We’re in a weird time for the way the future looks; somehow House of Cards can slyly introduce a floating text-message interface to their present-day political drama without so much as blinking, but most of our iconic near- and far-future worlds run on tracks laid down well before the ’90s.

Annually this event aims to strengthen the networking between computer scientists nationwide and to provide a communication platform for highlighting the excellence of Austrian computer science. Distinguished computer scientists will present a variety of attractive topics, illustrating the broad scope and the impact of national research. Similar to last year, eight researchers from different computer science departments at national and international universities will give an overview over the computer science research done in Austria. Furthermore, there will be included a poster session in order to allow PhD students to present and discuss their work with the community.

Twitter used to be a sort of surrogate newsroom/barroom where you could organize around ideas with people whose opinions you wanted to assess. Maybe you wouldn't agree with everybody, but that was part of the fun. But at some point Twitter narratives started to look the same. The crowd became predictable, and not in a good way. Too much of Twitter was cruel and petty and fake. Everything we know from experience about social publishing platforms—about any publishing platforms—is that they change. And it can be hard to track the interplay between design changes and behavioral ones. In other words, did Twitter change Twitter, or did we?

cyberpunk may have been dead since 1990 or whatever, but ~my generation~ are a gazillion times more cyberpunk than any old-school Neuromancer fanboy could ever have dreamed. we live in a Google and Facebook-owned dystopian hellscape of police spy drones and PRISM, and have the ability to use Bitcoin to buy everything from hamburgers to hard drugs. a 13-year-old girl Snapchatting youtube clips of One Direction to her friends is probably more cyberpunk than the “real” cyberpunks of yesteryear.

“Science fiction represents how people in the present feel about the future,” Robinson says. “That’s why ‘big ideas’ were prevalent in the 1930s, ’40s and partly in the ’50s. People felt the future would be better, one way or another. Now it doesn’t feel that way. Rich people take nine-tenths of everything and force the rest of us to fight over the remaining tenth, and if we object to that, we are told we are espousing class warfare and are crushed. They toy with us for their entertainment, and they live in ridiculous luxury while we starve and fight each other. This is what The Hunger Games embodies in a narrative, and so the response to it has been tremendous, as it should be.”

For a brief historical moment, humanity has flown high like Icarus, on a vulnerable first-generation Internet platform for securing and using distributed ideas, arts, media, science, commerce, and machines—promising brilliant futures such as a network of things, autonomous personalized services, and immersive media. But now our first-generation Internet, built on a fragile global network of vulnerable codes, is failing, like the wings of Icarus, from too close an encounter with a triple shock: A massive dotcom data stalker economy built on mining of terabytes personal data Ubiquitous criminal penetration of financial and identity networks, both on our devices and in the cloud Pervasive state intruders at all levels and at every encrypted hardware and software node

To be honest, I have a hard time imagining Internet 2.0. I’m old enough to remember the utopian enthusiasm that greeted the Internet when it emerged 20 years ago. We can’t go back—we know too much now—but maybe we can learn from what we loved about the Internet back then. Namely, its egalitarian nature—that homemade and small-scale sites were just as accessible as the emerging e-commerce platforms. It was a pleasant, chaotic jumble. Can we revive the feeling of a souk and lose the big-box store feel?

The audience actually wants to work for their meal. They just don’t want to know that they’re doing that. That’s your job as a storyteller is to hide the fact that you’re making them work for their meal. We’re born problem solvers. We’re compelled to deduce and to deduct because that’s what we do in real life. It’s this well-organized absence of information that draws us in.

The Sony Walkman TPS-L2 introduced in 1979 is one of those legends. It's the first Walkman ever made and the first product I'm showcasing that's older than myself. This was the first time music became truly portable making it historically more significant than even the iPod. The TPS-L2 has become a collector's favorite so expect to pay a premium for one in good condition. I was lucky and purchased this from a university museum for a reasonable price.

At its heart, Tails is a version of the Linux operating system optimized for anonymity. It comes with several privacy and encryption tools, most notably Tor, an application that anonymizes a user’s internet traffic by routing it through a network of computers run by volunteers around the world.

Most of the attention around the Heartbleed attack has focused on the simplest and most obvious scenario: a malicious client attacking an HTTPS server to steal cookies, private keys, and other secrets. But this isn't the only attack possible: a malicious server can also send bad heartbeat packets to a client that uses OpenSSL and extract data from that client. The TLS heartbeats used in this attack are symmetric: they can be initiated by either the "client" or the "server" in a TLS connection, and both endpoints use the same vulnerable parsing code.

While the other eight packages all achieved protection scores of 87% or higher - with five scoring 98% or 99% - Microsoft's free antivirus software protected against only 61% of the malware samples used in the test.

Dear computer- and IT-Equipment vendors: NEVER use red LEDs to indicate “OK-Status” EVER! RED has to be reserved for alert or emergency conditions only! Thanks! — IT-departments and system Administration worldwide Image [photos.app.net]

“Similar to the Necronomicon, a C++ source code file is a wicked, obscure document that’s filled with cryptic incantations and forbidden knowl- edge.” [research.microsoft.com]

Technology does something to us, we are not the subject but the object, the victim. But that is wrong. [...] All technology comes from the human wish to gain a better grip on the world, to extend one’s reach in whatever way:

Epic! I would have expected this in a book by William Gibson or Cory Doctorow, but not in the wild.

Sg. Hr. Gerald Lehner vom ORF Radio Salzburg, was sind bitte "illegale Computer-Spezialisten"? Sind die heimlich über die Grenze gekommen? Haben die keine ECDL-Prüfung? Diese Stimmungsmache gegen Leute, die sich mit IT auskennen, kotzt mich an.

Mit Kindern kann man nämlich sehr vernünftig reden. So wie sie verstehen, dass in einem Buch, das vor 30 Jahren geschrieben wurde, die Kinder kein Handy, aber einen Plattenspieler haben, so würden sie auch verstehen, dass damals das Wort Neger üblich war und verändertes Bewusstsein veränderte Sprache bringt.

The truth is, kids can't use general purpose computers, and neither can most of the adults I know. There's a narrow range of individuals whom, at school, I consider technically savvy. These are roughly the thirty to fifty year-olds that have owned a computer for much of their adult lives. There are, of course, exceptions amongst the staff and students,

Not really knowing how to use a computer is deemed acceptable if you're twenty-five or over. It's something that some people are even perversely proud of, but the prevailing wisdom is that all under eighteens are technical wizards, and this is simply not true. They can use some software, particularly web-apps. They know how to use Facebook and Twitter. They can use YouTube and Pinterest. They even know how to use Word and PowerPoint and Excel. Ask them to reinstall an operating system and they're lost. Ask them to upgrade their hard-drive or their RAM and they break out in a cold sweat. Ask them what https means and why it is important and they'll look at you as if you're speaking Klingon.

They click 'OK' in dialogue boxes without reading the message. They choose passwords like qwerty1234. They shut-down by holding in the power button until the monitor goes black. They'll leave themselves logged in on a computer and walk out of the room. If a program is unresponsive, they'll click the same button repeatedly until it crashes altogether.

This has happened before. It is not a new phenomenon. A hundred years ago, if you were lucky enough to own a car then you probably knew how to fix it. ... I doubt my five year-old son will even need to learn to drive. It'll be done for him by his car ...

I want the people who will help shape our society in the future to understand the technology that will help shape our society in the future. If this is going to happen, then we need to reverse the trend that is seeing digital illiteracy exponentially increase. We need to act together, as parents, as teachers, as policy makers. Let's build a generation of hackers. Who's with me?

The parents seem to have some vague concept that spending hours each evening on Facebook and YouTube will impart, by some sort of cybernetic osmosis, a knowledge of PHP, HTML, JavaScript and Haskell.

The truth is, kids can't use general purpose computers, and neither can most of the adults I know. There's a narrow range of individuals whom, at school, I consider technically savvy. These are roughly the thirty to fifty year-olds that have owned a computer for much of their adult lives. There are, of course, exceptions amongst the staff and students.