For one thing, people are buying more and more books in Amazonia, and more and more of them are on Amazon's ebook platform the Kindle. In May this year, Amazon announced that, for the first time, it was selling more Kindle versions of books than paperback and hardbacks combined, and (here's the thing that doesn't get quoted so often) sales of print books were still increasing.

Amazon also announced that, in the year to May 2011, it had seen the fastest year-on-year growth rate for its US books business, when expressed in volume and in dollars. This included books in all formats, print and digital. In the UK, less than one year after opening its UK Kindle store, Amazon.co.uk is selling more Kindle books than hardcover books. And again, this is while hardcover sales continue to grow.

Bad-boy Pentagon boffinry bureau DARPA has now released the official solicitation for its "100 Year Starship" project, intended to get human beings making interstellar voyages within a century.

We've covered the 100 Year Starship push on these pages before, and the outline idea remains the same. A very small amount of US government seed money (to be specific, $500,000) will be provided by DARPA and handed out by NASA's Ames campus in Silicon Valley. This tiny financial seed is intended to sprout and grow into a stupendous organisation able to harness and deploy the titanic resources necessary to deliver working interstellar transport.

Dubbed "The Great Internet Speedup,'' this cooperative effort involves deploying an extension to the Domain Name System, which is the underlying protocol that matches Internet domain names with corresponding IP addresses.

Proponents of the DNS tweak say it will decrease the latency end users experience when accessing videos and other large files, and that it offers CDNs a better ways to scale up their networks.

But others say the DNS protocol tweak creates architectural issues and privacy concerns, the latter stemming from the passing of parts of IP addresses in a DNS query. This change to the DNS protocol has been proposed as an experimental document to the Internet Engineering Task Force, but it hasn't been adopted yet by the standards-setting body.

Mit einer kurzen Meldung hat Oracle die 2006 von Sun ins Leben gerufene "Operating System Distributor License for Java" (DLJ) in Rente geschickt. Unter dieser – nicht freien – Lizenz durften Linux-Distributoren bislang die Java-Versionen von Sun und später Oracle paketieren und verteilen.

Polen erwägt derzeit die Einführung eines Gesetzes, das es der Regierung ermöglichen wurde, im Falle eines Cyber-Angriffs das Kriegsrecht auszurufen. Ähnliche Gesetzgebung existiert bereits in den Vereinigten Staaten. Unter IT-Sicherheitsexperten sind derartige Konzepte extrem umstritten.

Switzerland could become the first country to outlaw PowerPoint presentations if a new party runs in the October parliamentary elections. Matthias Poehm, founder of the Anti-PowerPoint Party, claims that €350bn could be saved globally each year by ditching the scourge of public speaking. Poehm believes that the software takes people away from their work and teaches them little. "There is a solution," he says. "A flipchart."

Was tut man als holländische CA, nachdem man erwischt wurde, wie man dem Iran Zertifikate für Google Mail ausgestellt hat? Das ist PR-technisch keine ganz einfache Situation. Man könnte sagen, naja, das ist der Iran, die hätten die halt sonst woanders gekauft. Und so haben wir ihnen Geld abgenommen, mit dem sie jetzt keine Raketen bauen können!1!!

DigiNotar geht einen anderen Weg. Hier ist ihre Presseerklärung. Und das ist Comedy Gold, sage ich euch! Nicht nur behaupten sie, die Zertifikate gar nicht ausgestellt zu haben, nein, sie pullen die "wir wurden gehackt!1!!"-Karte. Nun ist die Ansage, als CA, dass man gehackt werden kann, natürlich der ultimative Totalschaden.

All aboard for London's transport design icons. From railway signs to tube seats, the next stop could be your house

When members appear in public to protest censorship and what they view as corruption, they don a plastic mask of Guy Fawkes, the 17th-century Englishman who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament.

What few people seem to know, though, is that Time Warner, one of the largest media companies in the world and parent of Warner Brothers, owns the rights to the image and is paid a licensing fee with the sale of each mask.

A chatbot is a computer program that's intended to fool us into thinking that it's human. Historically, this has been a tricky thing to do, and for the last 20 years there's been a $100,000 prize and gold medal waiting for the first computer program that can carry on a conversation indistinguishably from a human. Arguably (very arguably), this could also be the first computer program to demonstrate an artificial intelligence.

Cornell's Creative Machines Lab decided to see what would happen if they put two chatbots face to virtual face and got them started talking to one another. Things didn't go quite as crazy as might have been expected, but a fair amount of pointless argument, passive aggression, and random hilarity did ensue:

Security researchers have discovered a counterfeit web certificate for Google.com circulating on the internet that gives attackers the encryption keys needed to impersonate Gmail and virtually every other digitally signed Google property.

When a new writing technology develops, we tend to romanticize the older one. The supplanted technology is vaunted as more authentic because it is no longer ubiquitous or official. Thus for monks, print was capricious and script reliable. So too today: Conventional wisdom holds that computers are devoid of emotion and personality, and handwriting is the province of intimacy, originality and authenticity.

Ich wage eine Prognose: Die Zeit von 1985 bis 201x, die wir vielleicht nur als leidlich aufregend empfanden bzw. empfinden werden, wird in den nur noch elektronisch abrufbaren Geschichtsbüchern künftiger Generationen einen ebenso großen Platz einnehmen wie das Römische Reich oder die Industrialisierung. Und zwar nicht in erster Linie wegen 09/11, sondern weil sich in dieser Zeitspanne der Herzschlag der Welt umstellte – von analog auf digital.

Yes, it’s true that I have dumped a good number of social software tools out there on the Social Web in favour of G+ itself, or, at least, thanks to it I have reduced my involvement with those social tools quite a bit. But there are two of them that I am not ready, just yet, to kiss good-bye and move them into SNS. One of them is my Flickr account and the other one, of course, is my blog. This blog. And Hugh explains it very very well how I, too, feel about it overall on why I still think there is a place and a time for blogging out there on the Internet, as well as the Intranet, by the way. Here are a couple of noteworthy quotes from his blog entry I thought were worth while sharing across:

“The content on your blog, however, belongs to you, and you alone. People come to your online home, to hear what you have to say, not to hear what everybody else has to say. This sense of personal sovereignty is important.” [Emphasis mine]

So why would anyone learn this stuff, anyway? Well, there are several reasons which come to mind:

* Your major requires a course in assembly language; i.e., you're here against your will.
* A programmer where you work quit. Most of the source code left behind was written in assembly language and you were elected to maintain it.
* Your boss has the audacity to insist that you write your code in assembly against your strongest wishes.
* Your programs run just a little too slow, or are a little too large and you think assembly language might help you get your project under control.
* You want to understand how computers actually work.
* You're interested in learning how to write efficient code.
* You want to try something new.

Fast jeder fünfte Versicherte wurde gemahnt und knapp jeder zehnte exekutiert. Das System trifft die Wenigverdiener am härtesten, jetzt formiert sich Widerstand

Let's say you were given a year to kill Hewlett-Packard. Here's how you do it ...

A data repository almost 10 times bigger than any made before is being built by researchers at IBM's Almaden, California, research lab. The 120 petabyte "drive"—that's 120 million gigabytes—is made up of 200,000 conventional hard disk drives working together. The giant data container is expected to store around one trillion files and should provide the space needed to allow more powerful simulations of complex systems, like those used to model weather and climate.

A 120 petabyte drive could hold 24 billion typical five-megabyte MP3 files or comfortably swallow 60 copies of the biggest backup of the Web, the 150 billion pages that make up the Internet Archive's WayBack Machine.

First, an IP address doesn't automatically identify a criminal suspect. It's just a unique address for a device connected to the Internet, much like a street address identifies a building. In most cases, an IP address will identify a router that one or more computers use to connect to the Internet.

But in many situations, an IP address isn't personally identifying at all. When it traces back to a router that connects to many computers at a library, cafe, university, or to an open wireless network, VPN or Tor exit relay used by any number of people, an IP address alone doesn't identify the sender of a specific message. And because of pervasive problems like botnets and malware, suspect IP addresses increasingly turn out to be mere stepping stones for the person actually "using" the computer—a person who is nowhere nearby.

Encrypted email should be the norm, not the once-in-a-lifetime event. We all know that we should use it. Haven't we all been schooled that sending emails is like having a post card plastered to the wall of your local coffee bar? Haven't all the various exploits with stolen credit cards and easily guessed passwords of Sarah Palin's Yahoo account been warning enough? Apparently not.