Interesting Snippets

Twenty-five years after the fact, Allan Scherr, a Ph.D. researcher at MIT in the early ’60s, came clean about the earliest documented case of password theft.

In the spring of 1962, Scherr was looking for a way to bump up his usage time on CTSS. He had been allotted four hours per week, but it wasn’t nearly enough time to run the detailed performance simulations he’d designed for the new computer system. So he simply printed out all of the passwords stored on the system.

“There was a way to request files to be printed offline by submitting a punched card,” he remembered in a pamphlet written last year to commemorate the invention of the CTSS. “Late one Friday night, I submitted a request to print the password files and very early Saturday morning went to the file cabinet where printouts were placed and took the listing.”

Britain’s new world champion (Mail Online)… rejects any form of print and online integration. It runs its online operation under an editor – Martin Clarke – who’s free to produce a digital version that, by the end of a working day, bears almost no similarity to what Paul Dacre ordains for print….

The mothership Mail Online office in Kensington has only 25 seats and terminals. In New York, there are 20 staff people, nine in Los Angeles (most of them buying celebrity pictures). … Mail Online, even before its current American surge, made £15m profit last year.

Sheryl Sandberg – Chief Operating Officer at Facebook – spoke at Hubert Burda’s DLD conference in Munich and stated that we were in the middle of 3 trends. First, a trend “from anonymity to real identity”. Secondly, a trend from “wisdom of crowds to wisdom of friends” and third, a trend “from being receivers of information to broadcasters of information”.

Online, you play at being yourself. Apply that pressure of public performance to private, inconsequential actions – such as listening to songs in the comfort of your own room – and what happens, exactly?

It’ll only get worse. Here’s what I am listening to on Spotify. This is the page of the book I am reading. I am currently watching the 43rd minute of a Will Ferrell movie. And I’m not telling you this stuff. The software is. I am a character in The Sims. Hover the cursor over my head and watch that stat feed scroll.

You know how annoying it is when you’re sitting on the train with a magazine and the person sitting beside you starts reading over your shoulder? Welcome to every single moment of your future.

It’s daunting, actually, to think about how hard I would have to work, and how much I would have to learn, and how many silently-and-inexplicably-failing scripts I would have to write, before I could produce code that would rival what the professionals write and put on the internet gratis.

I just can’t resist all the free goodies. If knowing how to program is tomorrow’s “basic literacy,” I afraid I’m just going to have to die as an illiterate code plagiarist.

FULL marks to Apple for devising ways to improve how science, mathematics and other topics are taught in primary and secondary schools across America…

Apple is providing a free Macintosh application, dubbed iBooks Author, which allows publishers, teachers and writers to produce interactive textbooks with video, audio and even rotating 3D graphics that spring to life with the touch of a finger. By and large, interactive multimedia offer more engaging explanations that students more readily grasp and remember. To play such books on an iPad, a free application called iBooks 2 must first be downloaded from the company’s App Store.

About half of the Stanford stat professors have joint appointments with other departments, including economics, human biology and environmental science. “Statistics is unusual,” Mr. Hastie notes. “It’s a service field to other disciplines. It doesn’t rely on its own work. It needs others.