News photos from around the world
24 hours of news photos: 2 March
Readers' pictures on the theme coffee break
The aftermath of a storm
Singer of 1960s group the Monkees has died
24 hours of news photos: 1 March 2012
24 hours of news photos: 29 February 2012
Protests and mass funerals continue in Syria
Police and bailiffs remove tents from Occupy camp
Dresses and fashions on the Oscar red carpet
Wired took a trip with Octocat this week, publishing on GitHub. Image: GitHubEarlier this week, Wired published a story about GitHub, the “version control” site that’s taking the internet by storm. But it was more than just a story. It was an experiment in version control. In addition to publishing our GitHub story on Wired, we published our GitHub story on GitHub
GitHub was originally designed for software developers. It lets programmers upload code and share it with other developers. It keeps track of who made what changes where. And it helps merge all those changes together. It “controls” the various versions of an open source software project.
But nowadays, it’s also being used to oversee stuff outside the programming world, including DNA data and Senate bills that may turn into laws and all sorts of other stuff you can put into a text file, such as, well, a Wired article.
At Wired offices, you hear the question over and over again as we work on stories like the one you’re reading now: “Are you out of the story? I want to go in.” We have a version control problem. We publish Wired.com on WordPress. It’s a decent publishing tool, but when two people change a story at the same time, one of them doesn’t get her changes onto the final story.
We published our GitHub story on GitHub because it was meta-cool. But we also did it to see if GitHub might actually help us solve our problem.
When we uploaded the story to GitHub, we published it under a Creative Commons license, and this allowed GitHub’s 1.3 million users to do what they do best: download their own version of the article — called a fork in GitHub parlance — mess around with it, and then offer the changes back to us via the website.
Within a few hours, the first change came in: a typo fix. With the push of a button, the error was gone. Then someone translated the article into Spanish. And we were elated. This was collaborative Nirvana.
More and more fixes started coming in. The story was published at 3:30 a.m. Pacific, and by 9 a.m., there were about a dozen changes. Soon we were nearing 20, and this is where things started to get complicated.
People were fixing the same problem over and over again. Some of their changes couldn’t be merged automatically, but they included good additions that should be considered. GitHub lets users describe the changes they’re making, but not everyone is precise when doing this. So you need to check closely to see what is really being changed.
Then we noticed a formatting issue. Because we’d used Windows encoding in the text file of the story, our GitHub forkers were accidentally turning apostrophes and smart quotes into strange new characters, and this was polluting our results, making it hard to see the real changes.
Finally, a troll popped up. He didn’t really improve our article in any way, but he did add what appears to be — well, we don’t quite know what it is. This was starting to feel like collaborative hell.
But we have to cut GitHub some slack though. GitHub was built for software development, not collaborative article editing. Pretty much all of the problems we had — even the troll — were standard issues you’d expect when you’re testing out something brand new.
“For published articles, we’re not yet optimized for that,” says GitHub founder and CTO Tom Preston-Werner. But he does want to add features that will make this work better.
And here’s the thing. Just about all of the changes that were submitted were great. The readers were thorough in a way no single editor could ever be, uncovering missed spaces, substituting “an” for “a,” pointing out that our description of Ruby on Rails as a language was incorrect, and digging up an embarrassing number of typos.
And the contributors were cool. They stuck with it when we screwed up or missed fixes, they were smart and good natured. In short, great people to work with. And we think that this issue of version control is going to be increasingly important to the future of collaboration as people work together not just on software and books, but on physical objects as well.
In all, the experience was the strangest mixture of excitement and tedium.
“Welcome to the world of collaborating,” says Preston-Werner.
Robert McMillan is a writer with Wired Enterprise. Got a tip? Send him an email at: robert_mcmillan [at] wired.com.
In an unprecedented collaboration between Anonymous and WikiLeaks, the secret spilling site began leaking Sunday night portions of a massive trove of e-mails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor that Anonymous obtained by hacking the company in December.
WikiLeaks did not mention the source of the reported five gigabytes of e-mails in its press release, but did say it has been working for months with 25 media outlets from around the world to analyze the documents.
The first batch of leaked e-mails purport to show that Stratfor monitored the political prankster group known as The Yes Men on behalf of Dow Chemical, which has been targeted by The Yes Men over the company’s handling of the Bhopal disaster. The e-mails also purport to show Stratfor’s attempt to set up an investment fund with a Goldman Sachs director to trade on the intelligence Stratfor collects, as well as give insight into how the private intelligence firm acquires, and sometimes pays for, information.
Stratfor, somewhat akin to a privatized CIA, sells its analyses of global politics to major corporations and government agencies.
Members of Anonymous with direct knowledge of the hack and transfer of data to WikiLeaks told Wired that the group decided to turn the information over to WikiLeaks because the site was more capable of analyzing and spreading the leaked information than Anonymous would be.
“WikiLeaks has great means to publish and disclose,” the anon told Wired. “Also, they work together with media in a way we don’t.”
“Basically, WL is the ideal partner for such stuff,” the anon continued. “Antisec acquires the shit, WL gets it released in a proper manner.” Antisec is the arm of Anonymous that is known for hacking into servers.
According to Antisec participants, Stratfor was targeted not just for its poor security, but also because of its client list, which includes major companies and government entities
“We believe police and employees who work for the most significant fortune 500 companies are the most responsible for perpetuating the machinery of capitalism and the state,” said one Antisec participant in December, “That there will be repercussions for when you choose to betray the people and side with the rich ruling classes.”
Anons also told Wired that future collaborations with WikiLeaks could involve a series of hacks that will be announced, one after another, every Friday for the foreseeable future. If that happens, the Stratfor e-mail release could be the first sign of a new, powerful alliance between the two groups, each of which has vexed and angered the world’s most powerful governments and corporations.
When WikiLeaks received the documents on a server it controlled, it acknowledged the successful transfer with a coded, public Tweet, according to an anon with direct knowledge of the collaboration.
A document provided to Wired that could not be authenticated indicated that the media partners of WikiLeaks agreed to parcel out stories on the leaks over the coming week and a half. Those media partners do not include previous partners such as the Guardian and U.S. partners The New York Times and the Washington Post.
According to the document, e-mails about WikiLeaks and Anonymous will be disclosed Wednesday, followed by separate disclosures on Italy, the Middle East and then Asian countries including Pakistan, Afghanistan and India, among others. The project, code-named Rock Guitar, is officially named “The Global Intelligence Files.”
Stratfor had been aware that the e-mails would likely be published in some form by Anonymous, but said in January that the e-mails should not embarrass the company.
The collaboration between WikiLeaks and Anonymous is an odd couple pairing. WikiLeaks has largely crumbled over the last 18 months, due to internal disagreements over the management style and legal problems of its outspoken leader Julian Assange. By contrast, Anonymous is an amorphous group with no leadership structure.
If Anonymous continues feeding WikiLeaks with documents, the secret spilling site could return to a prominence that seemed lost due to technical difficulties, legal troubles, in-fighting and public fallings out with media partners in the wake of the site’s publication of a massive trove of U.S. documents in 2010 and 2011.
WikiLeaks’s alleged source for those documents, Pfc. Bradley Manning, is facing a U.S. army court martial and a possible sentence of life imprisonment.
As for how the collaboration between the two groups went, an anon with direct knowledge of it indicated that the new relationship had some tough moments.
“There were some natural tensions as usually can happen inside partnership,” the anon said. ”I hope this was only the beginning of a beautiful relationship.”
Quinn Norton is a writer and photographer who peripatetically covers net culture, copyright, computer security, intellectual property, body modification, medicine, and biotech. 
Park Ji-Hwan | AFP | Getty ImagesAsia-focused StanChart [STAN.L Loading... ()] reported a 2011 pretax profit of $6.78 billion, up from the $6.12 billion it recorded a year earlier, it said in a filing to the Hong Kong bourse.The result was in line with an expectation for $6.8 billion from a poll of 24 analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S."Growth momentum will likely accelerate in 2012," said Dominic Chan, an analyst at BNP Paribas in Hong Kong. "Key markets such as India are showing signs of improving and the bank is well placed to gain market share in areas such as trade finance and wholesale banking."Helping boost earnings was strong performance in Greater China and Singapore, with the Southeast Asian city-state becoming the third of its markets to deliver more than $1 billion in profit.Income in Singapore rose 26 percent, while profits jumped 40 percent, the bank said.StanChart's Hong Kong-listed shares [2888.HK Loading... ()] rose by more than 1 percent after the earnings announcement, outpacing the 0.5 percent advance on the benchmark Hang Seng [.HSI Loading... () 
] .The bank is one of the very few still hiring and it said it added about 1,400 staff in 2011, bringing the total number of employees to almost 87,000."We have started 2012 strongly, following a very strong finish to 2011," chief executive Peter Sands said in the statement. "In 2012, we are on track to deliver double-digit income, double-digit EPS and flat jaws, but it is very early days."Like rival HSBC [HSBA.L Loading... ()] , StanChart saw its cost-to-income ratio worsen to 56.5 percent from 55.9 percent a year ago, although it said that its expense and income growth were now largely in line.StanChart said it had kept its bonus pool flat from a year earlier despite the profit growth, with bonus payouts less than the amount given to shareholders in dividends."Our approach to remuneration has not changed," the bank's chairman, John Peace, said in the statement. "We continue to reward our people for sustained high performance and we do not reward failure or short-term risk taking."On the regulatory front, a British tax on bank balance sheets is expected to cost StanChart $165 million this year. The bank has said it would like to keep London as its headquarters because of the expense of relocation.In South Korea, where StanChart was hit by industrial actions last year, it launched an early retirement program that the bank said would deliver savings of $95 million a year.India also saw a decline in profit, the bank said, hit by a total of 13 interest rate increases over two years.StanChart's London-listed shares are up about 13 percent so far this year, valuing the lender at about $62 billion. This makes it bigger than other Britain-based banks such as Barclays [BARC.L Loading... ()] and Lloyds [LLOY.L Loading... () ] .Copyright 2012 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.In a statement issued to WKYC-TV in Cleveland Monday night (http://on.wkyc.com/A4Yohv ), a lawyer representing the family of T.J. Lane offered "their most heartfelt and sincere condolences" to the family of slain student Daniel Parmertor, adding that they are praying for the four other injured students from Chardon High School.
Lawyer Robert Farinacci says Lane's family is trying to understand how the tragedy happened.
The shooting Monday morning sent students at the 1,100-student school screaming through the halls.
The FBI says the suspect was arrested near his car a half-mile from Chardon. He was not immediately charged.
It's pretty clear that we're going to see a new iPad next Wednesday at the Apple event in San Francisco. But what about an Apple TV? I'm going to make the case that investors should hope we don't get a television next week. Why? The iPad is Apple's [AAPL Loading... () ] newest growth machine, and deserves to have the spotlight to itself. And spring and summer aren't great times to sell televisions. First, there's not a lot of upside to Apple stealing thunder from the new iPad. Think about it: Apple executives take the stage and talk about what a huge success the iPad has been; introduce new software and services for it; unveil a new model with a sharper screen, better camera and faster chip; design Jony Ive appears in a video talking about how there's never been a high-resolution touch display this responsive — and then, "One more thing" — a TV. Whiplash. Marketing chief Phil Schiller would have to take another hour to explain how great the TV is. Design chief Jony Ive would have to appear in another video about how everything Apple has done in digital entertainment since the iPod has built up to this moment. And all the headlines would be about Apple's bold attempt to take over the living room. And oh yeah —there was something about a new iPad. Considering Apple sold 15.4 million iPads last quarter for $9.2 billion in revenue, it would be sort of a shame for Apple to steal the buzz from a product category CEO Tim Cook says will be bigger than PCs. There would be a real financial cost to taking the focus off the iPad. Then there's the question of timing. There are two major shopping seasons in the 250-million-unit annual TV market. In North America in particular, the first is the holiday season, starting just after Thanksgiving. The second follows a month later, just before the Super Bowl. So if Apple's going to unveil a new TV, the best time to do it is probably August or September — that gives enough time for Apple to build up inventory after the announcement and have millions of sets on hand to sell. Why would you unveil a TV set in March? Well, that would catch the Dads and Grads season if it's ready by May. But people don't buy TVs for Father's Day and graduations, they buy gadgets. And while there might be a little bit more incentive for shoppers to buy TVs this summer with the Olympics happening, summer is actually a slow season for TV in general. Then there's the developer issue. If Apple needs software developers, gaming companies or other content providers to build products that work with an Apple TV, they'll want to give them a few months to work on things. That could justify showing us a TV this early. But you know what might make the most sense? Apple could update the $99 Apple TV box with a lot of the features it intends to build into the full-fledged television, but save the TV launch for closer to TV-buying season. That would give the iPad its day in the sun, and let the TV stand on its own. 
"I found myself lying on the floor," says Jones-Cox, 45. "Staring at a dead rat, by the way." The house tour from hell didn't stop her from making an offer on the place. While she was at it, she bid on some other houses, too. Forty nine houses, actually. She's paying $3,000 for each, a bit more than the cost of an Apple Mac Pro. "We're at a bottom," says Jones-Cox. "I mean, where else is there to go but up?" As the greatest real-estate fire sale in the history of the United States rages on, the bulk buy is the dead hot deal of the moment. In some of the most foreclosure-ravaged parts of the country, it is almost as if the housing market has become the new big box store, with investors wiping out whole shelves at a time. The idea is to arbitrage other people's misery. With the ranks of the rental class expected to swell, investors can buy houses at clearance sale prices, pour some money into repairs and then take advantage of the difference between their low cost of capital and the rent they receive. Often, they bank cash from day one. Hedge funds ![[cnbc explains]](C:\Program Files\ABS\Auto Blog Samurai\data\News around the WORLD\CNBC\CNBC_explains_icon1.gif){kind=small}
and private equity shops like McKinley Capital Partners started to quietly become landlords by buying up inventory last year. Now Main Street investors are following suit. "They aren't just buying one rental property," says Oak Park, Illinois realtor Kyra Pych. "This is a frenzy. They are loading up." Pych has five clients who are in the process of buying more than one condo in Forest Park. Illinois. Units that sold for $180,000 during the boom are now going for as little as $13,500. So instead of putting that money into a retirement account, her customers are putting the cash into homes and renting them out. In Detroit, the Midwest's aspiring Donald Trumps are buying bungalows for $500 each. In Atlanta, a group of Florida investors are in the process of buying the remaining 322 units in downtown Atlanta's swank, Art Deco Atlantic Residences, with room service and maids, near Atlantic Station. The prices start at $180,000. In California, Waypoint Homes, which has already purchased 1,000 single-family homes, got $250 million in funding in January from Menlo Park private equity firm GI Partners for more bulk buys. 