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Government Informant is Called Kingpin of Largest U.S. Data Breaches

A government informant who helped put away nearly 30 fellow hackers five years ago is considered by U.S. law enforcement officials to be the kingpin of the biggest data breaches in U.S. history.

Albert Gonzalez, 28, of Miami was indicted yesterday for the third time in connection with the data breaches. Two Russian citizens were indicted along with Gonzalez by a grand jury in New Jersey yesterday on charges of running an international scheme to steal more than 130 million credit and debit card numbers as well as personally identifying information from five companies, including Heartland Payment Systems Inc., 7-Eleven Inc. and Hannaford Bros. Co.

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For those who do not remember, the Heartland breach was larger than even the TJX heist. In the TJX breach there were approximately 45,000,000 card numbers compromised; compared to potentially 100,000,000 cards at Heartland.
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Gonzalez became an informant for the U.S. Secret Service after his 2003 arrest in New Jersey on on charges of ATM and debit card fraud, according to an official at the U.S. Department of Justice, who asked not to be named.

In 2004, Gonzalez provided information that helped the U.S. Attorney's Office in Newark, N.J., bust up what at the time was one of the largest online centers for stolen identity and credit card information. The online underground marketplace, dubbed the Shadowcrew group, was charged with trafficking more than 1.5 million stolen credit and ATM card numbers.

Twenty-eight people were arrested and 27 pleaded guilty in connection with that incident. One man fled and became a fugitive.

[...]

The DOJ official did confirm that Gonzalez acted as an informant in the case. However, according to this week's indictment, Gonzalez was allegedly continuing to work as a criminal hacker at the same time he was cooperating with the government.

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Ooops. I guess that being a snitch doesn't buy you immunity from the crimes you commit.
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It appears that Wired.com is also running this story. The Wired version seems to have a few more details and hard numbers.
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IBM: UNIX to Linux Migration Rate Growing

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Skipping a few paragraphs to get to the meat of the article...
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Inna Kuznetsova, Director, Linux Strategy, led the meeting attended by IT analysts and painted a telling picture of what IBM's Linux business has been in recent months: in short, strong and growing. To give an idea of this strength, Kuznetsova reported that in the past three years, over 1,800 customers have migrated from competitive platforms to IBM, and nearly 50 percent of those IBM wins included Linux.

IBM is also picking up a lot of business from Sun, having doubled their number of Sun customer wins between first quarter and second quarter 2009. Kuznetsova attributed these recent moves to customer uncertainly regarding Sun following the recent takeover bid from Oracle.

Image Gallery: Building an Apple-I Replica From Scratch

At KansasFest 2009, held July 21 to 26 in Kansas City, Mo., retrocomputing fans from around the world gathered to celebrate the Apple II, the computer that launched Apple Computer Inc. to fame.

But going back even further than that is the Apple-1 (a.k.a. the Apple I or the Apple 1), the machine Steve Wozniak invented and first demonstrated at the Palo Alto Homebrew Computer Club in 1976.

In attendance at KansasFest was Vince Briel, who has created an authorized reproduction of this classic machine. Briel's Replica 1 sells for $149 and comes as an unassembled kit. He held a workshop at KansasFest to help new owners put together their own working Apple-1 machines.

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There are 18 pages of images detailing the process of building your own replica. I'm not much of a hardware hacker, but this is just too cool.

A little further into the gallery...
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The Replica 1 includes 88 component parts. There's also a packing list and instruction manual to help you unpack and assemble the machine.

DOJ Approves $7.4B Oracle-Sun Deal

Oracle on Thursday said the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has approved its $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems, although the deal is subject to certain conditions and still needs the blessing of European regulators.

Oracle first announced its bid in April and Sun shareholders approved the acquisition on July 16.

The combined company will give Oracle an array of new assets, including a stake in the computer hardware market, the open-source MySQL database and stewardship of the Java programming language.

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Oracle will undoubtedly cut a large portion of lesser-performing sectors of the company. I'm afraid that this might be the death-knell for SPARC-based processors; including the Niagara and UltraSPARC T-2.

Sun certainly has it right with these processors; they boast very low power consumption and up to 64-way SMT on 8 cores per chip. Compare that to your 4-way SMT AMD64 Phenoms and the like.

I don't forsee [Open]Solaris going anywhere anytime soon. Solaris has long been the platform of choice for large Oracle installations, and I see the Solaris+Java combination as being the crown jewels to Oracle. Oracle has embraced open-source to a pretty fair degree thus far, so I see no reason that they would try to close OpenSolaris or anything similar.

I could honestly not care less what becomes of MySQL. It's been a sub-standard RDBMS from the very get-go. PostgreSQL serves just fine for single-database solutions; and I'd recommend Oracle RAC for clustered/multi-master replication scenarios.
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Japanese Supercomputer Calculates Pi to Record 2.5 Trillion Digits

The T2K Open Supercomputer, located at the University of Tsukuba’s Center for Computational Sciences, reaching 2,576,980,377,524 decimals in an approximately 73 hours and 36 minutes long calculation, according to an announcement made to the Japanese press on August 17th. The Center said it was in the process of applying for the record book.