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The Almighty Buck

DuckDuckGo Donates $100,000 Among Four FOSS Projects 36

Posted by samzenpus from the have-a-little-cash dept.
jones_supa writes As is the search engine company's annual habit, DuckDuckGo has chosen to advance four open source projects by donating to them. The primary focus this year was to support FOSS projects that bring privacy tools to anyone who needs them. $25,000 goes to The Freedom of the Press Foundation to support SecureDrop, which is a whistleblower submission used to securely accept documents from anonymous sources. The Electronic Frontier Foundation was given $25,000 to support PrivacyBadger, which is a browser add-on that stops advertisers and other third-party trackers from secretly tracking your surfing habits. Another $25,000 arrives at GPGTools to support GPG Suite, which is a software package for OS X that encrypts files or messages. Finally, $25,000 was donated to Riseup to support Tails, which is a live operating system that aims at preserving your privacy and anonymity.

Comment Re: 68th to 22nd and there are many to go (Score 1) 192

Ruby has been used where Java was used before, but now some companies are switching to Go for the same purposes. Smaller, lighter apps that do exactly the same thing as the Ruby version. CloudFlare is one company that blogged about it, and I've seen other major companies make the switch.
Microsoft

Microsoft Restricts Advanced Notification of Patch Tuesday Updates 57

Posted by timothy from the you'll-find-out-eventually dept.
wiredmikey writes Microsoft has decided to ditch its tradition of publicly publishing information about upcoming patches the Thursday before Patch Tuesday. The decision represents a drastic change for the company's Advance Notification Service (ANS), which was created more than a decade ago to communicate information about security updates before they were released. However, Microsoft's "Premier customers" who still want to receive information about upcoming patches will be able to get the information through their Technical Account Manager support representatives, Microsoft said.
Transportation

3D-Printed Car Takes Its First Test Drive 132

Posted by samzenpus from the print-and-drive dept.
An anonymous reader points out this advancement in 3D printing. This week, at the International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS) in Chicago, Arizona-based automobile manufacturer Local Motors stole the show. Over the six day span of the IMTS, the company managed to 3D print and assemble an entire automobile, called the "Strati," live in front of spectators. Although the Strati is not the first ever car to be 3D printed, the advancements made by Local Motors with help from Cincinnati Inc, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, have produced a vehicle in days rather than months.
United Kingdom

Correcting Killer Architecture 98

Posted by samzenpus from the built-to-kill dept.
minstrelmike writes In Leeds, England, architects are adding a plethora of baffles and other structures to prevent the channeling of winds from a skyscraper that have pushed baby carriages into the street and caused one pedestrian death by blowing over a truck. Other architectural mistakes listed in the article include death ray buildings that can melt car bumpers and landscape ponds that blind tenants.

Comment Re:Custom URL (Score 1) 238

by EvilIdler (#47463073) Attached to: Pseudonyms Now Allowed On Google+
YouTube allowed a custom nickname too, if you were persistent. But as much as I tried, it never let me actually pick the the first 5 attempts. I now have 6 alternate identities which are *exactly the same 11-letter name*. But the 6th one stuck, and YouTube still logs in with it. G+ I only use to stay in touch with a minimal subset of developers, so my real name isn't a problem. I was confused by circles disappearing and being replaced with communities, though. It's not just their policies which need some tweaks, but also their interfaces.
AI

The Lovelace Test Is Better Than the Turing Test At Detecting AI 285

Posted by samzenpus from the why-did-you-program-me-to-feel-pain? dept.
meghan elizabeth writes If the Turing Test can be fooled by common trickery, it's time to consider we need a new standard. The Lovelace Test is designed to be more rigorous, testing for true machine cognition. An intelligent computer passes the Lovelace Test only if it originates a "program" that it was not engineered to produce. The new program—it could be an idea, a novel, a piece of music, anything—can't be a hardware fluke. The machine's designers must not be able to explain how their original code led to this new program. In short, to pass the Lovelace Test a computer has to create something original, all by itself.

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