A burst of 9 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team
Maciej Ceglowski (who also runs Pinboard.in):
Marc [Thiele] emailed me a few weeks ago to ask if I thought my talk would be appropriate to close the conference.
"Marc," I told him, "my talk is perfect for closing the conference! The first half is this incredibly dark rant about how the Internet is alienating and inhuman, how it's turning us all into lonely monsters."
"But in the second half, I'll turn it around and present my vision of an alternative future. I'll get the audience fired up like a proper American motivational speaker. After the big finish, we'll burst out of the conference hall into the streets of Düsseldorf, hoist the black flag, and change the world."
Marc said that sounded fine.
As I was preparing this talk, however, I found it getting longer and longer. In the interests of time, I'm afraid I'm only going to be able to present the first half of it today.
Long, but very worthwhile.
Holding page for Mary Meeker's annual presentation, to be given today in California, so you might have to wait a few hours for it to come live. Also contains links to the previous reports, which are worth browsing. Try 2001's.
The PDF docket in which the FBI explains what Monsegur did. Notable passage on page 6: he had "contemporaneous knowledge" of hacking by co-conspirators including the Sony Playstation Network. That's never been directly pinned on LulzSec or Anonymous before.
Security researchers uncovered a global cybercriminal operation that infected with malware almost 1,500 point-of-sale (POS) terminals, accounting systems and other retail back-office platforms from businesses in 36 countries.
The infected systems were joined together in a botnet that researchers from cybercrime intelligence firm IntelCrawler dubbed Nemanja. The researchers believe the attackers behind the operation might be from Serbia.
The size of the botnet and the worldwide distribution of infected systems brings into perspective the security problems faced by retailers from around the world, problems that were also highlighted by the recent PoS breaches at several large US retailers.
We've become aware of some unauthorized access to our systems and internal company data and we wanted to let you know the steps we're taking in response. As soon as we were aware of this issue we immediately launched an investigation. Information security and data protection are of great importance to us at Spotify and that is why I'm posting today.
Our evidence shows that only one Spotify user's data has been accessed and this did not include any password, financial or payment information. We have contacted this one individual. Based on our findings, we are not aware of any increased risk to users as a result of this incident.
We take these matters very seriously and as a general precaution will be asking certain Spotify users to re-enter their username and password to log in over the coming days.
This is now getting like the episode of The Simpsons where the names of celebrities who have been arrested scrolls past at speed - except it's web services and hacking.
Established as a dedicated music streaming service specifically for Samsung devices, Samsung Music Hub will be discontinued after less than three years of operation.
The service allows users to browse through a catalogue of millions of songs from major and "key independent" record labels, and listen to song previews before purchasing individual tracks and albums.
Users create playlists of up to 200 songs, which can then be cached offline. There is also a Music Hub web interface that can be used to scan a PC for existing music files and match them to files in Music Hub, while Smart TV can also access music video playback at 720p.
The service runs on a tiered subscription model, offering a monthly access fee for single devices or a premium model that provides access for up to four devices as well as a web interface.
Available across the Samsung ecosystem and promoted with specific device launches such as the Galaxy S5, the rollout of the service was largely enabled by Samsung's purchase of cloud content service provider mSpot in 2012. Since first launching, Music Hub is currently available in a number of regions globally, including the UK, Europe, North America and Australia.
However Samsung Milk, the streaming service available only in the US, will continue.
Rory Cellan-Jones used Glass for six weeks continuously:
Right now, Glass just doesn't have enough functions. I have found it mildly useful to hear a ping and look up and see a tweet or an email without getting my phone out. The simple digital clock on the main menu is also helpful when you're rushing to get somewhere.
But getting directions, especially given Glass's inability to understand me, is nearly always not worth the bother, and as for reading recipes from the All Of The Cooks app or using the instant translation tool Word Lens, both have proved too fiddly for this impatient user.
The concern is that this product has been in the hands of developers for a year now but on the Glassware store, there are still only around 60 apps. I have seen various demos of what look like exciting augmented reality apps - services that overlay information on what you see through Glass - but so far these have not appeared in the store.
I have also come across organisations, from museums to hospitals to oil companies, which are exploring exciting ways to use Glass to improve the work they do.
But what is lacking in this project right now is momentum. When the device was unveiled at Google I/O in 2012 with an extraordinary live skydiving demo, there was justifiable excitement. But two years on Glass does not appear to have made much progress. Indeed some functions - notably the ability to make live video calls - have even been removed during software updates.
You may find this shocking and stunning. Please make sure you're sitting down before you view this (completely real) comparison of how Google's logo used to look, and how it does now.
Various metals widely used in electronics, such as tin and zinc, often show hairlike protrusions on their surfaces. These "whiskers" can be responsible for current leakage and short circuits in electronic equipment, causing billion-dollar losses in the auto, aviation, and space industries. But the formation mechanism of whiskers has remained a mystery for over 60 years and researchers have been unable to provide even order-of-magnitude predictions of whisker parameters.
Previous theories offered a qualitative explanation of the growth of a whisker, based on the gain in energy due to the whisker's needlelike structure. Now, Victor Karpov at the University of Toledo, Ohio, has proposed a theory that provides, for the first time, quantitative estimates of whisker nucleation, growth rates, and length distributions.
"Whiskers" are a key problem with lead-free solder - which is now mandatory.
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