If you want reliable global Internet connections, have a limitless appetite for video, or happen to live in Greenland or East Africa, here's some good news: a construction surge in transoceanic cable is under way.

Technology Review: New Oceans of Data

Never mind Web 3.0: The next stage in technological evolution is a single worldwide computer.

Tap Into the 12-Million-Teraflop Handheld Megacomputer

bondi (pronounced "bond-eye") is a programming language centered on pattern-matching. It supports functional, imperative, query-based and object-oriented programming styles using a single small evaluator.

bondi

Nicholas Carr:

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Read a lot of news articles or blog postings online? Have trouble keeping your place in long articles, or switching between articles and forgetting how much you've read? Get annoyed at having to slam repeatedly on the down arrow, or click on the scroll bar every few seconds?

Introducing Paragrasp, an extension for Mozilla Firefox, to alleviate your problems. It adds a highlight to the current paragraph you're reading, and allows you to use simple keyboard shortcuts to navigate forward or backward, moving the highlight and automatically scrolling the window to focus your reading attention to the center of the screen. Each window and tab has their own highlighter, which allows you to switch between them while still keeping your place. Try it now!

Paragrasp

All right: a rant. If you're like me, you dine out with friends quite a bit. And just as often, you find your meal sullied by the complex task of splitting the bill.

Sounds like somebody needs tabjab.

Splitting the check [this is broken]

The JIT is an advanced JavaScript infovis toolkit based on 5 papers about different information visualization techniques.

The JIT implements advanced features of information visualization like Treemaps (with the slice and dice and squarified methods), an adapted visualization of trees based on the Spacetree, a focus+context technique to plot Hyperbolic Trees, and a radial layout of trees with advanced animations (RGraph).

JavaScript Information Visualization Toolkit (JIT)

I'm a research scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). My research background is in online games and immersive virtual reality. I am interested in social interaction and self-representation in virtual environments. You can find out more about my work and what I do for fun with the links on the right.

Nick Yee's HomePage

Wednesday Yahoo announced they have a built a petascale, distributed relational database. In Yahoo Claims Record With Petabyte Database, the details are thin but they built on the PostgreSQL relational database system. In Size matters: Yahoo claims 2-petabyte database is world's biggest, busiest, the system is described as an over 2 petabyte repository of user click stream and context data with an update rate for 24 billion events per day. Waqar Hasan, VP of Engineering at Yahoo! Data group, describes the system as updated in real time and live – essentially a real time data warehouse where changes go in as they are made and queries always run against the most current data. I strongly suspect they are bulk parsing logs and the data is being pushed into the system in large bulk units but, even near real time at this update rate, is impressive.

The original work was done at a Seattle startup called Mahat Technologies acquired by Yahoo! in November 2005.

Petascale SQL DB at Yahoo!

I finally got to see Topo's presentation this week-end at PH-Neutral and discuss it with him and FX.

Given that the slides aren't online yet [1], that Core hasn't published Topo's technical paper on their website [2] yet either, and that I'm done replying to direct inquiries about it [3], here's a summary of the IOS rootkit saga and its impact on the Service Provider community (from my point of view :)

Topo spent a lot of time (and if you ever loaded an IOS image in IDA you know what I'm talking about) analyzing strings and functions in IOS. In his proof of concept he located the code doing the password check and adds a trampoline to his backdoor code (by saving paramaters, glueing the two codes together, doing the "new" password check and returning properly to the main code path). Nice lesson on 101 hooking on IOS.

IOS Rookit: the sky isn't falling (yet)