Why Printed Books Will Never Die

‘Your favorite books define you, and digital versions don’t seem to impart connections that are quite as deep.’

‘For those who prefer their books printed in ink on paper, that sounds depressing. But perhaps there is reason to hope that e-books and print books could have a bright future together, because for all the great things e-books accomplish – convenience, selection, portability, multimedia – there are still some fundamental qualities they will simply never possess…’
http://mashable

Why You Must Disable Java
UAE Accused: Java Flaw Used To Spy On Activist

‘The latest Java zero-day saga continues, with a rights group claiming that the UAE government used the vulnerability in an attempt to get spyware onto a machine belonging to an activist.

‘The flaw emerged last week and various hacked websites were seen serving up exploits. Oracle released an out-of-band update over the weekend and urged the users to immediately patch their software.

‘Many remain concerned about who has taken advantage of the vulnerability, and to what ends.

‘Bahrain Watch said it had dissected an email sent to an activist, which contained a link to a video purportedly involving Dubai’s chief of police. After inspecting the HTML code on the linked page, the organisation claimed to have discovered a Java applet serving up an exploit via the vulnerability…’

Java is not JavaScript
You don’t have to disable Javascript. If you’re on Firefox, you can disable script per website with NoScript

‘Java applets used to be fairly common, but (mainly through the rise of JavaScript) they are now are used rarely, or not at all, on most of the popular websites out there.

‘In fact, you probably won’t miss much without applet support. Lots of Facebook users, for example, report being able to use their favourite addons such as games without Java.

‘Nevertheless, there have been several recent and widely-abused bugs in the applet part of Java that make your browser insecure.

‘So we are recommending that you turn off Java in your browser…’

Auto-write Your Own Book With An Algorithm
‘Parker’s work isn’t publishing’s first foray into auto-writing, but up until now, most, like companies like Chicago-based Narrative Science and North Carolina’s StatSheet, focused on short, formulaic sports and crime writing for newspapers, not full-length books.

‘When ReadWrite spoke with Parker this week, he gushed about how much press he’s gotten of late – and how often they’d gotten his story wrong…’
ReadWrite: Tell me about the algorithm you created to auto-write books.

Everything-as-a-Service is Happening Right Now
‘As the idea of a sharing and scaling services that were otherwise once local and isolated continues to spread, we are now seeing just about every function you can imagine being delivered as-a-service to any business who wants them.

‘The most recent example of this new *aaS trend is the release of the Vocus Marketing Suite, a hosted marketing service that enables small- to medium-sized businesses to access marketing tools and (more importantly) expertise for those SMBs to use…’