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mix of iPads and tablets with detachable keyboards.

HP EliteBook Revolve 810 G3, a laptop-tablet hybrid

Some K-12 systems are moving away from iPads and on to Chromebooks. And many elementary schools use Kindles and tablets made by Samsung and Android rather than Apple iPads.

Open-source software often gets derided for its downsides—maintenance concerns, the need for development resources, concerns about security—but its huge transparency and collaboration benefits typically get missed.

(It’s worth noting that you may be using open-source software without realizing it: Most major content management systems, including WordPress and Drupal, are based on open-source code bases. Not that you’d immediately think of them in that context.)

Open source tends to follow current standards. The reason Mozilla Firefox gained so much momentum on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer about a decade ago has everything to do with programming strategy. IE, being proprietary and without much competition, didn’t have a reason to keep innovating quickly. Firefox, on the other hand, was in a spot to iterate relatively quickly and drive online development—and when Google Chrome came into the picture, this process moved even faster. This is true of a lot of open-source software. It can ensure you’re working with this year’s model.

As for Flash, the change in Chrome's behavior is just another cut that's making the security-flaw-ridden platform less relevant and, hopefully, soon obsolete.

This isn’t the first time this has happened, that big data sets full of personal information – supposedly obscured, or de-identified, as the process is called – have been reverse engineered to reveal some or even all of the identities contained within. It makes you wonder: Is there really such a thing as a truly anonymous data set in the age of big data?

That might sound like a bore, but think about it this way: there’s more than taxi cab data at stake here. Pretty much everything you do on the Internet these days is a potential data set. And data has value. The posts you like on Facebook, your spending habits as tracked by Mint, the searches you make on Google – the argument goes that the social, economic and academic potential of sharing these immensely detailed so-called “high dimensional” data sets with third parties is too great to ignore.

University of Colorado Law School associate professor Paul Ohm’s 2009 paper on the topic made the bold claim that “data can be either useful or perfectly anonymous but never both.”

Data crunching has grown so sophisticated and powerful, privacy researchers now warn that tracing identities from a pool of supposedly "anonymized" data is not just a possibility, it's a certainty.

"It is depressingly hard to try to anonymize data in a way that resists identification by a committed adversary," Arvind Narayanan, a privacy researcher at Princeton University, told NBC News.

such as the DuckDuckGo search engine, whose motto is "We don't track you" — gain popularity, an incentive would arise.

To that end, supplying attention itself can be an act of complicity in the unethical actions of a platform. The mere act of choosing to look at something online generates real value for a company, materially helping to support its staff, its content, and the social interactions that a platform plays host to. This is why a website like Do Not Link exists: It promises a way to share a link from a website without boosting that site’s standing in search rankings.

attention boycott

ethical attention

About two million people a day now use Slack, mainly to chat with others at work. On Tuesday, the company is unveiling a couple of initiatives that will add new capabilities to the system. The first is an app store that will let developers of business software more easily plug their programs into Slack. Together with its investors, the company is also creating an $80 million fund to invest in apps that can be integrated with Slack.

Atlassian makes HipChat, one of Slack’s chief rivals, which also offers integration with other applications.

In its first incarnation, the directory will feature 150 apps that are compatible with Slack, including programs from Google, Twitter, Dropbox and Box.

While one adult learner may be well versed on how to search for resources online, another may have very little experience using the Internet.

Survey your audience beforehand to determine any technical knowledge limitations they may have, as well as to assess their education levels.

As we get older, we tend to gravitate more toward learning experiences that offer some sort of social development benefit.