Why a disconnected society is far more dangerous than a connected one
Do we need a social media kill switch? I don't think so, not judging by where I live.
Let me explain. I call home a fairly anonymous part of southwest London called Colliers Wood. Despite it turning into a nice place to live over the past 20 years, a week ago it saw more than its fair share - if ever there can be a fair share - of disturbances, including rioting, arson, looting and other types of mindless vandalism.
It didn't warrant much mention in the rolling TV or radio news, and few online heat maps even register what went on, but it was serious wrongdoing and, relative to the size of the community, among the worse in London, I'd wager.
One of the benefits of living in this part of SW19 is that it is well served in a retail sense but in addition to family-owned shops and a thriving market, there are big-brand high-street names, which acted like a red rag to the criminals' bull. Read more...
Don’t blink: Firefox 6 is out now
Back in March, Mozilla promised a new version of Firefox every 16 weeks. It's trying to keep up with the Joneses (and the Googles) by pushing out bits at a furious pace.
Firefox 4 shipped March 22.
Firefox 5 shipped June 21, or 12 weeks later.
Firefox 6 will ship Aug. 16, or eight weeks after version 5.
If the current rate continues, Firefox 11 will ship before version 10.
That's the bad news. The good news is that you can run out and snag a final copy of Firefox 6 right now, if you want to test it before it's pushed to the masses. The Firefox FTP server holds Linux, Mac, and Windows versions, localized into nearly 100 languages. The whole crop has been available all weekend, even though Mozilla says what's available is not final. (So why is it available publicly? Mozilla either has awful security or wants to have its cake and eat it too in terms of getting users to update quickly.) Read more...
Amazon promises to improve redundancy after Dublin outage
AWS (Amazon Web Services) learned a lot of lessons from the outage that affected its Dublin data center and will now work to improve power redundancy, load balancing and the way it communicates when something goes wrong with its cloud, the company said in a summary of the incident.
The post mortem delved deeper into what caused the outage, which affected the availability of Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), EBS (Elastic Block Store), the RDS database and Amazon's network. The service disruption began Aug. 7, at 10:41 a.m., when Amazon's utility provider suffered a transformer failure. At first, a lightning strike was blamed, but the provider now believes it actually wasn't the cause, and is continuing to investigate, according to Amazon. Read more...
‘Major’ C++ revision receives standards blessing
Changes to the standard behind of one of the world's most popular programming languages have been approved by standards chiefs.
The next version of C++ has been approved during a unanimous ballot by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
Official publication of what will now be called C++11 is expected by the end of the year, according to C++ guru and ISO C++ committee chief Herb Sutter, who announced the news here.
Sutter called the ballot an "important milestone in the history of a great language". Read more...
Internet Explorer is best at protecting against drive-by downloads
Internet Explorer is better at defending against drive-by downloads than competitors' browsers and the contest isn't even close, according to a worldwide test of browsers by security research firm NSS Labs.
Internet Explorer scored a 99.2 percent protection score in the firm's most recent test of socially engineered malware distribution, with Google Chrome coming in a distant second with 13.2 percent.
Trailing behind it were Safari and Firefox tying with 7.6 percent each, and Opera pulling up last with 6.1 percent. Read more...
How Linux mastered Wall Street
When it comes to the fast-moving business of trading stocks, bonds and derivatives, the world's financial exchanges are finding an ally in Linux, at least according to one Linux kernel developer working in that industry.
This week, at the annual LinuxCon conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, Linux kernel contributor Christoph Lameter will discuss how Linux became widely adopted by financial exchanges, those high-speed computerized trading posts for stocks, bonds, derivatives and other financial instruments.
As an alternative to traditional Unix, Linux has become a dominant player in finance, thanks to the operating-system kernel's ability to pass messages very quickly, Lameter said in an interview with the IDG News Service. In fact, the emerging field of high-frequency trading (HFT) would not be possible without the open-source operating system, he argued. Lameter himself was hired as a consultant by one exchange -- he won't say which one -- based on his work in assembling large-scale Linux clusters. Read more...
Apple’s evidence may be flawed in European Samsung case
Apple and its lawyers have, perhaps inadvertently, misled the judge of a Düsseldorf court by filing flawed evidence of the similarity between the iPad 2 and Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablets based on an inaccurate picture, an investigation by Webwereld.nl, a Dutch IDG publication, has found.
But it appears that Apple has failed to provide the German judge with accurate evidence. At least one of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 pictures that Apple provided as evidence in the German case is either wrong or manipulated.
Photographic evidence submitted by Apple, found on page 28 of the German complaint, shows two pictures: the iPad 2 and the alleged Galaxy Tab 10.1, accompanied by Apple's claim that the "overall appearance" of two products is "practically identical."
Industry group releases spec to test consumer SSD performance
The Storage Networking Industry Association this month announced the release of a specification that can be used to test the performance of consumer (client) solid-state drives (SSDs) regardless of the vendor.
The specification, for the first time, creates a level playing field for determining consumer SSD performance.
The SNIA's announcement follows the release of a specification earlier this year for testing the performance of data center-class SSDs.
Like its Enterprise Performance Test Specification, the new Client Performance Test Specification defines a set of device-level tests and methodologies intended to enable comparative testing of SSD devices regardless of the manufacturer. Read more...
Cell phones stay on, but protesters disrupt SF subway
San Francisco's commuter railway left mobile phone services untouched during a closely watched protest Monday, but for many commuters that didn't matter because they were locked out of the railway system altogether.
During a chaotic, peaceful protest that started at the end of the workday, members of the hacking collective Anonymous joined up with Bay Area activists to protest last month's killing of Charles Hill, a passenger who was shot by a Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) policeman after throwing a knife at the officer.
A group of about 50 to 100 protesters started at BART's Civic Center Station, a few blocks from San Francisco City Hall, and then moved slowly down Market Street, forcing BART to shut station after station in San Francisco's downtown, in a cascading disruption of BART services between 5 and 7 p.m. Monday night. Read more...
Are Motorola’s patents enough to protect Android?
Google's $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility will land it a vast portfolio of patents, but the legal obstacles facing its Android operating system are far from over, legal experts said.
Android has been beset with legal challenges from all sides, including a multibillion dollar lawsuit filed by Oracle, and complaints brought by Apple against Android device makers including HTC and Samsung. Meanwhile, Microsoft has been extracting license fees from Android device makers, saying it owns technology patents related to Google's mobile OS.
The Motorola acquisition, announced Monday, should help shield Google and its partners from future legal action by Apple and others. But it may be too late to help device makers facing lawsuits already under way, and it won't help Google to fight Oracle's Java patent infringement lawsuit, which is due to begin trial in October, legal experts said. Read more...