Cyber security expert Jeffrey Carr on the rise of government-sanctioned hackers.
by Mac Slocum
| @macslocum | 14 February 2011
Over the next year, cyber security expert Jeffrey Carr expects to see governments enlist civilians in organized cyber militias — and some countries will do this in plan and public view.
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Vesting Incentives, Camera Hacks, iPad Longform Saviour?, and Bogus Science
by Nat Torkington
| @gnat | 14 February 2011
- Stephen Elop is a Flight Risk (Silicon Beat) -- a foresight-filled 2008 article that doesn't make Nokia's new CEO look good. A reminder to boards and CEOs that option vesting schedules matter. (via Hacker News)
- CHDK -- Canon Hack Development Kit gives point-and-shoot Canon digital camera new features like RAW images, motion detection, a USB remote, full control over exposure and so on. (via Sennheiser HD 555 to HD 595 Mod)
- The Atavist - iPad app for original long-form nonfiction (what used to be called "journalism"). (via Tim O'Reilly)
- Why Most Published Findings are False (PLoS Medicine) -- as explained by John D. Cook, Suppose you have 1,000 totally ineffective drugs to test. About 1 out of every 20 trials will produce a p-value of 0.05 or smaller by chance, so about 50 trials out of the 1,000 will have a “significant” result, and only those studies will publish their results. The error rate in the lab was indeed 5%, but the error rate in the literature coming out of the lab is 100 percent!.
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The combined efforts of the Locker Project and TeleHash could help people be at the center of their data. Plus: Bloom presents Fizz, a new data app.
by Tish Shute
| @tishshute | 11 February 2011
Three data efforts -- the open source Locker Project, the TeleHash protocol, and commercial support from Singly -- look to help people get more value from their personal data.
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The American Chemical Society gets recognized for its app, Bloomsbury changes focus on rights, and the tablet wars flare up
by Jenn Webb
| @JennWebb | 11 February 2011
In this week's edition of Publishing News: The American Chemical Society's slick mobile app gets recognized, Bloomsbury ditched its territory structure, and HP took aim at Apple with its TouchPad tablet and publisher-friendly subscription policies.
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The fifth Tech@State Conference focuses on the role of open source in government, industry and society.
by Alex Howard
| @digiphile | 11 February 2011
Public officials, technologists and citizens will discuss open source's role in government and society at the Tech@State conference, being held today in Washington, D.C.
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Floppy Fun, BBC Archived, NFC Unlocked, and LAMP Supreme
by Nat Torkington
| @gnat | 11 February 2011
- Phantom of the Flopera (YouTube) -- Bach's Tocata and Fugue in D Minor (BWV 565) as performed by floppy drives. Creative intimacy with one's tools is a sign of mastery. (via Andy Baio)
- Save Entire BBC Archive (Ben Goldacre) -- I pointed earlier to the questionable BBC closure of scores of websites in the name of cost-cutting. It's a torrent of an archive of spidered BBC websites. (via Andy Baio)
- Android Hidden NFC Capabilities Unlocked -- Gibraltar Software Factory, based in Argentina, went through the source code of Android 2.3 and found that Google has purposefully hidden several NFC related API calls, most likely due to the fact that they’re not quite stable enough for public release. Some minor tweaking of the source code, and boom, they’ve enabled write support for NFC tags. This means mobile phones will not just read RFID tags, but also act like RFID tags. (via Chris Heathcote on Delicious)
- Pinboard Creator Maciej Ceglowski (ReadWriteWeb) -- I think many developers (myself included) are easily seduced by new technology and are willing to burn a lot of time rigging it together just for the joy of tinkering. So nowadays we see a lot of fairly uninteresting web apps with very technically sweet implementations. In designing Pinboard, I tried to steer clear of this temptation by picking very familiar, vanilla tools wherever possible so I would have no excuse for architectural wank. The other reason I like the approach is that the tried-and-true stuff is extensively debugged and documented. The chances of you finding a bug in MySQL or PHP as the author of a mid-sized website are microscopic. That's not the case for newer infrastructure like NoSQL or the various web frameworks.
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