Cody Taylor

rye writes in to recommend a Sherri Davidoff interview with Matt Knox, a talented Ruby instructor and coder, who talks about his early days designing and writing adware for Direct Revenue. (Direct Revenue was sued by Eliot Spitzer in 2006 for surreptitiously installing adware on millions of computers.) “So we’ve progressed now from having just a Registry key entry, to having an executable, to having a randomly-named executable, to having an executable which is shuffled around a little bit on each machine, to one that’s encrypted — really more just obfuscated — to an executable that doesn’t even run as an executable. It runs merely as a series of threads. … There was one further step that we were going to take but didn’t end up doing, and that is we were going to get rid of threads entirely, and just use interrupt handlers. It turns out that in Windows, you can get access to the interrupt handler pretty easily. … It amounted to a distributed code war on a 4-10 million-node network.”

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Over the next 1 to 3 years, and beyond, we are set to see the glory of the GNU/Linux operating system take hold as the prominently used end user platform for computers everywhere. This is why it makes a whole bunch of sense for you to port your games to GNU/Linux. But don’t take my word for it, checkout the links and information below…

paleshadows writes “The Times Online reports that researchers claim that each query submitted to Google has a quantifiable impact. Specifically, two queries performed through a desktop computer generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a cup of tea. From the article: ‘While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 [whereas] boiling a kettle generates about 15g […] Google is secretive about its energy consumption and carbon footprint. It also refuses to divulge the locations of its data centers. However, with more than 200m Internet searches estimated daily, the electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions caused by computers and the Internet is provoking concern. A recent report [argues that] the global IT industry generate[s] as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines — about 2% of global CO2 emissions.'” Google makes an interesting focus for such claims, but similar extrapolations have been done before about, for instance, the energy costs of sending a short email.

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An anonymous reader writes “So, with the financial crisis and loss of jobs everywhere, what are the chances of getting a good IT job? I’m going to graduate this year with a BS in Software Engineering majoring in Network Security. I’ll be looking for a job as a penetration tester eventually, but I hear that is hard to get right out of college so I’ll be looking for a job as a Junior Network Admin or similar type of job to start off in. Is there a lack of jobs in this field? I figure computers always need fixing so they have to have some sort of IT personnel on staff to maintain the core of their business. Anyone have a good insight on this issue?”

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theodp writes “Every day, Americans toss out more than 350,000 cell phones and 130,000 computers, making electronic waste the fastest-growing part of the US garbage stream. A lot of the world’s e-waste is exported to Guiyu, China, where peasants heat circuit boards over coal fires to recover lead (a 15″ computer monitor can pack up to 7 lbs. of Pb), while others use acid to burn off bits of gold. Guiyu’s willingness to deal with lead, mercury and other toxic materials generates million a year for the village, but as a result. Guiyu is slowly poisoning itself with the highest level of cancer-causing dioxins in the world. The village experiences elevated rates of miscarriages, and its children suffer from an extremely high rate of lead poisoning. TIME suggests checking out recycling brokers and accredited e-stewards the next time you’re ready to toss a gizmo.”

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