Group items tagged

Last week, the Iranian government apparently started a new censorship program that blocks encrypted Internet traffic. Even Iranians who had taken steps to evade government firewalls were being stymied-and the immediate impact can be seen in usage of the Tor network.

 Ever since Rosie the Robot took care of "The Jetsons" in the early 1960s, the promise of robots making everyday life easier has been a bit of a tease. Enlarge This Image   Jodi Hilton for The New York Times, left; Hanna-Barbera With Ava, left, iRobot is trying to do Rosey the Robot of "The Jetsons" one better. Ava will have an iPad or Android tablet for a brain and Xbox motion sensors to help her get around. Rosie, a metallic maid with a frilly apron, "kind of set expectations that robots were the future," said Colin M. Angle, the chief executive of the iRobot Corporation. "Then, 50 years passed."

Having at least six months of expenses provides financial stability, helps you avoid debt with high interest payments, and lowers stress levels. We have a full year of expenses put aside in liquid cash, and it lets me sleep well at night. Emergency funds can actually have a better return on investment than what you see on a bank account. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't still maximize my interest earned, especially as cash is an asset class where you can increase your return without having to take on additional risk (if you stay FDIC-insured or equivalent).

You want to start your own blog but you don't want to look tacky by using an existing design. Creating your own theme can be daunting, but with some assistance you can have a unique design for your blog in no time. This post will help you put it all together using WordPress, the most popular (and free) blogging software available.

I went to the GLUE conference to get in over my head. That was my entire goal. I wanted to learn about the technology that helps to stitch together the various parts of the Internet, but I also wanted to spend some time getting to know the people who made that technology do what it does. Over the course of 2 days I met people who made me feel dumb, saw thousands of lines of code and left with a new appreciation for how technology works.

In the past few years, digital technologies have revolutionized everything from the way we work to the way we educate, inform and entertain ourselves. In fact, millions of engaged citizens are using the Web to connect and collaborate around shared concerns and opportunities in their communities and in international forums and institutions. Now, as Canada readies itself to host the World Congress on Information Technology (WCIT2012) in Montreal this October, we have a unique opportunity to mobilize large numbers of connected citizens to participate in a global, online conversation designed to elicit new ideas and innovations that could help address some of the world's most urgent challenges.

Dan Siroker helps companies discover tiny truths, but his story begins with a lie. It was November 2007 and Barack Obama, then a Democratic candidate for president, was at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, to speak. Siroker-who today is CEO of the web-testing firm Optimizely, but then was a product manager on Google's browser team-tried to cut the enormous line by sneaking in a back entrance. "I walked up to the security guard and said, 'I have to get to a meeting in there,'" Siroker recalls. There was no meeting, but his bluff got him in.

From disrupting the peer-reviewed journal publishing tradition to utilizing a dispersed model to test code, the academy has been trying out new ways of innovating an overburdened scholarly apparatus using technology. One of the latest areas to see this sort of experimentation is that of IP, or intellectual property. Marblar, a startup launched by three British PhD students, is hoping to successfully crowdsource the resurrection of "dormant" IP, to flatten and widen the process of tech transfer. A major British venture capital firm, IP Group, has invested about $600,000 in the startup.

BiblioCrunch's e-book services marketplace is now open to the public, the New York-based startup announced today, right on time for Book Expo America. According to its CEO Miral Sattar, its ambition is to create new opportunities for authors, publishers and e-book service providers to work together.