Up Front: Google may take a tiny step toward better security
Wednesday's tech headlines
The New York Times
• Congress would like to know why the NSA's domestic surveillance program is so much larger than the agency previously admitted. In particular, your representatives are wondering about the scope of domestic e-mail surveillance efforts, which analysts connected to the agency have confirmed scrutinize large amount of citizens' e-mail without a warrant. James Risen and Eric Lichtblau have coverage.
• As Iran roils, Michael Wines has a nice story from China about how citizen expressions of mass displeasure are actually doing some good -- though it gets a little mob-justicey now and then.
Ars Technica
• Animations in PowerPoint aren't just stupid, ugly, annoying and generally ill-conceived. John Timmer reports that a recent study indicates that adding animations torpedoes viewer comprehension.
• Canonical, light of the world which tends Ubuntu distribution, has plans to tidy up a bunch of little annoyances with its One Hundred Paper Cuts project. It's slated to finish up operations before the planned launch of karmic Koala in October. And yes, even you can contribute your pet Ubuntu annoyances; in fact, developer David Siegel suggests that would be a good way for n00bs to get involved in the community.
• Sun may be canceling its high-end Rock server chip.
Wall Street Journal
• Nvidia's Jen-Hsun Huang has some big ideas about GPU computing, a process that would shift a great deal of your computer's numbers-crunching off the CPU and onto the graphics subsystem. And Nividia can help, since "Doing graphics only is a disservice to humanity" according to Mr. Huang. Don Clark has details.
• The IRS is changing its mind about stepping up enforcement of 20-year-old tax laws concerning the personal use of employer-provided cell phones.
• Uh-oh: Some students might be using Wolfram Alpha to avoid actually doing their math homework. Dr. Wolfram's okay with that, but a lot of educators aren't.
• Recapping Tuesday's tech earnings reports, Best Buy made money during its Q1, while Adobe's Q2 declined, but both stocks fell (by 7.3% and 2.3% respectively). If you want advances, you need Palm (up 1.6% after analysts gazed favorably upon the Pre) or Microsoft, which rose even as Yahoo declined, and for the same rason -- the increasing unlikelihood of a Microsoft-yahoo search collaboration. Rob Curran wraps these things up so tidily.
The Register
• SCO has a deal with an investment firm called Gulf Capital Partners. The firm was previously expected to be dissolved in a Chapter 7 hearing this summer; if the deal goes through, it would keep alive SCO's unending Unix-licensing claims against IBM and Novell. Austin Modine eschewed the obvious undead / zombie / Jason-from-Friday-the-13th cracks and went with a nuclear holocaust / roaches motif for this article. The commenters fixed that for him, throwing in a Rasputin-assassination reference for good measure.
• On October 1, IBM will roll out a "Software Secure Support via USA Citizens" package, for commercial and federal customers who need not to discuss their computers' little tantrums with foreign entities.
TechCrunch
• Michael Arrington takes up the issue of whether Facebook ought to get rid of its the Holocaust-denial groups, a controversy that heated up over the weekend. The writeup is gripping -- apparently most Facebook employees support the retention of those groups -- but the very, very long comments section could cause retinal bleeding. (Though it's a great deal more intelligence than the groups themselves, but I didn't need to tell you that.)
• Look for Facebook to start beta on an "everyone button" next week. The site hopes to encourage people to share their information and photos not just with friends but with the whole world. (Shades of Twitter, yes.)
• MG Siegler really doesn't like a promotional campaign Microsoft has going for IE down in Australia right now, feeling that its incompatible-browser message was rude and kind of mean to Mac folk (who, of course, haven't got an IE browser and thus cannot go on Microsoft's $10,000 treasure hunt).
San Jose Mercury-News
• A successor to silicon? Scientists at Stanford say that bismuth telluride has some intriguing electromagnetic properties that could make it a new-gen successor to the material we currently know and love.
• A study conducted by the Association for Computing Machinery says that while 45% of high-school boys think it would be "very good" to major in computer science, just 10% of girls think so. The stats for tech jobs are split about the same, with 38% of boys and 9% of girls thinking that sounded like an appealing path. Chris O'Brien jumped to the same initial conclusion your reporter did: Damn those Disney princess movies.