Here is an interesting Kickstarter project. Connectify Switchboard is trying to raise $100,000 for a project to build their software that aims to improve Internet speed. The software achieves the faster speed by utilizing all of your connections to the Internet and making them available for improved downloads and uploads.
The classic scenario goes that a person driving around hears their vehicle make a noise. They take it to the auto mechanic but quickly find that the vehicle won’t make the sound now that it is in the shop. The mechanic isn’t able to do much about the supposed problem and the vehicle owner goes on their way. Some people have taken to calling unreproducible problems with their computers that they reports as “resolved by tech fairies”. They portrayed little pixies that went around and magically fixed computers.
Artist Mark Crummett has a similar proposal with photographic evidence to back it up. He uses tiny people from model train sets and places them in unusual situations where their out-of-scale proportion makes for a unique view. He has a collection involving technology called Ghosts in the Machine.
New programming languages could be introduced at any time. Knowing the right language might position you very well for a career opportunity in the future. Therefore, it might be advantageous for a developer to track languages like Java, C, Objective-C, Python, Ruby, and Perl to see which direction they are headed in popularity.
This infographic also gets into the history of some languages, vulnerability distribution per language, and how those vulnerabilities are being fixed.
Technology changes very quickly and the industry changes right alongside it. There is more written about new products, security concerns, coming-soon hardware, and other technology news than can be covered sufficiently and in-depth. These technology news wrap ups hope to provide a one-stop resource to make sure you did not miss any of the big stories in the past week. They will be published each Saturday, drawing from a wide variety of sources to give the best coverage.
Technology news 2013/05/12 – 2013/05/18:
Adobe Acrobat, the de facto PDF software, is an expensive utility when you only occasionally need to alter PDF documents. But when you need to, it is nice to have something readily available that works and works well. Even with Office 2013 gaining the ability to edit PDFs, there is still a place for the utilities that make manipulating PDFs easy. PDFMate Free PDF Merger is one of those free tools that can help you alter a PDF to be what you need. In addition, PDFMate PDF Converter allows you to convert PDF to various formats.
HBGary was a technology security company that made more of a name for itself in its demise than its successes. The company was founded by Greg Hoglund, a security researcher and author of books on rootkits, exploiting online games, and exploiting software, each of which I have previously read and reviewed. HBGary Federal was a subsidiary spun off to work with the government where security clearance might be needed with Aaron Barr as CEO. Barr’s tangle with Anonymous, which I recently read more details regarding in This Machine Kills Secrets, ultimately led to the company’s demise. HBGary was bought by ManTech International at the end of February, 2012 and HBGary Federal was reportedly closed.
Despite the company’s storied history, it was a technology security company first and foremost with many advanced security software tools. It provides a number of those tools for free to benefit other security researchers and students.
Kickstarter and IndieGoGo have standardized crowdfunding for a variety of projects. One type of projects, open-source software, has been around for far longer but has often faced gaps between interest in projects and funding. One website aims to fix that problem as a crowdfunding site specializing in open source projects.
This Machine Kills Secrets – How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World’s Information is written by Forbes journalist Andy Greenberg and provides a historical recount of the use of the cryptography revolution. This takes the story from the Pentagon Papers of 1971 to the WikiLeaks of 2010 and beyond with several organizations’ attempts to build the next generation Leak software.
