It's important to note that in order to truly experience the noticeably superior audio from a Soundblaster ZxR you need to pair it with an appropriate Purity Audio Ultra GT preamp (retail $53,000), WAVAC SH-833 monoblocs ($350,000 each, you'll need two sets) driving Moon Audio Titan 2's ($510,000 each), with the equipment on an NTT Audiolab RC4 stand ($18,000) and Walker Audio speaker cables ($13,500 a pair, you'll need two pairs because you're bi-amping) alongside a PurePower 2000 power conditioner ($2,800).

Actual measurements of music reproduction quality rather than liberal use of the listener's imagination as in the HotHardware review have shown that even the crappiest DACs built into a cheap motherboard or laptop produce sound that's as good as anything from a professional sound system of 5-10 years ago. The important factor beyond that point is (a) noise immunity of the low-level signal portions (the inside of a computer isn't a good environment for those) and (b) the speakers. Whether you're using a Creative Labs or Intel Express chipset DAC doesn't make any difference.

Actually I think the use of algorithms to write articles is great, I'm currently working on an anti-article algorithm that extracts just the facts from algorithm-generated articles and turns them into tweets. So instead of having to plough through a long slew of pseudo-intelligent analysis, all you get are the essential sound bytes: "Cat explodes; canary charged by police", that sort of thing. Pretty soon it'll be bigger than Facebook.

TLS doesn't work that way, the implementation trusts, and uses, whatever keys it's told to trust (via certificates). And that's the problem, while most implementations will allow you to manage your own certs, for example by creating self-signed certs, the Windows implementation will only trust certs from commercial CAs. You know, Diginotar, Trustwave, Comodo, those sorts of guys. So you can't just generate and manage your own keys and certs but are forced to pay, and trust hundreds of external CAs to manage your certs (and by extension keys) for you.

Basically they want the people who write malware packers to tag the packed malware as malware so it can be easily identified. Sort of like asking burglars to wear a shirt with I AM A BURGLAR printed on it in large letters, and perhaps notify the police when they're planning to break into a house.

It's a cunning plan, but somehow I can't see it catching out many bad guys.

The problem was that Windows 7 gadgets had no security whatsoever, the only security setting you could have for them was "everything all the time" (there were theoretical config.options you could use that tightened things up a bit, but they weren't actually used). So you had the situation of ActiveX circa 1995 in a current OS that was touted as very secure (or at least "we tried really hard to make it very secure"). The issue wasn't why they discontinued it, it was how it ever got out the door in that state in the first place.

That's like saying that gonorrhea isn't as bad as syphilis.

The Chewbacca defence! Devilishly clever...

It's someone who has been active in the crypto/security community for awhile now. Personal details are pretty scarce (i.e. it could be a front for the NSA for all anyone knows), but the persona has been active in crypto. If you want something to Google on try "alyssa rowan cryptography".

If it's the real Alyssa Rowan tweeting that then it's a pretty reliable source.

There's an even closer-to-food analogy for this: If you want a good Italian pizza, get a Greek to make it. I have no idea why this works, but the best Italian pizzas always tend to be made by someone called Nikos or Costas.

Saying "would you like fries with that" doesn't really count as working in a restaurant though...

Other materials used include chewing gum, rubber bands, old newspapers, and spit.

Interesting to see that the supposed origin is northeastern China, which is where the Japanese special unit 731 carried out biological warfare experiments during WWII, polluting large areas with bioweapons products. Perhaps this is a case of the chickens coming home to roost?