ReadWriteWeb

Hussein Ghrer, a prominent Syrian blogger headquartered in Damascus, disappeared after leaving his house on October 24. Ghrer joins many journalists and activists who've been arrested and otherwise detained during the civil strife in Syria.

Other imprisoned journalists include Lina Saleh Ibrahim and Wael Yousef Abaza, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Also imprisoned is blogger Anas Almawari.

Klout's algorithms have recently depressed scores for many users. Jux released an iPad app. All of this and more in today's Daily Wrap.

Sometimes it's difficult to catch every story that hits tech media in a day, so we thought it might be helpful to wrap up some of the most talked about stories. Assuming this goes over well, we're going to give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus as well. This is a new feature at ReadWriteWeb so we covet your feedback. If you have suggestions, please leave them in the comments below or reach out to me directly at robyn at readwriteweb.com.

An article in USA Today this week got me interested in how much the tech firms are paying to lobby Congress. There are a few places you can easily research this information, and to no surprise the usual suspects rise to the top in terms of annual lobbying expenditures.

Unstructured data, for lack of a more poetic phrase, exists. In fact, there's more of it now than at any time in history - the growth rate Forrester experts cite is 80% annually, and perhaps rising. All this year, analysts have been asking whether Microsoft would come to embrace unstructured data, or what some call "NoSQL databases." But by now, it's grown so large that it's encompassing Microsoft.

So amid today's stunning news that the company plans to integrate Hadoop support in Windows Server, even insofar as to consider adopting it as a role alongside Web server (IIS) and DNS server, there's this structured database management system whose roadmap to general availability was announced this morning at the PASS Summit in Seattle.

Just last week, ReadWriteWeb's Joe Brockmeier asked and answered the question, "Who wrote Hadoop?" That's the cloud database framework that scales huge datasets over multiple clusters, distributed under the Apache v2 open source license.

As of this morning, Cloudera and the other members of the Hadoop community have a new neighbor. Hortonworks is now coalescing with Microsoft to distribute a new Hadoop distribution for Windows Server and a Hadoop service for Windows Azure. This news from the PASS Summit for SQL Server in Seattle.

Microsoft launched a website today designed to give users a detailed look at how secure their browser is. The site, called Your Browser Matters, automatically detects the visitor's browser and returns a browser security score on a scale of four points.

Not suprisingly, Microsoft's own Internet Explorer 9 gets a perfect score. The latest stable releases of Firefox and Chrome, however, each score 2.5 and 2 points, respectively. Other browsers like Safari are not able to be analyzed by the site, which returns a message saying "We can't give you a score for your browser." Presumably, the domain yourbrowsermattersunlessyoureamacuser.com was too long to be marketable.

It may not be an independent source of data about Windows, but Microsoft's system of telemetry for tracking the causes of system failures, is orders of magnitude more sensitive than anything else in the field. A report released by Microsoft this morning reveals that what would have been a record quiet year for Windows security was pretty much wiped out by one stupid little flaw that Microsoft can't completely patch.

We've heard the phrase "Windows Everywhere" for some decades now, and many of us already came to the conclusion that if you someday carried Windows with you wherever you go, that's what it meant. Windows Embedded is a phrase we haven't found ourselves saying as often, though it's been around for five years and its predecessor, Windows CE, since 1997.

In an era when it's more popular to outsource computing power to a data center someplace in "the cloud," you'd think a consumer-oriented campaign around distributed computing to smaller clients would seem a little antiquated, like a trip through Disney's Tomorrowland circa 1970.

In a Best Practices online advisory to browser-based Web site developers published last week, Microsoft paints a compelling picture for favoring JavaScript libraries - especially jQuery - for rendering client-side UI, over the use of plug-ins. If Microsoft is to score a blow against Adobe Flash, it has to strike at plug-ins' very reason for existence, arguing that jQuery is faster, easier, cheaper, and prettier.

Microsoft's patterns and practices team had been advocating the use of its Silverlight plug-in for composite applications since 2008, with a project it calls Prism. That project remains ongoing, though the emphasis in recent months has shifted to Project Silk, which focuses on what the company describes as "building cross-browser Web applications with a focus on client-side interactivity. These applications take advantage of the latest Web standards, including HTML5, CSS3 and ECMAScript 5, along with modern Web technologies such as jQuery, Windows Internet Explorer 9, and ASP.NET MVC3."

Microsoft has put up a post about secure boot in response to concerns about its effects on Linux and other operating systems. Microsoft has provided a very detailed explanation of what UEFI secure boot is, and what its benefits are. What Microsoft hasn't done is to actually respond to concerns raised by Matthew Garrett about its secure boot policies. In short, while Microsoft is requiring secure boot to be enabled, its policies do not require that users be able to turn the feature off. As Garrett says, "end user is no longer in control of their PC."