- Brazil undertaking all digital census, using smartphones, Slashdot
- Contribute to SETI@home from your browser
Via Hacker News. - Re-targeting ads stalk surfers for weeks after they shop
Slashdot links to a story at NYT that I find fascinating for its potential to drive home the point about widespread behavioral advertising. If more users notice these sorts of creepy practices, the more fuel we’ll have for debate around better practices around transparency and affording the ability to opt out. - Cyanogen, after market mod for Android smart phones, now supports FroYo, ReadWriteWeb
- GPU assisted sorting algorithm breaks giga-sort barrier, Slashdot
- iPhone app in approval limbo goes open source, Slashdot
- New model developed to help organize, keep private massive amounts of online data, Science Daily
HT @joabj - Some California schools decide to track students with RFIDs, EFF
Tag: distributed computing
feeds | grep links > Distributed Computing Spots Astronomical Rarity, Search Engine Runs a Tor Enclave, and More
- 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