Today EFF and the Tor Project are launching a public beta of a new Firefox extension called HTTPS Everywhere.This Firefox extension was inspired by the launch of Google's encrypted search option. We wanted a way to ensure that every search our brows...
As a simple online platform for conversation, Twitter is an ideal an ecological system through which we can understand the relationship between users and their environments on the Web. Especially compared to other social networks, Twitter simplifies most of the extraneous features and boils down its environment to people and content. The unusual simplicity of Twitter, though, continues to warp perception of how the relationship between user and platform operates. Many of the popularized studies examining influence on Twitter fail to identify the nuances of social interaction in the system. While attempts have been made (eg., http://twinfluence.com/about.php), the analyses tend to focus on the connections between users rather than the relationship of users, content, and platform. This report therefore aims to supplement previous investigations of the Twitter environment with more comprehensive data sets to enhance new approaches to understanding the concept of “influence” on social networks.
PGP and GnuPG have been utilizing webs of trust to establish authenticity without a centralized certificate authority for a while. Now, a new tool seeks to extend the concept to include scientific publications. The idea is that researchers can review and sign each others' works with varying levels of endorsement, and display the signed reviews with their vitas. This creates a decentralized social network linking researchers, papers, and reviews that, in theory, represents the scientific community. It meshes seamlessly with traditional publication venues. One can publish a paper with an established journal, and still try to get more out of the paper by asking colleagues to review the work. The hope is that this will eventually provide an alternative method for researchers to establish credibility.
adamengst writes in with good news for anyone who needs to collaborate remotely on a writing or editing project — coding too. It's especially good news for those using Windows and Linux. Mac users have had SubEthaEdit for a few years now. With EtherPad, two or more people can edit a document and see all the edits simultaneously.
People have this delusion that the Web is a fount of all information. That, if you look hard enough with Google and other search engines, you can find all the answers. That’s crap.