Horror show: Worst mergers and acquisitions in tech history Corporate mergers -- like marriages -- can result in the two parts being stronger than the whole, or they can end in utter disaster. Just this month, Western Digital and SanDisk announced plans to tie the knot in the largest storage consolidation to date, while Dell and EMC's impending nuptials equate to technology's largest leverage buyout. While it's too early to tell whether or not these two marriages will lead to long-term bliss, the tech industry has had its share of frighteningly awful mergers. ZDNet
An analysis of the final intellectual property TPP chapter leak Earlier, Wikileaks published one of the controversial chapters of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP). We here at Freezenet have been following the TPP debate carefully and offered very detailed coverage of the text of this agreement. Earlier, we analyzed the August 2015 draft. Before that, we offered an in-depth analysis of the 2011 leaked draft. Today, we are continuing our coverage by examining the final draft leak of this chapter. FreezeNet
Joomla SQL injection vulnerability exploit results in full administrative access Trustwave SpiderLabs researcher Asaf Orpani has discovered an SQL injection vulnerability in versions 3.2 through 3.4.4 of Joomla, a popular open-source Content Management System (CMS). Combining that vulnerability with other security weaknesses, our Trustwave SpiderLabs researchers are able to gain full administrative access to any vulnerable Joomla site. Trustwave
Fairphone 2 hands-on: Modular phones are finally here With more and more similarly priced and specced Android smartphones arriving on the market, unique selling points are becoming increasingly rare. There's nothing bad about selling a decent phone with an attractive price tag, but it's always more interesting to take a look at something that stands out. You don't have to add a plethora of unnecessary features or keep pumping the display resolution up, though. Ars Technica
CCTV botnet in our own back yard Much has been said about the threat posed by the Internet of Things (IoT). Considered the “barbaric horde” of under-protected connected devices, all of them are just waiting to be compromised by any half-competent hacker. While we haven’t yet had the chance to intercept any refrigerator-mounted malware, over the years we‘ve seen our share of IoT botnets, with CCTV ones being among the most common. Incapsula
Red dawn A family is gathered around the dinner table: Dad and the kids have spaghetti on their plates, Mom is standing, serving spoon in hand. She cocks her head to the side and with a broad smile declares, "Don't thank me, thank the savings." The family freezes and a Geico logo appears hovering over the table as a voice intones, "You can't skip this Geico ad, because it's already over." But the scene isn't actually frozen... The Verge
Do you know how much your computer can do in a second? Let's find out how well you know computers! All of these programs have a variable number in them. Your mission: guess how big number needs to get before the program takes 1 second to run. You don't need to guess exactly: they're all between 1 and a billion. Just try to guess the right order of magnitude! A few notes: Computers Are Fast
Star Wars: The Force Awakens - Supercut of ALL trailers Science Vs. Cinema co-creator James Darling has mashed together the ultimate Supercut for Star Wars: The Force Awakens using all 3 trailers and the Comic-Con BTS reel.
Spectators and players need the same thing from your game design Sometimes, we hear about a conversation between two game developers that sounds so interesting that we wish we could have been privy to it. So we ask the devs to share the insights from that conversation with us. Gamasutra
How happy can you make a single inmate in Prison Architect? In Prison Architect, I'm always anxious when I'm done building my prison and the first inmates arrive. Have I forgotten something? Do I have enough of everything? Is this going to be a complete disaster? I'm feeling that doubly so today: I've spent ten game-days and hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a very special prison. A luxury prison. It will house a single inmate, and he's due to arrive in a couple minutes. PC Gamer
Revisiting the Killer NIC, eight years on Onboard gigabit Ethernet: we don't think about it too much. We've had it for a long time, and for the most part, it just works. The folks behind the Killer Networking products first burst on to the scene trying to change that, and they're still at it. It's been just over eight years since we first took anin-depth look at a Killer NIC. The Tech Report
A look inside N. America's first 'fully digital' hospital A hospital that lets patients video chat with nurses and has supplies delivered by robots is preparing to open its doors in Toronto next month. Located in the northwest end of the city, the Humber River Hospital will become North America's first "fully digital" medical centre. The hospital's Chief Operating Officer Barb Collins told CTV's Canada Am that the digital vision aims to save staff time while allowing patients to feel more connected. CTV News (also, Samsung developing robots to replace cheap Chinese labour)
Review: Ubiquiti UniFi made me realize how terrible consumer Wi-Fi gear is Back in July, Ars ran a syndicated piece from The Wirecutter on the best consumer-grade wireless access point, with the winner being the $100 Netgear EX6200. The result didn't particularly move me -- I'd been using an 802.11ac-capable Apple Airport Extreme since late 2013 and Wi-Fi in House Hutchinson seemed pretty much a solved problem. Ars Technica
Faster optimization Optimization problems are everywhere in engineering: Balancing design tradeoffs is an optimization problem, as are scheduling and logistical planning. The theory -- and sometimes the implementation -- of control systems relies heavily on optimization, and so does machine learning, which has been the basis of most recent advances in artificial intelligence. MIT
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