- Linux kernel appears to have a significant power management regression
Slashdot points to some interesting empirical data derived from manual testing of the current kernel, to be included in the looming Ubuntu update, and reaching back to compare against a handful of historical versions. The concerns is an apparent inefficiency in power management that drops battery life for some portables anywhere from 10% to 30%. Hopefully now that this has been spotted it will be rapidly addressed. - In praise of the chaos monkey
Jeff Atwood shares of his more clueful first hand lessons in application scaling at his Coding Horror blog. Anyone sufficiently lucky or unlucky enough to be on the critical path for keeping up large scale, multiple component web applications will recognize his experience. I supposed when I’ve been in the situation of robustifying an undiagnosable, roving crash condition, at some level I too recognized that the longer lasting fruits of my efforts were to harden the overall architecture against the unforeseen. - The gadgets that police are using to snarf cell phone data
I cannot remember where I saw mention of this earlier but Matthew Lasar at Ars has an excellent post covering the very concerning details. The post only mentions the Michigan state police in the context of that state’s chapter of the ACLU trying to get documents to assess how the devices in question are being used. Regardless of acting in good faith, that is with a warrany, as the Michigan police are now claiming is the case, I expect sharing of the staggering capabilities of these forensic gadgets will increase pressure on the currently hotly contested 4th Amendment questions around cell phones and other mobile devices. - Pirate Part of Canada promises VPN in response to Conservative call for net filtering, Slashdot
- Selective rather than full encryption for wireless may offer a better security-power compromise, EE Times
- Nook Color gets an official update turning it into a relative complete tablet, Ars Technica
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