fourbrothers

Defcon hackers target cell phone security
By Paul F. Roberts

Attendees at the annual Defcon hacking conference in Las Vegas might be advised to keep their cell phones powered off at the show, where one prominent security researcher says he will demonstrate a way to transparently intercept and eavesdrop on cell phone calls.

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Inside Facebook's Open Source Infrastructure
By Sean Michael Kerner

Facebook connects its 500 million users using an array of open source software to enable social networking as well as data intelligence. Facebook's open source Web serving infrastructure has a lot more than just the traditional LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) stack behind it.

During a keynote session...

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Programming for a culture approaching singularity
By Luke Palmer

In 2001, Ray Kurzweil published his inspiring, controversial essay The Law of Accelerating Returns. I acknowledge that the essay sometimes seems far-fetched, and perhaps some details are overly (or underly) idealistic, but in essence I find it very convincing. I will take it as an assumption for this article, and I...

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The Creativity Crisis
by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman

For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. What went wrong—and how we can fix it.

Back in 1958, Ted Schwarzrock was an 8-year-old third grader when he became one of the “Torrance kids,” a group of nearly 400 Minneapolis children who completed a series of creativity tasks newly des...

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10 interview questions to help make the best geeky hire
By Justin James

Interviewing for an IT position isn’t all about determining technical proficiency — it’s also important to measure a candidate’s geek quotient. After all, would you want someone on board who doesn’t know who Gary Gygax was?

Anyone who has been involved in the hiring process knows how tough it ca...

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Why I'm a programmer
By Anne Epstein

I don't know if you can say I'm a programmer solely because of my dad(by training a physicist and by profession an engineer), but he was a big part of getting me there. I had my first experiences with a computer when I was very young, no older than 4 or 5- my dad would write small games games for me on the TRS-80: One of them was a spelling ...

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There Are No Famous Programmers
By Zed A. Shaw

I frequently meet a friend for lunch and we talk. Usually I'll blab on and on about music, or some weirdo project I have going on. He'll tell me about jobs he's had or trips he might take now that he's sold a company and can chill out for a while. After one such meeting he said, "It's so refreshing to meet up with a geek who do...

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5 Chrome Extensions For Faster Navigation
by Varun Kashyap

A large part of our time on the computer is spent within the browser these days. And if the recent past is any indicator, this will continue to grow in the future as well with the likes of Chrome OS where all you get is a web browser to interact with your computer and the outside world.
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HP Buys Palm: The Optimist’s View
By Harry McCracken

Wow. The rumormongering about Palm ends today: HP is buying the struggling mobile pioneer for $1.2 billion. One of the largest tech companies on the planet will own WebOS, one of the best available mobile operating systems–but one which has failed so far to make much of an impact as it’s shipped on Palm’s Pre and Pixi hand...

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