"The hidden side of your soul": How the FBI uses the Web as a child porn honeypot

Don't want these emails? Unsubscribe here. Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. Top stories: Apr 20 - Apr 26 One Microsoft Way Windows 8 on the desktop—an awkward hybrid by Peter Bright Windows 8's new user interface has proven nothing short of polarizing. The hybrid operating system pairs a new GUI concept, the touch-friendly Metro interface, to the traditional windows, icons, menus, and pointer concept that Windows users have depended on for decades. In so doing, it removes Windows mainstays such as the Start button and Start menu. While few are concerned about Windows 8's usability as a tablet operating system, desktop users remain wary. Will the new operating system take a huge step back in terms of both productivity and usability? Specific concerns voiced in our forums have included the mandated fullscreen view and a lack of resizable windows, the tight restrictions on what applications are permitted to do, and the automatic termination of background applications. The good news is that these specific criticisms are largely off-base. Windows 8 includes a full desktop with all the applications and behavior that you expect a Windows desktop to include. This means full multitasking (no background suspension or termination), full system access (to the extent that your user permissions allow), resizable non-maximized windows, Aero snap, pinned taskbar icons, alt-tab—it's all still there and it all still works.  The bad news is that the various pieces of the operating system do not in fact mesh together smoothly; the seams, especially between the Metro and legacy interfaces, remain obvious and jarring. For desktop users, the experience remains decidedly mixed. Read More Tech Policy "The hidden side of your soul": How the FBI uses the Web as a child porn honeypot by Nate Anderson The e-mail arrived in James Charles Cafferty's inbox on July 14, 2011. Unlike most unsolicited e-mail on the Internet, the message did not pitch mortgages, get rich quick scams, or penis pills. Instead, it provided a link to an under-the-radar child pornography website and the password needed to access it. Cafferty, a diplomatic security officer working for the US government at its London embassy, waited for three days, then clicked on the link. This is what he saw: "Welcome to the hidden side of yur soul, where you view the yung and innocent. We have been around since 2002, offering the best of private and series Child Pornography (CP), (hardcore/soft core) all for FREE! All you have to do, enter in the password, and you'll be viewing free CP for days. We move around when we have to... congratulations for finding us. Yur old password won't work, so get the new one and you are IN!!!" Read More Business IT Coolest jobs in tech (literally): running a South Pole data center by Sean Gallagher Steve Barnet is hiring, but not for an ordinary IT job. His ideal candidate "will be willing to travel to Polar and high altitude sites." Barnet, interim Computing Facilities Manager for the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC) at the University of Wisconsin, is looking to fill what may be the coolest Unix administrator job opening in the world—literally. Plenty of IT jobs exist in extreme and exotic locales, but the WIPAC IT team runs what is indisputably the world’s most remote data center: a high-performance computing cluster sitting atop a two-mile thick glacier at the South Pole. The data center has over 1,200 computing cores and three petabytes of storage, and it's tethered to the IceCube Observatory, a neutrino detector with strings of optical sensors buried a kilometer deep in the Antarctic ice. IceCube observes bursts of neutrinos from cataclysmic astronomical events, which helps to study both "dark matter" and the physics of neutrinos. Read More Gadgets For today's IT professional, the iPad is an addition, not a replacement by John C. Welch When I think about the iPad as a sysadmin's tool, I don't think about it in terms of can/can't. Obviously, the iPad can be a sysadmin tool. Heck, I used Windows Mobile 6 phones as sysadmin tools. It wasn’t a lot of fun, but if you were really far from a laptop, tin cans with string, or a sharp stick and soft dirt, you could do it. Prior to getting my first iPad, I used my iPhone to some effect. The truth is you can use an iPhone (or really, any smartphone) as a sysadmin tool as long as you have a decent Web browser and few key apps. But it is not a particularly enjoyable experience. Yes, I know, “sysadmin” and “enjoyable” seem like they’re mutually exclusive. The small screen of the iPhone, and the small size of its keyboard have always made it one of those “if you have to" tools. Things like VNC or other similar remote logins were... well, you can do those sorts of things on an iPhone, but I always tried to avoid it. It’s easier to drive home to the MacBook Pro than use the iPhone. 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