ON MAY 20th Yahoo announced that it was buying Tumblr, a popular blogging platform, for $1.1 billion in cash. Blog-hosting websites date back to 1998 and 1999, when the concept of a personal journal organised as a list of posts in reverse chronological order, combined with the inexorable expansion of internet access, triggered a boom in confessional self-publishing. By 2007, however, the various blog-hosting platforms had matured considerably, along with the medium of blogging itself. Blogging software had become both powerful and complicated. Tumblr, which launched that year, took a different approach in an effort to make blogging simple again—and succeeded, which explains in part why Yahoo has now decided to buy it. So what exactly is Tumblr?The first generation of blog software, including Open Diary, EditThisPage, LiveJournal and Blogger, made it easy to post text, essentially providing a large box into which a blog post could be typed or pasted, and a "post" button to publish it. A second generation, led for many years by Movable Type and now dominated by WordPress, offered users the choice between installing server software onto their own (or leased) machines, or relying on a hosted service run by the software-makers on their own hardware. These second-wave products matured into full-featured publishing systems that could be used to build company websites with ...
D-WAVE'S controversial quantum computer is pitted against regular number-crunching machines in a series of tests
AMERICANS have grown accustomed to North Korean nuclear petulance. Now they are learning to live with its cyber sabre-rattling. Earlier this month the Department of Defence delivered a report to Congress accusing the hermit kingdom's expanding army of “cyber-warriors” of using foreign infrastructure, such as broadband networks, to launch cyber-attacks on American allies, most notably South Korea.Kim Jong Un, North Korea's fresh-faced dictator, is said to have 4,000 loyal cyber-warriors at his disposal. Brightest sparks at the sharp end of Songbun, the North’s rigid social hierarchy, are plucked from school to train as elite hackers. Following graduation they are often posted in China and Europe to wreak digital havoc, says Sun Chul Kim, a cyber-security expert at Korea University in Seoul.According to American report, cyber-warfare is a cost-effective way for North Korea to boost its military capabilities, which may explain the keen interest Mr Kim has taken in it. Prominent web security analysts such as Rob Rachwald of FireEye, an American firm, agree that the tools used in a recent cyber-attack on South Korea could have cost just tens of thousands of dollars, compared to the estimated $1.3 billion the North spent on its rocket programme last year.On March 20th thousands of South Korean banking and broadcasting systems were paralysed by a devastating cyber "time ...
QUANTUM mechanics and computers traditionally don't mix. The strange fuzziness of the quantum world is a big obstacle for chip designers, who work with components so small that quantum effects make the electrons flowing through them unruly and unpredictable. But it is possible to design a computer in which that quantum fuzziness is a feature, not a bug. Researchers have been working on so-called quantum computers since the early 1980s, when the idea was first proposed. Recently, a Canadian firm called D-Wave has been in the news, for its device—a special kind of quantum computer designed to solve one particular problem—has, for the first time, been raced against a classical, non-quantum computer to see which is faster. D-Wave's machine is designed to solve only a specific kind of problem, but scientists around the world are working on general-purpose quantum machines that could attack any kind of problem that a standard computer could tackle. But what exactly is a quantum computer?Classical computers—like the one on which you are reading this article—work by performing a series of simple tasks (such as adding two numbers) extremely quickly. But the circuits in a classical computer abide by the rather boring laws of classical physics, which stipulate that they can only be in a single state at a given time. Quantum computers use the racier laws governing quantum ...
UK Only Article: standard article Issue: Japan’s master plan Fly Title: Quantum computing Rubric: The first real-world contests between quantum computers and standard ones Main image: 20130518_STP003_0.jpg CHIPMAKERS dislike quantum mechanics. Half a century of Moore’s law means their products have shrunk to the point where they are subject to the famous weirdness of the quantum world. That makes designing them difficult. Happily, those same quantum oddities can be turned into features rather than bugs. For many years researchers have been working on computers that would rely on the strange laws of quantum mechanics to do useful calculations. They would do this by using binary digits which, instead of having a value of either “one” or “zero”, had both at the same time. That might allow them to do some calculations much faster than non-quantum, “classical” computers can manage. Progress has been slow, but steady. And now it may be possible to see how a certain type of quantum computer performs ...
THE UN urges Westerners to start eating insects, a controversial quantum computer is put to the test, and Samsung shows off "5G" mobile technology
AN ENIGMATIC group of hackers who may or may not be in Syria have compromised the world's top media organisations, posting mischievous messages
UK Only Article: standard article Issue: Wall Street is back Fly Title: Education and the French mindset Rubric: A new school breaks old rules Location: PARIS Main image: Is 42 the answer to France’s prayers? Is 42 the answer to France’s prayers? WHEN French entrepreneurs decided in March to launch a swanky new school for software developers, they thought they were on to something. But even they were startled by its popularity. For 1,000 student places starting this autumn on a three-year course, they have fully 50,000 applications. France has a skills mismatch. Joblessness has reached 10.6%, a 14-year high. For the under-25s, it is 26%. Yet, according to a poll by the French Association of Software Publishers and Internet Solutions, 72% of software firms are having trouble recruiting—and 91% of those are seeking software engineers and developers. Such frustrations spurred Xavier Niel, the billionaire founder of Iliad, a ...
UK Only Article: standard article Issue: Wall Street is back Fly Title: Schumpeter Rubric: Windows 8 is only the beginning of Microsoft’s problems Main image: 20130511_WBD000_0.jpg IT IS always fun to watch the mighty fall. It is even better when they try to break their fall with corporate waffle. This week Microsoft said it was rethinking “key aspects” of its new operating system, Windows 8. But then it began to obfuscate. A Microsoft executive insisted that “customer satisfaction” with the new offering “is strong” while also conceding that “the learning curve is definitely real”. (Translation: customers are tearing out their hair and scattering it on the keyboard.) The company is attempting a U-turn. Windows 8 was Microsoft’s biggest bid so far to adjust its flagship product to the new world of touch-screen devices. Out went the “start” button that had controlled access to the computer’s menu since 1995. In came giant multicoloured tiles that respond to the touch. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s ...
CHINA overtook America in sales of personal computers (PCs) last year, to become the world’s biggest PC market. According to IHS, a research firm, shipments to China amounted to 69m units, against 66m to America. But the global total is in decline. Earlier this month IDC, another research firm, said that in the first quarter of 2013 worldwide PC sales fell by 13.9% to 76.3m units, their steepest decline since 1994, when records began. People have been slow to buy PCs with Windows 8, Microsoft’s latest operating system, and they are eager to get their hands on tablets or smartphones. In China, not only are PC sales still rising; they are evenly split between desktops and portable notebooks, which globally make up 64% of the market. China’s huge rural population prefers desktops, at least for now: IHS believes that the Chinese market will come to resemble the rest of the world’s. The firm also thinks the market will grow by only 3-4% this year. That may disappoint Lenovo, a Chinese PC manufacturer that has profited from rising demand in its home country.
CARS that can drive themselves, a staple of science-fiction, have started to appear on roads in real life. Google’s self-driving vehicles are the best-known, but most carmakers are also developing them. In 2011 BMW sent a robotic car at motorway speeds from Munich, the German carmaker’s hometown, to Nuremberg, about 170km away (with a driver on board just in case). Audi got a self-driving TTS Coupe to negotiate 156 tight curves along nearly 20km of paved and dirt road on Colorado’s Pikes Peak, with nobody behind the wheel. Proponents say that driverless cars would reduce road deaths, ease congestion, reduce fuel consumption, improve the mobility of old and disabled people and free up time spent commuting. So how do they work?In many ways self-driving cars are a logical extension of existing driver aids such as lane-keeping systems (which follow road markings and sound a warning and correct the steering if a vehicle starts to drift out of its lane), adaptive cruise control (which maintains a constant distance from the vehicle in front, rather than a constant speed), auto-parking systems (which can reverse a car into a parking space), emergency braking (which slams on the brakes if an obstacle, another vehicle or a pedestrian is detected in front of the car) and satellite-navigation systems. Computerised control of a car’s steering, acceleration and braking is already ...
A GENERATION of youngsters in Britain learned to program during the 1980s courtesy of the BBC Micro, developed by Acorn Computers of Cambridge for the BBC’s computer literacy project. American teenagers did much the same with the Commodore 64. At the time, your correspondent could not afford the $595 for a Commodore, let alone the £335 (equivalent to $800 at the time and over $2,000 today) for the more practical version of the BBC Micro. At more than $1,300, the Apple II was completely out of the question. But for £50, enthusiasts adept at wielding a soldering iron could construct a Sinclair ZX81 from a kit. Your correspondent built two, one for himself and another for a friend’s 11-year-old son.In hindsight, the best part about the ZX81 was, ironically, its limited amount of storage. Having to write programs that could fit within the featherweight machine’s one kilobyte of RAM demanded serious thought. Simply displaying a screen-full of data took up three-quarters of the RAM. Even so, one enthusiast actually wrote a whole chess game in a kilobyte. Sinclair owners viewed the 32 kilobytes of the BBC Micro or the 64 kilobytes of a Commodore 64 as unimaginable luxury. But had they been given such an amount of memory, they might have written sloppier code.Clive Sinclair (later knighted for his part in dragging Britain into the technological age) wanted to produce the ...
Our sister blog, Schumpeter, has an article about a smartphone app for football fans. Read it here.
UK Only Article: standard article Issue: Clean, safe and it drives itself Fly Title: Mobile apps Rubric: A spat between Apple and a popular French start-up causes a furore Location: PARIS THE French have always loved Apple. Its elegant products and nimble operating systems, and its underdog struggles against IBM and Microsoft in the 1980s, are especially appealing in a country that prides itself on being chic, clever and revolutionary. Apple’s two stores in central Paris nestle in locations that are dear to French hearts—under the Louvre and directly opposite the Opéra. But the love affair is fading—in official circles at any rate—as concern grows that the technology giant’s market grip threatens to suffocate a business in which French entrepreneurs have been successful: designing applications for mobile devices. The government has made a fuss over Apple’s eviction from its app store of a popular product developed by a French start-up firm. AppGratis offers its users one free app a day, charging ...
TIME is finally running out for the 500m or so people around the world who still rely on Windows XP to perform their daily computing chores. In less than a year, Microsoft will leave them—your correspondent included—to fend for themselves. There will be no more security patches, bug fixes and free (or even paid) online assistance, as the firm ends its extended support for this operating system four years after it ceased offering mainstream support for the product. From April 8th next year, anyone who continues to use Windows XP will be at the mercy of hackers who find fresh ways to exploit vulnerabilities in the 12-year-old operating system and applications that run on it.Windows XP (for “eXPerience”) was launched in 2001. It went on to became the most popular operating system ever, with more than 800m users. Though it hails from three generations ago (having been officially replaced by Windows Vista in 2007, Windows 7 in 2009 and Windows 8 in 2012), it still runs on 39% of computers currently in use. Only in the past six months has Windows 7 displaced it as the most popular operating system in use today, with 45% of the installed base.What made Windows XP such a success was the way it combined the user-friendliness of a consumer product like Windows 95 with the industrial strength of Windows NT, an operating system built for professional users. As such, XP was the first ...
OUR correspondents discuss the rise of Bitcoin, Facebook's new mobile platform and the prospects for the next Xbox console
SOFTWARE crunching piles of personal data can help firms recruit workers more efficiently, say our correspondents
A DAY after the mobile phone celebrated its 40th birthday, Facebook has produced something that it hopes will make certain of the devices even more useful. On April 4th the giant social network unveiled Home, new software that is designed to give it more prominence on mobile phones powered by Android, an operating system developed by Google.This matters because more and more folk are now accessing social networks from mobile devices rather than from desktop computers and because mobile advertising revenues are growing fast, albeit from a low base. Without a robust mobile presence, Facebook could see some of its users siphoned off by rivals born in the mobile era. And it could miss out on a potentially massive source of new revenue.There had been speculation that Facebook was working on a phone of its own, or at least on a mobile operating system to rival Android or Apple’s iOS. But dabbling in hardware at this stage of its development would be a huge risk for Facebook and developing a rival operating system would risk alienating Apple and Google, whose mobile platforms have helped power its advertising growth. EMarketer, a research firm, reckons Facebook is on track to win 11% of the $13.6 billion likely to be spent around the world on mobile ads this year.Home, which is a group of Facebook apps, avoids both pitfalls. Among other things, it converts a phone’s home screen ...
CHINA monitors its internet very closely, via the Great Firewall and the Golden Shield. The system has millions of eager users and thousands of censorsRead the special report on China and the internet here
UK Only Article: standard article Issue: A giant cage Fly Title: The Great Firewall Rubric: Chinese screening of online material from abroad is becoming ever more sophisticated ON FEBRUARY 9TH, Chinese New Year’s Eve, Fang Binxing, known in China as the father of the Great Firewall, wished his followers on Sina Weibo a happy Year of the Snake. As always whenever Mr Fang tweets, thousands of fellow microbloggers sent messages along the lines of “get lost”. They could not reply directly: Mr Fang gets so much abuse for his role in engineering China’s censorship technology that the “comments” function on his microblog page had to be disabled long ago. Nor can users easily find the comments on the 35,000 retweets of his new-year post: Sina has blocked access to those as well. Mr Fang is used to being, in the parlance of the system he helped create, a “sensitive keyword”. He is one of the most important figures in the history of the Chinese internet, and perhaps its most reviled. In 2011 several students in Wuhan, in central China, said they threw eggs and a pair of ...
UK Only Article: standard article Issue: A giant cage Fly Title: Cyber-hacking Rubric: China’s state-sponsored hackers are ubiquitous—and totally unabashed Main image: 20130406_SRD004.jpg CHINA’S SOPHISTICATED HACKERS may be the terror of the Earth, but in fact most of their attacks are rather workaday. America and Russia have hackers at least as good as China’s best, if not better. What distinguishes Chinese cyber-attacks, on anything from governments to Fortune 500 companies, defence contractors, newspapers, think-tanks, NGOs, Chinese human-rights groups and dissidents, is their frequency, ubiquity and sheer brazenness. This leads to an unnerving conclusion. “They don’t care if they get caught,” says Dmitri Alperovitch, who used to work at McAfee, a computer-security firm, where he helped analyse several Chinese hacking operations in 2010 and 2011, and is a co-founder of CrowdStrike, another cyber-security firm. The indiscriminate tactics of China’s 2010-11 campaign made it relatively easy to ...
UK Only Article: standard article Issue: Korean roulette Fly Title: Big data and hiring Rubric: How software helps firms hire workers more efficiently Main image: 20130406_WBD002_0.jpg THE problem with human-resource managers is that they are human. They have biases; they make mistakes. But with better tools, they can make better hiring decisions, say advocates of “big data”. Software that crunches piles of information can spot things that may not be apparent to the naked eye. In the case of hiring American workers who toil by the hour, number-crunching has uncovered some surprising correlations. For instance, people who fill out online job applications using browsers that did not come with the computer (such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer on a Windows PC) but had to be deliberately installed (like Firefox or Google’s Chrome) perform better and change jobs less often. It could just be coincidence, but some analysts think that people who bother to install a new browser may be the sort who take ...
WHEN Charlie Loyd wanted a job at a mapping firm, he did not send out resumés or make calls. Instead, he posted a message on Twitter that linked to a side-by-side comparison of satellite imagery of Cape Morris Jesup, Greenland's northernmost tip. On the left was a lacklustre image with no real detail captured by a NASA satellite and widely used by Mr Loyd's prospective employers; on the right, his own version.To create the image, Mr Loyd gleaned the best exposures, down to the individual pixel, from multiple publicly available images. Although the results speak for themselves (see picture), four of the firms he mentioned in the message—Google, Microsoft, Nokia (with its Navteq) and Yahoo (with MapQuest)—ignored his tweet. But the fifth, MapBox, was in touch five minutes later. Within a week, he was hired.MapBox sells access to interactive street and satellite maps that may be embedded in websites and apps in the style pioneered by Microsoft and Google, and emulated (with problems) by Apple. It counts Foursquare, a popular location-sharing service that publicly defected from Google a year ago, among its clients.The company set Mr Loyd to work immediately, and soon plans to roll out satellite imagery using his approach. It will be "the most beautiful, clean map ever made," says Eric Gunderson, the firm's co-founder and boss.Apple and the four firms that ignored Mr Loyd's ...
IN 2010 a panel created by the White House estimated that American taxpayers spend 7.6 billion hours and some $140 billion a year keeping the IRS off their backs. According to the Washington Post over 80% of taxpayers use software or pay someone to file their taxes. The national taxpayer advocate, a sort-of in-house IRS watchdog, once said, "If tax compliance were an industry, it would be one of the largest in the United States." But of course, it is an industry.It is an industry made up of accountants and companies like H&R Block and Intuit, which makes the TurboTax software used by many Americans. And it is an industry that, according to ProPublica, has worked hard to keep the IRS from preparing your tax returns for you for free. Intuit, for example, has spent millions lobbying the federal government, opposing bills that would allow the IRS to send you pre-filled-in returns (the agency already has most of your relevant information) and supporting bills that would ban the practice.A large number of Americans might cringe at the idea of allowing the IRS to prepare their tax returns. The agency would likely err on the side of higher taxes, right? But such a system is already in place in many European countries (where the tax codes are admittedly simpler) and there are few complaints. The system would work something like this: the IRS would use the information it ...
A SMALL and unexpected pleasure of following this week’s powerful denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against Spamhaus, a European spam-fighting charity, was reading observers' increasingly imaginative efforts to communicate what precisely DDoS is.Hackers that launch a denial-of-service assault instruct thousands of hijacked computers to flood a target's servers with nuisance traffic, blocking or slowing the passage of genuine users who want to connect. The International Business Times employed a popular image, which it attributed to Graham Cluley of Sophos, a security firm: “Imagine 15 fat men trying to fit through a revolving door all at once—nothing moves.”NPR conjured a musical metaphor when citing Martin Libicki, a researcher at RAND, an American think-tank, who compared DDoS attacks to the traffic jam that follows the end of a concert: "You've got all these people filling the streets all at once. If you happen to be in the same area at the same time, you're going to have a hard time getting through."Fox News imagined that websites hit by DDoS attacks are "trying to sip from the Niagara falls". But this Babbage’s favourite—at least for the time being—is the gastronomic accident recounted by Matt Gunin, a systems administrator and gaming enthusiast:Just imagine jellybeans being thrown at you one at a time. It starts with one jellybean being thrown ...