ReadWriteHack

As Windows 8 approaches, Mozilla developers have been working hard on a Metro version. If you're using Windows 8 on the desktop, no problem. Tablet users, however, are going to be denied a fully functional Firefox - and will face restrictions on many other third-party applications. In the name of security, Microsoft is forcing them into a "sandbox" on ARM devices. The lockdown renegs on the company's prior promises, and it's going to have some far-reaching effects on many applications.

Having data available electronically is not the same thing as the data being useful. Campaign finance disclosures provided electronically by the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), are a good example of that. The New York Times's Fech (not "fetch") is a RubyGem - a packaged application - designed to help journalists and public interest organizations access and make sense of FEC filings.

Slowly but surely, SPDY ("speedy") is becoming more widely used. The Google-backed protocol, a modification to HTTP, is designed to help reduce latency and bolster security. Even if you don't manage a Web server yourself, you should know about SPDY and what it offers to you - and the Web at large.

It's a fantastic time to be a web developer. Society and the software economy that serves it are experiencing a dramatic change in the way successful Web applications are built. Previous shifts in software development have had massive, far-reaching consequences: the toppling of old technology giants, crowning of new industry kings, and the very transformation of how people communicate and how work gets done.

At the same time, these shifts also ripple through the software development ecosystem, changing everything from the processes and tools developers use down to the programming languages that are taught in schools. This time, the change is the real-time Web.  

How do you calculate the popularity of various programming languages? The TIOBE folks try to rank programming language popularity by searching the Web. The RedMonk team pulls data from GitHub and Stack Overflow. But O'Reilly has a unique method: It measures book sales as an indicator of technology trends. By that measure, at least, Java and JavaScript come out on top.

When you buy an enterprise product, you almost assume nowadays that its management interface is going to be via a Web browser to a built-in Web server on the device. This trend began almost as soon as the graphical Web was available in the mid-1990s, and today almost no one writes their own front-end management software. Well, that is both a blessing and a curse, as the folks from the InfoSec Institute have recently reminded me in their post here this week.

Domain Name Servers (DNS) were still functional during the weekend. There were reported claims to bring down this collection of important servers in the hopes of more cyberterrorism. However, while there are only 13 root servers, they are replicated into hundreds of machines around the globe using a variety of protocol tricks, and recently efforts were accelerated to further protect the roots, too.

But I learned a valuable DNS lesson of my own last week, unrelated to the supposed plans of this hacker group. And that is: Treat DNS with the respect that it deserves. I lost several hours of productivity to debugging some beta software on my Mac when I was on the road. Hopefully, after you read this, you will be more careful than I was in what you place on your own equipment. If we are going to bring more of our own devices into work, we have to be better at what changes we make to them, too.

The next time representatives from Microsoft come knocking on your door, it may be to actually seize your servers. And it is all legit, thanks to the RICO laws. The interesting thing is it is part of its digital crime efforts to disrupt botnet operators. On Friday, Microsoft staffers entered two hosting providers, one in Illinois and one in Scranton, Penn., to seize the command and control computers of two Zeus botnets. Microsoft had sued the operators on the grounds that the botnets violated their copyrights and trademarks by taking control over a series of Windows PCs.

Adobe has had a SaaS-based forms creation service called FormsCentral for the past year. Today they announced the ability to link your forms with PayPal for automatically collecting money from your respondents. It is a great move.

Imagine looking for a job at the same exact time that everyone else is doing it, and you have to adhere to rigid interviewing and application standards. Now imagine that to get the job you have to be matched with your prospective employer by a national computer system. The program is designed to take into account your preferences and your prospective employer's. That is precisely what is going on next week, when medical students from all over North America participate in what is called Match Day. For more than 50 years, Match Day has happened in March, on the third Thursday, which is next week.