News (18)

Kevin Mitnick: Social engineering 101

Kevin Mitnick has proven that the weakest link in any security system is the person holding the information. Read more »

Inside the Top500 supercomputers

Roadrunner has topped the Top500 supercomputers list to be released Wednesday at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany. Read more »

IBM breaks petaflop barrier with PS3 and AMD chips

Computing giant IBM has built a supercomputer that can operate at one petaflop — 1,000 trillion floating point operations per second — twice as fast as the world's previous fastest computer, IBM's Blue Gene. Read more »

Browser faceoff: IE vs Firefox vs Opera vs Safari

Web 2.0, with its complex sites and rich Ajax applications, is an increasingly demanding platform for a browser. In this review feature, we look at how the leading browsers measure up. Read more »

Twitter lets staff "trigger nuclear option" on bosses

Mark Pesce, Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney, says that the days of bosses' bad office behaviour are well and truly numbered. Read more »

US Homeland Security wants a cyber-nuclear bomb

The US wants to help defend against cyber attacks by embarking on a project that would build the equivalent of an online nuclear bomb. Read more »

Machines to terminate human intellect

Machine intelligence will catch up with that of humans and begin to overtake it in the next two decades, a visionary scientist has predicted. Read more »

IDC Web site defaced by 'eco-terrorists'

The Web site of Global IT research firm IDC has been hacked by a group purporting to be Brazilian environmental terrorists to serve a message urging people to take action over global warming. Read more »

Criminals' botnet more powerful than BlueGene?

Criminals behind the Storm worm have created a botnet containing millions of PCs, which have a combined computing power greater than the most powerful supercomputer in existence. Read more »

CIA and Vatican alter Wikipedia entries

The CIA and the Vatican have made alterations to Wikipeda entries, according to a US hacker's homemade program that detects the source of edits to the online encyclopedia. Read more »

Features (4)

How start-ups can survive

Here we go again: Another boom, another bust. But we've learned something from the last time, haven't we? Read more »

PARC founder George Pake dies

George Pake, the scientist who founded Xerox's fabled Palo Alto Research Center, died last week, less than a month shy of his 80th birthday. Read more »

Microsoft's singing in C#

Microsoft and its allies have quietly expanded an effort to gain acceptance for C#, the software giant's competitor to Java and a foundation for its next-generation Internet services. Read more »

The very real limitations of open source

Yes, open source software benefits society. However, some programmers are questioning the practicability of open source development. Read more »

Video (2)

NICTA's clarinet playing robot

NICTA and UNSW have collaborated to create a clarinet playing robot designed to demonstrate the versatility of embedded systems. The robot won the ARTEMIS orchestra competition in Athens. Video courtesy of NICTA. Read more »

Explaining Google's BigTable

Google uses a proprietary, high performance and scalable database called BigTable. Brett Slatkin, senior software engineer at Google, explains BigTable and how it get the best out of it with AppEngine. Read more »

Blog (1)

A new coat of varnish

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- This week featured plenty of coverage from the various conferences occurring around the country. All the while Builder's design gnomes were busy give the site a touch-up. Read more »

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  • Staff Microsoft shows off IE9 preview

    This week, highlights from Microsoft's MIX10 conference and more in the Roundup. Read more »

    -- posted by Staff

  • Chris Duckett IE9's H.264 vote killed Ogg

    In a split decision by the judges, the winner of the W3C/WHATWG video codec consensus is H.264, taking home the future of video playback on the internet while loser Ogg goes home with nothing but thoughts of what might have been. Read more »

    -- posted by Chris Duckett

  • Staff Google launches Apps Marketplace

    Google launches and app store, while Mozilla plans to re-write its open-source license. More of this week's news in the Roundup. Read more »

    -- posted by Staff

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