The Insider News

The Accidental Businessman[^]:

When I first started digging into the bowels of the Internet, I was fascinated by how many of its protocols—like HTTP and SMTP, for example—were entirely text based. At first, this struck me as a very odd thing; text is inefficient, and machines, not humans, are meant to interpret protocols. A binary setup would save bytes — bytes! — and be all-around more manageable by software. It wasn’t long, however, before I realized the true genius behind this decision.

Computerworld[^]:

Effective immediately, developers must fix vulnerabilities in their apps rated "critical" or "important" -- the top two rankings in Microsoft's four-step threat-scoring system -- within 180 days of being notified by the MSRC. The penalty for failure: Microsoft will remove the vulnerable app from the pertinent app store.... Microsoft's own Windows, Office or Azure apps are also covered by the new policy.

ZDNet[^]:

Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner shared some new hints about what's coming during what he called Microsoft's "biggest innovation year ever" during Day 3 of Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference... We already knew Microsoft had committed to launching Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2, Visual Studio 2013, SQL Server 2014, System Center 2012 R2 and a host of other "Blue" wave of products during this coming fiscal year... here are a few things I thought worth calling out...

TechHive[^]:

How Bitcoins are actually created is all too often overlooked. The currency isn’t minted at will in a factory setting. Bitcoins don’t just magically appear out of thin air. Instead, they’re the products of complex software algorithms that run day and night on incredibly powerful computers. So who, exactly, has the pioneering spirit to “mine” the virtual currency, converting CPU and GPU cycles into something of real-world value? It takes time, dedication, and an extraordinary amount of water-cooled PC hardware.

Threatpost[^]:

Bug bounty programs can be as much as 100 times more cost-effective for finding security vulnerabilities than hiring full-time security researchers to do the same thing. New research from the University of California at Berkeley, which focused on bug bounty programs run by Google and Mozilla, found that each of these programs has cost the vendor about $400,000 over the course of three years, far less than it would’ve cost to hire employees to find the same number of vulnerabilities.

jeffhandley.com[^]:

It’s about time, right‽ In fact, it has been 3 and a half years since I first declared that getting RIA Services open-sourced was my stretch goal. Since then, I’ve seen dozens of forum posts, hundreds of tweets, and over 13,000 page-views for my original declaration. There was even a time during a LIDNUG call when Scott Guthrie was directly asked what it was going to take to get RIA Services open-sourced. This has been an important topic to a lot of people for a long time, and I am finally happy to announce it’s happening!

BERG[^]:

I drew a parallel between the Apple Newton’s sophisticated, complicated hand-writing recognition and the Palm Pilot’s approach of getting humans to learn a new way to write, i.e. Graffiti. The connection I was trying to make was that there is a deliberate design approach that makes use of the plasticity and adaptability of humans to meet computers (more than) half way. Connecting this to computer vision and robotics I said something like: "What if, instead of designing computers and robots that relate to what we can see, we meet them half-way – covering our environment with markers, codes and RFIDs, making a robot-readable world".

Wired.com[^]:

Today, at Dropbox’s first-ever developers conference, the company is officially launching a new set of coding tools designed to push Dropbox into every corner of your digital life. Not content to stay sequestered inside the box, the company’s co-founders are unveiling ways for developers to meld their service with every app on every device you own.

Learning by Shipping[^]:

Targeting multiple operating systems has been an industry goal or non-goal depending on your perspective since some of the earliest days of computing. For both app developers and platform builders, the evolution of their work follow typical patterns—patterns where their goals might be aligned or manageable in the short term but become increasingly divergent over time. While history does not always repeat itself, the ingredients for a repeat of cross-platform woes currently exist in the domain of mobile apps.

Paulo Ortins[^]:

Two years ago, I was working in a project where our goal was to write a web excel-like application to calculate products/services prices... This project became so big and we didn’t use any types of automated tests (our QA team was doing manual tests) that the project spent more time being tested than being developed. Each little change, the project spent hours, hours and hours with the QA team. One day I went to a developer meeting and talked about my problem with others programmers. They suggested to me learn about unit tests, acceptance tests and TDD.

The Goo Software Blog[^]:

ASCII is the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It uses 7-bit numbers to represent the letters, numerals and common punctuation used in American English. The fact that ASCII uses 7-bit numbers means there are 2-to-the-power-7 or 128 possible values it can represent, from 0 to 127 inclusive. Each of those 128 values is assigned to a character.... ASCII really should have been named ASCIIWOA: the American Standard Code for Information Exchange With Other Americans.

PandoDaily[^]:

Software programming? Yeah it’s an okay way to make a living. But the real money is in teaching. Or at least that’s the recent experience of Scott Allen, a programmer and teacher the tech-y online education platform Pluralsight.com. Allen has earned more than $1.8 million through fees and royalties from Pluralsight over the last five years.... Both higher education and journalism have recently had their economic foundations rocked. The purists in both industries are wary of the democratizing potential of the Internet to replace august institutions of old. Meanwhile, others hope the Web may be an answer for solving some of the innate problems.

Secure Mac Programming[^]:

Back when I was a student, the way you talked to other people on the internet was via Usenet. The language we used, while still called “English”, was slightly different from the language we use today. One small example of this difference is that there was still an outside chance that the word “hacker” could be a badge of honour, an indication of one who wanted to understand the principles of a system and how they could manipulate it.

Ars Technica[^]:

In December 2011, the Department of Homeland Security notified both the EDA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that there was a potential malware infection within the two agencies' systems. The NOAA isolated and cleaned up the problem within a few weeks.... EDA's CIO, fearing that the agency was under attack from a nation-state, insisted instead on a policy of physical destruction. The EDA destroyed not only (uninfected) desktop computers but also printers, cameras, keyboards, and even mice.

guardian.co.uk[^]:

Take Google's bizarre practice of publicly killing products. To most companies, killing a product is a shameful thing. It disappoints customers, and it hurts your own ego because it's an admission that you failed. Most companies hide their product cancellations... Google does the exact opposite – a couple of times a year it trumpets to the world that it's terminating products and services that millions of people love and rely on. Google isn't merely up front about these cancellations; it's downright cheerful... If you look at the world through the eyes of the scientific method, every Google project is an experiment, and experiments must be periodically reviewed. When an experiment is completed, you either choose to follow up on it, or you terminate it and move on to something else.

Quote:

A Muslim search engine that blocks forbidden content “according to Islamic law” was launched today, a press release stated.

‘Halalgoogling’ fetches results from leading search engines such as Google and Bing and has a built-in “advanced special filtering system that blocks Haram content according to the Law of Islam”, the press release said.