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Get to the heart of the technologies and problems that dominate your IT workday.

by Kevin Fogarty

Kevin Fogarty writes about enterprise IT for ITworld.

Last day to tell Google to forget you

Posted Feb 22, 2012 - 12:48 pm

EFF has posted simple instructions showing how to delete your web history at Google before it tucks all that casual data into a database that might give a very intimate portrait of what you like to know and and how you spend your time.
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- Security, consolidated privacy program, Google
Anonymous calls NSA a bunch of idiots; confesses mean things it actually does

Posted Feb 21, 2012 - 04:05 pm

Anonymous doesn't want to bring down the power grid that powers everything it loves, Anonymi tells the NSA. Anonymous hackers want to keep doing what they do: making every aspect of life more difficult by hiding your keys and moving furniture so you stub your toe in the dark.
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- Security, anonymous, fact-free theorizing
NSA: Anonymous may take down U.S. power grid in two years

Posted Feb 21, 2012 - 02:12 pm

The NSA is warning top government officials that hacktivist collective Anonymous may be developing the ability to attack the SCADA systems in electric utilities, may be able to cause limited blackouts within two years. Main evidence is bogus Operation Global Blackout.
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- Security, anonymous, bogus evidence
Alarm maker uses radiation to nuke ATM card skimmers

Posted Feb 21, 2012 - 01:57 pm

There are more ways to steal from ATMs than from almost any other bank property (some just steal the ATM itself). Alarm-maker ADT is expanding its ATM protection products with a unit that generates electromagnetic radiation to keep individual cards from being stolen.
Why quantum computers will be inaccurate: There is more an one kind of nothingness

Posted Feb 20, 2012 - 07:28 pm

Philosophers have wrestled for centuries with the difference between being and nothingness, pretty badly for the most part. Now physicists are mucking up even those inaccurate results by demonstrating there may only be one form of being, but there are all kinds of nothingness.
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- Science, descartes, forms of doesn't matter
SOPA replacement uses child porn as excuse to spy on 99.7 percent of Americans

Posted Feb 20, 2012 - 03:37 pm

Stymied on the Internet-censoring SOPA and PIPA, of which he was primary author, Texas Rep. Lamar Smith is pushing a bill labeled as anti-child-porn that actually creates a comprehensive network to track all Internet activity by everyone in the U.S., keep it available 18 months.
- 4 comments
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- Security, HR 1981, Internet surveillance
JotForm takedown shows anti-SOPA hysteria wasn't alarming enough

Posted Feb 17, 2012 - 01:20 pm

Real-world example of how the Internet works under the sway of pro-SOPA factions: Online service business JotForm is shut down by the Secret Service Wednesday with no explanation, by an agent "too busy" to tell JotForm's founder why he was out of business. Thursday JotForm was back, with no idea what it did wrong, how to avoid doing it again or any explanation at all.
- 2 comments
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- Security, capricious enforcement, copyright enforcement
Flying robot made cheap, easy enough to buy from vending machines

Posted Feb 17, 2012 - 12:13 pm

RoboBee is a cool, flying robot manufactured as a stack of flat disks and 'assembled' by pulling up to unfold the stack into a fully functioning 'bot. Process could make micro-bots practical for tasks you can't think of right now, and to annoy the cat.
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- Mobile & Wireless, Harvard Microrobotics Lab, microrobotics
Why is IT so bad at cloud computing?

Posted Feb 17, 2012 - 12:00 am

It's no secret IT is ambivalent about cloud computing's potential to steal jobs and user loyalty. That's no excuse for sloppy security negligence of apps in the cloud. That attitude doesn't come from hostility; it comes from overwork and the desperate wish that something new could happen without incremental additions to every headache IT ever had and never cured.
Is Anonymous making empty threats to (briefly) kill the Internet?

Posted Feb 16, 2012 - 12:34 pm

Since early January someone wearing Anonymous drag on Twitter and Pastebin has been threatening to take down big parts of the Internet: first Facebook, then the root DNS servers that would 404 the whole 'net. Is it a realistic threat? An overreach? Or a complete fake from either radical factions of Anonymous, or opponents trying to make it look foolish?
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- Security, anonymous, Facebook

February is...
Open Source Month

FEATURE: Spotlight on open source
CAREER: What to Include in Your Open Source Resume
WIN THIS BOOK: Ubuntu Unleashed, 2012 Edition
TIP: 9 useful Android keyboard shortcuts
REVIEW: Mint is fun, client-focused Linux distro

SOPA replacement uses child porn as excuse to spy on 99.7 percent of Americans

4 comments
Can an Android phone run without Google?

3 comments
Please God, kill me now before Pinterest spams me again

3 comments
PlayBook 2.0 update is here, and does it really matter?

3 comments
Where are all the Linux professionals?

2 comments

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