The Old Reader: behind the scenes - RSS and the Open Web. November 20, 2013 RSS and the Open Web This post is not about the day to day operations of The Old Reader or anything of that nature. It’s about how our team came to get involved with RSS and how we see the future of this application and technology that we value so highly. As a long time user of RSS and Google Reader, I’ve long appreciated the benefits of the technology. Like many people, my use of Google Reader faded a bit as social media platforms took hold. But, I’d always go back to Google Reader when I wanted to cut through the noise of social networks and focus on things I’m really passionate about. 1. 2. 3. For my professional career in web research and development, I can’t really live without these features. So this leads me to how we got involved in The Old Reader. However, we see this trend of migrating from the open web to private networks as cyclical.
Thanks for using The Old Reader! <a href=" Tuts+ Tutorials. Brain Pickings. HTML5 Bookmarks - daily news articles and bookmarks. Healthcare.gov: Code Developed by the People and for the People, Released Back to the People - Alex Howard. This new flagship federal .gov website is "open by design, open by default. " That's a huge win for the American people. Healthcare.gov As the first website to be demonstrated by a sitting President of the United States, Healthcare.gov already occupies an unusual place in history.
In October, it will take on an even more important historic role, guiding millions of Americans through the process of choosing health insurance. How a website is built or designed may seem mundane to many people, but when the site in question is focused upon such an important function, what it looks like and how it works matter. Last week, the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) relaunched Healthcare.gov with a new appearance and modern technology that is unusual in federal-government websites. "It's fast, built in static HTML, completely scalable and secure," said Bryan Sivak, chief technology officer of HHS, in an interview.
That adds up to cost savings. Smashing Newsletter: Issue #88. Grab Fall Design Bundle Freebie for free today! - Paddle. The 10 Most Destructive Hacker Attacks In The Past 25 Years. From a computer virus named for a stripper to swarming botnet attacks on the Pentagon and Microsoft, The Daily Beast lists the 10 most infamous hacks, worms, and DDoS takedowns in the last 25 years. The unending cyber assault executed last week by a group of anonymous “hacktivists” instilled fear and loathing in the hearts of network administrators at some of the world’s most powerful governments and corporations.
It was unprecedented in its scope—attracting thousands of amateur users willing to do battle in the name of free speech on the web. But amongst the real hackers out there is a feeling of indifference. These “script kiddies”—as those using software to attack Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal are being called—weren’t the cyber warriors the media set them out to be, but amateur, talentless teens launching assaults with the click of a mouse. 10. 9. Adrian Lamo is making headlines these days for being the hacker Pfc. 8. 7. 6. 5. 4. 3.
In 1999, New Jersey-resident David L. 2. 1. 'Follow the Money': NSA Spies on International Payments. The National Security Agency (NSA) widely monitors international payments, banking and credit card transactions, according to documents seen by SPIEGEL. The information from the American foreign intelligence agency, acquired by former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden, show that the spying is conducted by a branch called "Follow the Money" (FTM). The collected information then flows into the NSA's own financial databank, called "Tracfin," which in 2011 contained 180 million records. Some 84 percent of the data is from credit card transactions. Further NSA documents from 2010 show that the NSA also targets the transactions of customers of large credit card companies like VISA for surveillance.
NSA analysts at an internal conference that year described in detail how they had apparently successfully searched through the US company's complex transaction network for tapping possibilities. Keep track of the news Stay informed with our free news services: Nelletorres's blurblog. Definitions are basic objects in mathematics. Even so, I’ve never seen the art of definition explicitly taught, and I have rarely seen the need for a definition explicitly discussed. Have you ever noticed how damn hard it is to make a good definition and yet how utterly useful a good definition can be?
The basic definitions inform the research of any field, and a good definition will lead to better theorems than a bad one. If you get them right, if you really nail down the definition, then everything works out much more cleanly than otherwise. So for example, it doesn’t make sense to work in algebraic geometry without the concepts of affine and projective space, and varieties, and schemes. They are to algebraic geometry like circles and triangles are to elementary geometry. You define your objects, then you see how they act and how they interact. I saw first hand how a good definition improves clarity of thought back in grad school.
Why? Going back to that. Nelletorres's blurblog. Definitions are basic objects in mathematics. Even so, I’ve never seen the art of definition explicitly taught, and I have rarely seen the need for a definition explicitly discussed. Have you ever noticed how damn hard it is to make a good definition and yet how utterly useful a good definition can be? The basic definitions inform the research of any field, and a good definition will lead to better theorems than a bad one. If you get them right, if you really nail down the definition, then everything works out much more cleanly than otherwise. So for example, it doesn’t make sense to work in algebraic geometry without the concepts of affine and projective space, and varieties, and schemes. They are to algebraic geometry like circles and triangles are to elementary geometry. I saw first hand how a good definition improves clarity of thought back in grad school.
Why? Going back to that. Personally, I got just as much out of Tate’s help with my thesis as anything else about my thesis. VerifyXML provides open source tools, resources and examples for XML business information exchange processes. U.S. Government RSS Directory. A big collection of sites and services for accessing data. This is part of a series of posts to share with readers a useful collection of some of the most important, effective and practical data visualisation resources.
This post presents a collection of key sites that provide data, whether through curated collections, offering access under the Open Data movement or through Software/Data-as-a-Service platforms. Please note, I may not have personally used all the services, sites or tools presented but have seen sufficient evidence of their value from other sources. Also, to avoid re-inventing the wheel, descriptive text may have been reproduced from the native websites for many resources.
You will see there is a prominence of US and UK based sites and services. This is simply because they are the most visible, most talked about, most shared and/or useful resources on my radar. I will keep updating this site to include as many other finds and suggestions as possible, extending (ideally) around the world. Government and NGOs NYC Open Data SF OpenData.
MOSX Tumblelog - No more Lynda.com for me · The present and future of post production business and technology. Government data surveillance through a European PRISM. By Christopher Kuner The recent revelations concerning widespread US government access to electronic communications data (including the PRISM system apparently run by the National Security Agency) leave many questions unanswered, and new facts are constantly emerging. Thoughtful commentators should be hesitant to make detailed pronouncements before it is clear what is actually going on. Nevertheless, given the potential of these developments to fundamentally reshape the data protection and privacy landscape, I cannot resist drawing a few high-level, preliminary conclusions, from a European perspective: Legal protection without political commitment is insufficient to protect privacy. In the regulation of data flows across national borders, trying to resolve conflicts between privacy regulation and government access requirements solely through legal means puts more pressure on the law than it can bear.
Government access to personal data is a global issue. Dr. RFC 791 - Internet Protocol (RFC791) RFC 1855 - Netiquette Guidelines (RFC1855) U.S. Secretly Obtains Two Months of A.P. Phone Records. Web.cecs.pdx. Run a blog? Better fix your bounce rate ◔_◔ Drawing a Blank. It turns out that Google Analytics will wait for a visitor to trigger a second event, such as visiting another page on the same site. If that second event is never triggered, the visit is counted as a bounce (regardless of the duration of the visit). On a typical non-blog website this is beneficial as visitors are encouraged to visit multiple pages in order to maximise conversions. If the visitor never moves beyond the first page, their visit is a bounce. For a blog, however, it’s common that a visitor will land on one specific article, but not visit any other pages.
This will be reported as a bounce even though the visitor may have spent several minutes reading the artice and may intend to read more of your posts in the future. My research brought me to this article from the Google Analytics blog, which discusses Adjusted Bounce Rates. The new tracking event is added in this line: setTimeout("_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', '15_seconds', 'read'])", 15000); Update 26th May, 2013. Untitled. Google defends dropping chat federation with inaccurate and misinformed comments on the underlying protocol (XMPP) and blaming others for not joining.
Apparently, all the of the (good) sentiments behind the reasons for choosing XMPP as the protocol for Google Talk ( ) are no longer the driving force behind the decision making regarding its replacement Google Hangouts. All that talk about Client Choice, Service Choice and Platform Choice has been replaced with "if the other big players don't play, why should we? ". So all those "thousands of other ISPs, universities, corporations and individual users" Google Talk used to federate with are no longer important. On top of that, XMPP is blamed for not keeping up with the times: "When XMPP was designed, smartphones and social networks didn't exist.
Yet both trends essentially transformed communication but the standard remains unchanged. How didn't the standard (XMPP) change again? Anonymous Hollywood Exec Ignites BitTorrent Inc Piracy Controversy. Describing entirely legitimate, tax-paying technology pioneers as "the devil" is not something you hear happening every day, especially at the highest levels of business. However, that's how a Hollywood studio exec has labeled BitTorrent Inc, the software and solutions company utilizing the world's most efficient data shifting protocol.
While the company is understandably annoyed, one has to question just how hard it's going to be to change perceptions about what BitTorrent Inc. is all about. If one is to understand what caused this big BitTorrent dispute, one has to understand a few key things. First, BitTorrent is a data transfer protocol, just like HTTP or FTP. It was invented more than a decade ago by Bram Cohen and one of its first public applications was shifting around completely legal recordings of music concerts.
Cohen made BitTorrent public – anyone could use it – and soon people all over the web were using it to shift files. Here’s why. And Open Access. Happy World Backup Day! Go Backup Your Stuff! Seriously. An error occurred with this part of the page, sorry for the inconvenience. Hard drive backups are like the socks of gifts you give yourself. They’re initially about as unexciting as gifts can get, only to become the best gift ever in a pinch.
Got a meeting ... Netflix requests the help of cloud gaming specialists in its recent job listing posts, a possible hint at what’s to come for its ongoing gaming venture. “You want to get your $7,500, then build this industry.” Apple is introducing a handful of new ways to support U.S. EV acceleration hit a new and interesting phase at the Monterey Car Week event that wrapped Sunday. Elon Musk’s legal team has subpoenaed former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, marking the latest development in the legal battle over Musk’s attempt to break his $44 billion acquisition agreeme... New Carta data is a mishmash of sorts, with the numbers not pointing cleanly in one direction. Is Coinbase cheap, or is FTX overvalued? Nelletorr : "Geography of hate against... Varsity Bookmarking. FreedomHTML. The Fascism of Knowing Stuff.
Last weekend I spent some of my time drinking beer and talking to Sir Peter Blake about Kendo Nagasaki. This weekend I spent an hour biting into a pen like a shire horse as my brain failed to comprehend a journalist I was sitting next to. I was at QEDcon, on a panel entrusted with the subject “Is Science the New Religion?” It is the sort of title popular with media folk, like “is comedy the new rock and roll?”
Or “is knitting the new psoriasis?” The answer to “is science the new religion?” Though I spent much of time either startle-eyed or furiously furrowed, as if an invisible Duchenne was experimenting on my face, there was one opinion expressed that continues to haunt me. I attempted to explain to the journalist that the world we live in has never been more complex or filled with things that require work and patience to understand. The journalist suggested this was the kind of fascistic thinking that held up women’s suffrage and the education of the poor.
Like this: Like Loading... How You Can Help Save Upcoming.org, Posterous, and More. This morning, I woke to the news that Archive Team is working to save Upcoming. This is the Internet equivalent of hearing that Marsellus Wallace is sending The Wolf. For those unfamiliar, Archive Team is a band of rogue archivists and programmers working to rescue dead and dying websites from destruction. To put it mildly, they are very good at what they do. Led by computer historian/documentary filmmaker Jason Scott, they've saved massive sites like GeoCities, Friendster, MobileMe, Fortune City and many others from deletion, and collaborate with the Internet Archive to inject their backups into the Wayback Machine for permanent preservation. The importance of their work can't be overstated. While companies like Yahoo work to destroy as much Internet history as possible, Archive Team is the only group actively trying to save it. Want to help? It's dead simple to get up and running, and works on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Discover What's New in The Commons. CISPA, The Privacy-Threatening Cyberspying Bill, Is Dead In The Senate. Sorry Google; you can Keep it to yourself. Google today launched Keep, an app that allows you to save things, clip stuff from the web, hoard notes and what not and put them all onto your Google Drive. Yup, you guessed it — it is an imitation to Evernote and many other such applications. It is a good thing that Google has decided to compete with the likes of Evernote — it validates their market. It might actually be good, or even better than Evernote. But I still won’t use Keep.
I spent about seven years of my online life on that service. Looking from that perspective, it is hard to trust Google to keep an app alive. Evernote is like Derek Jeter, playing shortstop and trying to win every day. Sorry Google, but you might not realize that you are acting like the company you wanted to replace: Microsoft. And by the way – how is this app strategic for you guys and Reader is not? How about a pledge? Image courtesy of Flickr user Dano. Flashlight apps, location and why consumers still don’t understand privacy shared by Rubslopes. NBC Universal Warns File-Sharers of Criminal Prosecution.
Ask & Project Management, Subversion & Git Hosting, Collaboration. Infographics & Data Visualization | Visual.ly. Google Details How It Responds To Government Requests For User & Search Data. IWS - The Information Warfare Site. Piracy Doesn’t Hurt Game of Thrones, Director Says. Rumpus.net. Icons. 5 Mistakes Retailers Can't Wait For You To Make. Record Labels go to High Court to Force More ISPs to Block Pirate Bay. ISP Walks Out of Piracy Talks: “We’re Not The Internet Police” Three More Polio Workers Killed in Pakistan. Unroll.me - End Email Overload. PhpMyAdmin. Big, open and more networked than ever: 10 trends from 2012. SQL is Agile. Donations to The NetBSD Foundation. Video Hosting for Business.
Gooru. Those who stare at the past have their backs turned to the future. UICloud | User Interface Design Search Engine, UI Elements, GUI Design, Free Downloads. Top 100 Free Audio Books - Download Mp3 and iPod format today! TLDRLegal - Software Licenses Summarized in Plain English. Ly. Pricing — Squarespace 6. Readlists. Howard rheingold's | tools for thought. A Quotation. Mindful Simplicity: Decluttering, Cleaning & Leaving No Trace - nellynettetorres. The Sphinx Thesis Resource (sphinxtr) Free Software Resources. Blog. Concepts/internet and web/the history of the web - WebPlatform Docs. Age calculator. Evening Edition | The perfect commute-sized way to catch up on the day’s news. How to Remove Your Google Web History Before The New Privacy Policy Change.
Mit. WriteLaTeX. Reading someone’s Gmail doesn’t violate federal statute, court finds. Hypothes.is. Kippt, Pinboard Help Digg Users Find New Home For Old Data [Here's How] Online viewer for PDF, PostScript and Word. Ted Nelson. Search Free Ebooks Pearltree. Wftnasa? Springpad. AnnotateIt - Annotating the Web. Home - AnnotateIt - Annotating the Web. Socrative.