The Insider News

The Verge[^]

A concerned citizen has been scraping phone numbers posted publicly by Twitter users, and sending them interesting facts about cats in the hope of educating them about the internet. The only way to stop this deluge of feline factoids? Tweet "Meow, I <3 catfacts” at Edward Snowden.

"The main cause is to spread awareness of operational security," said the coder behind the project, who wished to remain anonymous due to his possible breach of anti-spamming laws. "When people tweet pictures of their drivers licenses or debit cards, they usually understand their mistake upon someone retweeting it. When they tweet their phone number, they think nothing of it." He adds: "If the messages sent to them were malicious, [they] could be exploited with ease," citing bugs like Android Stagefright as a possible vector of attack. This is the danger of sharing your phone number in the 21st century — it's not just a way to get in contact, it's a possible route to hacking your whole life via your smartphone.

Clean Coder[^]:

In order to defend and preserve the honor of the profession of computer programmers...

Jaxenter[^]:

Is a good software architect like an octopus, forcing its tentacles into everyone’s code? How can the architect be an authority in all technologies used by a system? We discuss the age-old problem of broad vs. focused knowledge with three veteran software architects.

Beta News[^]:

Windows Phone is becoming an increasingly unattractive proposition in the eyes of smartphone buyers. The tiled operating system dropped to 1.7 percent market share in the third quarter of the year, thanks to extremely weak sales of Lumia devices.