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Modern software development is a fast moving, highly fragmented, and highly distributed supply chain, with parts built by disparate teams, running on disparate platforms. Code quality and security can no longer be an afterthought.

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SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk’s next venture could be small satellites equipped to provide internet to remote corners of the world, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. Sources told the paper that Musk and former Google executive Greg Wyler are in talks with officials in Florida and Colorado about the construction of a satellite factory.

The project is apparently in its early stages, and it is not clear that Musk will actually see it through. Wyler previously headed up Google’s satellite division, and is now the founder of WorldVu Satellites, which owns a segment of the radio spectrum that the satellites could use to provide internet. The two are searching for a partner that has experience in the satellite industry.

Current plans call for around 700 satellites that each weigh less than 250 pounds, according to the WSJ. That is much lighter than the several tons more traditional satellites weigh

The most expensive consumer fitness tracker going on sale this year is a fancy wristwatch — not a smartwatch — and it will cost $450. The Withings Activité went up for pre-order on Friday, and it will ship by the “end of November.”

You won’t find a screen on the Swiss-made Withings Activité, which is powered by a watch battery and doesn’t require daily charging (its timekeeping mechanism is quartz-based.) Instead, under its minimalist analog face, you’ll find an accelerometer and Bluetooth. The Activité can track calories, steps, running workouts, and sleep. It’s even waterproof, and Withings hopes to add a swimming workout mode soon. All that data can be synced with the Withings Health Mate app. Unfortunately, the Activité can only sync with the iOS at the moment and not the version of the app on Google Play.

The [company]Withings[/company] Activité also has a few nifty non-fitness tracking features, like the ability to automatically…

The Samaritans suicide prevention charity in the U.K. has suspended its controversial Samaritans Radar Twitter app, which scanned the tweets of people that subscribers follow, in order to find signs of heavy depression and alert the subscribers. Critics, many of whom have experience of mental health issues, pointed out that the app was a gift to stalkers and trolls, and a disincentive to using Twitter to vent. Consent was a major issue, with the people being monitored not even receiving notifications when their tweets were flagged. In a Friday blog post, the Samaritans apologized “to anyone who has inadvertently been caused any distress” and said they would test “potential changes” to the app. The suspension took too long to arrive, but I’m glad it has.

Looking to install proximity beacons in your store, or in your local ballpark, or in various phone booths around your city? First, you’ll need to decide which brand of beacon you’ll be installing, which isn’t easy — there are now a lot of various beacon hardware options at a wide range of prices. A good place to start sorting through is this new report by Aislelabs, a beacon services provider, which looks at 16 different beacon hardware makers.

There are a surprising number of considerations when choosing which line of beacons to buy. For instance, some beacons advertise themselves to devices by sending pings out more often, which increases the chance of a usable connection and signal, but drains battery life more quickly. Do you want your beacon hardware to have a battery, or are you going to plug it into USB or a power outlet? Finally, how much do you…

SoundCloud is getting ready to launch a music subscription service within the first half of 2015, and has inked a deal with Warner Music that will allow it to use some of Warner’s catalog for both its current ad-supported service as well its future subscription tier, both companies announced Tuesday.

The announcement didn’t spell out the commercial details of the deal, which likely includes Warner taking a small stake in SoundCloud. However, it did reveal some interesting details on the content covered by the arrangement:

The deal includes licensing terms that will provide WMG and its artists greater ability to manage the availability of content, while providing a path towards delivering additional revenue from user-generated mixes and mash-ups of WMG music.

What’s tnteresting about this isn’t just the flexible content licensing model, which could mean that Warner can start to stagger the release of its music, making them available to…

A stream of Google cloud executives took the stage in San Francisco on Tuesday to announce a slew of new cloud computing features, including around advanced network and resource-management capabilities. Speaking on a panel at the AppDynamics user conference in Las Vegas, Allan Naim, global product lead for the Google Cloud Platform, told the audience about how the company has been laying the groundwork for these new capabilities for years.

He explained how application containers can be a huge source of operational efficiency if you know how to manage them. Everything at [company]Google[/company] runs on containers and the company spins up 2 billion of them per week, he said. In the name of squeezing every ounce of capacity out of each server, a single box might contain hundreds of containers split among multiple workloads (Gmail and MapReduce jobs, for example) and it’s management software like Google’s Omega that helps ensure they’re all getting the…