An anonymous reader writes "The author looks at the markup for the new whitehouse.gov site, launched today. It uses ASP.NET and various JavaScript libraries. It suffers from various inefficiencies, most easily remedied. Check the images and techniques used to build the site front-end."

wiedzmin writes "Great entry in today's SANS Internet Storm Center Handler's Diary — How to suck at Information Security. Some of my favorite points include: 'Assume the users will read the security policy because you've asked them to. Assume that policies don't apply to executives. Make someone responsible for managing risk, but don't give the person any power to make decisions. Expect end-users to forgo convenience in place of security. Hire somebody just because he or she has a lot of certifications. Expect your users to remember passwords without writing them down.' Very entertaining and informative read with total of about 4 dozen points. Now if I could only find a way to get management to read it." There's also a one-page PDF on the author's site.

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."

NinjaCoder writes "The Guardian has an interesting article based on a new book (Outliers: The Story Of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell) which examines some persons of interest to computer technology (Bill Joy, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, amongst others). It examines reasons for their successes and strongly suggests a link between practice (10,000 hours by age 20 being the magic milestone) and luck. This maybe an obvious truism, but the article does give interesting anecdotes on how their personal circumstances led to today's technological landscape. It points out that many of the luminaries of the current tech industry were born around 1955, and thus able to take advantage of the emerging technologies.