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silverly submitted a story about the internal battles that ensued when MSN implemented its messenger service and tried to make it interop with AOL's instant message application, AIM. If you've ever tried to write a device driver, or reverse engineer a protocol, you'll feel right at home. This goes back to the tme when 'social media' referred to MSN and AIM, and the article covers all of the tricks that they tried to pull on each other in order to achieve and maintain market dominance. It is a long read, but some will find it of interest. It will not, however, be to everyone's taste.

Adam Ferris, a programmer from Microsoft, wrote this essay on tactics that Microsoft and AOL used to force users to use their chat service and keep them:

Some protocols, like HTTP and TCP/IP, are public, documented, and spoken by everyone, but some are private/proprietary and undocumented. AIM's protocol, known as OSCAR (for Open System for CommunicAtion in Realtime), was in the latter group. I didn't have the "key" to decode it. But what my boss and I could do was sign up for an AIM account and then watch the communications between the AIM client and the server using a network monitor, a development tool used to track network communications in and out of a computer. That way we could see the protocol that AIM was using to send the messages.

Much of the message was opaque, but in the middle was one of my text messages. "Hi... Anybody?" I would write into my AIM chat box and press return, and then on my network trace I would see my "Hi... Anybody?" Some of the protocol was always changing, but some was always the same. Our client [MSN Messenger] took the surrounding boilerplate and packaged up text messages in it, then sent it to the AOL servers. Did AOL notice that there were some odd messages heading their way from Redmond? Probably not. They had a hundred million users, and after all I was using their own protocol.

taylorvich writes:

Death is the one certainty in life, a pioneering analysis of blood from one of the world's oldest and healthiest women has given clues to why it happens.

What they found suggests, as we could perhaps expect, that our lifespan might ultimately be limited by the capacity for stem cells to keep replenishing tissues day in day out. Once the stem cells reach a state of exhaustion that imposes a limit on their own lifespan, they themselves gradually die out and steadily diminish the body's capacity to keep regenerating vital tissues and cells, such as blood.

lhsi writes:

A physicist has demonstrated that the operating force in a syphon is gravity, and not atmospheric pressure, and has corrected a 99-year old incorrect dictionary definition.

In 2010, eagle-eyed Dr Hughes spotted the mistake, which went unnoticed for 99 years, which incorrectly described atmospheric pressure, rather than gravity, as the operating force in a siphon.

Dr Hughes demonstrated the science of siphons in a paper published yesterday in Nature Publishing Group journal Scientific Reports.

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

ITAR-TASS is reporting that Russian Bloggers are about to be required to register with the state and follow news outlet laws.

The law introduces a new term: "Internet user called blogger." Bloggers will be obliged to declare their family name and initials and e-mail address. Those authors whose personal website or page in social networks has 3,000 visitors or more a day must have themselves registered on a special list and abide by restrictions applicable to the mass media. In other words, registration requires the blogger should check the authenticity of published information and also mention age restrictions for users. Also, bloggers will have to follow mass media laws concerning electioneering, resistance to extremism and the publication of information about people's private lives. An abuse of these requirements will be punishable with a fine of 10,000 to 30,000 rubles (roughly $300 to $1,000) for individuals and 300,000 rubles ($10,000) for legal entities. A second violation will be punishable with the website's suspension for one month.

Angry Jesus writes:

Ubisoft has released a unique promotion for the video game, Watch Dogs point it at your facebook account and it will use the information there to build a dossier on you as if you were the target of an assassination plot. It includes things like expected daily schedule, likely passwords based on your birthday and friend's names, etc.

While the result might scare some people into being more cautious, it doesn't make much effort to educate people what they can do to protect themselves short of "don't use facebook" which is not really an option for most of the people who currently use facebook. At a minimum it ought to generate a list of things you can lock down using facebook's privacy settings. Can you suggest a comprehensive and up to date guide for where to go on facebook and what settings to change in order to improve privacy for the average facebook user?

AnonTechie writes:

Fewer college students use tablets; may be a sign that the device doesn't boost productivity.

Ball State researcher says students use tablets mostly for entertainment; many question whether the technology can be used for academic projects. How much real work can one get done on a tablet? Or are tablets mostly designed for entertainment? The questions arise as a recent survey of college students showed a small decline in tablet ownership. About 29% of college students said they owned a tablet in 2014, slightly less than did in 2012, according to a new study by Michael Hanley, a professor of advertising and director of Ball State University's Institute for Mobile Media Research. Hanley said the decline comes as tablets are seen as primarily tools to entertain. They aren't seen as tools for heavy writing or college projects due to its lack of a physical keyboard and laptop and desktop type power, he added.

Woods writes:

Mark D. Hill and his peers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have been analyzing computing systems, trying to look for delays in the architecture and the interfaces between them.

Through careful analysis, Hill uncovers inefficiencies, sometimes major ones, in the workflows by which computers operate. Recently, he investigated inefficiencies in the way that computers implement virtual memory and determined that these operations can waste up to 50 percent of a computer's execution cycles.

The inefficiencies he found were due to the way computers had evolved over time. Memory had grown a million times bigger since the 1980s, but the way it was used had barely changed at all. A legacy method called paging, that was created when memory was far smaller, was preventing processors from achieving their peak potential.

Hill designed a solution(pdf) that uses paging selectively, adopting a simpler address translation method for key parts of important applications. This reduced the problem, bringing cache misses down to less than 1 percent. In the age of the nanosecond, fixing such inefficiencies pays dividends. For instance, with such a fix in place, Facebook could buy far fewer computers to do the same workload, saving millions.

prospectacle writes:

It's often said that "you get what you pay for", but when it comes to free software, this doesn't apply. You often get a lot more. However, you do get what someone pays for. Software development takes time and money, and without substantial donations, sponsorship, etc., a free-software project will be limited to what volunteers can achieve in their own time.

According to an article in Ars Technica, the security software OpenSSL has one full-time employee and receives about $2000 a year in donations. It's therefore not surprising that bugs aren't always caught before they cause problems.

AnonTechie writes:

In the 1950s, rocket scientists dreamed of atomic-powered spaceships. Now these far-fetched designs might help a new generation explore the cosmos. Project Orion has to be the most audacious, dangerous and downright absurd space programme ever funded by the US taxpayer. This 1950s design involved exploding nuclear bombs behind a spacecraft the size of the Empire State Building to propel it through space. The Orion's engine would generate enormous amounts of energy and with it lethal doses of radiation. Plans suggested the spacecraft could take off from Earth and travel to Mars and back in just three months. The quickest flight using conventional rockets and the right planetary alignment is 18 months.

AnonTechie writes:

Liquid spacetime: A very slippery superfluid, that's what spacetime could be like.

What if spacetime were a kind of fluid? This is the question tackled by theoretical physicists working on quantum gravity by creating models attempting to reconcile gravity and quantum mechanics. Some of these models predict that spacetime at the Planck scale (10^-33cm) is no longer continuous, as held by classical physics, but discrete in nature. Just like the solids or fluids we come into contact with every day, which can be seen as made up of atoms and molecules when observed at sufficient resolution. A structure of this kind generally implies, at very high energies, violations of Einstein's special relativity (an integral part of general relativity).

Angry Jesus writes:

Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs) pose a multitude of threats to a free society. Most of the focus has been on long-term retention of ALPR readings along with location and timestamps. But Maryland has found a new way to abuse the data they pull concealed carry permit information from other states and then use that to target cars registered to CCW permit holders when they drive through Maryland.

Several members are reporting on a potentially disastrous change of course by regulators:

Rune of Doom writes:

After the FCC's Net Neutrality rules were struck down by a federal appeals court three months ago there was some speculation that it might reclassify ISPs as common carriers in order to preserve Net Neutrality. That seems like wishful thinking, now that Tom Wheeler, the former cable and wireless industry lobbyist who heads the agency under President Obama has announced plans to allow carriers to charge extra for preferential delivery of content.

fadrian writes:

The New York Times reports that, after a recent SCOTUS ruling ripped apart current net neutrality rules, the FCC has decided that net neutrality isn't worth arguing over. It's now perfectly fine for carriers (including your last mile providers) to charge different rates for different data. If Congress wants to change this, they can, but until then, the FCC has decided that this debate isn't worth debating any more.

davester666 writes:

Evidently, ISPs should be able to charge whatever they can get from web sites in order for you to see them. Never mind that this is the opposite of what Wheeler, the head of the FCC, and who is proposing these changes, has been saying all along, that he wasn't an industry shill and would fight hard to keep net neutrality alive.

hash14 writes:

Ars Technica reports on an article appearing in the Wall Street Journal about the FCC voting on new rules "that would allow content companies to pay Internet service providers for special access to consumers." The report describes that content providers would have to pay for "preferential treatment" of traffic over ISP networks and that the FCC will mediate whether the terms are "commercially reasonable" on a case-by-case basis. Ironically, on the same day, the CTIA announced that it will be hiring another former FCC Chairman, Meredith Attwell Baker, who approved Comcast's acquisition of NBCUniversal while serving as Chairman. Of course, one must ask whether the FCC would really act as a balanced mediator with respect to these "commercially reasonable" terms between content providers and ISPs, given the latter's close revolving door relationship with the government agency.

mendax writes:

It seems that the FCC has made a U-turn in terms of policy regarding Net Neutrality. It seems that the party is over and that the big guys are now going to have to pay more to stream to us, and we're going to have to pay as well. It makes me feel fortunate, however, that I only rent DVD's from a local RedBox.

AnonTechie writes:

From the Wired article, The Cubicle You Call Hell Was Designed to Set You Free:

In 1964, the iconic furniture design company Herman Miller unveiled an office plan unlike anything anyone had ever seen. Called Action Office, it was the brainchild of Robert Propst, who was among the first designers to argue that office work was mental work and that mental effort was tied to environmental enhancement of one's physical capabilities. Rather than a furniture item or a collection of them, Action Office was a proposition for an altogether new kind of space.

Most office designs at the time were about keeping people in place; Action Office was about movement. Advertisements for the system show workers in constant motion; indeed, the human figures in the images often appear blurred, as if the photographer were unable to capture their lightning speed.

An anonymous coward writes:

Kembrew McLeod, writing for The Atlantic, relates a forgotten footnote from the early history of British-Chinese relations. In early 18th century England, a blond, blue-eyed man calling himself George Psalmanazar became a celebrity by claiming to be a native of Taiwan who was kidnapped from his home by French Jesuits, and then by Dutch Calvinists. He gave fantastic and detailed accounts of his home island, featuring cannibalism and human sacrifice:

They built a gigantic temple for a high priest named yes, wait for it Gnotoy Bonzo, who commanded them to annually sacrifice "the hearts of 18000 young Boys, under the Age of 9 Years, on the first day of the Year." This was obviously a major logistical flaw for such a sparsely populated nation. Psalmanazar smoothed it over by claiming that men were permitted to have multiple wives, so that "they may beget many Children every Year; of whom some of the Sons are Sacrific'd, but the Daughters are all preserv'd for Matrimony."

(...)

Psalmanazar's con worked because he tailored it for an Anglican audience predisposed to hating the Catholic Church. (If you are going to spin a crazy yarn for anti-papist Englishmen, it helps to say that French Jesuits kidnapped you.)

Papas Fritas writes:

Dan Falk writes in Scientific American that in the last few years, scholars have begun to look more closely at William Shakespeare's interest in the scientific discoveries of his time-asking what he knew, when he knew it, and how that knowledge might be reflected in his work. Astronomer Peter Usher argues that examples of the playwright's scientific knowledge can be found in works spanning his entire career and has taken a particular interest in Hamlet, which he sees as an allegory about competing cosmological worldviews. "According to Usher, the play references not only Copernicus, but also Ptolemy, as well as Tycho Brahe (PDF), who pushed for a hybrid model of the solar system (a compromise that preserved elements of the ancient Ptolemaic system as well as the new Copernican model). Digges, too, is central to Usher's theory. When Hamlet envisions himself as "a king of infinite space," could he be alluding to the new, infinite universe described-for the first time-by his countryman Thomas Digges?" Usher's proposal may sound far-fetched-but even skeptics do a double take when they look at Tycho Brahe's coat of arms, noticing that two of Tycho's relatives were named "Rosencrans" and "Guildensteren."

According to Falk, Shakespeare's characters were connected to the cosmos in a way that seems quite foreign to the modern reader. Whether crying for joy or shedding tears of anguish, they look to the heavens for confirmation, calling out to "Jupiter" or "the gods" or "the heavens" as they struggle to make sense of their lives. "[Shakespeare] lived in an age of belief, yet a streak of skepticism runs through his work, especially toward the end of his career; in King Lear it reaches an almost euphoric nihilism. His characters often call upon the gods to help them, but their desperate pleas are rarely answered. Was Shakespeare a closet atheist, like his colleague Christopher Marlowe?

kaszz writes:

"On 2011-02-03, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) issued the remaining five /8 address blocks, each containing 16.7 million addresses, in the global free pool equally to the five RIRs, and as such ARIN is no longer able to receive additional IPv4 resources from the IANA. After yesterday's large allocation (104.64.0.0/10) to Akamai, the address pool remaining to be assigned by ARIN is now down to the last /8. This triggers stricter allocation rules and marks the end of general availability of new IPv4 addresses in North America. ARIN thus follows the RIRs of Asia, Europe and South America into the final phase of IPv4 depletion."

Jeremiah Cornelius writes:

The political analysis blog moonofalabama.org is under multiple DDOS, targeting both server availability and name services and cannot be resolved through DNS. The attackers are presumably suppressing the top-level entry, exposing violence by Ukrainian right-wing militia against civilian targets in Eastern Ukraine. As of this writing, a google cache of the page is available.

Hosted on Typepad, Moon of Alabama has a reputation for accurate and unconventional insight consistently brought to emerging stories. Bernhardt, the site owner has extracted the subtext of stories and exposed official disinformation on Iranian nuclear development, Wall Street corruption, African incursion and Syrian jihadists often to the embarrassment of US and European governments.

AnonTechie writes:

We can simulate the climate and we can even simulate babies. Now, we can simulate life on Earth, too the vast and complex interactions of the living organisms on our planet.

Named Madingley, after the village in Cambridgeshire, UK, where the idea was dreamed up, it's a mathematical model that could help us predict the future. It could tell us what would happen if all the bees disappeared, the difference it would make if pandas died out, and what the world might have looked like if humans had never invented intensive farming. The work also suggests that the basic structures of all ecosystems can be predicted using a small number of universal ecological principles.