I’m not going to talk about Google, and the threats about leaving China.

I’m going to talk about what happened. Well, about what I hear on the grapevine.

What I heard was that an attempt was made to steal source code from Google. Important source code, hence the pissed reaction by Google.

The attempt was made by using a zero-day exploit in PDF. Well, zero-day is not the right word, since it was published sometime in december, but that’s not important right now.

Imagine this. Somewhere in Google, right now, there’s a tech complaining loudly and with lots of swear words, about those stupid users, always opening pdf files from strangers off the net.

Two buildings down, there’s HR, where it’s their fucking job to open pdf files from strangers off the net.

How do we fix this stupid mess?

[Quote:]

The president of Microsoft’s entertainment and devices division Robbie Bach, who presided over last year’s drop in Windows Mobile’s market share, said Linux will fall below the quality bar needed to succeed in mobile handsets.

I’m pretty sure Microsoft is right. After all, no other company knows as much about failing the quality bar needed to succeed in mobile handsets.

[Quote:]

Schroit, his wife and some friends arrived at the house Oct. 31 to prepare for about 30 guests to arrive the next day for a party, Schroit said.

When Schroit’s wife tried to unlock the door, the key wouldn’t work, he said. They noticed a poster with the message that the house had been seized by Bank of America in a foreclosure.

“We have nothing to do with Bank of America,” Schroit said.

Schroit called an emergency number on the poster and got a recording advising him to call back during normal office hours during the week, he said.

Schroit said he suspects the bank was really after a house with the same address number on the next street.

Agents working for Bank of America cut off power to the property by turning off the main switch in the lower part of the house, according to the lawsuit. They also changed the locks, so Schroit was unable to reach the switch to turn the power back on, according to the lawsuit.

The Schroits called the police and finally managed to get into the top part of their house, only to be hit by an “overpowering putrid smell of rotten fish,” according to the lawsuit.

The power had been off for about a week, Schroit said.

Sounds like simply a bad mistake on the part of the bank, right?

Until you get to the part where the bank claims the lawsuit “has no merit”. In other words, they strongly feel they can fuck up any house they want.

[Quote:]

At first glance, high school senior Lucas Faber, 18, seems like any ordinary gay teen. He’s a member of his school’s swing choir, enjoys shopping at the mall, and has sex with other males his age. But lately, a growing worry has begun to plague this young gay man. A gnawing feeling that, deep down, he may be a fundamentalist, right-wing Christian.

“I don’t know what’s happening to me,” Faber admitted to reporters Monday. “It’s like I get these weird urges sometimes, and suddenly I’m tempted to go behind my friends’ backs and attend a megachurch service, or censor books in the school library in some way. Even just the thought of organizing a CD-burning turns me on.”

Added Faber, “I feel so confused.”

[Quote:]

As health care reform nears the finish line, there is much wailing and rending of garments among conservatives. And I’m not just talking about the tea partiers. Even calmer conservatives have been issuing dire warnings that Obamacare will turn America into a European-style social democracy. And everyone knows that Europe has lost all its economic dynamism.

Strange to say, however, what everyone knows isn’t true. Europe has its economic troubles; who doesn’t? But the story you hear all the time — of a stagnant economy in which high taxes and generous social benefits have undermined incentives, stalling growth and innovation — bears little resemblance to the surprisingly positive facts. The real lesson from Europe is actually the opposite of what conservatives claim: Europe is an economic success, and that success shows that social democracy works.

[Quote:]

Hapodi, the French agency that’s in charge of the country’s new anti-piracy scheme (if someone you live with is accused of three acts of infringement, your whole household is taken offline and added to a list of address to which it is illegal to provide Internet access) has been accused of pirating the font used it its logo. The font designer is talking lawsuit. Hadopi says it wasn’t infringement, just an “error of manipulation.”

It’s tempting to count coup here, but it’s more important to recognize that Hadopi has proved that the copyright minefield is an unnavigable mess and that the guillotine is too blunt an instrument to use in its policing. If an organization charged with policing copyright with absolute, unaccountable power can’t stop its employees from committing unwitting acts of infringement, how can a mere family ensure that no act of infringement takes place over its network connection?

In the meantime, I’m sure that if Hadopi commits two more acts of infringement, it will order its own offices taken offline for a period of a year.

Right?

[Quote:]

Do you want to know how much fresh powder has really fallen on your favourite ski hill? There’s an app for that.

Ski resorts have for years pulled a subtle snow job on their customers, routinely inflating how much new snow falls on Saturdays and Sundays to lure the weekend crowd. It’s why that 20 centimetres in the snow report never seemed as deep on the hill as it sounded on paper.

The deceptive advertising has been decisively busted by the internet, where skeptical skiers can now check a skireport.com application on their iPhone to vet the resort-supplied snow tally against first-hand accounts from the slopes and lifts.

Once the app was embraced around a year ago, the snow jobs suddenly ceased.