Monday, March 5, 2012

Tech Links: March 5, 2012

Modular Apple Store - Front by gotoAndLego on Flickr.


Entertainment


WHAT. THE. FUCK. QR CODES?

News


Android apps can secretly copy photos "Android apps do not need permission to get a user's photos, and as long as an app has the right to go to the Internet, it can copy those photos to a remote server without any notice, according to developers and mobile security experts."

Google has pledged cash prizes totaling $1 million to people who successfully hack its Chrome browser at next week's CanSecWest security conference.


Reading & Discussion


How I Found the Human Being Behind Horse_ebooks, The Internet’s Favorite Spambot: As Horse_ebooks has tweeted its way to fame, the human behind the account has remained an enigma. The most any one knew was the vaguely menacing fact that a Russian spammer named "Alexei" had supposedly set up Horse_ebooks. On the internet, that could mean anything. Who Alexei really was was a mystery, until now.

Is SEO killing America? Clay Johnson about how media gives us what we want, not what we need, and how it's destroying democracy. If you don't have time or can't watch a 17 minute video, read this article discussing and summarizing the video. 

Lord of the Files: How GitHub Tamed Free Software (And More): GitHub’s geektastic 14,000-square-foot loft mirrors its mission: to democratize computer programming. GitHub.com is best thought of as Facebook for geeks. Instead of uploading videos of your cat, you upload software. Anyone can comment on your code and add to it and build it into something better. The trick is that it decentralizes programming, giving everyone a new kind of control.

Mastered for iTunes: how audio engineers tweak music for the iPod age: The problem? The AAC compression algorithm is "quite quirky." Without compressing a song, and carefully listening to it, then comparing to the uncompressed master, there's no way to predict how the sound will change. Vlado Meller, another engineer at Masterdisk, described mastering for iTunes "like polishing your Bentley in total darkness, then turning on the lights to see where you missed."


The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia: Explain to me, then, how a ‘minority’ source with facts on its side would ever appear against a wrong ‘majority’ one?" I asked the Wiki-gatekeeper. He responded, "You’re more than welcome to discuss reliable sources here, that’s what the talk page is for. However, you might want to have a quick look at Wikipedia’s civility policy.


Technology


Tech’s latest boom has generated a new, more testosterone-fueled breed of coder. Sure, the job still requires enormous brainpower, but today’s engineers are drawn from diverse backgrounds, and many eschew the laboratory intellectualism that prevailed when semiconductors ruled Silicon Valley.... At some startups the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that it’s given rise to a new 'title': brogrammer.

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