Sean Gallagher is the IT editor at Ars Technica. A University of Wisconsin grad, he wrote his first program in high school on a DEC PDP-10, and his first database app on a dual-floppy Apple II. Sean served four years as a naval officer, including a tour aboard the USS Iowa (BB-61), and at a river patrol boat squadron (where discovery of his computer skills landed him the assignments of network administrator and computer security officer). Aside from a few dark years as a systems integrator and a stint as Ziff Davis Enterprise's director of IT strategy, Sean has been either in the review lab or on a tech beat for most of the last two decades. A telecommuter since 1995, Sean lives and works in Baltimore. When not jacked in, he can often be found with his family, behind a camera, or on a bike trail.
Since the shutdown of Megaupload, stories have erupted about the life and exploits of the company's founder, a self-styled "Dr. Evil" of file sharing. Kim Dotcom's opulent digs, high-end cars, fondness for models and other Bond-villain-esque behaviors have been splashed across websites and have confused evening newscasts for the last week.
Online retailers have long gathered behavioral metrics about how customers shop, tracking their movements through e-shopping pages and using data to make targeted offers based on user profiles. Retailers in meat-space have had tried to replicate that with frequent shopper offers, store credit cards, and other ways to get shoppers to voluntarily give up data on their behavior, but these efforts have lacked the sort of data capacity provided by anonymous store browsers — at least until now. This holiday season, shopping malls in the United States have started collecting data about shoppers by tracking the closest thing to "cookies" human beings carry — their cellphones.
Dennis Ritchie, the creator of the C programming language and co-developer of the Unix operating system passed away on October 8 at the age of 70, leaving a legacy that casts a very long shadow.