That 64GB SDXC card is yesterday’s news (figuratively and literally). The new CompactFlash 5.0 standard promises a ridiculous 144-petabyte theoretical maximum storage capacity for newer CF cards. Finally, you’ll be able to store your media library and the libraries of your closest 70,000 friends in your pocket! While SDXC cards are happy with their 2 [...]
Archive for March, 2010
VeriSign rolls out new Web site verification service
VeriSign is introducing a certification service that confirms whether a business is legitimate and that their Web site is free of malware. VeriSign already sells various SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates for Web sites that aim to let visitors know the site meets high standards for encryption of sensitive information. Those sites are also allowed [...]
Looking to the future with Cassandra
Digg has been researching ways to scale our database infrastructure for some time now. We’ve adopted a traditional vertically partitioned master-slave configuration with MySQL, and also investigated sharding MySQL with IDDB. Ultimately, these solutions left us wanting. In the case of the traditional architecture, the lack of redundancy on the write masters is painful, and [...]
Twitter growth prompts switch from MySQL to ‘NoSQL’ database
Ryan King, an engineer at Twitter, today told the blog MyNoSQL that the social networking company plans to move from MySQL to the Cassandra database for what he called its resilience, scalability and large community of open-source developers. “We have a lot of data, the growth factor in that data is huge and the rate [...]
Cell phones show human movement predictable 93% of the time
We’d like to think of ourselves as dynamic, unpredictable individuals, but according to new research, that’s not the case at all. In a study published in last week’s Science, researchers looked at customer location data culled from cellular service providers. By looking at how customers moved around, the authors of the study found that it [...]
The Web’s greatest security threats revealed
Where are the greatest Web-related security threats today? Analysis of Web Hacking Incidents Database (WHID) reveals that in 2009 social networks were at the greatest risk, malware and defacement remained the most common outcome of Web attacks, and SQL injection was the most common attack vector. Here’s a deeper dive on the findings and what [...]
A peek behind the scenes at Hotmail
Hi, my name is Arthur de Haan and I am responsible for Test and System Engineering in Windows Live. To kick things off, I’d like to give you a look behind the scenes at Hotmail, and tell you more about what it takes to build, deploy and run the Windows Live Hotmail service on such [...]
Tech apocalypse: Five doomsday scenarios for IT
Technology drives just about everything we do, and not just at our jobs. From banks to hospitals to the systems that keep the juice flowing to our homes, we are almost entirely dependent on tech. More and more of these systems are interconnected, and many of them are vulnerable. We see it almost every day. [...]
Why Wikipedia Should Be Trusted As A Breaking News Source
Most any journalism professor, upon mention of Wikipedia, will immediately launch into a rant about how the massively collaborative online encyclopedia can’t be trusted. It can, you see, be edited and altered by absolutely anyone at any moment. // // tweetmeme_url = ‘http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_wikipedia_should_be_trusted_or_how_to_consume.php’; tweetmeme_source = ‘rww’; // ]]>But how much less trustworthy is the site [...]
Windows Phone 7′s Impossible App Mission
Microsoft’s already done a lot right with Windows Phone 7, and it’s not even out until late this year. But after today’s announcements, there’s one lingering question: How can Windows Phone 7 possibly catch up, in terms of apps? To be clear, the problem is as follows: When Windows phone 7 launches later this year, [...]