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VC activity in the US

VCs are collectively pumping about $7b per quarter on average in the US, with an average deal size of $7.5m, so approx 1000 new/renewed investments per quarter! The hot industries are usual suspects: software, energy and bio-tech.

VC Deals In Charts @ TechCrunch

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Business Education Innovation Productivity Social Technology

How to securely wipe your system before resale

Free, open-source boot disk utility Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN) automatically and completely deletes the content of every hard disk it can find on your computer when you run it.

Darik’s Boot and Nuke Securely Wipes Your System in an Emergency

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Business History Innovation Productivity Social Technology

The Next Step in our Open Search Ecosystem

Yahoo! is taking a bold step tonight: opening up its index and search engine to any outside developers who want to incorporate Yahoo! Search’s content and functionality into search engines on their own sites.

Search War: Yahoo! Opens Its Search Engine to Attack Google With An Army of Verticals

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Business Education Innovation Productivity Technology

Ready-made open source software stacks as Virtual Appliances

JumpBox offers a neat array of read-made open source software stacks as Virtual Appliances, pre-configured with “best practices”.

JumpBox

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Art Education Innovation Social

Browser fun: Sand in a browser window

A neat Flash application that simulates sand in a browser window!

thisissand.com

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Art Education Innovation Social

Browser fun: Scalable Vector Graphics app

A neat SVG application that do not make use of Flash/Silverlight or Java for interactive user-interface, just vanilla SVG.

Blobular

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Business Education Innovation Productivity Science Technology

TrueCrypt 6.0 Released

The new version touts two major upgrades. ‘First, TrueCrypt now performs parallel encryption and decryption operations on multi-core systems, giving you a phenomenal speedup if you have more than one processor available. Second, it now has the ability to hide an entire operating system, so even if you’re forced to reveal your pre-boot password to an adversary, you can give them one that boots into a plausible decoy operating system, with your hidden operating system remaining completely undetectable.’

TrueCrypt 6.0 Released

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Business Finance Innovation Science Social Technology

“Vulnerability tax” on buggy software; Using economics to improve the industry!

The total economic cost of software security flaws has been estimated at about $180 billion a year. A former cryptographer for the National Security Agency and NASA suggests creating a tax on software based on the number and severity of security bugs, even if the cost gets passed on to consumers, in order to hold software manufacturers accountable.

A Tax On Buggy Software

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Business Innovation Productivity Social Technology

Google adds new privacy feature I was thinking of last week!

Gmail has introduced a new privacy feature that will let users see how many computers their account is open on, and also allows them to sign-out remotely.

Google Lets You Monitor Access To Your Gmail Account

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Innovation Science Technology

Bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol

Silicon Valley is experimenting with bacteria that have been genetically altered to provide ‘renewable petroleum’. Genetic alteration of very, very small bugs makes it possible for them to feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw and excrete crude oil.

Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol