How Corruption Is Strangling U.S. Innovation

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One of the prime drivers of economic growth inside America over the past century has been disruptive innovation; yet the phenomenon that Lessig describes is increasingly being used by large incumbent firms as a mechanism to stave off the process. Given how hard it can be to survive a disruptive challenge, and how effective lobbying has proven in stopping it, it’s no wonder that incumbent firms take this route so often.

via How Corruption Is Strangling U.S. Innovation – James Allworth – Harvard Business Review.

Netflix. Uber. Airbnb. Tesla. Fisker. Most economies would kill to have a set of innovators such as these. And yet at every turn, these companies are running headlong into regulation (or lack thereof) that seems designed to benefit incumbents like NADA and Comcast — regulation that, for some strange reason, policy makers seem extremely reticent to change if it results in upsetting incumbents.

For Riot Games, Big Data Is Serious Business

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Once Riot Games opened up a European base of operations, it couldn’t fit all its data into one instance of mySQL. “So we created a separate instance. That was a bad precedent and we needed to change that,” Livingston added. “We moved quickly to Hadoop as a scalable low-cost storage system. We use Hive to overlay an SQL-type interface on top of the Hadoop File System.” That helped scale up, but “the downside is that it takes a long time to spin up to do your queries, some taking a minute or more to complete, so it is difficult to iterate and build complex queries using Hive.”

via For Riot Games, Big Data Is Serious Business.

Part of the challenge is to maintain a level playing field for all players, yet constantly tweaking game play and game mechanics to make it more interesting for returning players: “We need lots of insight so that competitive play will continue to happen. We don’t want different versions of the game for pros and noobs, for example.”

How to detect reverse_https backdoors

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According to Mandiant 83% of all backdoors used by APT attackers are outgoing sessions to TCP port 80 or 443. The reason for why APT, as well as other attackers, are using these two ports is primarily because most organizations allow outgoing connections on TCP 80 as well as 443. Many organizations try to counter this by using web-proxies, which can inspect the HTTP traffic and block any malicious behavior. But TCP 443 cannot be inspected in this way since SSL relies on end-to-end encryption.

via How to detect reverse_https backdoors – NETRESEC Blog.

Well, something that many people aren’t aware of is that the initial part of an SSL session isn’t encrypted. In fact, there are some pieces of relevant information being transmitted in clear text, especially the X.509 certificate that is sent from the SSL server.

ITU’s deep packet snooping standard leaks online

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The standard describes itself as applicable to “application identification, flow identification, inspected traffic types” – which The Register would highlight as the most sensitive functions – along with how DPI systems manage signatures, report to network management systems, and interact with their policy engines.

via Revealed: ITU’s deep packet snooping standard leaks online • The Register.

The ITU has now announced that the DPI standard has been approved. Its announcement spins the standard in the direction of performance management, managing not to dwell on unwelcome issues such as BitTorrent or VoIP blocking.

Finding the Source of the Pioneer Anomaly

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These spacecraft also underscore the value of data preservation. In the early days of the Pioneer missions, scientists and engineers often viewed the medium as more valuable than the data it contained. Many considered raw data to be worthless once “useful” scientific and technical information had been extracted. Nowadays data storage may be cheap, but we’re still in danger of suffering from shortsightedness when it comes to data custodianship. Every experiment needs a clear plan in place to ensure that a record of the original observations is still available and readable, even decades into the future. It may very well be the only way we’ll resolve the next confounding mystery.

via Finding the Source of the Pioneer Anomaly – IEEE Spectrum.

10 PRINT CHR$ (205.5 + RND (1)); : GOTO 10 from MIT Press, reviewed.

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10 PRINT CHR$ (205.5 + RND (1)); : GOTO 10, a new book collaboratively written by 10 authors, takes a single line of code—inscribed in the book’s mouthful of a title—and explodes it.

That one line, a seemingly clumsy scrap of BASIC, generates a fascinatingly complicated maze on a Commodore 64

via Computer programming: 10 PRINT CHR$ (205.5 + RND (1)); : GOTO 10 from MIT Press, reviewed. – Slate Magazine

The book, which has also been released for free download under a Creative Commons license, unspools 10 PRINT’s strange history and dense web of cultural connections, winding its way through the histories of mazes and labyrinths, grids in modern art, minimalist music and dance, randomness, repetition, textiles, screensavers, and Greek mythology. There are forays into early computer graphics, hacking, Cold War military strategy and Pac-Man. References abound, from the Commodore 64 user’s manual to Roland Barthes’ S/Z. This is a book where Dungeons and Dragons and Abstract Expressionism get equal consideration.

Which Web Browser Should You Run On Your Android Device?

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Unlike Apple, Google doesn’t impose a Draconian policy on developers. Third-party rendering and JavaScript engines get the green light on any Android-based device, jailbroken or not. This means that Firefox is free to use its Gecko rendering engine, and Opera isn’t limited to a “mini” browser.

via Which Web Browser Should You Run On Your Android Device? : Web Browser Grand Prix: Android Circuit.

Microsoft Surface sales Q4 2012- Less than 1 million tablets sold: Est

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In a note to clients picked up by Forbes, the firm states that Surface sales in the December quarter are shaping up to fall into the 500,000 to 600,000-unit range, well below its earlier estimates of between 1 million and 2 million units. According to Detwiler, Microsoft’s tablet strategy appears to be “in disarray.”

via Microsoft Surface sales Q4 2012- Less than 1 million tablets sold: Est | BGR.