The Insider News

CNN.com[^]:

More than passively eavesdropping, we're penetrating and damaging foreign networks for both espionage and to ready them for attack. We're creating custom-designed Internet weapons, pre-targeted and ready to be "fired" against some piece of another country's electronic infrastructure on a moment's notice.... We're pursuing policies that are both expensive and destabilizing and aren't making the Internet any safer. We're reacting from fear, and causing other countries to counter-react from fear. We're ignoring resilience in favor of offense. Welcome to the cyberwar arms race, an arms race that will define the Internet in the 21st century.

Gizmodo[^]:

Microsoft just announced that its much-maligned DRM policies won't look at all like they originally had originally been described. They're going to more relaxed, sort of like the PS3's. Good news, you say? No. Bad news. The Xbox One just got worse. But what? Isn't all DRM bad and anti-consumer? No. Often it is, sure. If applied in the ways that gaming culture has been anxious about for the past few weeks, it would be disastrous. But that's not what was really at stake.

The Verge[^]:

Microsoft has offered its basic Office Web Apps free to Outlook.com and Office 365 customers for over three years now, but one of the big drawbacks for students and businesses has been the lack of true real-time co-authoring. Google Docs has long supported real-time editing with multiple users, but the Office Web Apps have been fairly basic when it comes to editing documents alongside other users. Microsoft is planning to change this over the next few months, and the company is demonstrating the changes this week.

NYTimes.com[^]:

Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring. We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship. It’s a complete random mess, except for one guy who was highly predictive because he only interviewed people for a very specialized area, where he happened to be the world’s leading expert.

Scott Hanselman[^]:

I'm totally geeked out about Smart Watches. I always have been, from the original Microsoft SPOT watch (from 10 years ago!) to the Pebble, and now the AGENT Smart Watch from Secret Labs. Secret Labs are the folks that brought us the Netduino open source electronics platform that uses the .NET Micro Framework. It's pretty awesome that you can write C# and run it in 64k or in 64gigs, from the wrist to the cloud.

Computerworld Blogs[^]:

Microsoft will release a test version of Windows 8.1 at its BUILD developers conference next week, but there's a chance that Windows update could go a long way towards hurting those developers, and slowing app growth in the Windows Store. Is there anything Microsoft can do to combat that? Reports say that among Windows 8.1's changes will be a boot-to-the-desktop option that allows people bypass the Start screen. Many users have been clamoring for it, because they find little use for the touch-oriented Start screen. That will certainly please users. But it may also hurt those, like many at the BUILD conference, who are writing so-called "Modern" apps for Windows 8.

Wouter's Wiki[^]:

Unlike other game making systems that focus on an engine/editor that happens to be able to call out to a scripting language, Lobster is a general purpose stand-alone programming language that comes with a built-in library suitable for making games and other graphical things. It is therefore not very suitable for non-programmers. It's also meant to be portable (mostly courtesy of OpenGL/SDL/Freetype), allowing your games to be run on Windows, Mac OS X, iOS, Linux, and Android (in that order of maturity, currently).

Carrot Creative[^]:

If you are a web developer, you’ve probably heard of nginx (pronounced engine-x). Nginx is a fast and extremely powerful http and reverse proxy server that can be used to quickly and easily serve webpages. Unfortunately, like many sysops tools, there is very little documentation and very few tutorials that explain how it works and how to get up and running.... After struggling with it myself for a bit, I finally got down the basics of how to work with nginx, and wanted to share it so that other developers would have an easier time picking it up.

Clemens Vasters[^]:

We're talking a lot about "Mobile" solutions in the industry, but the umbrella that this moniker casts has become far too big to be useful and doesn't represent any particular scenario subset that's useful for planning services for "mobile" devices. Nearly every personal computing scenario that consumers encounter today is "mobile". This post is a personal perspective on "mobile" applications and how applications that run on devices labeled under this umbrella really enable a range of very different scenarios, and do require a different set of backend services, depending on the core scenario.

Search Engine Watch[^]:

Ever since the news hit about the NSA PRISM surveillance program in the United States, many people have become much more concerned about what exactly search engines are tracking about them. Although Google, Bing, and Yahoo have stringent privacy policies, there have been enough people worried that they have begun looking at alternative search engines, particularly so-called “private search engines.”

Forbes[^]:

For years, Microsoft has refused to offer financial rewards to researchers who tell the company about security flaws in its software, even as Google and Facebook have ratcheted up their so-called “bug bounty” programs. Now the software giant has suddenly changed its mind–and it’s even offering even bigger bounties in some cases than those competitors.

ZDNet[^]:

Under iOS, users have the option to specify their own passwords to secure their device when it is used as a personal hotspot. However, for convenience and security, Apple initially populates the password field with an automatically generated password. This ensures that even users who are not security conscious enough to change their password from the default will be protected from those attempting to access their phone with a default password. However, according to three researchers from the German university, the method in which these passwords are generated leaves them vulnerable to attack.