The Insider News

Daemonic Dispatches[^]:

There has been some noise recently about a presentation at Black Hat 2013 entitled "Preparing for the Cryptopocalypse". Based on some recent research by Antoine Joux et al., the speakers argued that we should be prepared for the day when RSA is announced to be broken. Personally, I'm not so worried.

GeekWire[^]:

What do spam email and HIV have in common? They’re examples of the range of problems that longtime Microsoft researcher Dr. David Heckerman has battled during his career — applying his background as an MD and his work in computer science to make advances in some surprising areas. The spam battle dates back to 1997, when Heckerman received his first piece of junk email and decided to do something about it, setting him and his colleagues on a multi-year battle with spammers that resulted in sophisticated protections still used in Microsoft products today.

The Economist[^]:

David Kriesel, a doctoral student in computational geometry at Bonn University, has no academic interest in compression algorithms. When a former client asked him about a bizarre incident involving a photocopier, his first reaction was, "You guys have to be kidding me." The client called him when they found that a Xerox machine had scanned an architectural drawing of a house in such a way that numbers from one part of the original drawing wound up replacing those in another portion. The mystery proved too hard to resist.

Blondihacks[^]:

Veronica seemed to be humming along nicely with her new RAM, and I was chugging away on her next set of parts. However, I started noticing strange behaviour when running test code. Things were getting a little erratic. Simple code that was clearly correct would fail to execute properly. Then the RAM test (which runs automatically on boot up) started failing sometimes. Then, she started failing to boot up at all about half the time. Something was very wrong, but with so many parts, it’s hard to know what. When faced with a tricky problem in a complex system, a good first step is to isolate some variables. Humans don’t actually solve hard problems. We reduce them into a hundred simple ones and solve those instead.

iank.org[^]:

CAPTCHAs are "a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether or not the user is human." They are designed to be relatively easy for humans to solve, and difficult to automate. Some of them are very good, but the CAPTCHA system employed by reddit.com is, as of 2013-07-26, not state-of-the-art. Below, I attempt to solve this CAPTCHA automatically.

kelly jacklin[^]:

Back some time in 1998, a friend I used to work with named Jeff Robbin approached me about a project he and Bill Kincaid were working on, which was called DAS at the time... but would eventually become SoundJam (and then SoundJam MP), and would then eventually become iTunes (once Apple bought it). At the time, in my usual myopia, I thought "who the hell would want a Mac version of WinAmp?!?", silly me.... At some point, Jeff and I were chatting about his disc burning feature, and he said he needed some way to inform the user that the burn was done. DAS being a sound-making app, he wanted a sound to alert the user, something simple. Since I'm a hobbiest musician, and had a recording setup, I told him I'd tinker around and see if I could some up with something.

New Scientist[^]:

Lorna and her classmates, who range in age from 4 to 7, are taking part in a pilot study here at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, to see how young children respond to ScratchJr, a spin-off of the Scratch programming language. Scratch was invented to teach students as young as 8 how to program using graphical blocks instead of text. Now even children who haven't yet learned to read or write are getting in on the act.

Marco.org[^]:

Here’s AnandTech’s reported price list of the Xeon E5-2600 V2 CPUs that the new Mac Pro will use. What’s interesting about the high-end models is that Intel is clearly hitting huge thermal-efficiency walls. As the number of cores goes up, the highest clock speed goes down to keep within a usable TDP.

Forbes[^]:

Customers of Silent Circle’s encrypted mail service got an unfortunate surprise on Friday: all their messages had been deleted. The management of Silent Circle, an encryption firm that specializes in smartphone communication, abruptly shut down their e-mail service yesterday, saying they were pre-empting the U.S. government from forcing them to hand over customer data. While they were confident they could protect text messages, voice calls and video calls, e-mail had always been less secure because it relied on standard Internet protocols.

ReadWrite[^]:

While it has become de rigueur to ascribe all sorts of supernatural powers to Big Data, one of the world's most celebrated statisticians, Nate Silver, is far more circumspect about it. If anything, according to Silver in his book The Signal and the Noise, Big Data carries the potential to cloud our decisions by introducing far more noise than it does signal. It's an interesting position for someone who makes a living predicting the future, and one that directly counters other expert opinion.

PCMag[^]:

IBM on Thursday announced a new computer programming framework that draws inspiration from the way the human brain receives data, processes it, and instructs the body to act upon it while requiring relatively tiny amounts of energy to do so.

New Scientist[^]:

Want to do your own space experiment? From next week, you will be able to run science projects on the world's first open-source satellites. And it won't break the bank.

Crave[^]:

YouTube lets you get your retro game on with a fun Easter egg that anyone can do. Here's how to play.

Hanselman.com[^]:

Here's my own Q&A about Azure Websites and Pricing. Folks are always emailing me with confusion so I'm writing it up.

The Verge[^]:

Bill Gates has questioned whether Google's Project Loon, an effort to bring giant internet-giving balloons to less-developed countries, is really that good of an idea.