Design patterns represent just one way to solve problems, but if you primarily use object-oriented languages, you may come to think in design patterns. In this installment of Functional thinking, Neal Ford illustrates solutions to a common problem — incompatible interfaces — using traditional design patterns, metaprogramming, and functional composition. Each approach has pros and cons, but thinking about the design of the solutions helps you see problems in new ways.

Meet the gKrypt engine, the world's first package to employ general purpose graphics units (GPGPUs) for data encryption, which is an important tool for information security. It uses an Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) based 256-bit block cipher to provide robust security. In this Part 1 of a two-part series, explore the AES, the GPU port of the Rijndael algorithm for Linux®, the parallelizing of the AES algorithm, and the use of the gKrypt Engine supporting CUDA for NVIDIA-based GPUs.

Inspired on Escher's works. A free vision on how could be his workplace.

Throughout the course of this animation we see many objects. I imagined that these things could be his travel souvenirs, gifts from friends, sources of inspiration… Some are tridimensional representations of works by Escher and others might be just his tools as artist and engraver. Here you will find some brief explanatory notes about those elements which have a highly mathematical nature, including the works of that great Dutch artist that appears along the film.

It should be clear, particularly from the last rule outlined above, that we don’t need to be following a semicolon-free coding style to fall foul of JavaScript’s ASI feature. Perfectly innocent line breaking can lead to semicolons being inserted into our token stream without our permissions so it’s important to be aware of the kinds of situations where this can happen. Much of the recent debate about semicolons misses this point. Additionally, love or hate ASI, it’s with us and is not going away so perhaps it would be more productive to embrace it as a feature and use it where it suits us and work around it where it doesn’t.

Regardless of your preference, ASI and other obscure rules in non-trivial languages such as JavaScript mean that our build tools should involve some kind of syntax checking mechanism. Strongly-typed languages such as Java have sophisticated editors that can understand the intent of your code and provide real-time feedback as you type.

Anlässlich des 100. Geburtstags von Alan Turing werden heuer weltweit zahlreiche Ausstellungen, Kongresse und Symposien veranstaltet. Trotz der Arbeit vieler Biografen bleiben Leben und Werk des britischen Wissenschafters schwer fassbar.

The grid below illustrates the list of Twitter accounts (passwords intentionally removed - if we didn't, anyone viewing this page will be able to login into any of the accounts below!) that reusable.py was able to login to using email/password combinations from the leaks described in our disclosures. We have listed only those accounts that have at least 1000 followers to reduce the load time of this page. But this just shows how easy it is for anyone to pick a list of email/password combinations and programmatically attempt to use them to login into other popular sites and these may include your email accounts on Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail.

The biggest news is that Cordova-JS is now on Android, iOS, Windows Phone and BlackBerry! Cordova-JS brings a unified Javascript layer to the PhoneGap project making it more consistent and streamlined. “The inclusions of Cordova-JS paves the path for public plugin API and associated tooling,” says Brian LeRoux, one of the key PhoneGap dev leads. You can read more about Cordova-JS here.

In yesterday’s blog post, Making the HTTP Archive faster, one of the biggest speedups came from not using a script loader. It turns out that script loader was using document.write to load scripts dynamically. I wrote about the document.write technique in Loading Script Without Blocking back in April 2009, as well as in Even Faster Web Sites (chapter 4). It looks something like this:

document.write('<script src="' + src + '" type="text/javascript"><\/script>'):

The problem with document.write for script loading is:

Every DOM element below the inserted script is blocked from rendering until the script is done downloading (example).
It blocks other dynamic scripts (example). One exception is if multiple scripts are inserted using document.write within the same SCRIPT block (example).

Here is an A - Z list of some Javascript idioms and patterns. The idea is to convey in simple terms some features of the actual Javascript language (rather than how it can interact with DOM). Enjoy...

Beautifully crafted timelines that are easy, and intuitive to use.

Wir geben jeden einzelnen Tag Geld für Unterhaltungsinhalte aus und ich bin es verdammt noch mal leid, mir dauernd vorwerfen zu lassen, ich würde Urheber nicht respektieren, während ich selbst einer bin. Nur eben einer, der nicht rumheult wegen des Internet, sondern anders Geld mit seiner Arbeit verdient als vor 20 Jahren. Insert Bob Dylan quote here.

...

Und wenn ich eine englischsprachige TV-Serie oder einen Film wegen bekloppter und überholter Regionsabkommen nicht legal bekomme, dann dauert es trotzdem keine halbe Stunde, bis ich ihn habe, und DAS, liebe Industrie und liebe Leistungsschutzrecht-Journalisten, ist nichts anderes als völlig grandios und daraus wäre ein so unfassbar großes Geschäft zu machen, denn nicht nur ich würde dafür bezahlen (und tue das an den Stellen, an denen es möglich ist bereits), ... Ich WILL den Urhebern und Produzenten der Inhalte, die ich mag, mein Geld geben, denn sie haben es verdient.

Der 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York entschied, dass der Programmierer Sergey Aleynikov durch das Herunterladen von Programmcode von den Servern seines ehemaligen Arbeitgebers Goldman Sachs keinen Diebstahl begangen habe.

Weil der Code nämlich auf den Servern noch vorhanden ist und Sergey durch das Runterladen keine “physische Kontrolle” über irgendetwas erlangte. Die drei Richter des Berufungsgerichtshofs wiesen ausserdem die allgemeine Interpretation zurück, irgendwelche Daten könnten Gegenstand eines Diebstahls sein, ausser Geld. Was mit Aleynikov nun konkret passieren wird, müssen die US-Gerichte formulieren, aber für die Definition von Begriffen wie “geistige Leistung” und “geistiges Eigentum”, vor allem im Zusammenhang mit dem alten Rechtsbegriff “Diebstahl” ist die Entscheidung grundlegend. Wie jedes Kind verstehen kann, liegt kein Diebstahl vor, solange das Original noch an seinem Platz ist.

While the law seems aimed at blackmarket tools that can be used to create malware infested sites, it’s also likely to criminalize tools used by researchers, developers and black hats alike – including tools like fuzzers, the Metasploit penetration testing tool and the wi-fi sniffing tool Wireshark. (Perhaps even the command line would be outlawed.)

U.S. law remains murky or outright dangerous for security researchers, hacktivists and curious citizens. Provisions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act make it a crime to get around encryption built into products, with only a few exceptions. And federal prosecutors have tried to prosecute citizens under federal anti-hacking laws for violating the terms of service on a social network.

The E.U. ban could, if enacted, have consequences across the pond. Recently, the U.K. approved extradition of one of its citizens to the U.S. to face copyright infringement charges for a site that linked to online television shows.

Staffers in the European Parliament are facing a challenge to their ethics. A company is offering all of them a gift which could not only compromise their independence, but also get them in hot water for copyright infringement. The people working at the European Parliament now need to make a choice: Leave the gift on the table and earn the respect of the citizens they’re working for, or compromise on ethics.

The company in question is Microsoft, and the gift is a bunch of proprietary programs. Through the Parliament’s administration, Microsoft is offering staffers (though probably not MEPs) gratis licenses to Microsoft Office, Project (a project management software) and Visio (a diagramming tool). This happens under the so-called “Home Use Program“.

The most obvious problem is that the parliament’s staff are working on regulations that govern the very business that is now making a gift to them. That’s a clear conflict of interest which can’t be explained away.

nformation Assurance (IA) in the field of communication and information systems is the confidence that such systems will protect the information they handle and will function as they need to, when they need to, under the control of legitimate users. Effective IA shall ensure appropriate levels of confidentiality, integrity, availability, non-repudiation and authenticity. IA shall be based on a risk management process.

Where the protection of European Union Classified Information (EUCI) is provided by cryptographic products, such products shall be approved as follows: ...

“... If you ever decide to switch devices, with IPG you’ll always be able to take your e-books with you. You bought them, you own them, and we’ll always make sure that you have a way to convert your e-books to the latest and greatest devices. Changing devices and platforms shouldn’t mean throwing away your library.”

...

In January, Apple released its iBooks 2 app for authoring e-books to be displayed on the iPad. The fine print on the licensing agreement says that any book created with the iBooks authoring app can only be sold in the Apple store, because the program’s proprietary design elements give Apple a stake in the product, and thus the right to tell you what to do with the book you create using it.

As an example of this in the last book, written in 2010, an 8 character password made up of both upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols would have taken 2.25 years to crack. The same password now would take just 57 days. I have included the data in a table for you here, heat mapped with what I consider to be safe and unsafe password combinations. Where does your password fit in the table and how secure is it?

Forbes—one of financial journalism’s most venerable institutions—now employs a company called Narrative Science to automatically generate online articles about what to expect from upcoming corporate earnings statements. Just feed it some statistics and, within seconds, the clever software produces highly readable stories. Or, as Forbes puts it, “Narrative Science, through its proprietary artificial intelligence platform, transforms data into stories and insights.” Don't miss the irony here: Automated platforms are now “writing” news reports about companies that make their money from automated trading. These reports are eventually fed back into the financial system, helping the algorithms to spot even more lucrative deals. Essentially, this is journalism done by robots and for robots. The only upside here is that humans get to keep all the cash.

To celebrate the history of math and its impact on the world, IBM (NYSE: IBM) has released Minds of Modern Mathematics, an iPad app that re-imagines a classic 50-foot infographic on the history of math created by husband-and-wife design team Charles and Ray Eames and displayed at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City.

The app, which can be downloaded from the iPad App Store, is an interactive vintage-meets-digital experience for students, teachers, and tech fans that illustrates how mathematics has advanced art, science, music and architecture. It reinvents the massive timeline on the history of math from 1000 AD to 1960 that was part of Mathematica: A World of Numbers...and Beyond, IBM’s milestone World’s Fair exhibit.