Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Tech Links: June 20, 2012

Illustration for Andrew Keen’s article “Society isn’t a startup and sharing’s not caring” in Wired Magazine.

"Society isn’t a startup and sharing’s not caring" by Andrew Keen in Wired Magazine.

Entertainment


Pretty Eight Machine - an 8-Bit rendition of the Nine Inch Nails album.

Gadgets


Microsoft today announced it's first ever hardware products running a mainstream version of Windows, and the first designed for Windows 8: The Microsoft Surface, in ARM and Intel flaovours. Hands on. Video highlighting the stand and covers.

Newton, Reconsidered: There was certainly some Newton in the Pilot. And there’s an awful lot of Pilot in the iPhone 4S, the iPad and every Android device–starting wtth the home screen’s grid of icons and the way apps run in full-screen mode. Had Apple followed Palm’s path–smaller, simpler, cheaper–it might have made all the difference.

Internet


The Curious Case of Internet Privacy: Free services in exchange for personal information. That's the "privacy bargain" we all strike on the Web. It could be the worst deal ever.

Government requests to censor content ‘alarming,’ Google says Google has received more than 1,000 requests from authorities to take down content from its search results or YouTube video in the last six months of 2011. In its twice-yearly Transparency Report, the world’s largest web search engine said the requests were aimed at having some 12,000 items overall removed, about a quarter more than during the first half of last year.

Infographic: How Social Media Is Making Us Awkward

Online articles often change after publication, except there is no history tab and sometimes those revisions are controversial, for example this Politico story on General Stanley McChrystal. Enter NewsDiff: Tracking Online News Articles Over Time. It allows you to compare evolving versions of online news articles after they are published, starting with The New York Times and CNN. Here are some example diffs - see anything controversial? Last year, Times executive editor Jill Abramson called the idea "unrealistic" in response to an OpEd calling for diffs.

News


Breaking records at 16.32 petaflops, Blue Gene/Q is the world's new fastest supercomputer. Code named Sequoia pdf, Blue Gene/Q pdf is built around a derivative of the IBM PowerPC A2 processor. A 45nm, 16 core, 64 bit system on a chip, the PowerPC A2 pdf is highly parallel and highly energy efficient, enabling Sequoia to achieve 2.097 Linpack GF/watt.

Reading & Discussion


How Tech Is Turning Us All Into Neurotics: I’m never not looking sideways at what I’m doing, never not pulled to look at something else, never not reacting to whatever I’ve paused on.

How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet: It was a stunning failure in vision, and more or less the same thing happened at Flickr. All Yahoo cared about was the database its users had built and tagged. It didn't care about the community that had created it or (more importantly) continuing to grow that community by introducing new features.

Is Technology Fostering a Race to the Bottom?

Science


TorChat is an instant messaging protocol based upon Tor hidden services, making it perhaps the only instant messaging protocol with any substantive resistance to traffic analysis. jTorChat is a portable stand alone client written in Java.

Software


Falsehoods programmers believe about names and time shows how difficult it can be to represent basic concepts in code.

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