Walkthrough Of Tor, Silk Road, Deep Web. Return of the Borg: How Twitter Rebuilt Google's Secret Weapon | Wired Enterprise. Illustration: Ross Patton John Wilkes says that joining Google was like swallowing the red pill in The Matrix. Four years ago, Wilkes knew Google only from the outside. He was among the millions whose daily lives so deeply depend on things like Google Search and Gmail and Google Maps. But then he joined the engineering team at the very heart of Google’s online empire, the team of big thinkers who design the fundamental hardware and software systems that drive each and every one of the company’s web services. These systems span a worldwide network of data centers, responding to billions of online requests with each passing second, and when Wilkes first saw them in action, he felt like Neo as he downs the red pill, leaves the virtual reality of the Matrix, and suddenly lays eyes on the vast network of machinery that actually runs the thing.
“I’m an old guy. ‘I prefer to call it the system that will not be named.’ — John Wilkes The Borg moniker is only appropriate. . — Ben Hindman. The age of the brag is over: why Facebook might be losing teens. One week ago, Facebook Director of Product Blake Ross announced that he’d leave the company in a goodbye letter he posted on his profile page. Ross wrote: "I’m leaving because a Forbes writer asked his son’s best friend Todd if Facebook was still cool and the friend said no, and plus none of HIS friends think so either, even Leila who used to love it, and this journalism made me reconsider the long-term viability of the company. " A few sentences later, Ross wrote, "In all seriousness, even after switching to part-time at Facebook, it’s just time for me to try new things," but the damage was done.
Ross has since removed the letter, perhaps because he’d accidentally posted it publicly, or because his jesting intro wasn’t taken as lightly as he’d hoped. Teenspeak When Branch co-founder Josh Miller asked his fifteen-year-old sister what was hot, she said Facebook had gone cold. What if it’s not about brand, but about the changing definition of what’s fun and addictive online?
Adapt to survive. HitBliss, The Pandora Of Ads, Will Pay You To Watch Commercials. We’ve been bombarded by advertisers for so long it’s rare we even remember this, but advertising is still valuable. HitBliss, a new service launching into beta, is looking to put the control back in the hands of consumers, opting in to the notion that content sellers and advertisers shouldn’t even be in communication.
“After all, the only thing that advertisers and content creators have in common is the consumer,” said founder Sharon Peyer. The HitBliss platform is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you have the HitBliss Store, which is just like any other content platform wherein customers can rent a movie for $3.99 and download a TV show for $2.99. There are absolutely zero ads on the Store. On the other side of the business lies HitBliss Earn, lovingly nicknamed the “Pandora of ads”, which is where things get much more interesting.
HitBliss Earn is an opt-in only platform that lets consumers create an advertising profile. The truth is, we don’t hate ads. Intercontinental mind-meld unites two rats. Katie Zhuang, Laboratory of Dr. Miguel Nicolelis/Duke University Two rats were wired up together (here in an artist's impression) so that one would make decisions using sensory cues from the other. The brains of two rats on different continents have been made to act in tandem. When the first, in Brazil, uses its whiskers to choose between two stimuli, an implant records its brain activity and signals to a similar device in the brain of a rat in the United States. Miguel Nicolelis, a neuroscientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, says that this system allows one rat to use the senses of another, incorporating information from its far-away partner into its own representation of the world.
Nicolelis says that the work, published today in Scientific Reports1, is the first step towards constructing an organic computer that uses networks of linked animal brains to solve tasks. Animal engineering Better, stronger, faster. Cisco Hearts Internet Of Things. Cisco is one of those companies people have a hard time figuring out. Despite the confusion, though,he company has posted a 44% increase in income from last year in its fiscal second quarter earnings released on Wednesday. And its long-term future looks even better. Clearly, some people have gotten Cisco figured out, because they're doing business with the networking giant.
The question is, what kind of business? Retreat Or Strategic Withdrawl? Look at the history of Cisco, and you see a company very much in retreat from the consumer market it had briefly coveted. Instead of routers for consumers and Flip video cameras, now its business is done back in the server rooms and network cabinets, as it once again targets the IT infrastructure of enterprises and governments around the world.
The drive to be the big-kid networking company on the proverbial block is more than just about selling equipment by the ton. This is not, by any means, a sudden pivot by Cisco. Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong - Alexis C. Madrigal. Here's a pocket history of the web, according to many people. In the early days, the web was just pages of information linked to each other. Then along came web crawlers that helped you find what you wanted among all that information. Some time around 2003 or maybe 2004, the social web really kicked into gear, and thereafter the web's users began to connect with each other more and more often.
Hence Web 2.0, Wikipedia, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I'm not strawmanning here. This is the dominant history of the web as seen, for example, in this Wikipedia entry on the 'Social Web.' tl;dr version 1. 2. 3. 4. But it's never felt quite right to me. To be honest, this was a very difficult thing to measure. There are circumstances, however, when there is no referrer data. This means that this vast trove of social traffic is essentially invisible to most analytics programs. Nonetheless, the idea that "social networks" and "social media" sites created a social web is pervasive. Get this. Why a stream of consciousness will kill off websites | Technology | The Observer. The communications theorist Marshall McLuhan observed that "we look at the present through a rear-view mirror". And that "we march backwards into the future". Amen. Remember the horseless carriage? Not to mention the fact that we still measure the oomph of a Porsche 911 in, er, brake horsepower.
But the car industry is a ferment of modernism compared with the computer business. But then they ruined everything by putting a trash can on the desktop. The problem with metaphors is that they are double-edged swords (as it were). But at the same time as they help us make sense of something, metaphors also constrain our thinking by locking us into the past. And the metaphor for a web page was, just that: a page – a static object that could be accessed by a distant reader. So although the web has changed out of all recognition in two decades, our underlying metaphor for it probably hasn't changed that much. How The Kids At Box Are Disrupting Software's Most Lucrative Game.
eCoupled Home | eCoupled. HOW TO: Plan a Vacation Using Social Media. Vacation is a time to relax, or a time to seek out adventure. It's a way to let go of your stress and live out your fantasies. That is, if the stress and pain of planning the vacation doesn't kill you first. Whether you want to relax on the beaches of Hawaii, roam the English countryside, or visit the temples of Thailand, you've got to be informed, organized, and ready for what lies ahead. To that end, social and web tools can help. Part 1: Research The first step whenever you are planning to travel is to do your research! While there are hundreds of social media websites you can visit for information, here are recommendations to get you started: Nextstop: Nextstop, which we recently reviewed, provides a ton of simple-to-understand, user-generated guides for getting the most out of any locale.Where I've Been: Not only is Where I've Been a popular Facebook application, but it's also a stand-alone social network as well.
Part 2: Planning and organizing Part 4: Documenting and sharing. Tagged. Enter The Dronenet. Here’s my favorite Big Idea of the year so far, via John Robb, who’s always worth your attention: The Dronenet, a “short distance drone delivery service built on an open protocol.” He fleshes it out in a series of posts, but basically, it would be a network of drones that would carry things the same way the Internet carries data: in packets, over a series of multiple hops, routing on the fly. Sound like a pipe dream?
Not at all: Matternet is a startup working on implementing just that for delivery of high-value goods (pharmaceuticals, electronics) to developing countries and/or rugged locations where the roads are so few and/or terrible that UAVs become the superior option. Their idea is for drone transportation to – literally – leapfrog trucks in those areas in the same way the cell phones leapfrogged land lines.
Robb’s, typically, is bigger. Best of all, though, it lets me quote one of my favorite lines in all of science fiction: –Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash Will it actually happen? Want to Learn Anything? Use This Site. You can learn virtually anything on the Internet. The problem is sifting out what's valuable and accurate from the rest of the web's misinformed crud, which unfortunately, tends to dominate. Non-profit Khan Academy's goal is to make informative content readily accessible by anyone.
Founded by Sal Khan in 2008, the online service isn't just available to paying subscribers or university-enrolled students. People of any age, whether established pupils or students of life in general, can tune in to Khan Academy's curriculum. Even "a friendly alien just trying to get a leg up in earthly biology" is welcome. Khan Academy's learning library is largely video-based. "I teach the way that I wish I was taught," writes Khan on the website. Here's a sample Khan Academy video in which Khan explains the fiscal cliff. Aside from videos, Khan Academy offers interactive knowledge maps and dynamic exercises.
Khan Academy built in a reward system alongside its exercises. Image courtesy of Khan Academy. The Rise and Fall of Jeremy Hammond: Enemy of the State | Culture News. DuckDuckGo. Dow Jones Private Equity & Venture Capital – PE & VC News, Data & Analysis. Kanye West – So Appalled Lyrics.
The Entire Internet May Soon Be Annotated. When Marc Andreessen was building the first Web browser, Mosaic, in 1993, he planned to include an annotation function. “It was a very simple implementation,” says Andreessen. “I think that all I did was have the annotations show up at the end of the page.” His hope was to ultimately make it possible for people to add endless layers of argument and interpretation all over the Web, but he had to abandon the project. “We ran out of time,” he says. “I was barely sleeping as it was.” Twenty years later, Andreessen believes his old idea has new life in the form of Rap Genius, a website where users post explanations of hip-hop lyrics. Rap Genius is the brainchild of three friends—Mahbod Moghadam, 29, Tom Lehman, 28, and Ilan Zechory, 28—who met at Yale University.
Andreessen announced his investment with an annotated statement on Rap Genius. As it goes about that process, Rap Genius can call upon two decades of learning about what works and doesn’t in online communities. Square: Jack Dorsey’s payments firm is Silicon Valley’s next great company. Photo by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images. Ever since Facebook went public, people in Silicon Valley have been a bit bummed out about the tech industry. Keep in mind that the Valley is infinitely optimistic, so even when they’re bummed, folks here keep smiling. Still, in numerous conversations over the past few months, I’ve detected a sense of gloom, and it’s obvious why. Farhad Manjoo is a technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the author of True Enough. Follow Social networking had long been hailed as the next big thing, a revolutionary tech that promised to change the world and rake in big money, too. The Valley likes to anoint standard-bearers, companies whose amazing, unreasonable success points to sunny days ahead.
I believe the tech industry’s next great company is Square. If you study Square’s products and its pricing, and if you talk to Dorsey about his plans, you’ll find that the company’s real mission is to alter the psychology of consumption. Square has lots of rivals. Why Facebook's Search Engine Won't Be Anything Like Google's. When Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg mentioned during an interview last month that he wanted to build a search engine, headline writers instantly put Google on notice. Yet, while Larry and Sergey are probably watching closely, the technology and data at Facebook’s disposal suggest the company will most likely create something fundamentally different from Google’s search service.
Facebook lacks the comprehensive index of the Web that it would need to equal Google’s ability to match queries with Web pages—and it would have to invest a lot to create one. However, flush with cash from its IPO this summer, the world’s largest social network already has its own unique stockpile of data—courtesy of its users’ social lives—that could power a new kind of search engine altogether. Microsoft’s experience with Bing should caution Facebook against such an approach. Since 2009, the Redmond company has spent more than $5 billion on Bing, according to some analyses.