Tech Links: March 2, 2012

Infographic: Who has the most stake in Facebook

Source: Reuters

Entertainment

Infographic: The Digital Classroom

Infographic: Pros and Cons of Social Media in Education

Gadgets

Raspberry Pi the £22 ($35) computer was launched today and sold out immediately. It is intended to encourage children to develop a better understanding of computers and get involved in programming. The design is based on a Broadcom BCM2835 SoC with no keyboard or other frills; it's meant to run Linux.

News

Last week, small press distributor Independent Publishers Group (IPG) announced that Amazon has decided to stop selling Kindle editions for the publishers IPG represents. The decision impacts over 500 small publishers and almost 5,000 Kindle titles. Neither party has offered much in the way of specifics, but other publishers have been reporting that Amazon has been pressuring them to offer higher discounts and/or pay a “co-op” fee of an additional 3%-4% on all sales to cover the cost of offering “automation and personalization” services (i.e. Customers who bought x also bought y). Authors and publishers have been reacting to the development.

Verisign today seized control of a .com domain belonging to a Canadian online gambling business operating in Canada (inasmuch as an online business can be said to be operating in Canada), on behalf of Federal Authorities. "what has happened is that US law (in fact, Maryland state law) as been imposed on a .com domain operating outside the USA, which is the subtext we were very worried about when we commented on SOPA."

Reading & Discussion

"Smart talk has never been such a valuable commodity. It’s spawned conferences like TED, Davos, and now a slew of upstart competitors. It has made the eighteen‑minute TED lecture a viral online phenomenon. But are we running out of things to say?"

Resources & Software

Curious about windows 8? ISO images for the 'consumer preview' version are now available from Microsoft. Typically these previews expire at a certain date, but the previously released developer preview won't expire until January 15th, 2013. You can use the Open Source Virtual Box to run the OS in a virtual machine. (Instructions for installing windows 8)

EFF's HTTPS Everywhere v2 adds support for Chrome and adds Decentralized SSL Observatory to the FireFox version. SSL Observatory helps cryptographic researchers find implementation problems and now warns users when known problems are detected. And it plays nicely with Tor of course. There is also another interesting EFF project in the works called Sovereign Keys that seeks to replace the certificate authority system entirely.

Tutorials

Adm. Grace Hopper, inventor of the first compiler, explains how big a nanosecond is