Stories about: Reilly

Last July, the FBI executed what is arguably its most public campaign against hacktivists--individuals who breach computer systems to make a political or ideological statement. On Tuesday, July 19, the G-men cuffed 12 men and two women allegedly associated with hacktivist group Anonymous for their supposed involvement in a dedicated denial of service (DDoS) attack against PayPal's website in December 2010.

Before I get to this week's main topic I must give a big thumbs-up to a book that all of you who like to cook will thoroughly enjoy: "Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food" by Jeff Potter (pub. O'Reilly).

An emerging concept known as DevOps will be the major theme at this year's Usenix LISA (Large Installation System Administration) conference, to be held in Boston the week of Dec. 4.

If the Internet is the new Wild West, then hackers are the wanted outlaws of our time. And like the gun-slinging bad boys before them, all it takes is one wrong move to land them in jail.

Scripting languages are the hot technology today for application and Web development -- no longer the backwater afterthought of the early days running in a pokey interpreter. Nor are scripting languages any longer merely the tool used for quick-and-dirty patching (someone once called Perl the duct tape of the Internet, and it stuck so well that Perl lovers wear the label proudly). No, today, scripting languages are popular for "real" programming work. In fact, entire systems and large-scale enterprise-grade projects are built from them.

This year's Web 2.0 Summit will focus on the critical role that online data plays in the Internet economy and on how its use and misuse can make the difference between success and failure in markets like online gaming, Web advertising, search, social media and mobile.

After helping pave the way for platform independent websites and applications, the Mozilla Foundation has set a new, and ambitious, task for itself to standardize mobile applications on the Web platform as well, according to a talk given by its chief technology officer.

MasterCard on Thursday gave a sneak peek into the near future of mobile payment systems and said that the Google Wallet application is within weeks of being rolled out commercially.

Google is keenly aware that many people are eager to set up profiles in Google+, the company's new social network, but the site will remain in a limited trial while the company works feverishly toward a broader rollout that can accommodate a larger number and wider variety of users.

Following a recent uproar over the ways in which Apple and Google collect location information from mobile users, two U.S. senators have proposed a law that would require companies to get permission from mobile users before sharing that information with third parties.