- Distributed computing project spots astronomical oddity
I’ve always found the idea of harnessing spare CPU cycles from home computers and applying it to really big, data intensive projects fascinating. My own computers have been enrolled in such efforts on and off over the years. John Timmer at Ars Technica has news of the discovery of a rare pulsar as part of a side project at Einstein@Home, one of the many distributed efforts using the BOINC platform. - DuckDuckGo now operates a Tor exit enclave
Via Hacker News. “I believe this fits right in line with our privacy policy. Using Tor and DDG, you can now be end to end anonymous with your searching. And if you use our encrypted homepage, you can be end to end encrypted as well.” - Recommendations for making online petitions more ethical, honest, perhaps effecting
- Company that had largest ever credit card data breach is breached again
- Open source givers and takers
I think Mike Loukides’ analysis at O’Reilly Radar of some recent stats on open source usage vs. contribution is spot on. The bargain isn’t that all people gaining from open source give back, it isn’t even necessary for projects to thrive. Recent studies around Wikipedia illustrate how the same asymmetry can still yield incredibly worthwhile results from a much small core of contributors within a larger community of more passive users or lower volume contributors. - Challenges to scaling chips below 32nm
Exploring digital citizenry as a creator and a consumer.