Tech Links: February 15, 2012

Source: Business Insider

News

With the fight against SOPA and PIPA, hacktivism has gone mainstream. Along with Anonymous' fight against such organizations as Scientology, white supremecists, and child pornographers, their work against laws that would censor the Internet made the news. The hacktivists' trend towards self-policing also helps quell questions about their motivations.

Entertainment

Inforgraphic: Robot App Store

Google's answer to TED talks has gone live. Solve For X, a "forum to encourage and amplify technology-based moonshot thinking and teamwork," currently contains links to YouTube videos from the likes of Neal Stephenson, Rob McGinnis, and Privahini Bradoo. Videos range from 10 to 20 minutes in length.

Reading

Open Source for You, or "Your Day Job Sucks, Make Programming Fun Again". Stephen McDonald, creator of Mezzanine, shares his experience of "what it's like contributing to open source".

The "visible web" is what you can find using general web search engines. It's also what you see in almost all subject directories. The "invisible web" is what you cannot find using these types of tools. It's the internet that Google doesn't show us; some of it dull, some of it private, some of it deliberately hidden.

Is Webkit, the web browser engine used by Safari and Chrome, turning into IE6? Concern is growing that reliance on proprietry CSS features marked by vendor prefixes could be breaking the web. 

Why We Need a New Definition of ‘PC’

Resources & Tools

Is it Old? Before you make a complete fool of yourself when you send a link to your friends, colleagues or twitter followers, enter it here to make sure it's fresh enough.

OneSwarm is a privacy preserving BitTorrent client that offers  permissions for restricting access to shared content  and  sharing without attribution, with the anonymity being provided by fellow OneSwarm peers routing transfers.