NEW YORK (Reuters) - In early 2007, as signs of distress began appearing in securities backed by residential mortgages, executives at Standard & Poor's began advising analysts responsible for rating mortgage bonds that they should put the phrase "privileged and confidential" on emails to one another.

PARIS (Reuters) - French and Chadian forces expect to have secured the northeast region of Mali that is the stronghold of Islamist militants by end-March, French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told French media.

SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea has cut off a Red Cross hotline with South Korea as it escalates its war of words against Seoul and Washington in response to a military drill in the South and U.N. sanctions imposed for its recent nuclear test.

Lord British kickstarts new fantasy RPG

Multimillionaire games developer, moon rover owner and space tourist Richard Garriott has taken to Kickstarter to try to get funding for his new video game.…

I worry that comments about the value of software security made at the RSA Conference last week will be taken out of context. John Viega did not say that software security wasn't important. He said: For large software companies or major corporations such as banks or health care firms with large custom software bases, investing in software security can prove...

 ZDnet: Linux, once again, proved to be far more secure than most other operating systems as Google's Linus-based Chrome OS shrugged off its attackers at the $3.14-million Pwnium cracking competition.

10GE starts to ramp and the 40GE shows some backbone

The Ethernet switch market picked up a tiny bit as last year came to a close, according to various box counters, and the prognosticators at Infonetics Research and IDC were projecting that 2013 would see stronger growth as the move to 10 Gigabit Ethernet begins in earnest in the data center and companies start contemplating using 40GE switches as their new backbones.…

DWP sidelines Universal Credit IT overseer Hilary Reynolds

Exclusive The Department for Work and Pensions has replaced the project director of Universal Credit, its £500m web-based benefits system, days after denying it's suffering an IT management crisis.…

There'll NEVER be analytics good enough to sort through this dusty pile

I've been an industry analyst a long time – and I have seen a lot of "the next big things" come and go. In fact our appetite as an industry for the next big thing rivals that of Simon Cowell in pursuit of the next big star. And just as Simon's "stars" are usually anything but, so too are we in the IT sector often deluded, and ultimately find ourselves short-changed.…

SBuild is a Scala-based build system. It features platform independence, multi project support, automatic detection of needed actions, automatic up-to-date detection, a flexible scheme handler mechanism, Maven repository support, Ant task integration, automatic cross-project resolving of dependencies, high speed, a simple "syntax" that requires almost no Scala knowledge, behind-the-sceens compilation of build script to bytecode for fast execution time, and built-in scheme handlers for HTTP and Maven.

Release Notes: New features and speed improvements. Up-to-date state calculation of phony targets is now based on (virtual) lastModified timestamps, which can be overridden in a target via TargetContext. Phony targets can now be cached; SBuild will not reexecute them if the dependencies or the project file did not change. Additional files can be attached to targets. Empty phony targets will automatically attach all files of their dependencies and last but not least, the SBuild comand line has been improved. Essential information is highlighted with colors, and error message output has been enhanced.

Release Tags: Major, Stable

Tags: Java, build system, Build Tools, Scala

Licenses: Apache 2.0

What does it matter if millions of 'Joe Bloggs' records are leaked?

Officials from justice departments across the EU have been asked to explore to what extent the pseudonymisation of personal data can be used to "calibrate" businesses' obligations to data protection.…

Does your source code editor pass the Verity test?

Stob When I heard, in a tutorial video, the multi-platform programmer's editor Sublime described as "the cool kids' code editor" (or possibly "the Cool Kid's code editor" - the speaker didn't enunciate his capitals and apostrophes very clearly) I was puzzled. As the goto (or, rather, the call-by-reference) consultant on Agile Harlem Shake in the northwest corner of our floor, surely no such assertion could plausibly be made without first interviewing me?…

New submitter ceview writes "NASA has released its latest green data showing a creeping of green towards the northern hemisphere. From the article: 'Results show temperature and vegetation growth at northern latitudes now resemble those found 4 degrees to 6 degrees of latitude farther south as recently as 1982.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

mk-configure is a lightweight replacement for GNU autotools written in and for bmake (a portable version of NetBSD make). The main goal is to have only one top-level tool instead of aclocal+automake+autoconf+autoheader. Other goals are clean design, simplicity, and "no code generation".

Release Notes: Support for subprojects containing the / symbol was added to mkc.sub{dir,prj}.mk with appropriate changes in OBJDIR_<dir> variables. A fix for the target "errorcheck" in mkc.sub{dir,prj}.mk. A fix for non-empty MAKEOBJDIR and MAKEOBJDIRPREFIX in mkc.sub{dir,prj}.mk. Minor improvements in examples/*/linkme.mk. DPLIBS is deprecated. Minor fixes in mkc_imp.lua.mk (LUA_MODULES vs. LUA_LMODULES). Improvements and fixes in the man page and FAQ.

Tags: autotools, NetBSD make, bmake, build automation, cross-platform development, NetBSD, BSD

Licenses: BSD Revised

Forget Lua, time go to old skool

Want a guaranteed job in IT? Learn COBOL, even if it cripples you mentally – that’s the advice of university profs teaching tech.…

DataNucleus AccessPlatform is a standards-compliant Java persistence product. It is fully compliant with the JDO1, JDO2, JDO2.1, JDO2.2, JDO3, JPA1, and JPA2 Java standards, and provides a REST API. It complies with the OGC Simple Feature Spec for persistence of geospatial Java types. It allows access to all popular RDBMS available today, together with the MongoDB, LDAP, NeoDatis, JSON, Excel/ODF spreadsheets, XML, BigTable, HBase, and Neo4j databases.

Release Notes: Support for bulk delete was added for HBase, Neo4j, and MongoDB. Bulk update setting field to null was fixed for RDBMSs. Multi-threaded usage had an important fix. TypeConverter handling for RDBMSs was improved. Overriding of data source properties for JPA was improved. A check was added for attempted persistence of 'final' fields. A fix was applied to in-memory query evaluation of variables when the variable had no possible values.

Release Tags: JDO, JPA, Persistence

Tags: Database, API, ORM, JDO, JPA, Persistence

Licenses: Apache 2.0

Still backs up over the network. Just in case, like

Software house Atlantis has updated its ILIO product, which juggles the storage of virtual desktops in data centres, so that virtualised machines run entirely in a server's memory - sans a SAN or local drives.…

KABUL (Reuters) - Afghan President Hamid Karzai ratcheted up his criticism of the United States on Sunday, marring a debut visit by the new U.S. defense secretary, Chuck Hagel, and highlighting tensions that could undermine Washington's strategy to wind down the unpopular war.

Bmrblib is a Python API abstracting the Biological Magnetic Resonance Data Bank (BioMagResBank or BMRB) NMR-STAR format. It allows the writing of NMR-STAR files for BMRB data deposition and the reading and easy extraction of data from files residing in the BMRB data bank, all without knowledge of the Self-Defining Text Archive and Retrieval (STAR) format.

Release Notes: This is a quick release removing an overwhelming quantity of debugging printouts. Upgrading is recommended.

Release Tags: minor bugfix release

Tags: Python package, Software Development, Libraries, Scientific/Engineering

Licenses: GPLv3+

Clip-on Star Trek comms badges lead crowd-funding projects

Pic Project fundraising websites - such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo - provide a wonderful array of dreams into which one can throw excess money. Between the desperate dance troupes and the technically optimistic, a few gems tread the fine line between genius and insanity.…