1.5 million pages of ancient texts to be made accessible online
This week the University of Oxford and the Vatican announced a plan to collaborate in digitizing 1.5 million pages of rare and ancient texts, most dating from the 16th century or earlier. The project is expected to span about 4 years and was made possible by a donation of £2 million (approximately $3.1 million) from the Polonsky Foundation—a charitable organization that supports higher education, medical research, and other general matters in the arts and sciences.
Specifically, the texts will include pages from Oxford's Bodleian Libraries and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV). The digitized pages will include early printed books—called incunabula—from Rome and the surrounding area; Greek manuscripts including early church texts and works by Homer, Sophocles, Plato, Hippocrates; and Hebrew manuscripts from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. "With approximately two-thirds of the material coming from the BAV and the remainder from the Bodleian, the digitization effort will also benefit scholars by uniting virtually materials that have been dispersed between the two collections over the centuries," a statement from Oxford read.
The aim of the project, as envisioned by the Polonsky Foundation is "to democratize access to information, [seeing] increasing digital access to these two library collections, among the greatest in the world, as a significant step in sharing the wealth of resources on a global scale." This is not the Polonsky Foundation's first gift to digitize rare and ancient texts, either. An earlier gift to the Bodleian Libraries from the Foundation allowed the Oxford libraries to upload images of 280,000 fragments of Hebrew manuscripts, called the Cairo Genizah Collection, which are now available to search and view for free online.
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How does the Lumia 900 hold up under the magnifying glass of the Ars OpenForums?
Nokia's new Lumia 900 smartphone marks its attempt at a comeback into the US smartphone market. The new device is also the flagship Windows Phone Mango device for the American market. Casey Johnston reviewed the 900 earlier this week on Ars. Then on Wednesday, we reported that Nokia will be giving Lumia 900 customers a $100 credit for loss of data and poor connectivity.
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Flashback malware removal tool arrives for Java-less Mac users
Apple has released another Flashback malware removal tool—this time for OS X Lion users who do not have Java installed. At the moment, Apple doesn't offer a similar stand-alone tool for earlier versions of the OS.
Earlier this week Apple acknowledged the presence of malware being spread by a Java vulnerability through Mac computers, although earlier versions of the malware have infected Macs before this year's breach. After an estimated 600,000 Apple computers were infected, the company released a Java update that patched vulnerabilities in the software and came with a Flashback removal script which checked for the most common varieties of the Flashback malware and removed it.
Third-party security companies have released tools to check your computer for Flashback malware and remove it, but this new tool is official from Apple.
As the new tool is meant for OS X Lion users without Java, the utility obviously doesn't come with any Java updates. "If the Flashback malware is found, a dialog will be presented notifying the user that malware was removed," Apple's tool summary says, "In some cases, the Flashback malware removal tool may need to restart your computer in order to completely remove the Flashback malware." Topher Kessler of CNet suggests that this stand-alone utility was made to address, "earlier variants of the malware that these users might have encountered."
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Bitten by the maker bug: one man's first steps with Arduino
Hopefully you're here because you've heard about this new-fangled "Arduino" thing, and you'd like to know more. Maybe you know your way around a
soldering iron, maybe you want to relive your glory days troubleshooting college lab circuits, or maybe you just like looking at pictures of circuits.
Hopefully, some or all of this will help whet your appetite to play
around with the Arduino and discover what it can do.
Arduino describes itself as an "open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software." If you're interested in maker projects, circuit boards, or just goofing around with a soldering iron, Arduino may be worth your time.
Arduino hardware is available in a number of form factors, so you can decide whether you want to spend a lot of time assembling hardware or build the boards by hand. The hardware can receive input from a "variety of sensors" which can be used to turn on motors, lights, and "other actuators." Programming is accomplished via the Wiring-based Arduino language. Best of all, everything is offered under an open source license.
This article marks the start of my journey—one from a guy who has some basic circuit knowledge and some
(rather outdated) technical training, to a guy who decided to get off his butt
and figure this Arduino stuff out. This specifically is the small start to a greater project I have in mind—ultimately driving a color, multipixel display
by means of an Arduino processor. Before we get to the whiz-bang cool
stuff, today we start from the absolute bottom of the barrel.
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Does Facebook track your enemies as well as your friends?
Facebook announced an expansion to its Download Your Information feature, according to a post on its Facebook and Privacy page Thursday. New categories of information that users can download from the site include IP addresses they've logged in from, previous names, and a full list of friend requests they made. This last item suggests that there is an ocean of negative space-style data that the company could, in theory, be collecting.
Facebook started allowing users to export parts of their profiles in 2010, giving them a directory of items like photos, wall posts, profile information, messages, and notes. While this is a good complement of items, it's far from complete. The company has said it plans to continue to expand the range of information that users can download going forward.
But the "friend requests" item in particular draws attention to the negative space—that is, things its users have chosen not to do or actively avoided—that Facebook could theoretically be using to form its understanding of users. Friend requests you've sent that have never been accepted, or vice versa, are an interesting form of data in and of themselves; they highlight relationship inequalities on a platform where friendship must, by default, be mutual.
Facebook has taken steps to mitigate this necessary mutuality with features like friend lists and the ability to subscribe to individuals. But there are more fascinating negative correlations we imagine Facebook could be collecting. For instance, while a never-accepted friend request may just indicate unequal affections, two people with heavily overlapping social circles who are not friends witch each other could suggest an active dislike—a piece of data that Facebook could track and use (the company would not respond to requests for comment on this matter).
Of course, there are many possible explanations for social blips like the one above, where there's a significant chance two people know each other but remain unconnected on Facebook. Could those people really be considered your enemies? Perhaps only insofar as your Facebook friends could be considered your friends.
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Computer modeled using swarms of soldier crabs
Computer scientists at Kobe University in Japan have built
a computer that draws inspiration from the swarming behavior
of soldier crabs.
The computer is based on theories from the early 1980s that examined the possibility of building a computer out of billiard balls. Proposed by Edward
Fredkin and Tommaso Toffoli, the mechanical computer was based on
Newtonian dynamics and relied on the motion of billiard balls in an idealized, friction-free environment instead of electronic signals
like a conventional computer.
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"Sandwich makers" now described as "female" under Facebook's "Leet Speak" option
D1d u kn0w F@c3b00k h4s a l337 sp3@k l4ngu@g3 0p7i0n? If you didn't before, you do now—though using the site with it turned on is more insufferable than reading my first sentence in this post. For those who didn't participate in the early days of the Internet, l337 sp3@k (or "leet speak") was once a popular way to communicate online among the geek community, though it has largely fallen by the wayside in these modern times of using real words to talk to other people.
But on Facebook, you can still change your default language option to "Leet Speak," as well as "Pirate" and a plethora of other languages. (Load up the main site and scroll to the very bottom—your current language setting is in the bottom right next to links to the privacy policy.) This obscure setting has actually been there since at least 2008 but remained unknown to the general population until fairly recently. And up until Friday, the Leet Speak setting changed the gender on women's profiles to "54ndw1ch m4k3r," or "sandwich maker." The gender on men's profiles remained "Male."
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Ask Stack: How to mentor a junior developer?
This Q&A is part of a biweekly series of posts highlighting common questions encountered by technophiles and answered by users at Stack Exchange, a free, community-powered network of 80+ Q&A sites.
Josh Johnson asks: Recently, my company has hired a few new developers whose attitudes toward programming are different than my own. Some seek to extract just enough information to get a task done, but not enough to learn.
I've found myself going over and over the same issues with many of them, and I'm realizing it might be time to change the way I'm teaching.
How can I:
- Give a junior programmer the tools to become more self-reliant?
- Help a junior programmer break bad development habits early on?
- Reduce the amount of time I spend mentoring these junior developers?
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Leaked roadmap raises questions about Office 15, Windows 8 launch
Earlier in the week Microsoft partner Maarten Visser published some pictures of a Microsoft roadmap document after he didn't realize that the unprotected document on a public Web server was intended to be covered under a non-disclosure agreement.
Though the roadmap leaves many questions unanswered, it did pin down a couple of release dates: it said that Office 15—and all the related products, such as Exchange 15, SharePoint 15, Visio 15, and Project 15—will be released in early 2013, with a beta in the second half of the year. This meshes with the company's existing promise to release an Office 15 beta in the summer. It's also consistent with rumors that Office 15 will RTM in November.
The roadmap leaves Windows 8's releases unspecified; the only Windows releases are the Windows 8 Developer Preview and Consumer Preview (released last September and this February, respectively), and the Windows XP end-of-life in 2014. However, Microsoft has previously stated explicitly that Windows on ARM will ship with Office.
If Office 15 isn't ready until 2013 then that implies that Windows on ARM can't be ready until 2013 either. And if Windows on ARM isn't ready until 2013, that in turn implies that the essentially identical Windows for Intel-compatible systems won't be ready until 2013 either.
This in turn contradicts previous rumors of retail availability in or around October. PC vendors and Intel are counting on a launch this year to reinvigorate a flagging PC market, with Intel in particular hoping to promote a second generation of Ultrabooks equipped with touch screens and Ivy Bridge processors.
Microsoft has not publicly committed to any particular release schedule for Windows 8. The company has alluded to the Windows 7 development process and release schedule, which would similarly place retail availability late third quarter or early fourth quarter of this year.
We've asked Microsoft for comment, and not heard anything back at the time of writing.
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Week in Apple: Flashback eviction edition
The most significant Apple news of the last week, in our opinion, was the US Department of Justice's antitrust suit against Apple and e-book publishers. But that wasn't the most popular bit of news: we also compared the Kindle's e-ink screen against the iPad's retina display, discussed AT&T's new iPhone unlock procedures, and, of course, addressed the many ways in which Mac users can detect and remove a Flashback malware infection. Read on for the roundup!
How to check for—and get rid of—a Mac Flashback infection: The Mac Flashback trojan is certainly making headlines, and it could even be making the rounds on your own computer. There are ways to check if you have it, though, and we have a few other tips for protecting yourself.
E-reader wars: does the iPad's retina display measure up to e-ink?: Does the new "retina" display make the iPad the new must-have e-reader over e-ink solutions?
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Week in Gaming: EA's "false advertising," Microsoft's hexadecacore rumors
This week, we took a look at a Better Business Bureau bloggers' claim that EA's pre-release hype for Mass Effect 3 amounted to false advertising, and found the reasoning a little bit wanting. We also talked about rumors that Microsoft's next console will sport a ridiculous 16 cores, looked over a few demos from PAX East, and reviewed an indie puzzle platformer nearly five years in the making.
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Week in tech: Megaupload's prospects for a fair trial and the downside of the Lumia 900
Megaupload: Erasing our servers as the US wants would deny us a fair trial: Megaupload has asked the court overseeing its criminal trial to intervene to save the data on its servers. It argues that allowing the data to be deleted, as the government has advocated, would violate Megaupload's right to a fair trial.
The Nokia Lumia 900: A good phone at a great price that you probably shouldn't buy: The Lumia 900 is a very nice phone: great design, good exclusive apps, and a fantastic price. In spite of these features, it's hard to recommend. Most of us are stuck with our phones for two years at a time, and with AT&T's consistent unwillingness to deliver updates in a timely manner, that's a distinctly unappealing prospect.
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This week in science, the lights did not go out
In a somewhat unusual occurrence, a book review was our most popular story this past week: Before the Lights Go Out, which focuses on renewable energy, efficiency, and our electric grid, set off a lively discussion, as well. Other popular stories included plans for Mars exploration that date from the 1960s, as well as an application to create a "commercial Cape Canaveral" on the coast of South Texas.
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iPhone users hold AT&T accountable for perpetuating smartphone theft
Three plaintiffs filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T in California Superior Court this week, alleging that the company acted as an accessory to theft by re-activating their stolen iPhones for the new, illegitimate owners. The suit comes as the telecom company is making moves to address smartphone theft—earlier this week, the AT&T as well as Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint announced a plan to create a national database of lost or stolen phones so that thieves could not reactivate pilfered devices.
Still, the plaintiffs think they have a case, as AT&T and other telecom companies have registered and assigned names of legitimate users to legally purchased smartphones for years, but still neglect to check with the original user when reassigning registration of the phone. And, telecom companies operate with the knowledge that users will simply buy or replace smartphones in the event of theft.
The complaint accused AT&T and any other "Doe Corporation Entities" that were "in some way legally or proximately responsible" of negligence, civil conspiracy, accessory to theft, and fraud and breach of contract, among other charges. "Plaintiffs have been told by AT&T representatives that they will not, and 'cannot' block and effectively kill usage of stolen cell phones by thieves and criminal organizations, however, such representations are false an fraudulent," the suit read(PDF).
Other countries like Germany and Australia keep databases that prevent reactivation of stolen phones, which has lowered incidences of theft. In the US, electronics have recently begun to surpass cash as the most frequently stolen form of property.
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Google's official app market found hosting malicious Android apps—again
Google has removed at least 15 Android apps from its official Play market after receiving outside reports they were malicious trojans that siphoned names, telephone numbers of email addresses of every person in the phone's contact list.
The apps, which were reported here by McAfee researcher Carlos Castillo, masqueraded as video players offering trailers of Android games and anime content. In the background and without warning, they also obtained the phone number and a unique identifier of the infected device and sent the information in clear text to a remote server under the control of the software developers. Statistics provided by Google Play (formerly the Android Market) indicated they had been downloaded at least 70,000 times, according to Castillo, who didn't provide the name of the apps or the developers marketing them.
The discovery marks at least the second time Google servers have been caught distributing Android malware since the company announced a new cloud-based service that scours its online bazaars for malicious apps. Two weeks ago, a separate set of researchers found malicious extensions in the Google Chrome Web Store that could gain complete control of users' Facebook profiles.
A Google spokesman declined to comment on Friday's report from Castillo. Japanese researchers appear to have been the first to uncover the malicious apps, according to this translation from hatena.ne.jp.
The repeated discoveries of malware hosted on Google servers underscore the darker side of a market that allows anyone to submit apps with few questions asked. Whatever critics may say about Apple's App Store, which is significantly more selective about the titles it hosts, complaints about malware aren't one of them. Why outsiders are making the all-too-frequent discoveries of trojans in Google Play and the Chrome store before the company's security team does is a question that has yet to be answered.
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Netflix never used its $1 million algorithm due to engineering costs
Netflix awarded a $1 million prize to a developer team in 2009 for an algorithm that increased the accuracy of the company's recommendation engine by 10 percent. But today it doesn't use the million-dollar code, and has no plans to implement it in the future, Netflix announced on its blog Friday. The post goes on to explain why: a combination of too much engineering effort for the results, and a shift from movie recommendations to the "next level" of personalization caused by the transition of the business from mailed DVDs to video streaming.
Netflix notes that it does still use two algorithms from the team that won the first Progress Prize for an 8.43 percent improvement to the recommendation engine's root mean squared error (the full $1 million was awarded for a 10 percent improvement). But the increase in accuracy on the winning improvements "did not seem to justify the engineering effort needed to bring them into a production environment," the blog post said. By that time, the company had moved on anyway.
When Netflix announced the contest to improve the service in 2007, its business was centered on DVDs, which are dealt with by customers in periods of days or weeks and provide little granular data. Now that Netflix's primary offering is streaming, it has access to much more information: "streaming members are looking for something great to watch right now; they can sample a few videos before settling on one, they can consume several in one session, and we can observe viewing statistics such as whether a video was watched fully or only partially," reads the post.
This doesn't seem like much data, but it broadly affects the full screen of personalized recommendations a user might see on their Netflix home page. If a user begins a movie from "Imaginative Time Travel Movies from the 1980s" but quickly closes it, the homepage could shuffle that category down and place a new category at the prime top position that still speaks to the customer's watching history; something less sci-fi and more 1980s, or vice-versa. (Mostly) gone are the days that customers would fill their DVD lists with artsy indie films or all of the Academy Award-winning documentaries they could, only for them to remain in queue purgatory. Netflix Watch Instantly is about the here and now, and Netflix is priming to respond to that time frame.
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MySQL founder's latest MariaDB release takes "enterprise" features open-source
MontyProgram AB, the company formed by MySQL creator Michael "Monty" Widenius in the wake of his break with Sun Microsystems, has released the latest version of MariaDB, a “drop-in replacement” for MySQL built on the MySQL 5.5 codebase. MariaDB 5.5.23, which according to developer Colin Charles has "1.5 million additional lines of code compared to MySQL," pushes forward the development of an open-source database with features that aim to match those of Oracle’s commercial-only MySQL releases.
Widenius, who lives in Helsinki, left Sun in 2009 when he became dissatisfied with the approach the company was taking to MySQL. Since then—and particularly after Sun’s acquisition by Oracle—much of the MySQL development team has left to join Widenius’ company, or to work on one of the other "forks" of the MySQL code line, including Brian Aker’s Drizzle and Peter Zaitsev’s Percona. SkySQL, a company made up largely of former MySQL AB employees, was launched to offer support for MariaDB, MySQL, and Drizzle for those dissatisfied with Oracle’s new licensing model. Oracle has continued development of MySQL, but stirred discontent in the MySQL community when the company shifted the development model away from a fully open-source approach to an "open core," with new enterprise features offered under a commercial license only.
Some of the new features in MariaDB mirror those added in Oracle’s commercial releases of MySQL Enterprise. For example, MariaDB 5.5 includes a plug-in to allow client authentication through Pluggable Authentication Modules (allowing users or applications to use Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) or other authentication systems as credentials for access instead of a password stored within the database) and a high-performance thread pool to help maintain server performance with large numbers of connected clients.
Some of the other high performance features were "developed for a very large social networking site," according to the company, including a non-blocking client library that allows applications to run multiple parallel connections to one or more databases—for tasks like data merges across "shard" databases in very large database implementations. There are also other features aimed at developers of geospatial applications based on the Open Geospatial Consortium’s OpenGIS standards.
The stable release of MariaDB can be downloaded from Mariadb.org.
Update: Earlier versions of MariaDB have also gotten update, as Widenius reported in his blog, because "we found a very serious security issue in all recent MariaDB / MySQL releases and we strongly recommend everyone to upgrade to one of the above releases ASAP." The vulnerability was also reported to Oracle, and Widenius expects that Oracle will also soon issue a MySQL update.
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Valve looking to hire hardware engineers for unknown project
Those of you who reload the Valve job postings page every morning hoping to find a way out of your meaningless, dead-end career may have noticed that the esteemed game developer is now looking for a couple of hardware engineers to "conceive, design, evaluate, and produce new types of input, output, and platform hardware."
The job postings don't go into any specifics on what kind of hardware Valve is looking for help with exactly, but the company says it wants to "invent whole new gaming experiences" that can "enhance" the kinds of software it's already making. Some might immediately try to connect the job postings to recent rumors of a PC-based "Steam Box" game console designed to run Valve's digital distribution service. But it's just as likely that the company is looking for people to further develop the kind of biofeedback devices it talked about at last year's Game Developers Conference, or even work on its patent for a "pivotally translatable handle" controller that came to light last year. Or maybe it's something the company hasn't spoken about publicly at all.
In any case, it seems clearer than ever that Valve has its sights set on expanding out of the software business, even as it says it's "a long way from... shipping any sort of hardware."
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Judge not impressed with government's arguments against preserving Megaupload data
The Virginia federal judge overseeing the Megaupload case on Friday ordered Megaupload and the government back to the negotiating table over the fate of the locker site's servers, which has been a subject of dispute in recent weeks. CNet reports that Judge Liam O'Grady declared himself "sympathetic" to the financial burdens that Carpathia Hosting, Megaupload's former ISP, was incurring as a result of the Megaupload litigation, and "seemed dismissive" of the government's objections to letting Megaupload have its data.
Ira Rothken, MegaUpload's lead attorney, asked U.S. District Judge Liam O'Grady to send all the parties interested in the data back to the negotiating table to continue looking for a solution they can agree on.
And that's exactly what O'Grady told them to do. What's most important about the judge's decision was that the user data will continue to be preserved.
O'Grady told the parties that unless they wanted to hire their own "special master" to help mediate the talks, then he would send them to a magistrate judge known for his abilities to "bring people together" and hash out agreements.
The exchange also hinted at why the government has shown so little sympathy for Carpathia's plight. The government pointed out to the judge that Carpathia had "generated $35 million from working with Megaupload," and implied that the hosting company bears some responsibility for Megaupload's actions.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation urged the judge to establish a system to allow Megaupload users to retrieve their legal data. But the judge expressed skepticism that it would be feasible to set up and operate such a system given the large amount of data involved.
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German court extends push e-mail injunction against iCloud, MobileMe
A German judge has extended an injunction against Apple barring the company from pushing e-mail to iCloud and MobileMe users in that country. The injunction was originally awarded after Motorola argued that Apple's push e-mail violated one of its patents related to syncing messages to pagers. As such, the injunction will remain in place while the court plans to consider Motorola's case involving a 3G-related patent separately.
Motorola won German injunctions against Apple Sales International, Apple's European distribution subsidiary, for two different patents earlier this year: one blocking push e-mail and the other banning sales of iPhones and 3G-equipped iPads. Motorola was able to enforce the injunction pertaining to push e-mail, forcing Apple to shut off push e-mail features for iCloud and MobileMe. Apple appealed the injunction, attempting to have the patent ruled invalid, but it was later rejected by the appeals court.
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Review: Fez's world-spinning puzzles drive us to distraction
It's hard to think of an indie game that has had more prerelease buzz and attention than Fez. Polytron's Phil Fish has been working on the game for nearly five years now, teasing fans with trailers and small trade show demos as he constantly put off planned release dates to perfect it just a little more. The game that is finally seeing the light of day today shows the care that went into creating a world full of hidden depths, but some players might find those depths a little too well-hidden.
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ICANN data breach exposes gTLD applicant data, leads to deadline extension
The group that oversees the Internet's address system has extended the application deadline for new generic top level domains (TLDs) and warned that a glitch in its processing system exposed potentially sensitive applicant information to competitors.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers confirmed the data breach in a brief advisory published on Thursday. "We have learned of a possible glitch in the TLD application system software that has allowed a limited number of users to view some other users' file names and user names in certain scenarios," ICANN Chief Operating Officer Akram Atallah wrote. The TLD application system was pulled offline "out of an abundance of caution" and will remain down until Tuesday unless ICANN officials change their mind.
From the limited information in Atallah's statement, it's unclear how damaging the data breach is. Applications were supposed to remain confidential to prevent one TLD candidate from gaining an unfair advantage over another one. Questions that remain unanswered include how long the disclosure leak lasted, how many applicants were affected, and whether there's evidence showing any applicants acted on the data they had access to as a result of the glitch. It seems feasible that user file names may have identified the applicants' names or the TLDs they were seeking.
It's also unclear if ICANN has contacted any of the applicants whose data was exposed. Any Ars readers who have received a notification, please contact me directly.
There are currently 22 generic TLDs, including .com, .org, .net, .info, and a host of others. Under a plan approved last year, ICANN devised a way to vastly increase both the number and range of suffixes that are appended to Internet addresses. Candidates must submit a $185,000 fee and demonstrate they have the technical and financial wherewithal to operate a TLD. The deadline for submitting applications had initially been Thursday. Following discovery of the glitch, the deadline has been extended to April 20.
Updated to clarify generic TLDs in the last paragraph.
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Great Firewall hiccup? China loses Internet connectivity for an hour
Thursday Internet traffic dropped off substantially to and from China. Paul Mozur of the Wall Street Journal's China Real Time blog tracked the outage as a data dropoff lasting from 11:00am to 1:00pm local time.
The interruption spawned a host of possible explanations. These included the powerful 8.6 magnitude earthquake the day before off the coast of Indonesia, a cinching down of the "Great Firewall of China" censorship system, a failure in the country's network backbone, and a software upgrade.
There is a bottleneck of undersea cables in the Malacca Straits which could have been affected by the quake. China is connected to the Internet from only three major points, as the Guardian notes in its coverage. This makes the country arguably more vulnerable than countries like the US.
However, Xu Chuanchao, an executive with Sohu, one of China's largest Web portals, posted to his microblog his opinion that "This malfunction is caused by the failure of China's backbone network and is under renovation."
The publication also pointed out that many "lesser known VPNs seemed to connect without any problems." and quoted David Wolf of Wolf Group Asia as saying, "It's possible they were short of capacity and that's why some people got through, but given that obscure VPNs were working I find that hard to believe."
According to Tech in Asia, (via China Digital Times), two of the largest Chinese ISPs, Telecom and Unicom, are denying knowledge of the source of the interruption but both insisted that a breakdown on their end was not to blame.
Mozur's reporting however, based on data from CloudFlare, indicated that the overwhelming majority of the dropoff was from Telecom and Unicom and it was almost exclusively HTTP traffic. This, according to CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince indicates it was probably a result of filtering, "which suggests that someone made a mistake when filtering something—likely they filtered the entire internet.”
Tech in Asia's writer C. Custer theorized it was the test of a new government Internet "kill switch."
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Certain coral species may be better adapted to deal with ocean acidification
Corals may be better able to cope with ocean acidification than previously believed, according to new research published in Nature Climate Change, providing a glimmer of hope for the future of coral reefs.
As more carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, more carbon dioxide is dissolved in the ocean, lowering the pH of the water. This process, known as ocean acidification, is occurring at an unprecedented rate. This is causing problems for shell-building organisms, and it raises concerns for corals. Can corals and their symbiotic algae have the ability to adapt or acclimate to such rapid changes in ocean chemistry?
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Apple: we broke "Amazon's monopolistic grip" on e-book industry
Apple has now publicly responded to accusations that it colluded with publishers to fix e-book prices. In a statement released late Thursday, the company says the launch of its iBookstore in 2010—along with the original iPad—not only brought competition to the market, it also broke "Amazon’s monopolistic grip on the publishing industry."
"The [Department of Justice]'s accusation of collusion against Apple is simply not true," Apple told several news outlets. "The launch of the iBookstore in 2010 fostered innovation and competition, breaking Amazon’s monopolistic grip on the publishing industry. Since then customers have benefited from eBooks that are more interactive and engaging. Just as we’ve allowed developers to set prices on the App Store, publishers set prices on the iBookstore."
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