- New software helps rebuild ancient cities
Curt Hopkins at ReadWriteWeb describes a fascinating bit of computation trickery that improves vastly on previous techniques. This is a novel application of automated and manual scanning of visual data as well as impressive visualization on what the researchers are able to gather from historical maps. Hopkins lists off some of the more interesting further applications this new software will enable. - Using war games to make organizations more secure
It isn’t clear to me how the games Slashdot describes differ from traditional security techniques like penetration testing and so called red-team or adversarial testing. I suspect it is the broader application that is novel, here. Exercises like these have always seemed sound to me in terms of understanding surprising failure modes before they occur due to causes out in the wild. I think this sort of creative drilling has applications well beyond security. - Canonical releases Component Catalog for Ubuntu and Linux
Some good news from Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at the ZDNet Open Source Blog. As much as hardware compatibility has improved there are still definitely rough edges. Making data like this available, both for their own distro and users of others, helps users spot potential problems before buying an upgrade, peripheral or new system. As sjvn notes, it is also immensely useful to the OEMs catering to the Linux market, helping them build systems that will work more reliably with less frustration. - Building circuits from the bottom up with nanowires , Ars Technica
- Sunlight Foundation releases real-time Congress API, ReadWriteWeb
- Geek swoops into to cheaply save unarchived sites deleted by the BBC, BoingBoing
- Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 9 RC, Slashdot
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