Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Wednesday, 16 October 2013


 
 
  
From the 1979-wants-their-rhetoric-back department
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Businessweek reports on some not-so-subtle commentary from China's official Xinhua News Agency on the U.S. budget showdown: 'It is perhaps a good time for the befuddled world to start considering building a...
 
From the american-attention-span-exceeded department
Nerval's Lobster writes "This morning we discussed news that the National Security Agency (NSA) has siphoned up millions of online address books and contact lists. The Post drew its information from top-secret documents provided by government...
 
From the defense-is-futile department
An anonymous reader writes with news of a man caught by the NSA dragnet for donating a small sum of money to an organization that the federal government considered terrorist in nature. The man is having problems mounting an appeal. From the...
 
From the completely-unbiased-and-without-any-sort-of-agenda department
sfcrazy writes "Oracle has a love-hate relationship with open source technologies. In a whitepaper (PDF) for the Deparment of Defense, Oracle claims that TCO (total cost of ownership) goes up with the use of open source. They're essentially trying...
 
From the just-initial-here-and-here-and-here-and-here department
realized writes "The Obamacare website Healthcare.gov has a hidden terms of service that is not shown to people when they sign up. The hidden terms, only viewable if you 'view source' on the site, says that the user has 'no reasonable expectation...
 
From the power-to-tax-is-power-to-destroy department
dcblogs writes "In a better time, circa 1998, Cypress Semiconductor founder and CEO T.J. Rodgers gave a provocative speech, titled 'Why Silicon Valley Should Not Normalize Relations with Washington D.C.' This speech is still important to...
 
From the when-toys-can't-play-together department
itwbennett writes "Until now Sony has done a pretty good job of keeping future Playstation 4 owners happy. But last week they finally hit a rock when Game Informer posted an article about headset compatibility. At launch, USB headsets that work...
 
From the unless-it's-an-fbi-sting department
An anonymous reader writes "The Washington Post reports, "British law enforcement agencies averted a plot to orchestrate a large-scale terror attack similar to the assault on Kenya's Westgate mall, an official said Monday. Police were questioning...
 
From the all-about-the-benjamins department
DavidGilbert99 writes "Ireland and its tax system came under some extreme scrutiny earlier this year when it was revealed that Apple funneled billions of dollars of revenue though three subsidiaries based in the country. Thanks to a loophole, none...
 
From the proofs-ahead department
Okian Warrior writes "As a followup to Linus's opinion about people skeptical of the Linux random number generator, a new paper analyzes the robustness of /dev/urandom and /dev/random . From the paper: 'From a practical side, we also give a...
 
From the iterative-process department
ananyo writes "ITER, the multibillion-euro international nuclear-fusion experiment, is on track to generate power by 2028. But some of the science that was supposed to happen along the way is going to be dropped to keep the vision alive. The plans...
 
From the just-do-what-comes-naturally department
jones_supa writes "Greg Jorgensen specializes in debugging, fixing, maintaining, and extending legacy software systems. His typical client has a web site or internal application that works, more or less, but the original developer isn't available....
 
From the deep-packet-inspection-for-fun-and-profit department
Charliemopps writes that the Washington Post reports "The NSA is collecting hundreds of millions of contact lists from all over the world, many of them belonging to Americans. The intercept them from instant messaging services as they move across...
 
From the death-by-textbook-delivery-drone department
First time accepted submitter Michael Harris writes "According to The Age, an Australian company plans to use autonomous quadropters to deliver text books to University students in Sydney. Apparently the drone will locate you via your smartphone's...
 
From the read-write-tops-read-only department
Lirodon writes "After being called out by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for banning the loosely-defined use of "servers" on its Fiber service, Google appears to have changed its tune, and now allows 'personal, non-commercial use of servers...