The AI does not love you, nor does it hate you, but you are made out of atoms it might find useful for something else. - Eliezer Yudkowsky

The world’s biggest IT security company Symantec has admitted anti-virus software is “dead” and it doesn’t think of the technology as a money maker anymore. The comments came from the company’s senior vice president for information security, as a handful of other companies released reports trying to put the final nail in the coffin of anti-virus.

It doesn’t matter how much an education costs, doesn’t matter if your kids can’t afford to go to college or come out with massive debt, we will always be able to send our kids to university. And because a lot of our income is derived from tax incentives and taxpayer-financed bailouts your taxes are sending our kids to school. But you do not have the right to any of our money to send your kid to school. Your kids are born with a glass ceiling above which they will almost certainly never have the opportunity to rise. Our kids are born with a marble floor beneath which they will never be allowed to fall.

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.