You'll love this: Jennifer Hoelzer's Insider's View Of The Administration's Response To NSA Surveillance Leaks[^] Jennifer Hoelzer is "former deputy chief of staff for Ron Wyden," the same Senator Wyden who's been saying stuff like this for a few years now:

Quote:

As members of the Senate Intelligence Committee we have been provided with the executive branch's classified interpretation of those provisions and can tell you that we believe there is a significant discrepancy between what most people -- including many Members of Congress -- think the Patriot Act allows the government to do and what government officials secretly believe the Patriot Act allows them to do.

Whatever you think of the policies in play, the sausage making is fascinating to watch.

Director of Content Development, The Code Project

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.

"When should we worry? If there's any hint of this work being extended to apply to prime fields."

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 next big problem? "I think sequencing weird organisms is a nice one in genomics."

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.

Image compression in document scanners: wh47 c0u1d p055i61y g0 wr0ng?

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.

Just when you thought it was safe to call yourself Turing-complete.

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.

The fourth law of robotics: Forget the first three laws. Just annoy the humans into submission.

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.

I'll be honest fellas, it was sounding great. But... I could've used a little more marimba.

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.

They also have strong feelings about variable naming, indentation and yummy snacks.

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.

But it's so pretty it must be better, right?

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.

Silent Circle’s mail server was in Canada. Think about that for a minute...

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.

Got a big data problem? Gather more data... now you've got terabytes of problems.

denniskubes.com[^]:

C is memory with syntactic sugar and as such it is helpful to think of things in C as starting from memory. One of the pieces that I think is often overlooked is variables and data types. If you have the right mental model for variables and data types it makes other concepts in C, and other langauages, easier.

I absolutely love this: "C is memory with syntactic sugar."

grahamcluley.com[^]:

Even though I knew malware was wrong, and not to be encouraged, I had a sneaking regard for the graphical payloads some of the virus writers were building into their creations. I recognised that this *was* a form of art. And there was art in the malware’s code as well. Virus writers would often spend months, tweaking their code, using innovative new techniques in an attempt to make it undetectable by anti-virus products. I didn’t agree with what they were doing, but had to admire the coding skill deployed by some of them. Like much modern art, you didn’t necessarily have to like it to acknowledge the skills used to produce it.

But then things started to change. Malware got commercial.

ongoing by Tim Bray[^]:

You’re putting up a new app and need to sign in users, so you use whatever’s popular with the package you’re using: On Rails, typically Devise, on NodeJS Drywall or Passport, on PHP Usercake, and so on. These things will take care of storing and checking usernames and passwords for you. But storing and checking passwords is a bad thing to do. Why? There are too many passwords.

By playing the yet-another-password game, you’re decreasing the security of the whole Internet.

Nettuts+[^]:

When you think about people who have made an impact in the JavaScript community, I think most people would immediately think of Brendan Eich, Douglas Crockford or John Resig. And rightfully so, as their contributions have unquestionably impacted JavaScript as we know it. There's another person who I feel has made a profound difference in the way that JavaScript is viewed and has done as much as anyone to bring organization and structure to the JS community. And that's Chris Williams, the founder and organizer of JSConf.

From JavaScript to robots (he's launching RobotsConf this year), based on a love for hacking.

Devhammer's Den[^]:

My purpose in this post is to introduce WebGL for those, like myself, who may be new to the technology. The short version is that WebGL brings a 3D graphics API (designed to be very similar to OpenGL) to the HTML5 Canvas element. So if you've followed my series on getting started with HTML5 Canvas, you're already aware that Canvas natively includes only a 2D drawing context. And while it was possible to play some tricks and get pseudo-3D in Canvas, it wasn't real 3D. WebGL changes all that.

Lights! Camera! Render the DOM!

Ars Technica[^]:

The HTTPS cryptographic scheme, which protects millions of websites, is susceptible to a new attack that allows hackers to pluck e-mail addresses and certain types of security credentials out of encrypted pages, often in as little as 30 seconds. The technique, scheduled to be demonstrated Thursday at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, decodes encrypted data that online banks and e-commerce sites send in responses that are protected by the widely used transport layer security (TLS) and secure sockets layer (SSL) protocols.

I'm a little tired, little wired, and I think I deserve a little appreciation!

Threatpost[^]:

Researchers have figured out how to leverage the reach of online advertising networks to distribute javascript of their choosing, creating the equivalent of a botnet of ad impressions capable of crashing underlying webservers or distributing malware on a massive scale for pennies on the dollar. Jeremiah Grossman and Matt Johansen of White Hat Security presented their research today at Black Hat USA 2013, research that did not include a zero-day vulnerability or exploit. All they had to do was buy an ad.

This is a limited time offer. Hackers are standing by...

pcmag.com[^]:

This news couldn't wait for the Black Hat conference happening now in Las Vegas. We reported in June that Georgia Tech researchers had created a charging station that could pwn any iOS device. The full presentation revealed precise details on how they managed it. I'm never plugging my iPhone charger into a USB port in a hotel desk again.

Your best defense against hackers: a dead battery.

TED.com[^]:

During a Formula 1 race, a car sends hundreds of millions of data points to its garage for real-time analysis and feedback. So why not use this detailed and rigorous data system elsewhere, like... at children’s hospitals? Peter van Manen [Managing Director of McLaren Electronics] tells us more.

Applying intelligence and observation to the situation...