SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korean authorities were investigating a hacking attack that brought down the servers of three broadcasters and two major banks on Wednesday, and the army raised its alert level…

#RackSpace #Amazon

What hypervisors (VMware, Xen, KVM…) are behind the virtualization services of big IaaS providers (Amazon, Rackspace, ecc). Why do they use those particular hypervisors?

I want to setup a (small) IaaS public cloud like Amazon EC2 and am not sure what hypervisor to go with.

Facebook has scheduled a press event at its Menlo Park, Calif., HQ, for 10 a.m. PST. to launch a new redesign of the News Feed in your Facebook account.

Here’s a copy of the press invitation:

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-will-unveil-a-new-look-news-fee-2013-3#ixzz2MM7paqrX

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Ahead of Microsoft’s annual TechForum event, the company is sharing its latest vision of the future. Focused on home and work, Microsoft puts forward a vision of multiple giant displays powered by devices and services. In one particular scenario a Surface tablet attaches to a touchscreen to link and transfer data. Touchscreens are persistent throughout and the idea of voice activation and convenience of using multiple devices and services is apparent.

Microsoft’s latest vision is focused on the next five to ten years, and some elements are shared with its previous productivity vision of the future for 2019. The video is part of a new Envisioning Center at Microsoft where the software giant is testing its latest ideas and technologies. Expect to see more details on where Microsoft is heading with its research projects next week during the company’s TechForum event. We’ll be reporting from the event, so stay tuned for more coverage.

Source: Microsoft, Youtube, TheVerge http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/1/4043334/microsoft-future-vision-video-2013

The loophole exploits a feature of HTML 5 which defines how websites are made and what they can do.

Developer Faross Aboukhadijeh found the bug and set up a demo page that fills visitors hard drives with pictures of cartoon cats.

In one demo, Mr Aboukhadijeh managed to dump one gigabyte of data every 16 seconds onto a vulnerable Macbook.

Most major browsers, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari, were found to be vulnerable to the bug, said Mr Aboukhadijeh.

While most websites are currently built using version 4 of the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), that code is gradually being superseded by the newer version 5.

One big change brought in with HTML 5 lets websites store more data locally on visitors’ PCs. Safeguards built into the “local storage” specification should limit how much data can be stored. Different browsers allow different limits but all allow at least 2.5 megabytes to be stored.

A thread on the Dropbox forums is filling up with reports of users getting sent spam email to addresses that have exclusively been used for the service. The uptick in spam has grown beyond just a few users, sparking some comparisons to last year’s data leak.

Dropbox has taken notice and is now investigating.

The thread indicates a couple of things that make this more interesting than ‘I’m getting spam’. First, many of the users complaining about the issue claim to be using email addresses exclusively for Dropbox. This means that they aren’t public emails and shouldn’t be on any other lists anywhere. Second, the spam coming to those emails spring into existence over the space of the last few days, indicating that there was some sort of incident (like a leak of emails) that allowed spammers access to them

Learn about a new “superpower” that isn’t being taught in in 90% of US schools. Starring Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, will.i.am, Chris Bosh, Jack Dorsey, Ton…

This article has been ranked #1 on all of Forbes and has “rankled” thousands of people. There have been industry experts rise up in defense and offense to what was said here. At last count 489 comments have been made. We stirred a hornets nest. In the end I modified some of my thesis, but stuck stronger than ever to other parts of it. When you are done you may want to read these comments, Death of SEO (Part 2), and this final link also “My Final Comment on my ‘Death of SEO’ article on Forbes” – Ken Krogue

Public cloud computing, such as that offered by Amazon, Microsoft, RackSpace and others, is the most prevalent deployment model in use today.  The costs to enter are the lowest of the three models, and because it is heavily commoditized, it offers effective self-service options. This minimizes the need for on-site technology staff.

Private cloud computing, where the organization creates its own cloud computing infrastructure internally, or has it hosted/managed by a large scale data center provider, is an option that larger enterprises make use of.  The costs are not trivial, and it can take a fair amount of time to put into place. It offers the most security and privacy and customization of the three models.

Read More at: http://www.techpageone.com/uncategorized/why-hybrid-cloud-computing-may-be-the-way-of-the-future/

Michio Kaku — We have found the Higgs boson. So then the next question is what’s next? Well the Large Hadron Collider, this machine that is 27 miles in circumference, costing 10 billion dollars is big enough to create the next generation of particles. So the Higgs boson in some sense is the last hurrah for the old physics, the old physics of what is called the standard model, which gives us quarks and electrons. The new theory is going to take us into dark matter. Now we know dark matter exists. Dark matter is invisible, so if I held it in my hand you wouldn’t see it. In fact, it would go right through my fingers, go right through the rock underneath my feet and go all the way to China. It would reverse direction and come back from China all the way here to New York City and go back and forth.

So dark matter has gravitational attraction, but it is invisible and we are clueless as to what dark matter really is. The leading candidate for dark matter today is called the sparticle. The sparticle is the next octave of the string. Now look around you. Everything around you, we think, is nothing but the lowest vibration of a vibrating string, the lowest octave in some sense, but a string of course has higher octaves, higher notes. We think that dark matter could in fact be nothing but a higher vibration of the string. So we think that 23% of the universe, which is the dark matter’s contribution to the universe, comes from a higher octave of the string. Now the standard model which we have ample verification of only represents four percent of the universe. So the universe of atoms, protons, neutrons, neutrinos - that universe only represents four percent of what there is. 23% is dark matter, which we think is the next vibration up of the string and then 73% of the universe is dark energy.

Dark energy is the energy of nothing. It’s the energy of the vacuum. Between two objects in outer space there is nothing, nothing except dark energy, dark energy, which is pushing the galaxies apart. So when people say if the universe is expanding they say two things, what’s pushing the galaxies apart and what is the universe expanding into. Well what’s pushing the galaxies apart is dark energy, the energy of nothing. Even vacuum has energy pushing the galaxies apart. And then what is the universe expanding into? Well if the universe is a sphere of some sort and we live on the skin of the sphere and the sphere is expanding what is the sphere expanding into? Well obviously a bubble, a balloon expands into the third dimension even though the people living on the balloon are two dimensional.

So when our universe expands what does it expand into? Hyperspace, a dimension beyond what you can see and touch. In fact, string theory predicts that there are 11 dimensions of hyperspace, so we’re nothing but a soap bubble floating in a bubble bath of soap bubbles and so in some sense the multiverse can be likened to a bubble bath. Our universe is nothing but one bubble, but there are other bubbles. When two bubbles collide that could merge into a bigger bubble, which could be the big bang. In fact, that is what probably the big bang is or perhaps a bubble fissioned in half and split off into two bubbles. That could be the big bang. Or perhaps the universe popped into existence out of nothing. That is also a possibility.

And so the universe could essentially be nothingness, which was unstable and created a soap bubble Now you may say to yourself well that can’t be right because that violates the conservation of matter and energy. How can you create a universe from nothing? Remainder of transcript - http://bigthink.com/ideas/49273

Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler & Elizabeth Rodd