Editorials

Today I read some very interesting news. According to a few news outlets the Australian Federal Police have arrested another “leader” of the group formerly known as LulzSec. This would make the 2nd top dog of the Anonymous splinter group to have been taken in by authorities. So the question is; who is the real LulzSec leader? Is it Hector Monsegur (Sabu) who was caught in New York and turned informant for the FBI to avoid a lot of jail time or is it 24 year old Mathew Trevor Flannery who went by the name Aush0k?

Some of you might remember the days of the “P” rating CPUs. It was an interesting time when you never really knew what you were actually getting in terms of clock speed. Instead you were able to get a CPU named something like P333 or P500. This was an attempt by some manufacturers to show their “P”erformance rating in relation to Intel’s Pentium. Cyrix, AMD, and a couple of others used this to sell CPUs. Unfortunately everyone knew that the P did not really stand for performance it really meant Pentium equivalency. A Cyrix P667 was supposed to perform as well as an Intel Pentium 667 (at least on paper). Sadly this just confused the market more and we all had the fun of trying to figure out what our CPUs were really doing. Now we might be seeing the trend return, but perhaps in reverse as AMD has announced the Centurion CPU.

Online privacy is a big issue in the US and around the world. Every day we as consumers dump information about ourselves into the web in the form of email, texts, tweets, Facebook updates, documents purchasing habits and more. We put our trust in the companies that maintain that data and have faith that the laws that should protect our private information are being followed and even more to the point enforced. Sadly it seems that we have never really had a right to have our personal information protected after it leaves our computers and enters the Internet.

Microsoft has embarked on a campaign claiming that they are concerned about your privacy on the internet. The campaign is a direct attack at Google who does not have the best track record when it comes to protecting people’s privacy. In fact Google is currently under investigation for establishing policies that violate EU privacy laws. Microsoft is taking advantage of commotion around Google’s privacy problems to try and bring people over to their side. This move, when looked at is as interesting as it is funny.