Having data available electronically is not the same thing as the data being useful. Campaign finance disclosures provided electronically by the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), are a good example of that. The New York Times's Fech (not "fetch") is a RubyGem - a packaged application - designed to help journalists and public interest organizations access and make sense of FEC filings.
We all know about those authentication blocks of text called CAPTCHAs, perhaps too well. (Today's fun trivia: The acronym stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.). A new idea from PlayThru is to embed a small Flash or HTML5-based game that a human plays with a mouse to prove he or she really is a carbon-based life form. It is intriguing, potentially less annoying, and has captured (if you will excuse the pun) a few supporters already. The service is just getting started, and it is free to try out.
News of a potential security leak in Skype’s network protocols may be overblown, an investigation by ReadWriteWeb reveals today. Though it is possible for a program to expose IP addresses that have, at some point in history, been utilized by Skype users, this particular program is not Skype itself or anything that exploits a flaw in Skype.
Rather, it’s a separate, nonendorsed, reverse-engineered form of Skype 5.5. Though the reverse engineering project responsible for this program calls itself “open source,” in actuality, its proprietors appear to have merely de-obfuscated Skype’s proprietary code, made adjustments to it, and recompiled it. Those adjustments can, we discovered, produce human-readable IP addresses.
One benefit many developers perceive from working with a proprietary platform is that its components are generally updated and deployed according to a single agenda. (Sometimes that agenda is so slow that this fact becomes undeniable.) By contrast, the tremendous pace of open source development can be overwhelming for some. Back in 2007 the Open Source Census noted one big problem, especially among enterprises: Development teams have continually demonstrated an inability to manage the multitude of dependencies that OSS components have upon one another, and to use the proper or most secure components for their projects. A new Sonatype survey confirms that things haven't really changed that much since then.
Haven't we seen this before: IBM making a big acquisition of a “V” company in the big data space? Indeed, last April 13, IBM purchased analytics software maker Varicent for an undisclosed amount. And then this morning, IBM announced its acquisition of enterprise search facilitator Vivisimo.
IBM usually doesn’t acquire applications software makers unless it has something very specific in mind for them. IBM is clearly piecing together a “big data” platform - a comprehensive package for storing, accessing and analyzing unstructured data.
Tickets to Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) sold out in a record two hours this morning. The conference will be held in San Francisco from June 11-15.
"Sorry, tickets are sold out," the site says. It explains that Apple will post videos of the sessions shortly after the conference, making it available to the Internet public at large. While the event always sells out, this is the fastest conference sellout in Apple's history.
Wappwolf and ifttt are a bit like the chocolate and peanut butter in Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Separate, they're pretty good. Together, though, is when the magic happens.
For folks new to the services, Wappwolf is an application that performs actions when you drop a file into your Dropbox. ifttt, on the other hand, can interact with websites and services and then do things like send an email or save a file in Dropbox.
Google's SPDY protocol offers several advantages over serving traffic via HTTP/HTTPS. But, if you want to use SPDY, you're going to have to take a few additional steps to set it up. The good thing is that if you happen to be using Apache on recent Debian or RPM-based systems, installing and using SPDY is a simple matter.
Slowly but surely, SPDY ("speedy") is becoming more widely used. The Google-backed protocol, a modification to HTTP, is designed to help reduce latency and bolster security. Even if you don't manage a Web server yourself, you should know about SPDY and what it offers to you - and the Web at large.
You've probably heard of Markdown. Maybe you've heard the name for years. Perhaps you just encountered it, since it's enjoyed a renaissance lately.
But do you know what it is? Are you using it? You should be. Here are three good reasons to use Markdown. There are no good reasons not to.
