The Insider News

MIT Technology Review[^]:

Researchers have created software that predicts when and where disease outbreaks might occur based on two decades of New York Times articles and other online data. The research comes from Microsoft and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. The system could someday help aid organizations and others be more proactive in tackling disease outbreaks or other problems, says Eric Horvitz, distinguished scientist and codirector at Microsoft Research. “I truly view this as a foreshadowing of what’s to come,” he says. “Eventually this kind of work will start to have an influence on how things go for people.”

Web Axe[^]:

There’s a fine line between inducing conversation and creating havoc. In the field of web accessibility (which is very complex and fragile already), it seems that this line has been crossed at least a couple times lately.... Web celebs have created confusion when the answer was already agreed upon by most web accessibility professionals. So, I won’t write about NodeJS and Spring if you other experts stick with your area of expertise. Many times, we should leave accessibility to the experts. Agreed?

OS News[^]:

On January 31st, 1997, Final Fantasy VII was released to the Japanese public. This single game both revolutionized and raised the bar of Japanese style console role playing games. It success was so staggering, it placed Squaresoft firmly on top the the the genre, displacing the Dragon Quest series created by the rival Enix company. The story of how this game came to be has a story more expansive than the game itself.

Mozilla Hacks[^]:

Mozilla is excited to announce that we’ve achieved a major milestone in WebRTC development: WebRTC RTCPeerConnection interoperability between Firefox and Chrome. This effort was made possible because of the close collaboration between the open Web community and engineers from both Mozilla and Google. RTCPeerConnection (also known simply as PeerConnection or PC) interoperability means that developers can now create Firefox WebRTC applications that make direct audio/video calls to Chrome WebRTC applications without having to install a third-party plugin.

8th Light[^]:

When someone shares their code, the respectful and honorable thing to do is to carefully critique that code. No one's code is above criticism. Criticism is, after all, how we learn. Respectfully criticizing someone's code is one of the highest honors you can pay to the author. Just remember, you respect the person, not the code. The code is fair game.

GNU Smalltalk[^]:

GNU has been producing free software for almost 30 years now, and there's no reason why it should stop.... So, here are some proposals to fellow hackers. Some of them may work out, some of them may not. It is even possible some of them are inapplicable because of U.S. law for non-profits. But I'm sure that they are welcome by the FSF, and that's already a good motivation to write them.

Nettuts+[^]:

Writing code, which is easy to change is the Holy Grail of programming. Welcome to programming nirvana! But things are much more difficult in reality: source code is difficult to understand, dependencies point in countless directions, coupling is annoying, and you soon feel the heat of programming hell. In this tutorial, we will discuss a few principles, techniques and ideas that will help you write code that is easy to change.

MPG[^]:

Over the past few years a semi-conscious unease has been steadily growing in my mind: OS X is not getting more reliable and more stable, it is instead developing more and nastier problems that range from interference with getting work done to potential data loss.... The goal here is for Apple to step up to the plate and engage in responsible OS X development; some of these issues are absolutely unacceptable even in a single minor release, but to see them persist for months or years is unforgiveable.

Standard C++[^]:

Many people don’t realize how many web pages offer access to try out C++ compilers, including many of the latest compilers with burgeoning C++11 language support. So we thought we’d publish a list.

Paul Thurrott[^]:

My “Windows Secrets” co-author Rafael Rivera has spent much of the past week investigating Play To, the streaming media technology available in Windows 7 and Windows 8. And perhaps not surprisingly, this is another example of Microsoft doing the right thing—supporting a standards-based interoperability solution—and then going absolutely nowhere with it.

Wired.com[^]:

People ask what the next web will be like, but there won’t be a next web. The space-based web we currently have will gradually be replaced by a time-based worldstream. It’s already happening, and it all began with the lifestream.... This lifestream — a heterogeneous, content-searchable, real-time messaging stream — arrived in the form of blog posts and RSS feeds, Twitter and other chatstreams, and Facebook walls and timelines. Its structure represented a shift beyond the “flatland known as the desktop” (where our interfaces ignored the temporal dimension) towards streams, which flow and can therefore serve as a concrete representation of time.

The Register[^]:

With Office 2013 now officially available, is there anything in it actually worth upgrading for? As was the case with its predecessors, the latest Office upgrade is driven less by actual appetite from consumers for new features as by compatibility factors. Will anything but the latest or at least a recent version run properly on Windows 7 or 8? Will it play nicely with SharePoint? Will users be able to read emailed documents, and create documents that are intelligible to others?

Gamasutra[^]:

As our industry is dragged into yet another round of scapegoating, I am discovering that the conversation about violent video games is rigged against us from the start, and that we collectively need to change the terms of the conversation before we sit down to talk with anyone.

Ars Technica[^]:

Some say we're living in a "post-PC" world, but malware on PCs is still a major problem for home computer users and businesses. The examples are everywhere: In November, we reported that malware was used to steal information about one of Japan's newest rockets and upload it to computers controlled by hackers. Critical systems at two US power plants were recently found infected with malware spread by USB drives. Malware known as "Dexter" stole credit card data from point-of-sale terminals at businesses. And espionage-motivated computer threats are getting more sophisticated and versatile all the time.

Securityweek[^]

This attack underscores the security problem posed by third party code. In this case, the vulnerable application was probably not coded by Yahoo! team, and not even hosted on Yahoo’s server farm, leaving Yahoo! with the full responsibility for securing the application on one hand, and a very limited capability to actually control the code, on the other hand.

Full report from Imperva (PDF)[^]