burgers at a fast food restaurant.