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[Don't sign in to Chrome if you're using a public or untrusted computer. When you set up Chrome with your Google Account, a copy of your data is stored on the computer you're using and can be accessed by other people using the same computer. To remove your data, delete the user you are signed in as.]

Chrome has another gigantic security hole baked in: if you sign in to your Google account, it automatically syncs with Google's servers and caches account information on whatever computer you signed in from.

I won't install Chrome on any of my PCs and will only run it from inside a VM. 

I use Android devices extensively, so I am automatically signed in to my Google accounts at all times, but I use Chrome as little as possible for browsing on those devices and always make sure that I have password saving disabled in any browser I use .  There are plenty of good Android browsers that offer much better privacy options.

I don't think this is the case.  You have to actually sign into the browser.  Which I don't do.

That is correct, you must sign in to sync.  And once signed in, you must explicitly sign out or you will remain signed in for future session.  When you are signed in, everything you do is synced with your account on Google's servers.

Google's description of how Chrome sync works has the following warning:

Don't sign in to Chrome if you're using a public or untrusted computer. When you set up Chrome with your Google Account, a copy of your data is stored on the computer you're using and can be accessed by other people using the same computer. To remove your data, delete the user you are signed in as.

If you take Google at their word, this indicates that signing out still leaves the synced information stored locally.

Of course, you can use Chrome without ever signing in, but as soon as you do, you have no control over what is spread around through the sync function.  As I said, I use Android devices and I also have ported my home and business phone numbers to Google Voice to keep them when I dumped the landlines they were attached to.  This means I need to sign into my Google accounts regularly. I just don't use Chrome to do so, because I don't want whatever is cached locally from other sessions to be synced to those Google accounts.

Chrome has another gigantic security hole baked in: if you sign in to your Google account, it automatically syncs with Google's servers and caches account information on whatever computer you signed in from.

I won't install Chrome on any of my PCs and will only run it from inside a VM. 

I use Android devices extensively, so I am automatically signed in to my Google accounts at all times, but I use Chrome as little as possible for browsing on those devices and always make sure that I have password saving disabled in any browser I use .  There are plenty of good Android browsers that offer much better privacy options.

Not to worry!

We have it on the authority of Katarina Witt that there is a big difference between East German Stasi and United States' NSA program.

Of course, she also goes on to say that "people are naïve if they don't think storage of their email, telephone and other electronic records doesn't make them vulnerable."

In their wildest dreams, the Stasi couldn't have imagined the technological capabilities of the NSA, but alas, our elected leaders don't seem to have learned anything at all from the example of East Germany (or North Korea, for that matter).

Reading ebooks is the number one use for my Android tablets and I've tried quite a few readers over the past two years.  Aldiko was my reader of choice originally, but it has fallen so far behind that I haven't even bothered to install it on the tablet I now use most often for reading (Nexus 10).

The readers I use today are:

1) Mantano Reader Premium ($6.99 - there is free Lite version and an intermediate Essential version for $2.99). My favorite in most situations for both epub and pdf. By far the best document navigation and library management if you have an extensive library (as I do). They have a paid cloud service for synchronization which I tried and quickly dumped. Rendering is not quite as good as Nook, but it allows you to install many TTF fonts.  Reasonably good support with a user forum and  an actual manual.

2) Moon+ Reader Pro ($4.99, on sale through August 2013 for $2.49, the free version is much less capable).  Extremely flexible with many customization options, and very robust - it can handle malformed epubs that other readers choke on.  Also does CHM well. The interface is rather quirky and can take some getting used to: It breaks epubs by chapters and allows you to scroll smoothly within them, so it is my first choice for reading on a phone (one-handed), however that design also makes it hard to find your place within a large book.  Can synchronize using Dropbox.

3) Nook from Barnes & Noble.  Although meant to work with the B&N Nook store, this is an excellent free epub reader that allows side loading and can be used with any non-DRM epub file. Not as flexible as the two mentioned above, it has the best on-screen rendering of any Android reader and pretty good within book navigation.

All three of these support Adobe DRM, but I always convert purchased ebooks to DRM-free epub before loading them on my devices, so I have never tested this.  I buy books from both Amazon and B&N, and other vendors too (e.g., O'Reilly), but while I do use the Nook reader on my devices, I hardly ever use the dreadful Kindle for Android app.

RightNote is "coming soon" at a 50% off on BitsDuJour. $29.97, which is $.02 more than the cost of an upgrade.

I've had RN for over a year and haven't found myself using it. If the discount also applies to upgrades, I might take it on spec that I might find a use for it in the future, otherwise, I will pass for now.

Nothing new here.

For an enlightening overview of how the same kind of Goliath vs. Goliath has played out over the last century and a half, I recommend reading The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications by Paul Starr.

WinPatrol is currently on sale for an unspecified "limited time:"

Single machine license:  $2.50  (regularly $29.95).
Lifetime family pack:  $10.50 (regularly $49.95).

Not quite free, but close.

It sounds like you're asking about the dumping problem for decrypted code. Is that right?

I don't believe static approaches like dump analysis are as effective for reverse-engineering as dynamic approaches like tracing program execution steps.  A program's gotta do what a program's gotta do.

"You write your software in a nice, reasonable, human-understandable way and then feed that software to our system," Sahai said. "It will output this mathematically transformed piece of software that would be equivalent in functionality, but when you look at it, you would have no idea what it's doing."

If the system works, this just means that the code is not retrievable from the program itself, but, the computer must still be able to follow the instructions in the code, or the program won't be of much use.  That means that the functionality of an "obfuscated" program can still be recreated by capturing what it does when it is executed or interpreted.

A bigger speed bump perhaps, but still just a speed bump.

After winning their anti-trust suit against Apple for e-book price-fixing, the US Department of Justice has revealed their proposed remedy, and it is no mere slap on the wrist.

DOJ is demanding that Apple terminate the agreements with the 5 major publishing conglomerates that brought on the lawsuit. But it would also require Apple to cease and desist from any anti-competitive practiices, allow in-app sales by Amazon, B&N and other competitors for e-books, as well as for other media including music and video. It would also require an auditor to monitor Apple's compliance over the next 2 years.

Apple, needless to say, is calling this "draconian" and pledging to fight it, and of course, the court would have to approve any remedy, but it should be remembered that this judge has already ruled twice against Apple and has had very harsh words about their business practices.

Paragon Software has made their new version of ExtFS for Windows free for personal use. It claims to be the only solution that provides full read/write access to Ext4, as wells as Ext2 and Ext3.

As I inch closer to giving Linux a serious tryout, this has been a concern of mine, as I would want to be able to access stored data on portable drives from either OS. I've heard bad things about Windows ExtFS drivers in general, but I've used Paragon products for many years and found them to be very reliable.

I'd be interested in what dual Windows/Linux users here think about this.

As of version 12.70 (July 23, 2013), the XYplorer lifetime license is back!

You can also upgrade from a standard to a lifetime license.

To celebrate the 2013 Open Source Convention, O'Reilly is discounting all programming Ebooks & videos by 50% until July 27, 3013.

Go here to browse the titles and get the discount code (CFSCN13).

For some time, Teamviewer has had an app that allows one to control a remote PC from an Android device.

They have now introduced a new mobile app called Teamviewer QuickSupport that allows a user to control certain Android devices (Samsung, Sony and a few others) from a PC.

The app is remarkably flexible, allowing not just remote control of the device, but file transfers in both directions through a 2-pane file explorer, screen captures and remote process control, among other features.  Some quick testing on my Nexus 10 (Samsung) showed that everything worked smoothly.

They also have a much less powerful version for iPad/iPhone, which I haven't tried, since I have no iOS devices.

You could trade in your smartphone for the new Galaxy S4 Zoom and replace two stones with one bird.

In yet another sign that Microsoft has decided the future lies elsewhere than the desktop, TechNet subscriptions will no longer be sold after August 31 2013 and the TechNet support site will disappear on September 30, 2014

My take on this is that small consultants will need to seriously start talking to their customers about switching to Linux, because that may soon be the only desktop OS for which they will actually be able to get support.

It is quite possible to buy a CD from Amazon and then list it for sale again on Amazon (which costs nothing until you sell it). Anyone can sell on Amazon. I often buy stuff on Amazon that is new but slightly cheaper from a third party seller.

Sounds like a quick route to bankruptcy.

Amazon has your cash until someone else comes along and buys your CD, at which point you will still be out the shipping charges both ways. You'd also have to sell it for less than Amazon to get someone to buy from you rather than Amazon, since you won't be offering the free MP3/streaming version that Amazon does.

BTW, I mostly listen to classical music and Jazz and am very picky about sound quality, which is why I always buy CDs (or flac) and rip my own MP3s for listening on players.  Amazon's rips are actually better than most (they use a relatively high bitrate VBR), but ripping them myself gives me complete control over quality, size and tagging.

Many newer CDs have been remastered at higher bitrates, so the sound is much better than older CD versions of the same music. CDs themselves are limited to 16 bit 44,100 Mhz reproduction, but the improved quality of the mastering makes the sound noticeably better. The highest quality MP3 rips are in practice indistinguishable from the CD and preserve the benefits of the remastering.

The same is NOT true of  DSD sound on SACDs, which can deliver vastly superior sound to anything you can get from a regular CD, if you have the proper playback equipment.  DSD cannot be ripped to regular digital formats, although most SACDs also incorporate a CD (Redbook) layer, which can be, albeit without the 5-1 surround and higher definition of DSD.

The idea that anyone would buy a CD from Amazon just to get the music as an MP3 and sell the CD as new, strikes me as beyond ridiculous.

To begin with, you'd need to have a buyer lined up for the CD, unless you already had a music store (remember those) where you could sell it - in which case, you wouldn't be buying from Amazon in the first place.

The simple explanation is the Amazon makes money selling CDs, and that providing buyers with the music they have legally purchased in MP3 format gives it a way to compete with iTunes, Google Play and music subscription services.  Nothing wrong with that.

Not sure I understand your concern.  The musical content is copyrighted, not the means of distribution.

If you own the CD, it is perfectly legal for you to rip the contents to MP3 (or any other format) to listen to on any digital device you own, as long as you don’t give the music away.   And if you do buy a CD, the only thing keeping you from copying or ripping it and reselling the original is your conscience anyway. 

What Amazon is doing is actually likely to encourage the sale of new CDs, which can only help the artists.

This cartoon references the NSA,, but much the same could apply to Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc., as well as most of their advertisers.

O'Reilly has a sale on all Microsoft Press eBooks until 5 PM PST, June 7, 2013.

Herman Hollerith invented the punch card in 1888 to allow mechanical tabulation of the 1890 US Census.  The company he founded became the nucleus of IBM several decades later.

In 1906, Hollerith devised a wiring panel system that allowed one machine to be used to tabulate many different jobs. This was not the first example of programming (see, e.g., the Jacquard loom or Charles Babbage), but it was arguably the origin of modern information processing.

I came along a few years later and stole his avatar.

Today is  International Day Against DRM.

In celebration, O'Reilly is offering every ebook they publish or distribute at 50% off until midnight tonight.

O'Reilly has long opposed DRM for ebooks, and Tim O'Reilly claims that this is a major part of their success.

Task management software works best as a simple resource to remind the user of what he/she wants to do, not as a traffic cop laying out a schedule and enforcing it. To my way of thinking, one of the most useful features of any task management software is floating events, which simply roll over to the next day, keeping all of their settings, if not completed when originally scheduled.

The original Palm organizer remains the (mostly unmatched) benchmark for today’s PIM software. Pimlico Software’s Datebook, which Handspring included in the Treo, the model for today’s smartphones, added floating events among other enhancements to the Palm organizer. Pimlical for Android and PC, from the same author, includes floating events, as does DTG. but few other task managers do.

A huge advantage of Android smartphones over the iPhone, IMO, is the availability of home screen widgets.  I have both DTG’s widget and Agenda Widget Plus on the home screen of my Android phone.  While Agenda Widget Plus can also display DTG tasks, I prefer to keep tasks and schedule separate. Whenever I look at my phone, which is many times a day, I have everything I need right there to remind me of what I need to do, and when.

This so-called "Poll" provides a textbook example of how to frame questions to get answers you can use to prove whatever you want.

Of course, it comes from Zogby, long known in the survey research field for phony polling. ABC News, among others, has a policy against quoting Zogby polls in news articles because they are not credible.

This clip from the British TV series Yes Prime Minister provides a very funny example of how this is done.