PBS has the article How the NSA Can Get Onto Your Computer.  Read the original article to get all the links to other information.

Many of the NSA’s programs revealed in the Snowden leaks describe the agency’s ability to target specific pieces of software.

But as The New York Times and others reported earlier this year, there is a suite of programs, codenamed QUANTUM, which allows the NSA access to a much wider variety of computers.

We had security expert Ashkan Soltani break it down.

I have been talking to a group of people I work with who are wary of putting information into the cloud (on the internet) for fear of security breaches. I tried to make the point that our web site probably has more security protection than the average person’s home computer. The data may actually be safer on our web site than it is on the home computers from which the data originates.

I am not saying data is safer on a public cloud computer automatically. The web site to which I am obliquely referring has some software that I have specifically put in place to try to protect it. I know I am not enough of a security expert to kid myself that I have made it completely safe.

The UK Independent has the article Alexander Lebedev and Vladislav Inozemtsev: Western financiers welcomed dirty money but now it must be stopped.

Corruption in the “developing” or “peripheral” countries may greatly affect global politics. In addition to its direct influence – through instability, social unrest and civil wars – it affects developed countries indirectly by making them accustomed to their elites’ corrupt behaviour.

About $1 trillion a year flows to the Western banks and financial institutions from the countries identified by the UN as low and medium-developed nations. A large portion of this cash is stolen by public servants and then laundered in the rich countries of the West. The latter want this money: during the 1990s and 2000s, a powerful lobby of financiers, lawyers and politicians was formed with the specific aim of securing it.

Inevitably, this dirty cash will provoke the growth of corrupt practices in the West. So, bribery and fraud exist on two fronts: in the developing and developed nations. Therefore we are convinced that the West should launch the fight against corruption worldwide as soon as possible.
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Options may be many, but one point is clear: corruption today is actively  spreading from the peripheral countries to the developed ones, and infecting sometimes solid and transparent institutions. It’s vital we consider how to prevent this becoming an epidemic.

The rise in the number of billionaires in countries from the USA to Russia, China, India, and in South America is surely a sign of the world-wide spread of corruption.  I suspect that the reining in of the billionaires will be a sign that we are making progress.

IEEE Spectrum has the story After the Sun (Microsystems) Sets, the Real Stories Come Out.

Besides a time for sharing Sun stories, the reunion was also a time for stepping back, and taking the long view. That’s perhaps a particularly good thing to remember this month, with Hewlett-Packard’s recent announcement of another 11 000 to 16 000 layoffs sending a shudder through the valley, a reminder that even great companies don’t necessarily last forever. Companies rise and fall, young founders (Sun’s founders were all in their 20s) grow up, and even when the signs in front of a building change (or don’t; Facebook intentionally left a few Sun signs up when it took over the former Sun campus in Menlo Park to remind people of what can happen to a company) the people inside will still be working on cool technology.

I find this story particularly fascinating as it is part of my history too, in a less direct way.

In 1983/1984, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) sent me to Berkeley, CA to be a visiting industrial fellow at the University of California.  I found the name of Bill Joy (one of Sun’s founders) frequently mentioned and I think there were some remnants of his software around.  I really had no idea of who Bill Joy was or that he was working for SUN, or how young SUN actually was.

I also had the opportunity to visit XEROX PARC for a day with many graduate students from Berkeley.  We were all shown the technology that XEROX was working on.

SUN became quite the competitor to DEC and eventually took a lot of business away from DEC.  After I left DEC, the computers that I used in subsequent jobs were all SUN Workstations.

Getting together with some of my fellow DEC Alums for a lunch once a month these days, I find that the result for those who stayed wasn’t quite as rosy as the paragraph excerpted above.  In fact, the plant in Hudson, MA where I worked, was taken over by HP and Intel after the remnants of DEC were sold to them.  Intel is now in the process of closing the whole thing down and trying to find a buyer for the building and equipment.  The chance of another company buying the site and continuing the work that was done there seems pretty slim.

Most of the people in the our lunch group are retired now.  The ones that stayed with the succeeding owners of the site did have many years of productive work there, but it’s not the same as working at the home location of a technology star like DEC was in its heyday.