The Insider News

Ars Technica[^]:

OK, you've got us. The jig is up. There is no use for absurdly large prime numbers—yet (we’ll explain that eventually). Slightly less ludicrous prime numbers do have a point, which we'll describe here. One modern-day instance of practical use for prime numbers is in RSA encryption, which allows two parties to pass secret messages back and forth using independent encryption and decryption codes. In RSA, someone who wants to receive a private message will publish a product of two large prime numbers as their "public key," which senders can use to encrypt messages intended for the key publisher.

MIT Technology Review[^]:

When the New York Times revealed this month that hackers had recently breached its networks, what turned the heads of security experts wasn’t that the attacks had occurred. It was a top antivirus company’s unusually candid admission about the limits of its own technology.

pandodaily.com[^]:

The battle for the future of computing is no longer a contest between tablets and PCs. Wearable computing is the hot new category, with startups like Pebble introducing “smart” watches while Apple reportedly tests a similar device (which former PandoDaily staffer Greg Kumparak asked for way back in August) in its Cupertino headquarters and Google prepares its own “smart” glasses. Wearable computing in general, and smartwatches in particular, could be, as The Verge’s Chris Ziegler writes, “the Next Big Thing in consumer tech.”

Computer History Museum[^]:

Opening the files that constituted the source code for Photoshop 1.0, I felt a bit like Howard Carter as he first breached the tomb of King Tutankhamen. What wonders awaited me? I was not disappointed by what I found. Indeed, it was a marvelous journey to open up the cunning machinery of an application I’d first used over 20 years ago.

Robert's talk[^]:

We would like to, in a factual manner, break down what the possible outcomes of having a majority of web browsers based on WebKit are, for web browser vendors and developers alike. Let’s start with some common questions...

Mark's Blog[^]:

A change that’s been occurring in the scareware industry over the last few years is that most scareware today also classifies as ransomware.... Without advanced malware cleaning skills, a system infected with ransomware is usable only to give in to the blackmailer’s demands to pay. In this blog post I describe how different variants of ransomware lock the user out of their computer, how they persist across reboots, and how you can use Sysinternals Autoruns to hunt down and kill most current ransomware variants from an infected system.

NYTimes.com[^]:

The Internet, it seems, has found its version of vinyl chic. Just as the LP has enjoyed a second spin among retro-minded music fans, animated GIFs — the choppy, crude snippets of video loops that hearken back to dial-up modems — are enjoying an unlikely vogue as the digital accessory of the moment.

Photon Storm[^]:

Apparently pixel art is cool once again, and if you are reading this blog, chances are, you like pixel art. As my first actual article on the site, I thought I’d make a little tutorial on how to pixel your own 16*16 sprite, that you can use as a favicon for your website or game. There are many ways to go about pushing pixels, and this is just one of them. Sadly, this tutorial will not teach you how to draw or come up with nice ideas, sorry. Also I will not go into program-specific details, you need to have some basic familiarity with the software you want to use.

davidmichaelross.com[^]:

We live in a wonderful time when programmers can be so naive about the workings of Big Business. I’m not being the least bit snarky there, either. I see so many young developers working in startups and progressive agencies, blissfully unaware of just how poisonous corporate culture can be sometimes. But they do tend to live in a tech-savvy bubble, and sometimes it’s helpful to see how “real people” use the tools our industry gives them. I once worked for a company run off a couple Excel spreadsheets, just like JP Morgan....

Jacques Mattheij[^]:

Over the years I’ve owned quite a few computers. An endless series of PC compatibles that mostly differed from each other in CPU speed or memory capacity. But before the PC era computers were a bit different in that they differed vastly from each other. The advent of the PC homogenized personal computing to a large extent, this is now due to the proliferation of mobile platforms and various tinkerer devices (Raspi, Arduino, etc) changing again but for the longest time it seemed as though x86 was what computing was all about.