Fortran still exists, your data is for sale, and more news

A hamstringing of Skype for Linux and the security corner round out the news. Read on...

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Fortran is still a thing. This post from Lisa Tagliaferri serves as an awesome introduction to Fortran in the modern world, and is amusingly written as well. The rest of the tutorials Digital Ocean hosts are pretty good content if you’re ever trying to learn how to do something new, too.

Shell scripting remains hard. Hacker Josh Max reveals an error in the Torch setup script that adds a colon to the end of the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable, which one might think wouldn’t do anything. Turns out that apparently ld.so interprets that as also including the cwd. Seriously.

Data for sale! Get your data here! “Data enrichment” data for 200 million people appears to be available for sale online. This data includes personal attributes such as credit rating, number of children, net worth, travel history, and political leanings. Don’t worry, though, the data is super expensive – $600 for the whole set – oh, wait. That’s mind-blowingly cheap. Three hundredths of a penny per person. I guess that’s how much your life’s history is worth.

Netflix pooh-poohing net neutrality shows us why we need it. Despite the jarring ads on this article, the point is a good one – the only companies with the luxury of ignoring net neutrality are people big enough to afford troll tolls. Netflix used to be a big fighter when it was the underdog, but now… well, somebody else can worry about it while Netflix sits in the corner and counts all their money.

Can you hear me now? Probably not if you’re on Linux. Microsoft has announced that it will retire the native Linux Skype client on July 1. There’s a beta, buggy, memory-intensive, lesser-featured Electron-based client you can use, though.

Windows NT Workstation making a comeback? A powerful no-nonsense version of Windows sounds like exactly the thing Microsoft needs to get out of the vitriolic negative feedback about Windows 10 from the Internet and especially from more technical users. Luckily, the rumor mill seems to think that Microsoft is planning on releasing such a version soon, called “Windows 10 Pro for Advanced PCs”.

How doing a startup is like fixing a bicycle. Check out this post with lessons for building a software business featuring Edith Harbaugh, co-founder of LaunchDarkly.

Some history of the IBM PC. Here’s a fantastic post about the history of the IBM PC, which is almost certainly the grandfather to whatever you’re reading this on. It’s old, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still good.

In the security corner this week: Office has another security flaw, malware using Intel AMT is here, and your printer is tattling on you.

• In news I’m certain surprised absolutely nobody, PowerPoint has another huge security flaw that lets users be infected by mousing over a link in a malicious presentation.
• AMT can bypass firewalls. Learn how some malware is taking advantage of this to exfiltrate data in this post.
• Color printers have secrets. Security folks have known about secret nearly-invisible yellow dots on all printouts from color printers for a while, but apparently NSA leaker Reality Winner (yes, this is actually her name) didn’t - and the yellow dots were likely part of how the NSA found her so quickly. Check out how it was done in this post from Errata Security.

Thanks for reading – as always, if you have feedback, or think there’s something I should cover next time, leave a comment!

Cover photo: Windows… 10 Workstation. Sure. (Cover image ? Microsoft, manipulated by LinkedIn)