Before Netscape: the forgotten Web browsers of the early 1990s. When Tim Berners-Lee arrived at CERN, Geneva's celebrated European Particle Physics Laboratory in 1980, the enterprise had hired him to upgrade the control systems for several of the lab's particle accelerators. But almost immediately, the inventor of the modern webpage noticed a problem: thousands of people were floating in and out of the famous research institute, many of them temporary hires. "The big challenge for contract programmers was to try to understand the systems, both human and computer, that ran this fantastic playground," Berners-Lee later wrote. "Much of the crucial information existed only in people's heads.
" So in his spare time, he wrote up some software to address this shortfall: a little program he named Enquire. Some years later Berners-Lee returned to CERN. Mosaic was soon spun into Netscape, but it was not the first browser. The CERN browsers Tim Berners-Lee's original 1990 WorldWideWeb browser was both a browser and an editor. Erwise Erwise came next. ViolaWWW. Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? - Magazine. Yvette Vickers, a former Playboy playmate and B-movie star, best known for her role in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, would have been 83 last August, but nobody knows exactly how old she was when she died. According to the Los Angeles coroner’s report, she lay dead for the better part of a year before a neighbor and fellow actress, a woman named Susan Savage, noticed cobwebs and yellowing letters in her mailbox, reached through a broken window to unlock the door, and pushed her way through the piles of junk mail and mounds of clothing that barricaded the house.
Upstairs, she found Vickers’s body, mummified, near a heater that was still running. Her computer was on too, its glow permeating the empty space. The Los Angeles Times posted a story headlined “Mummified Body of Former Playboy Playmate Yvette Vickers Found in Her Benedict Canyon Home,” which quickly went viral. Also see: Live Chat With Stephen Marche The author will be online at 3 p.m. National - Jennie Rothenberg Gritz - It's Not Just Porn: Why Ultra-Orthodox Jews Fear the Internet. At Citi Field Stadium this Sunday, 50,000 religious men gathered to discuss the dangers of the Web.
An organizer explains why the digital era is so challenging for the people of the book. Attendees at Sunday's rally used binoculars to watch rabbis deliver sermons about the Internet. (Mario Tama/Getty Images) There's a reason ultra-Orthodox Jews wear long black coats, even in summertime: They've been resisting modernity since the Enlightenment era. That was the topic that drew more than 50,000 ultra-Orthodox men to the Mets' Citi Field Stadium on Sunday. According to organizer Eytan Kobre, the attendees had more than pornography on their minds. For some rabbis, the solution is simple: Religious Jews should boycott the Internet.
At Sunday's rally, a long list of rabbis weighed in on the problem. None of this seems to bother Kobre. Have you seen our recent Atlantic cover story "Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? " Yes, I've seen it, though I must admit to not buying a hard copy. Absolutely. "You Get On The Internet And Pretty Soon You’re Drunk": The Orthodox At Citi Field.
While the ultra-Orthodox steadily streamed down the 7 train platform and onto the pavilion, a group of four teenagers sat around the big red New York Mets apple, waiting for their friends. This was last night, an hour or so before the Citi Field gates opened. Outside the stadium, a few hundred ultra-Orthodox Jewish men stood around, waiting for the masses to arrive to this rally about the dangers of the internet. The 40,000-stadium tickets had sold out the week before and the event organizers—The Union of Communities for the Purity of the Camp—had scrambled to rent nearby Arthur Ashe Stadium for the 10,000 or more attendee spillover. These boys were among the other early arrivals. “You get on the internet and pretty soon you’re drunk,” he said, as he mimicked a person wobbling back and forth. One of the boys took a call on his cellphone from a friend who'd just arrived by bus. “Well, now I don’t know what I’m going to do,” said the boy who stayed behind.
“I mean, it’s not practical. America’s confessor. Frank Warren is the creator of PostSecret, one of the internet’s most successful sites. But is he qualified to handle his readers’ most private confessions? Answering night-time calls at a suicide hotline in Washington DC some years ago, Frank Warren found himself using The Voice. Addressing callers’ problems and telling them where they might seek help, he noticed, was not nearly so important as adopting a certain tone: soothing, hypnotic, passive. Nowadays, Warren regularly speaks before hundreds of people; he says he sometimes slips into The Voice at these public events, but from what I can tell he seems to talk this way all the time. Whether he is discussing one person’s trouble tuning in to a radio station, or another’s difficulty with childhood sexual abuse, he projects relentless and unflappable sympathy.
With narrow shoulders, grey hair, glasses and a shy smile, Warren, aged 47, looks like an extra from The Office—you can imagine him trying to fix a photocopier. Inside search engines' war on bad results - tech - 15 December 2011. ANYONE can publish on the web, but it would be better if some people didn't; the world does not need another site that provides advice on how to unlock an iPhone or find cheap car insurance. Now new evidence shows that search engines have upped their game to make sure their results are not dominated by such low-quality sites. Search engines are meant to pick out high-quality sites amid the sea of knock-offs, but even they get overwhelmed. As recently as March, for example, the first 10 results from a Google search for "how to organise your desktop" contained nine links to pages churned out by "content farms" - websites that publish reams of articles, often of dubious quality, that aim simply to attract clicks and advertising dollars.
That prompted New Scientist to ask computer scientistRichard McCreadie at the University of Glasgow, UK, to look into the issue. The results show that Google and Microsoft have won a major victory in the fight against such content farms. Promoted Stories. How an omniscient Internet "sextortionist" ruined the lives of teen girls. In the spring of 2009, a college student named Amy received an instant message from someone claiming to know her. Certainly, the person knew something about her—he was able to supply details about what her bedroom looked like and he had, improbably, nude photos of Amy. He sent the photos to her and asked her to have "Web sex" with him. Instead, Amy contacted her boyfriend Dave, who had been storing the naked photos on his own computer.
(Note: victim names have been changed in this story). Amy, terrified by her stalker's eerie knowledge, contacted campus police. Small wonder that, when the FBI later interviewed Amy about the case, she was "visibly upset and shaking during parts of the interview and had to stop at points to control her emotions and stop herself from crying. " Due in large part to the stress of the attack, Dave and Amy broke up. But who had the mysterious stalker been? Why is my webcam light on? The bizarre case wasn't an isolated incident. The cases grew stranger. Sextortion. Cloud-Powered Facial Recognition Is Terrifying - Jared Keller - Technology. By harnessing the vast wealth of publicly available cloud-based data, researchers are taking facial recognition technology to unprecedented levels "I never forget a face," goes the Marx Brothers one-liner, "but in your case, I'll be glad to make an exception.
" Unlike Groucho Marx, unfortunately, the cloud never forgets. That's the logic behind a new application developed by Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College that's designed to take a photograph of a total stranger and, using the facial recognition software PittPatt, track down their real identity in a matter of minutes. Facial recognition isn't that new -- the rudimentary technology has been around since the late 1960s -- but this system is faster, more efficient, and more thorough than any other system ever used.
Often, the problems with facial recognition are rooted in the need for greater processing power, human and machine. Naturally, the development of such software inspires understandably Orwellian concerns. Bitcoin online currency gets new job in web security - tech - 17 January 2012. IT HAS been a rocky year for Bitcoin, the online peer-to-peer currency, with the exchange rate soaring from a few cents to over $30 per coin before crashing after a string of thefts, hacks and other setbacks. Coins have since regained a value of around $5. But it is becoming clear that the software could prove at least as useful as the currency itself, underpinning a number of important new technologies. First, it could be used as a form of "carbon dating" for digital information - something that would make electronic voting more secure.
This is possible because of the way Bitcoin records transactions, says Jeremy Clark, a computer scientist at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. An individual's bitcoins are registered to one or more addresses, which are alphanumeric sequences that serve as the user's identity on the P2P network. When a transaction takes place, it is broadcast on the network, effectively creating a public record. More From New Scientist More from the web.
The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin | Magazine. In November 1, 2008, a man named Satoshi Nakamoto posted a research paper to an obscure cryptography listserv describing his design for a new digital currency that he called bitcoin. None of the list’s veterans had heard of him, and what little information could be gleaned was murky and contradictory. In an online profile, he said he lived in Japan. His email address was from a free German service. Google searches for his name turned up no relevant information; it was clearly a pseudonym. But while Nakamoto himself may have been a puzzle, his creation cracked a problem that had stumped cryptographers for decades. The idea of digital money—convenient and untraceable, liberated from the oversight of governments and banks—had been a hot topic since the birth of the Internet. Cypherpunks, the 1990s movement of libertarian cryptographers, dedicated themselves to the project. One of the core challenges of designing a digital currency involves something called the double-spending problem.
Why It’s Good that the Internet Is Changing Our Brains - Technology. Things are easier said than done, or so the old adage goes, and we couldn’t agree more. That’s why we do The GOOD 30-Day Challenge (#30DaysofGOOD), a monthly attempt to live better. Our challenge for August? Get off the internet at 8. There’s nothing like an article about how the internet is changing our brains to really freak people out. Studies show our thought process is adapting to the constant influx of media. Google affects our memorization skills. And our reliance on smartphones has changed friendly debates forever.
Scientists and philosophers are beginning to look closer at the perceived boundaries between our physical selves and the exterior world. Neuroscientist V.S. But what if it’s not a trick? Think about how many tools you use in your daily life without even thinking about it. Sound scary? Whenever there has been a massive change in how we go about our daily lives, there’s also been a massive critique. Photo (cc) via Flickr user perpetualplum. Infinite Stupidity. It might be useful, with such a statement like that, to review some of these big events. Obviously one of the big events in our history was the origin of our planet, about 4.5 billion years ago.
And what's fascinating is that about 3.8 billion years ago, only about seven or eight hundred million years after the origin of our planet, life arose. That life was simple replicators, things that could make copies of themselves. And we think that life was a little bit like the bacteria we see on earth today. It would be the ancestors of the bacteria we see on earth today. That life ruled the world for 2 billion years, and then about 1.5 billion years ago, a new kind of life emerged.
It was another 500 million years before we had anything like a multicellular organism, and it was another 500 million years after that before we had anything really very interesting. And so, this is really just 99.99 percent of the way through the history of this planet, humans finally arose. Online echo chambers: A study of 250 million Facebook users reveals the Web isn’t as polarized as we thought. Illustration by Alex Eben Meyer. Farhad Manjoo is a technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the author of True Enough.
Follow This is of particular interest to me. In 2008, I wrote True Enough, a book that argued that digital technology is splitting society into discrete, ideologically like-minded tribes that read, watch, or listen only to news that confirms their own beliefs. I’m not the only one who’s worried about this. Eli Pariser, the former executive director of MoveOn.org, argued in his recent book The Filter Bubble that Web personalization algorithms like Facebook’s News Feed force us to consume a dangerously narrow range of news. It turns out we’re not doomed. Bakshy’s study involves a simple experiment. By comparing the two groups, Bakshy could answer some important questions about how we navigate news online. That’s exactly what Bakshy found. The fact that weak ties introduce us to novel information wouldn’t matter if we only had a few weak ties on Facebook.
The Rise of the Zuckerverb: The New Language of Facebook - Ben Zimmer - Technology. Last week, as he paced around the stage at the f8 Developers Conference, Mark Zuckerberg declared with wide-eyed optimism that Facebook was "helping to define a brand-new language for how people connect. " "When we started," Zuckerberg explained, "the vocabulary was really limited. You could only express a small number of things, like who you were friends with. Then last year, when we introduced the Open Graph, we added nouns, so you could like anything that you wanted. " And then he delivered the breathless payoff: "This year, we're adding verbs.
Last of all, the authors of the languages formed the verbs, as we observe children expressing nouns and particles but leaving the verbs to be understood. -- Giambattista Vico, The New Science, 1744 By adding verbs to the "brand-new language" of social connectivity, Zuckerberg told the f8 audience that Facebook was going to "make it so people can express an order of magnitude more things than they could before. " Media companies revisit their AOL days with Facebook. Among the news announcements at Facebook’s giant f8 developers conference on Thursday (we’ve collected the news in one place if you want to catch up) was the launch of social apps for media consumption.
This included music apps like Spotify and video apps like Hulu, but also news-reading apps from a series of media players — including newspapers such as The Washington Post and The Guardian, as well as digital-only outlets like News Corp.’s The Daily and Yahoo News. Although Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg championed these apps as “rethinking the whole way the news industry works” through social sharing of content, it seems more like those media outlets have signed over a big part of their destiny to something that feels like an AOL-style web “portal.”
The apps themselves are very similar to what the Wall Street Journal recently launched with its “WSJ Social” app (the Journal wasn’t part of the official Facebook launch, and says it came up with the app on its own).
Google. Facebook. The Great Tech War Of 2012. Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup. Google Drive: Why you’re a sucker if you pay for online file storage. How Gmail destroyed Outlook. How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet. "Groupon Is A Disaster" Why Groupon is poised for collapse. Why Siri Is a Google Killer. Facebook vs. Google: The battle for the future of the Web - Nov. 3. Will Robert Kyncl and YouTube Revolutionize Television? The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future - Alexis Madrigal - Technology. How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit - Yoni Appelbaum.
You Don’t Have to Tweet to Twitter. Inside the Eastern Rise of Weibo, China’s Twitter. Twitter, the Startup That Wouldn't Die. Technology - Alexander Furnas - When Twitter Stumbles, Sites Across the Web Go Down With It. How Twitter Makes the Internet More Local. Expanded tweets: Tweets are about to get a whole lot longer. Hooray! Forget the fantasy of porn-free youth - Pornography. A Privacy Manifesto in Code: What If Your Emails Never Went to Gmail and Twitter Couldn't See Your Tweets? - Alexis Madrigal - Technology. Please read this: A very important speech about social media in America. Accessibility vs. access: How the rhetoric of “rare” is changing in the age of information abundance. Optical Memory Could Ease Internet Bottlenecks.
The Promise and Perils of Pinterest | Symbiartic. Pinterest’s Terms of Service, Word by Terrifying Word | Symbiartic. News - Life after Firefox: Can Mozilla regain its mojo? Six degrees of aggregation.