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Assange: 'If anyone knows about reckless behaviour, it's me'

Plus: Craigslist gets Shakespearean on eBay's ass

QuoTW This week brought with it the death of journalism and the the exit of Stephen Elop from Microsoft.

Here's some of the better quotes the week brought us as well:

Brendan Eich, noted for the creation of JavaScript, said that he wouldn't mind seeing the standard become a bit easier to work with. He laid out his vision for the future of JavaScript and WebAssembly:

Bottom line: with co-evolution of [the plug-ins], in a few years I believe all the top browsers will sport JS engines that have become truly polyglot virtual machines.

Meanwhile, the chaps over at Craigslist channelled their inner Francis Bacon and dropped a bit of Shakespeare in announcing that they would no longer be affiliated with eBay. Their selected passage, taken from All's Well that Ends Well:

Love all, trust a few Do wrong to none: be able for thine enemy Rather in power than use, and keep thy friend Under thy own life’s key: be check’d for silence, But never tax’d for speech.

How poetic.

Meanwhile, NASA is pushing hard for a mission to search Jupiter's moon Europa for signs of life. John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for the US space agency's Science Mission Directorate, has high hopes that it could have some form of organic life:

Observations of Europa have provided us with tantalising clues over the last two decades, and the time has come to seek answers to one of humanity's most profound questions.

Twitter is occupying itself with a little project to eliminate the need for humans (that never goes wrong, does it?) The micro-blabbing site acquired Whetlab and gave the following terrifying explanation:

Our second strategic priority is to reduce barriers to consumption. This is based on our grand revision and our conviction that we can leverage our rich content and machine learning systems to instantly deliver great experiences.

Translation: hasta la vista, meatbag.

The National Vulnerability Database is no stranger to dealing with security flaws. This week, however, it was put in the uncomfortable position of addressing its own holes when someone spotted a cross-site-scripting vuln in the database's own code. Here's the alert:

The National Vulnerability Database (NVD) had an issue where it did not properly sanitise input received from NVD and partner systems. The issue has since been resolved and the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) now display correctly.

Over at Menlo Park, Facebook released an app that uses creepy facial recognition tech. And, after a little bit of digging, El Reg discovered that the app – dubbed Moments – wouldn't be coming to the EU any time soon.

Here's what Ireland's data watchdog told us on Wednesday:

In relation to the app called Moments, as it is a US product only, we have not been consulted by Facebook Ireland on it, we would only expect to be consulted if it was being introduced in Europe.

This office has not been consulted on any planned roll out of facial recognition products in Europe, we would expect to be consulted if such products are being considered for Europe.

And finally, we close with six-fingered WikiLeaker-in-Chief Julian Assange, who gave prosecutors in Sweden a tongue-lashing over their attempts to interview him in connection to alleged sexual assaults. Assange said:

To behave in such a way seems reckless and it is hard to imagine that it was more than a public relations exercise. It is impossible to maintain confidence in this prosecutor under such circumstances.

When Assange calls you reckless, you know it's probably time to take a hard look at things. ®

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