China censors bluntly, Disney helps coding and gets its influence all over it, Abrams potentially messes up Star Wars, security experts try to avert disaster and freak us out, and a theater group effectively designs a way for us to get inside the experience of someone with Parkinson’s. Basically, sometimes you can do pure harm or pure good, but mostly it’s Complicated.
Millions of creators around the world use CC licenses to give others permission to use their work in ways that they wouldn’t otherwise be allowed to. Those millions of users are the proof that Creative Commons works.
But measuring the size of the commons has always been a challenge. There’s no sign-up to use a CC license, and no central repository or catalog of CC-licensed works. So it’s impossible to say precisely how many licensed works there are, how many people are using Creative Commons licenses, where those people are located, or how they’re using them.
A theater group designed a virtual reality type experience that helps users unserstand the difficulty those with Parkinson’s disease experience in executing simple motor tasks. More of this sort of thing, please!
A scientific paper titled “Get Me Off Your F****** Mailing List” was actually accepted by the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology. As reported at Vox and other web sites, the journal, despite its distinguished name, is a predatory open-access journal. These sorts of low-quality journals spam thousands of scientists, offering to publish their work for a fee.
“Thanks to Disney Interactive,” announced Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi, “Code.org’s signature tutorial for the 2014 Hour of Code features Disney Infinity versions of Disney’s ‘Frozen’ heroines Anna and Elsa!.” Partovi adds, “The girl-power theme of the tutorial is a continuation of our efforts to expand diversity in computer science and broaden female participation in the field, starting with younger students.”
If you’re a Star Wars geek, check out the trailer. Every time you see lens flare, DRINK!
We have already seen news of a new AOC Ultra-Wide monitor today, now here’s a new monitor from EIZO that will appeal to those that are thinking “enough with the ultra-wideness already”. The EIZO FlexScan EV2730Q is a 26.5-inch square monitor with a square 1:1 aspect ratio and a resolution of 1920 × 1920 pixels.
The Chinese censorship authorities have DNS poisoned *edgecastcdn.net, which means all subdomains of edgecastcdn.net are blocked in China. EdgeCast is one of the largest Content Delivery Networks (CDN) in the world and provides its cloud services to thousands of websites and apps in China.
We have acknowledged all along that our method of unblocking websites using “collateral freedom” hinges on the gamble that the Chinese authorities will not block access to global CDNs because they understand the value of China being integrated with the global internet. However, we can now reveal publicly that the authorities are doing just that – attempting to cut China off from the global internet.
…there are security experts who now believe, as does Jeff Williams, CTO of Contrast Security, that “the Internet of Things will kill someone.”
E-Ink as tool for fashion. Must there also be an “E-ink of Things?”
If the bug is dangerous enough, it gets a name. Heartbleed’s branding changed the way we talk about security, but did giving a bug a logo make it frivolous… or is this the evolution of infosec?
Buzzfeed notices their cat videos don’t go over as well in France, and realizes what we think of as “internet culture” is really “American internet culture.” So it’s just the Americans that like their internets light and sweet?
