External Brain

Two years after the launch of the iPad, the tablet has a considerable footprint among business professionals — especially in Africa.

According to the results of the IDG’s latest iPad for Business Survey, African professionals are almost twice as likely as the global average to be supplied with an iPad by their employer.

Forty-seven percent of African respondents said they own a corporate-issue iPad. This is compared to the global average of 24% — via redwolf.newsvine.com

.htaccess files are used to configure Apache, as well a range of other web servers. Despite the .htaccess file type extension, they are simply text files that can be edited using any text-editor. In this article, we’ll review what they are, and how you can use them in your projects — via Nettuts+

The excellent ReadNow application, which allows you to easily read articles from your Instapaper and Read It Later articles on your Mac, has been pulled from the Mac App Store …because of an infringement letter. Developer Michael Schneider added [i]n my current situation I’m not allowed to provide any further information.

The good news is that if you have already purchased the app, you can still download it from the Purchases tab in the App Store.app even though the iTunes page for ReadNow now leads to the message, Your request could not be completed.

However, as I waited for the Mac App Store to load on my iMac this morning, I found myself wondering “What would I do if I couldn’t re-download it from the Mac App Store?

Fortunately I have the app on my MacBook Air, so I could go to /Applications/ReadNow.app and then select File » Compress Read Now (or control+click the app and choose Compress from the menu) — via TUAW

Los Angeles-based Web hosting firm DreamHost reset the FTP and shell access passwords for all of its customers on Friday after detecting unauthorised activity within one of its databases.

One of DreamHost’s database servers was illegally accessed using an exploit that was not previously known or prevented by our layered security systems in place, said DreamHost’s CEO, Simon Anderson, in a blog post on Saturday.

Even though it couldn’t be blocked, the unauthorised access was detected by one of the company’s intrusion detection systems (IDS), allowing its security team to react quickly and take the necessary mitigation steps.

The company notified its customers about the security breach via email and informed them that only passwords used for FTP and shell access were affected by the breach. Billing or personal information was not exposed, DreamHost said — via redwolf.newsvine.com

After snatching a notorious copyright troll’s name at auction, a Swiss company is turning Righthaven.com into a web hosting service. The intended customers? Publishers worried about the kind of abusive legal threats spewed out by the domain’s previous owner.

The Swiss courts don’t play games and registrars here cannot be scared, said Stefan Thalberg of Ort Cloud, an ISP based in Zürich. Frivolous plaintiffs will find little comfort here.

With hosting in Switzerland and planned in Iceland, the new Righthaven promises infrajuridsictional infrastructure — in other words, uptime that would require international co-operation to bring down – via redwolf.newsvine.com

Google has tweaked its search algorithm to punish websites with excessive advertising above-the-fold, that is, websites that stack the top of the page with nothing but advertisements.

According to Google, rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. To help users get to that content, Google may drop ad-heavy websites from its search results.

Google says that the change will only affect about one in 100 searches, and emphasizes that websites using what Google’s Distinguished Engineer and SEO guru Matt Cutts calls ads above-the-fold to a normal degree will not be affected — via redwolf.newsvine.com

How to use Facebook safely: Here’s the easy solution: don’t fucking surveil yourself! If you want to stay safe on Facebook, the answer is, you should not use it, and don’t tag people! There are benefits of using it, there are tradeoffs, but in the long run I think it’s going to be pretty bad that you gave a bunch of capitalists all your private information where the US government asserts and has the right to read it without a warrant and with the ability to gag the corporate.

What’s the greatest database of Jews on the planet? Facebook. What will happen when you want the biggest database of leftists on the planet? Or right wing people? That’s really, really scary, so one way to not be part of that dataset is to not put yourself in it voluntarily, and to chastise people who only hang out with you to tag you in Facebook as a sort of conspicuous consumption of the 21st Century say: Hey, if that’s all you get out of our friendship then go fuck yourself! — via redwolf.newsvine.com

A novel high-speed, high-security computing technology will be compatible with the cloud computing approach popular on the web, a study suggests.

Quantum computing will use the inherent uncertainties in quantum physics to carry out fast, complex computations.

A report in Science shows the trick can extend to cloud services such as Google Docs without loss of security.

This blind quantum computing can be carried out without a cloud computer ever knowing what the data is.

Quantum computing has been heralded as the most powerful potential successor to traditional, electronics-based computing — via redwolf.newsvine.com