1. DEFCON
Defcon was held in Las Vegas some time back. As usual there were lot of cool hacks – My favorites were Hacker Spoofs Cell Phone Tower to Intercept Calls and Web attack knows where you live. Both were incredibly clever and a bit creepy.
2. A regular expression to check for prime numbers
This post got lot of attention recently. The claim to fame is a clever (but inefficient) regular expression to check prime numbers. The trick was to represent the numbers in unary format and use regular expression backtracking to check for divisibility. Cool !
3. High-Speed Robot Hand
One of the mind blowing robot demos I have seen.
4. Amazon Prime for Students
This is an interesting move by Amazon to offer 1 year of free prime membership to students. I am not sure what percentage of students will continue with paid prime membership after a year. Usually, the students (especially foreign) students are pretty tech savvy and can search patiently for the lowest price deals. Let us see how successful this program becomes.
5. The Web’s New Gold Mine: Your Secrets
An interesting article series by WSJ that analyzes the amount of cookies and other tracking stuff popular websites uses. I was pretty impressed with the whole article series "What They Know". Check it out !
6. Google News
Update on Google Wave announced the shuttering of Google Wave. I was pretty impressed with the technology and quite sad to see it go. But there have been adequate (less confusing? ) replacements so I am sure most people will not miss Wave. Google will definitely add Wave’s features to other products so Wave will kinda live on.
Another of my favorite post was New Google Buzz API features, including a hose of fire. I have always wanted to play with Buzz programmatically but its limited API was hampering me. Recently, the Buzz API has made impressive strides that I should check it out again. The availability of fire hose is really neat. Lets see if I can build something cool !
7. GNOME Census
This article caused a huge commotion in the GNOME community especially with respect to Canonical. I have to say the census was very interesting.
8. Massive Censorship Of Digg Uncovered
A very interesting article. Looks like there is some organized conservative group that is burying more liberal articles. What surprises me the most is that digg did not have any mechanisms to prevent a group of people gaming the system. If my intuition is correct, it is a relatively simple data mining problem using topic models, anomaly detection and collusion detection/role discovery in relation graphs.
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