science & technology

steve jobs and bill gates together, being interviewed at the d5 conference.

“Noteput” is an interactive music table with tangible notes, that combines all three senses of hearing, sight and touch to make learning the classical notation of music for children and pupils more easy and interesting. [Jonas Friedemann Heuer]

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stuxnet is a microsoft windows computer worm discovered in july 2010 that targets industrial software and equipment. while it is not the first time that crackers have targeted industrial systems, it is the first discovered malware that spies on and subverts industrial systems, and the first to include a programmable logic controller (plc) rootkit.
the worm initially spreads indiscriminately, but includes a highly specialized malware payload that is designed to target only siemens supervisory control and data acquisition (scada) systems that are configured to control and monitor specific industrial processes. stuxnet infects plcs by subverting the step-7 software application that is used to reprogram these devices.
different variants of stuxnet targeted five iranian organizations, with the probable target widely suspected to be uranium enrichment infrastructure in iran; symantec noted in august 2010 that 60% of the infected computers worldwide were in iran. siemens stated on november 29 that the worm has not caused any damage to its customers, but the iran nuclear program, which uses embargoed siemens equipment procured clandestinely, has been damaged by stuxnet. russian computer security firm kaspersky lab concluded that the sophisticated attack could only have been conducted “with nation-state support” and it has been speculated that israel and the united states may have been involved. [wikipedia]

hi, i’m ruby on rails.
and i’m …

ruby on rails, often shortened to rails or ror, is an open source web application framework for the ruby programming language.
ruby on rails was extracted by david heinemeier hansson from his work on basecamp, a project management tool by 37signals (now a web application company). hansson first released ruby on rails as open source in july 2004, but did not share commit rights to the project until february 2005. in august 2006 the framework reached a milestone when apple announced that it would ship ruby on rails with mac os x v10.5 “leopard”, which was released in october 2007. [wikipedia]

Eli Pariser, the president of MoveOn.org, answered the PdF 2010 question “Can the Internet Fix Politics” with a warning about how the hidden personalization features of search and newsfeeds were subtly destroying the notion of a common public space.