Hackers target Facebook apps | Surveillance State - CNET Blogs

"Just a few months after this blog brought you exclusive news of privacy problems in Facebook's application system, we are now already seeing the consequences of Facebook's decision to pass the buck on on application security and privacy. Facebook shares user data with a large number of third-party application developers (without user consent), who then leave the data open to hackers due to nonexistent security and privacy protections. We at Surveillance State would be lying if we said we didn't see this coming."

Why Old Technologies Are Still Kicking - New York Times

"IN 1991, Stewart Alsop, the editor of InfoWorld and a thoughtful observer of industry trends, predicted that the last mainframe computer would be unplugged by 1996. Last month, I.B.M. introduced the latest version of its mainframe, the aged yet remarkably resilient warhorse of computing."

NVIDIA's Drivers Caused 28.8% Of Vista Crashes In 2007

As posted on Slashdot:

28.8% of Vista's crashes over a period in 2007 were due to faulty NVIDIA drivers. The information comes out of the 158 pages of Microsoft emails that were handed over at the request of a judge in the Vista-capable lawsuit. NVIDIA has already faced a class-action lawsuit over the drivers.

Here is a link from Microsoft's Technet about changes to driver handling pre and post NT 4.0.

A Slashdotter complained that this is just more blaiming Microsfot for everything, but depending on what version of "blame Microsoft" you are responding to the complaint may or may not be legitimate.

Windows NT 3.51 may have been the most stable version of Windows in history. I think it was the one on which Microsoft spent the most time and money on testing and on a fairly massive scale went out and helped hardware and driver people with their testing (providing labs with a large variety of configurations etc.). They were trying to solidify the Windows base within businesses, and convince businesses that Windows was no longer a toy (i.e. gaming) operating system only. The goal, among other things was to get people off of OS/2, older versions of Windows (93 and WFW).

The program was a great success. Not only did large parts of the federal government switch, I even made the switch on my home machines. Unless you were a gamer (in which case you would have still been running 95 or then 98) you could have experienced a relatively un-bloated and crash-free Windows experience. It was the last time I tried running Windows for days on end without regular restorative reboots.

As the link states:

"In Windows NT 4.0, drivers were moved into kernel mode to improve performance. However, when a kernel-mode driver fails, it can crash an entire system, whereas the failure of a user-mode driver causes only the current process to crash."

In point of fact, video drivers could "fail" prior to 4.0 and only cause minor screen corruption or glitches, or in fact be asymptomatic. After 4.0 though, the same failure might cause a system crash, or might cause other programs to appear to crash, or might cause disk I/O buffers to contain garbage that would subsequently be written out to disk and cause crashes hours later, not to mention you wondering why your spreadsheets were deteriorating over time.

I don't remember Microsoft going out and asking video vendors if they thought this was all a good idea. In fact the element of surprise was very important to MS for some reason on the 4.0 announcement... no pre-announcement of features being added or removed as there were for years leading up to Vista. They certainly didn't ask me. I left the meeting telling my colleagues that this was nuts. And I don't think they gave either vendors or users much time to adjust to the changes as I went from thinking that Windows had finally arrived to wishing I had stayed with OS/2.

From what I read, MS no longer does the extensive testing they did for 3.51, and in fact they make driver and hardware makers pay them for any help they get in order to be "certified". Having won the game of becoming THE business operating system, MS said "screw you" to the partners that helped them get there. Typical.

MS engineers bragged about being geniuses during the 4.0 product roll-out for moving drivers to kernel space, but the move was necessary due to GUI bloat that was added for that release. Subsequent bloat of that nature has made each subsequent version of Windows seem less snappy and take up more memory, and no doubt the next product roll-out after 4.0 (at which point I had stopped attending) I'm sure the MS engineers bragged about being geniuses for moving drivers back into user-mode for reliability reasons. Both moves might have cause significant adjustments to be made by driver makers on short notice depending, for example, on whether they were relying on memory protection and changing the nature of their context switches.

If you don't blame Microsoft for some of these driver problems you either work there, or haven't been paying attention for long enough.

Think Progress » Blog Archive » EXCLUSIVE: McCain’s Foreign Affairs Speech Plagiarizes 1996 Address By Adm. Timothy Ziemer (UPDATED)

Think Progress » Blog Archive » EXCLUSIVE: McCain’s Foreign Affairs Speech Plagiarizes 1996 Address By Adm. Timothy Ziemer (UPDATED): "EXCLUSIVE: McCain’s Foreign Affairs Speech Plagiarizes 1996 Address By Adm. Timothy Ziemer (UPDATED)»

UPDATE: It appears that Ziemer’s speech may have been plagiarized from McCain. According to the McCain campaign, the senator used these lines before Ziemer — in 1995. We regret the error.

UPDATE: As a blog that strives to maintain credibility and transparency, we would like to explain our mistake. When we were alerted to the tip that Adm. Ziemer gave a similar speech in 1996, we searched LexisNexis and McCain’s campaign site for whether the senator used the disputed phrases before that time. We did not find anything. After we published the post, the McCain campaign contacted us and pointed to a speech given by the senator in 1995, which appears on McCain’s Senate site. As soon as we were alerted to the error, we rushed to publish a correction. Once again, we regret the error."

Of course the truly amazing thing is that a liberal source would actually do a retraction and not at least bury it in a footnote in fine print on page 28.

They obviously need to be sent back to indoctrination classes.

But in the mean time, congratulations on seeking and finding the truth, or at least not running away when it finds you.

Link came from *HERE*.

Linux gains new architecture support

"Dozens of network-attached storage (NAS) servers and other consumer appliances are about to gain mainline kernel and Debian GNU/Linux support. The 2.6.25 kernel, currently in the final stages of testing, will support Marvell's Feroceon micro-architecture and 'Orion' SoCs, with Debian support close behind, sources say."

Jim McDermott: "We Don't Mind Being Used" by Saddam Hussein

"Thompson and McDermott would have us believe that they visited a sworn enemy of the United States -- one who had tried to assassinate a former president and declared that the 'Mother of all Battles' had never ended -- without doing even the most basic research about who was funding their trip? That's hard to believe. And Bonior, who was from Michigan and had taken money from al Khafaji before, had no idea that he was backed by Saddam Hussein? When I spent a week reporting in Michigan for a story on Iraqi exiles, virtually every Iraqi I spoke to told me about al Khafaji and his dirty money. Is is possible that nobody ever mentioned this to Bonior, who recently chaired John Edwards' presidential campaign, before he traveled to Iraq with al Khafaji? Again, hard to believe."

The Long Defeat - New York Times

"For nearly 20 years, she has been encased in the apparatus of political celebrity. Look at her schedule as first lady and ever since. Think of the thousands of staged events, the tens of thousands of times she has pretended to be delighted to see someone she doesn’t know, the hundreds of thousands times she has recited empty clichés and exhortatory banalities, the millions of photos she has posed for in which she is supposed to appear empathetic or tough, the billions of politically opportune half-truths that have bounced around her head."

The Tonya Harding Option

"The Tonya Harding Option -- the first time I've heard it put that way.

It implies that Clinton is so set on ensuring that Obama doesn't get the nomination, not only is she willing to take extra-ruthless steps, but in the end neither she nor Obama win the gold."

NIH researcher loses laptop with data on 2,500 patients

"The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute has strengthened its data protection policies and enforcement of those policies in the wake of the theft of a laptop computer containing unencrypted information on about 2,500 patients enrolled in a clinical research project."

The 10 Most Historically Inaccurate Movies

"2001: A Space Odyssey
According to this film, in year 2001 we would have had manned voyages to Jupiter, a battle of wits with a sentient computer, and a quantum leap in human evolution. Instead we got the Mir Space Station falling from the sky, Windows XP, and Freddy Got Fingered. Apparently the lesson here is that sometimes it's better when the movies get the facts all wrong."

blog.pmarca.com: Brad DeLong on trade and wages

"Berkeley econ professor -- and non-conservative"

Doesn't that fall into the category of tautology?

Anyway, the rest of the article is more hand wringing about China vs the US economy, displaying the typical cornerstone of liberal thought that it is either them or us. Either the Chinese or the western world, either the rich or the poor, either the east coast or the west cost. Winner and losers, and we of big heart all want to do our part to save the losers, even, heaven-forbid, if they are us!

Of course I'm not all that optimistic either, but it has more to do with the kids we are raising than our past business practices or trade regulations.

Original page where Brad Delongs readers tell him that everything he said was wrong.

This guy worked for the White House? I was almost afraid to look and see which one. Please, not eight more years of that!

Australian WiMAX pioneer trashes technology as "miserable failure" | CommsDay

Australia’s first WiMAX operator, Hervey Bay’s Buzz Broadband, has closed its network, with the CEO labeling the technology as a “disaster” that “failed miserably.”

They don't call it "bleeding edge" for nothing.

I, Cringely . War of the Worlds | PBS

"Here, buried in my sixth paragraph, is the most important nugget: we've reached the point in our (disparate) cultural adaptation to computing and communication technology that the younger technical generations are so empowered they are impatient and ready to jettison institutions most of the rest of us tend to think of as essential, central, even immortal. They are ready to dump our schools."

Moving in a Wired World - washingtonpost.com

"If Thomas Edison wired your digs for electricity and Alexander Graham Bell installed your phones, consider upgrading to newer technologies when you move."

The Angry Economist-Too many poor

"There are too many poor people in New York State. We could try to increase their wealth through the same old same old methods of income redistribution, or economic development. Or we could try some innovative new scheme, like ... paying them to leave. Why not? Let's make New York State a better place to live by getting rid of its poor people."

I'm tempted to quote the whole thing but the punch line is worth the trip.