Technology

If you’re reading this, chances are that you’ve googled a lot to decide which language to learn and how. And without a doubt, you must have run into a ton of articles about how language X is so much better than PHP and PHP is going to die through obscurity soon — via Nettuts+

Imagine the scene. Sober solicitor, probably with half-rim glasses, surrounded by grieving relatives about to read out the last will and testament of Great Uncle Johnny… And to my beloved niece, I leave access to my online poker and bingo account and to my great-nephew Frankie, all my iTunes credits.

It might seem far-fetched but as more and more of us amass digital assets, it is exactly the kind of will we might need to consider drawing up — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Jamming of global positioning signals (GPS) during Europe’s largest military exercise has been suspended, following complaints from fishermen.

The Royal Navy issued warnings in September and October that GPS in parts of Scotland would be disrupted during Exercise Joint Warrior.

But Western Isles fishermen said the first they knew was when their equipment went offline last Friday.

The Royal Navy said the military would seek to address their safety concerns — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Google has lost its cybersquatting fight with typo-snaffle site goggle.com, enabling its owner to carry on enticing clumsy typists into signing up for pricey text messaging services.

The company’s complaint against the domain name’s current registrant, Barbados-based David Csumrik, was dismissed on procedural grounds yesterday by a three-person National Arbitration Forum panel in the US.

Right now, Goggle.com’s website asks visitors a short series of questions before attempting to persuade them to sign up for a £3-per-text quiz competition, offering the latest Apple products as prizes — via redwolf.newsvine.com

GText is a new OCR utility that can help you scan text and extract it so you can copy it into another document.

Once installed, GTText lets you select an image file, load it, and then highlight the area where you’d like the app to translate the image into text. When the translation is complete, a pop-up window will appear that lets you highlight the text and copy it. If the app didn’t get it quite right, you can click try again. GTText recognises BMP, JPG, GIF, TIFF, and PNG images, and is available for Windows only

Cray said it has sealed a deal to overhaul the US Department of Energy’s Jaguar supercomputer, making it one of the fastest machines on the planet.

The supercomputer at the DOE Oak Ridge National Laboratory will be renamed Titan after it is beefed up with speedy, powerful chips from California companies NVIDIA and Advanced Micro Devices — via redwolf.newsvine.com

More than 1.1 million Myki cards are set to be replaced as hackers have found a method of cloning the tickets.

Myki manufacturers NXP has recommended users upgrade to the newer, 2008 swipecard, the MIFARE DESFire EV1. The Transport Ticketing Authority has said it will replace Myki with the more secure card, but has not said when.

TTA financial reports state the authority has $22.8 million worth of tickets in stock — which could include metcards and single-use Mykis — but this figure was written down this year to $8.1 million after the decision to scrap short term Myki tickets worth $14.1 million — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has aired its planned changes to the Numbering Plan that would see mobile phone users get access to free 1800 calls and cheaper 13 number calls.

The Numbering Plan sets forth how phone carriage services and phone numbering works around Australia. Initially enacted in 1997, the plan had been previously adjusted to make way for new geographical areas and new phone prefixes, as well as changes that allow easy access to 1800 and 13 numbers for charities — via redwolf.newsvine.com

I’ve always had a problem with the term jailbreaking when it comes to Apple’s mobile devices. The term jail came into usage long before iOS in reference to isolated user-space instances, but that old meaning seems to have been obscured through both overuse and continued attempts to paint Apple as a dictatorial company interested only in hamstringing users of its devices. I’ve let jailbreaking slide until now because even though I think it’s a loaded term, it’s also a nice, short way to describe the act of opening the device to greater customization than Apple offers out of the box. It’s also a better term than Android’s “rooting,” which sounds a bit rude in my part of the world.

In the wake of Richard Stallman’s epically tasteless diatribe against Steve Jobs last week (Google for it if you’re truly curious, I’m not serving him any page views), I’ve decided I can’t let this slide any more. In addition to saying he was glad Steve is gone, Stallman also called Jobs “the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom.” So according to him, Mac users, iPhone users, iPod and iPad owners are all imprisoned and too stupid to realise it.

It’s at this point that I have to wonder whether Stallman or any of the other members of the free software movement have ever spent any appreciable amount of time in an actual jail or jail-like environment. I’m betting that few if any of them have. If they had, they’d see as I do just how full of hyperbole (and something else that rhymes with chit) the jail metaphor is — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Many people now rely on their smartphones, sat-navs or other GPS devices to find their way around. But when these fail us, and there’s no-one to ask for directions, there’s a more natural way to navigate, says Tristan Gooley.

It’s not every week that a massive solar flare knocks out the GPS network, but all it takes is a flat battery or a mechanical fault to hobble your automated orientation aids.

And if there’s no-one around to ask and no paper map on hand, you could be in trouble.

Natural navigation may be just what you need. This involves working out which way to go without using maps, compasses or any other instruments. It relies on awareness and deduction, so does depend on retaining some awareness of direction throughout each journey — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Google today launched an early preview of Dart, a programming language the company hopes will help web application programmers overcome shortcomings of JavaScript that Google itself feels acutely.

Programmer and project leader Lars Bak detailed the project in a talk today at the Goto conference in Denmark and in a blog post. Dart is geared for everything from small, unstructured projects to large, complicated efforts — Gmail and Google Docs, for example.

If we want to focus on making the web better over time, we have to innovate, including with new programming languages, Bak said in an interview.

Google also unveiled a Dart language site that includes open-source tools for writing Dart programs, code samples and tutorials; libraries of supporting software; the Dart language specification; and forums for discussion — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Hacknotifier searches for your email address in publicly available hacked databases. All you need to do to check is type in your password email address on the main page and it will cross-reference it and give you its results in seconds, no registration or payment required. If you want 24-hour security, the site offers two plans of $5 and $7 per year for constant monitoring and notification

One of the consequences of the exhaustion of the IPV4 address space is that not only are legitimate companies having a hard time finding IP blocks to use, so are the attackers. The number of IP addresses required for large scale botnets to operate effectively can be considerable, and finding large IP blocks to use for them can be difficult. And if they do find them, the IP addresses often are blacklisted quickly by reputation systems and are then useless for the attackers.

Now, in one effort to get around these systems, some attackers are taking advantage of the lack of IPV4 space by either purchasing or renting blocks of IP space with good reputations that have been built up over the course of several years. A number of legitimate trading and auction sites have appeared as the IPV4 space became scarcer, and the attackers have gotten involved as well, getting their hands on known good IP blocks and using them for C&C or hosting malware — via redwolf.newsvine.com