Hot Links is Motherboard’s weekly roundup of killer stories from the weekend.A Samsung internal memo post-Apple loss says the company will prove victorious.Apple must be too expensive: NASA is throwing Android smartphones in satellites.Saudi Aramco is the world’s biggest oil producer, which makes a cyber attack on 30,000 of the company’s workstations kind of a big deal. The firm says core operations weren’t affected.The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service — what’s left of the former KGB — has shelled out nearly $700k for what sounds like social media propaganda, otherwise known as spam.The area of Arctic sea-ice extent has hit its lowest point in recorded history. Surf’s up!TeamGhostShell, a hacking collective that doesn’t care for spaces, has dumped what it alleges to be millions of records from banks and politicians, although it’s unclear what they actually unveiled.Cory Doctorow gave a really fascinating talk on the future of computer regulation. TL;DR: Since computers and the Internet have infiltrated everything, authorities will increasingly try to regulate them from “do anything” devices to “do everything but what we don’t want you to do.”Shout out to my alma mater UCSB for demonstrating factoring with a quantum computer.Tanning helps insects kill germs.One day, we might tame hurricanes with blasts of seawater.iPad, shmipad: Google is going to dominate the small tablet sector. Is phone/small tablet/laptop the trifecta of the future?Clownish headline of the week: “Did an Apple Exec Say Not to Expect a Television Anytime Soon?” Does anyone care about wild speculation?Hurricane Isaac is tracking along a similar path to Katrina, which hopefully proves to be ominous and nothing more.Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead.
Advertisement