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New Chapters

After a year and a half working with some of the smartest and most competent engineers I've ever met, it's time for me to part ways with BitPay. I've had the opportunity to be deeply involved in the design, implementation, and deployment of some incredible technologies, but we're turning a page in the story of Bitcoin's rise and it's time to start exploring the new chapter. BitPay continues to paint an incredibly compelling picture as to what the decentralized future looks like – we worked on some incredibly far-reaching and massively impactful ideas, including: - [ChainDB][chaindb], a distributed database backed exclusively by the Bitcoin blockchain. - [Copay][copay], a truly decentralized wallet & identity management platform. - [BitAuth][bitauth], a secure authentication mechanism for peers on the web, using the `k1` curve. - [Impulse][impulse], a method of securing zero-confirmation transactions. - [Foxtrot][foxtrot], a completely encrypted data transmission network. - [Bitcore][bitcore], a library of common software functionality to glue everything together. You might notice a few common themes. Let me point out the two most important. Firstly, that everything here is open source (with the notable exception of ChainDB). Open source, and more importantly [free software][free software], is a very big deal to me. Prior to joining BitPay, I was [open sourcing education][coursefork], [contributing to open source software](https://github.com/martindale), and [speaking on the importance of open source](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuYLWdG-lP0). Some of the things I'm most proud of are the things _other_ people built with the things _we_ gave away – _that's_ the real power of open source. Secondly, that everything here is based on Bitcoin, not some alternative blockchain. BitPay was a firm believer in Bitcoin as the exclusive platform that would secure the post-fiat era, and that belief has held strongly with me before and after my departure. Until a more compelling alternative to Bitcoin emerges, One of the other exciting things to come out of BitPay was the emergence of [DECENTRALIZE][decentralize], which we formed last fall with a few of our fellow employees. DECENTRALIZE has become [an acclaimed content source][cointelegraph:decentralize] in the latest resurgence of decentralized thinking, and now it gets to be a much bigger priority for me. Before I joined BitPay, I'd put a lot of work into [Maki][maki], a framework for making full-stack application development significantly easier. Maki took a bit of a back-burner position while I was focusing on my work at BitPay, so I'll be redoubling my efforts to see that vision through. In fact, I think now's as good a time as any to share that vision. To that end, I'm starting a new project named Fabric. I'd like to entirely eliminate centralized servers on the Internet and catalyze the development of an entirely new class of economic actor. More details soon. As we embark on our next journey, let's always remember the carefully selected input used to create [the Genesis Block][genesis]: > The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks [chaindb]: https://bitpay.com/chaindb.pdf [copay]: https://copay.io/ [bitauth]: https://github.com/bitpay/bitauth [impulse]: https://impulse.is/ [foxtrot]: https://github.com/bitpay/foxtrot [bitcore]: https://bitcore.io [decentralize]: https://decentralize.fm [free software]: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html [coursefork]: https://coursefork.org/ [maki]: https://maki.ericmartindale.com/ [cointelegraph:decentralize]: http://cointelegraph.com/news/114496/leaders-in-bitcoin-broadcasting-pandoras-box-is-open-and-theres-no-going-back [genesis]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block

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Open Source ALL the Things! I'll be speaking next week at +The Research Triangle Park about #OpenSource...

Open Source ALL the Things!
I'll be speaking next week at +The Research Triangle Park about #OpenSource , #education , and +Coursefork.  I'm extremely excited (and humbled!) to be a part of an event that includes speakers from +Red Hat and +IBM, especially to speak on a topic that I'm so passionate about. See the full speaker list at the official site!

I hope to see you there. :)

About the Event
Open source. It's faster, cleaner, and more accurate than traditional methodologies -- and it's the culture the Triangle is fast-becoming known for. There's a reason that Red Hat, the first billion-dollar open source company, has built its headquarters here.

For September's “RTP 180," we're celebrating our region's fondness for open source with a speaker series that pulls from our three founding universities (NC State, Duke University, UNC-Chapel Hill), companies and communities. On September 17, we hope you will join us from 6:00-7:30, at RTP’s headquarters (12 Davis Drive, Durham, NC), for "RTP 180: Open Source All the Things.”

Our doors open at 5:00 so you can stop in right after work to grab a snack; a reception will follow after the event. We hear there will be tacos and free beer.

#HackEducation   #RTP180   #Raleigh   #Durham  

Attachments

RTP180: Open Source ALL the Things!

*Open Source ALL the Things!* I'll be speaking next week at +The Research Triangle Park about #OpenSource , #education , and +Coursefork.  I'm extremely excited (and humbled!) to be a part of an event that includes speakers from +Red Hat and +IBM, especially to speak on a topic that I'm so passionate about. See the full speaker list at the official site! I hope to see you there. :) *About the Event* Open source. It's faster, cleaner, and more accurate than traditional methodologies -- and it's the culture the Triangle is fast-becoming known for. There's a reason that Red Hat, the first billion-dollar open source company, has built its headquarters here. For September's “RTP 180," we're celebrating our region's fondness for open source with a speaker series that pulls from our three founding universities (NC State, Duke University, UNC-Chapel Hill), companies and communities. On September 17, we hope you will join us from 6:00-7:30, at RTP’s headquarters (12 Davis Drive, Durham, NC), for "RTP 180: Open Source All the Things.” Our doors open at 5:00 so you can stop in right after work to grab a snack; a reception will follow after the event. We hear there will be tacos and *free beer*. #HackEducation   #RTP180   #Raleigh   #Durham  

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Flock Tip: Add Services To Your Sidebar (Sorta)

So, Firefox allows you to open favorites in a sidebar - which is great for things like FriendFeed, Google Talk, Twitter, or even Facebook chat. It lets you use a good web service as what essentially becomes an extension for your browser, so you can browse your regular pages while still participating in the conversation.

I recently switched over to the social browser, Flock - with great success and elation. Flock is built from the Firefox codebase, but they are massively more social in what the browser does - drag and drop images, open media feeds, view your friends in their People and Places sidebar, among many other really cool things.

Then there's Friendfeed - which is a web service that recently took off (but I must say, I've been using long before the hype. :D) because it allows you to combine all of your social media connections (Web 2.5, if you will) and even cross-post responses between them (closer to Web 3.0, minus filtering and duplicate content issues...). After putting in a request to Flock's develpment team to start moving in this direction, I decided to take matters into my own hands.

When you bookmark something in Firefox, you can open the properties of the bookmark and hit a checkbox, "Open this link in the sidebar." However, this option is not available in Flock (by default). So let's open our trusty about:config:

Do a filter on "sidebar", and you'll find a value called "flock.favorites.loadPageInSidebar" - which is set to false by default. Right click this value, and click "toggle".

Bingo. Now you will have the checkbox on all your bookmarks that will allow you to open links in your sidebar!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: , , , , ,

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Coursefork Among Top 10 Open Source Projects of 2013 I'm so pleased that +Coursefork made +Opensource.com's...

Coursefork Among Top 10 Open Source Projects of 2013
I'm so pleased that +Coursefork made +Opensource.com's list of the top 10 open-source projects for 2013... this puts us alongside +Docker and +OpenStack, a true honor in my book.

If you haven't heard what the team has been working on, Coursefork is building an open-source collaboration tool for educators.  In the same way software creators can re-use open-source resources to get ahead in the development cycle, we want to enable teachers to re-use materials and improvements thereof to allow for the accretion of teaching techniques in place of continual re-invention.

“We're creating the pull request for courses, and the process of getting there means creating the tools necessary to support the community of a new open future for education.”

Learn more in this interview on OpenSource.com: http://opensource.com/education/13/9/coursefork-education-tool

Attachments

Top 10 open source projects in 2013 |

Best of Opensource.com in 2013: Top 10 open source projects of the year.

4 Replies

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Coursefork Among Top 10 Open Source Projects of 2013 I'm so pleased that +Coursefork made +Opensource.com's...

Coursefork Among Top 10 Open Source Projects of 2013
I'm so pleased that +Coursefork made +Opensource.com's list of the top 10 open-source projects for 2013... this puts us alongside +Docker and +OpenStack, a true honor in my book.

If you haven't heard what the team has been working on, Coursefork is building an open-source collaboration tool for educators.  In the same way software creators can re-use open-source resources to get ahead in the development cycle, we want to enable teachers to re-use materials and improvements thereof to allow for the accretion of teaching techniques in place of continual re-invention.

“We're creating the pull request for courses, and the process of getting there means creating the tools necessary to support the community of a new open future for education.”

Learn more in this interview on OpenSource.com: http://opensource.com/education/13/9/coursefork-education-tool

Attachments

Top 10 open source projects in 2013 |

Best of Opensource.com in 2013: Top 10 open source projects of the year.

1 Replies

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Coursefork Among Top 10 Open Source Projects of 2013 I'm so pleased that +Coursefork made +Opensource.com's...

Coursefork Among Top 10 Open Source Projects of 2013
I'm so pleased that +Coursefork made +Opensource.com's list of the top 10 open-source projects for 2013... this puts us alongside +Docker and +OpenStack, a true honor in my book.

If you haven't heard what the team has been working on, Coursefork is building an open-source collaboration tool for educators.  In the same way software creators can re-use open-source resources to get ahead in the development cycle, we want to enable teachers to re-use materials and improvements thereof to allow for the accretion of teaching techniques in place of continual re-invention.

“We're creating the pull request for courses, and the process of getting there means creating the tools necessary to support the community of a new open future for education.”

Learn more in this interview on OpenSource.com: http://opensource.com/education/13/9/coursefork-education-tool

Attachments

Top 10 open source projects in 2013 |

Best of Opensource.com in 2013: Top 10 open source projects of the year.

4 Replies

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Why isn't education open-source in the first place? I recently gave a talk at +The Research Triangle...

Why isn't education open-source in the first place?
I recently gave a talk at +The Research Triangle Park about education and open source, and how the freedoms that are necessary for a healthy education system were systematically removed over time.  While the slides aren't available in the video, I've uploaded them to +Coursefork [1].

It's incredibly powerful to lay out the data and show how increased spending and manpower has impacted the quality of education over time: aptitude measurements have stayed flat (or negative!) while test scores and grades continue to inflate.  It seems as if we've built a system of education that is extremely good at—wait for it—_getting people to pass standardized tests_.

Companies like +Khan Academy and +Coursera are really chipping away at the problem of making the resources available, both content and services (i.e., actual teaching), but making the content interchangeable and hackable is of critical importance to building the healthy open source ecosystem that we've seen emerge in the software community (a la +GitHub) within the world of education.

One day, we'll see the equivalent of the pull request in education.  I'm hoping to build it with +Coursefork.

[1]:  http://coursefork.org/martindale/open-freedom-and-education

Attachments

RTP 180: "Open, Freedom, and Education" with Eric Martindale

Eric Martindale of Coursefork talks about the potential power of applying open source principles to education at The Research Triangle Park's RTP 180: "Open ...

1 Replies

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Why isn't education open-source in the first place? I recently gave a talk at +The Research Triangle...

Why isn't education open-source in the first place?
I recently gave a talk at +The Research Triangle Park about education and open source, and how the freedoms that are necessary for a healthy education system were systematically removed over time.  While the slides aren't available in the video, I've uploaded them to +Coursefork [1].

It's incredibly powerful to lay out the data and show how increased spending and manpower has impacted the quality of education over time: aptitude measurements have stayed flat (or negative!) while test scores and grades continue to inflate.  It seems as if we've built a system of education that is extremely good at—wait for it—_getting people to pass standardized tests_.

Companies like +Khan Academy and +Coursera are really chipping away at the problem of making the resources available, both content and services (i.e., actual teaching), but making the content interchangeable and hackable is of critical importance to building the healthy open source ecosystem that we've seen emerge in the software community (a la +GitHub) within the world of education.

One day, we'll see the equivalent of the pull request in education.  I'm hoping to build it with +Coursefork.

[1]:  http://coursefork.org/martindale/open-freedom-and-education

Attachments

RTP 180: "Open, Freedom, and Education" with Eric Martindale

Eric Martindale of Coursefork talks about the potential power of applying open source principles to education at The Research Triangle Park's RTP 180: "Open ...

1 Replies

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Why isn't education open-source in the first place? I recently gave a talk at +The Research Triangle...

Why isn't education open-source in the first place?
I recently gave a talk at +The Research Triangle Park about education and open source, and how the freedoms that are necessary for a healthy education system were systematically removed over time.  While the slides aren't available in the video, I've uploaded them to +Coursefork [1].

It's incredibly powerful to lay out the data and show how increased spending and manpower has impacted the quality of education over time: aptitude measurements have stayed flat (or negative!) while test scores and grades continue to inflate.  It seems as if we've built a system of education that is extremely good at—wait for it—_getting people to pass standardized tests_.

Companies like +Khan Academy and +Coursera are really chipping away at the problem of making the resources available, both content and services (i.e., actual teaching), but making the content interchangeable and hackable is of critical importance to building the healthy open source ecosystem that we've seen emerge in the software community (a la +GitHub) within the world of education.

One day, we'll see the equivalent of the pull request in education.  I'm hoping to build it with +Coursefork.

[1]:  http://coursefork.org/martindale/open-freedom-and-education

Attachments

RTP 180: "Open, Freedom, and Education" with Eric Martindale

Eric Martindale of Coursefork talks about the potential power of applying open source principles to education at The Research Triangle Park's RTP 180: "Open ...

14 Replies

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Why isn't education open-source in the first place? I recently gave a talk at +The Research Triangle...

Why isn't education open-source in the first place?
I recently gave a talk at +The Research Triangle Park about education and open source, and how the freedoms that are necessary for a healthy education system were systematically removed over time.  While the slides aren't available in the video, I've uploaded them to +Coursefork [1].

It's incredibly powerful to lay out the data and show how increased spending and manpower has impacted the quality of education over time: aptitude measurements have stayed flat (or negative!) while test scores and grades continue to inflate.  It seems as if we've built a system of education that is extremely good at—wait for it—_getting people to pass standardized tests_.

Companies like +Khan Academy and +Coursera are really chipping away at the problem of making the resources available, both content and services (i.e., actual teaching), but making the content interchangeable and hackable is of critical importance to building the healthy open source ecosystem that we've seen emerge in the software community (a la +GitHub) within the world of education.

One day, we'll see the equivalent of the pull request in education.  I'm hoping to build it with +Coursefork.

[1]:  http://coursefork.org/martindale/open-freedom-and-education

Attachments

RTP 180: "Open, Freedom, and Education" with Eric Martindale

Eric Martindale of Coursefork talks about the potential power of applying open source principles to education at The Research Triangle Park's RTP 180: "Open ...

1 Replies

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Please help!: My Open Source Scanning/Tunneling Microscope (a device that can see atoms) is competing...

Please help!:

My Open Source Scanning/Tunneling Microscope (a device that can see atoms) is competing for an open hardware scholarship grant - that's ~$2k to help me get this project (finally) reach a public beta stage! The award is determined by 24 hours of internet voting, and voting ends at 6pm US eastern standard time (7 hours from now).

Just do the following:
1. go here: http://www.openhardwaresummit.org/open-hardware-scholarship-voting/
2. select "Chemhacker Scanning/Tunneling Microscope"
3. click "vote"

Thanks very very very much!

If you want to learn more about my project, go here: chemhacker.com
If you want to learn more about all the projects up for the scholarship, go here: openhardwaresummit.org/scholarship

Attachments

Open Hardware Scholarship Voting | Open Hardware Summit

Which project should receive $2000? Many thanks to everyone who submitted projects. We applaud all of this years applicants on their creativity and committment to Open Source Hardware. Please cast you...

2 Replies

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Please help!: My Open Source Scanning/Tunneling Microscope (a device that can see atoms) is competing...

Please help!:

My Open Source Scanning/Tunneling Microscope (a device that can see atoms) is competing for an open hardware scholarship grant - that's ~$2k to help me get this project (finally) reach a public beta stage! The award is determined by 24 hours of internet voting, and voting ends at 6pm US eastern standard time (7 hours from now).

Just do the following:
1. go here: http://www.openhardwaresummit.org/open-hardware-scholarship-voting/
2. select "Chemhacker Scanning/Tunneling Microscope"
3. click "vote"

Thanks very very very much!

If you want to learn more about my project, go here: chemhacker.com
If you want to learn more about all the projects up for the scholarship, go here: openhardwaresummit.org/scholarship

Attachments

Open Hardware Scholarship Voting | Open Hardware Summit

Which project should receive $2000? Many thanks to everyone who submitted projects. We applaud all of this years applicants on their creativity and committment to Open Source Hardware. Please cast you...

5 Replies

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Please help!: My Open Source Scanning/Tunneling Microscope (a device that can see atoms) is competing...

Please help!:

My Open Source Scanning/Tunneling Microscope (a device that can see atoms) is competing for an open hardware scholarship grant - that's ~$2k to help me get this project (finally) reach a public beta stage! The award is determined by 24 hours of internet voting, and voting ends at 6pm US eastern standard time (7 hours from now).

Just do the following:
1. go here: http://www.openhardwaresummit.org/open-hardware-scholarship-voting/
2. select "Chemhacker Scanning/Tunneling Microscope"
3. click "vote"

Thanks very very very much!

If you want to learn more about my project, go here: chemhacker.com
If you want to learn more about all the projects up for the scholarship, go here: openhardwaresummit.org/scholarship

Attachments

Open Hardware Scholarship Voting | Open Hardware Summit

Which project should receive $2000? Many thanks to everyone who submitted projects. We applaud all of this years applicants on their creativity and committment to Open Source Hardware. Please cast you...

2 Replies

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Please help!: My Open Source Scanning/Tunneling Microscope (a device that can see atoms) is competing...

Please help!:

My Open Source Scanning/Tunneling Microscope (a device that can see atoms) is competing for an open hardware scholarship grant - that's ~$2k to help me get this project (finally) reach a public beta stage! The award is determined by 24 hours of internet voting, and voting ends at 6pm US eastern standard time (7 hours from now).

Just do the following:
1. go here: http://www.openhardwaresummit.org/open-hardware-scholarship-voting/
2. select "Chemhacker Scanning/Tunneling Microscope"
3. click "vote"

Thanks very very very much!

If you want to learn more about my project, go here: chemhacker.com
If you want to learn more about all the projects up for the scholarship, go here: openhardwaresummit.org/scholarship

Attachments

Open Hardware Scholarship Voting | Open Hardware Summit

Which project should receive $2000? Many thanks to everyone who submitted projects. We applaud all of this years applicants on their creativity and committment to Open Source Hardware. Please cast you...

2 Replies

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Coursefork Among Top 10 Open Source Projects of 2013

I'm so pleased that +Coursefork made +Opensource.com's list of the top 10 open-source projects for 2013... this puts us alongside +Docker and +OpenStack, a true honor in my book.

If you haven't heard what the team has been working on, Coursefork is building an open-source collaboration tool for educators.  In the same way software creators can re-use open-source resources to get ahead in the development cycle, we want to enable teachers to re-use materials and improvements thereof to allow for the accretion of teaching techniques in place of continual re-invention.

“We're creating the pull request for courses, and the process of getting there means creating the tools necessary to support the community of a new open future for education.”

Learn more in this interview on OpenSource.com: http://opensource.com/education/13/9/coursefork-education-tool

Attachments

Top 10 open source projects in 2013 |

Best of Opensource.com in 2013: Top 10 open source projects of the year.

6 Replies

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Compelling Narratives using Augmented Reality +Google Glass has, for better or worse, shaped the narrative...

Compelling Narratives using Augmented Reality
+Google Glass has, for better or worse, shaped the narrative around augmented reality this past year.  We've seen the arms (eyes?) race rapidly develop, culminating recently with the +YCombinator-backed +meta announcing their "SpaceGlasses" [1], one of the first truly compelling experiences built around a convincingly capable device [2].

The hardest part of augmented reality is not the hardware, nor the computer vision software—both extremely difficult academic challenges in their own right, and certainly not to be taken by the faint of heart—but in the experience.

These problems will be solved, through no small effort, but they will be solved.  The most daunting challenge is to build a compelling story that binds the available data (read "the Internet") to the real world, and exposes it in an unobtrusive and seamless fashion.  This too will emerge naturally, but early pioneers in the space need to think carefully about the application of augmented reality in order to succeed; no one wants a world filled with advertisements [3], and in fact—some even try to eliminate them [4].

Here, +Field Trip attempts to builds one such compelling story.  The experience of contextual information making itself available without interrupting your interactions with the real world is so tantalizingly close you can feel it, but one wonders just how much control the user will have over the frequency and relevance of the information "popups".  In the early days of the software industry (late 60s, early 70s), an ongoing debate between the [then] default of free software vs. closed software unfolded, setting the foundation for today's conversation around open source and free [5] software.  I'll be talking more about this in a presentation at the upcoming #RTP180 : Open Source All Things event [6] in North Carolina.

It's another step forward for ubiquitous augmented reality, an exciting one indeed, but one that won't achieve mass adoption until the user can control their own experience [7].

[1]: https://www.spaceglasses.com/
[2]: SpaceGlasses are the future of computing
[3]: https://vimeo.com/8569187
[4]: http://unlogo.org/pages/about
[5]: that's free as in libertas, not as in gratis.
[6]: http://www.rtp.org/rtp-180-open-source-all-things
[7]: I recently started a project to this effect called "Para", a client-agnostic peer-to-peer network for implementing a data layer on top of the real world.  I'm seeking collaborators!  Check it out: http://para.io

Attachments

Field Trip on Glass

Heads up! Your city is trying to tell you something. The history, architecture, insider tips and hidden gems from over 100 local publisher partners come to l...

4 Replies

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Compelling Narratives using Augmented Reality +Google Glass has, for better or worse, shaped the narrative...

Compelling Narratives using Augmented Reality
+Google Glass has, for better or worse, shaped the narrative around augmented reality this past year.  We've seen the arms (eyes?) race rapidly develop, culminating recently with the +YCombinator-backed +meta announcing their "SpaceGlasses" [1], one of the first truly compelling experiences built around a convincingly capable device [2].

The hardest part of augmented reality is not the hardware, nor the computer vision software—both extremely difficult academic challenges in their own right, and certainly not to be taken by the faint of heart—but in the experience.

These problems will be solved, through no small effort, but they will be solved.  The most daunting challenge is to build a compelling story that binds the available data (read "the Internet") to the real world, and exposes it in an unobtrusive and seamless fashion.  This too will emerge naturally, but early pioneers in the space need to think carefully about the application of augmented reality in order to succeed; no one wants a world filled with advertisements [3], and in fact—some even try to eliminate them [4].

Here, +Field Trip attempts to builds one such compelling story.  The experience of contextual information making itself available without interrupting your interactions with the real world is so tantalizingly close you can feel it, but one wonders just how much control the user will have over the frequency and relevance of the information "popups".  In the early days of the software industry (late 60s, early 70s), an ongoing debate between the [then] default of free software vs. closed software unfolded, setting the foundation for today's conversation around open source and free [5] software.  I'll be talking more about this in a presentation at the upcoming #RTP180 : Open Source All Things event [6] in North Carolina.

It's another step forward for ubiquitous augmented reality, an exciting one indeed, but one that won't achieve mass adoption until the user can control their own experience [7].

[1]: https://www.spaceglasses.com/
[2]: SpaceGlasses are the future of computing
[3]: https://vimeo.com/8569187
[4]: http://unlogo.org/pages/about
[5]: that's free as in libertas, not as in gratis.
[6]: http://www.rtp.org/rtp-180-open-source-all-things
[7]: I recently started a project to this effect called "Para", a client-agnostic peer-to-peer network for implementing a data layer on top of the real world.  I'm seeking collaborators!  Check it out: http://para.io

Attachments

Field Trip on Glass

Heads up! Your city is trying to tell you something. The history, architecture, insider tips and hidden gems from over 100 local publisher partners come to l...

1 Replies

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Compelling Narratives using Augmented Reality +Google Glass has, for better or worse, shaped the narrative...

Compelling Narratives using Augmented Reality
+Google Glass has, for better or worse, shaped the narrative around augmented reality this past year.  We've seen the arms (eyes?) race rapidly develop, culminating recently with the +YCombinator-backed +meta announcing their "SpaceGlasses" [1], one of the first truly compelling experiences built around a convincingly capable device [2].

The hardest part of augmented reality is not the hardware, nor the computer vision software—both extremely difficult academic challenges in their own right, and certainly not to be taken by the faint of heart—but in the experience.

These problems will be solved, through no small effort, but they will be solved.  The most daunting challenge is to build a compelling story that binds the available data (read "the Internet") to the real world, and exposes it in an unobtrusive and seamless fashion.  This too will emerge naturally, but early pioneers in the space need to think carefully about the application of augmented reality in order to succeed; no one wants a world filled with advertisements [3], and in fact—some even try to eliminate them [4].

Here, +Field Trip attempts to builds one such compelling story.  The experience of contextual information making itself available without interrupting your interactions with the real world is so tantalizingly close you can feel it, but one wonders just how much control the user will have over the frequency and relevance of the information "popups".  In the early days of the software industry (late 60s, early 70s), an ongoing debate between the [then] default of free software vs. closed software unfolded, setting the foundation for today's conversation around open source and free [5] software.  I'll be talking more about this in a presentation at the upcoming #RTP180 : Open Source All Things event [6] in North Carolina.

It's another step forward for ubiquitous augmented reality, an exciting one indeed, but one that won't achieve mass adoption until the user can control their own experience [7].

[1]: https://www.spaceglasses.com/
[2]: SpaceGlasses are the future of computing
[3]: https://vimeo.com/8569187
[4]: http://unlogo.org/pages/about
[5]: that's free as in libertas, not as in gratis.
[6]: http://www.rtp.org/rtp-180-open-source-all-things
[7]: I recently started a project to this effect called "Para", a client-agnostic peer-to-peer network for implementing a data layer on top of the real world.  I'm seeking collaborators!  Check it out: http://para.io

Attachments

Field Trip on Glass

Heads up! Your city is trying to tell you something. The history, architecture, insider tips and hidden gems from over 100 local publisher partners come to l...

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Compelling Narratives using Augmented Reality +Google Glass has, for better or worse, shaped the narrative...

Compelling Narratives using Augmented Reality
+Google Glass has, for better or worse, shaped the narrative around augmented reality this past year.  We've seen the arms (eyes?) race rapidly develop, culminating recently with the +YCombinator-backed +meta announcing their "SpaceGlasses" [1], one of the first truly compelling experiences built around a convincingly capable device [2].

The hardest part of augmented reality is not the hardware, nor the computer vision software—both extremely difficult academic challenges in their own right, and certainly not to be taken by the faint of heart—but in the experience.

These problems will be solved, through no small effort, but they will be solved.  The most daunting challenge is to build a compelling story that binds the available data (read "the Internet") to the real world, and exposes it in an unobtrusive and seamless fashion.  This too will emerge naturally, but early pioneers in the space need to think carefully about the application of augmented reality in order to succeed; no one wants a world filled with advertisements [3], and in fact—some even try to eliminate them [4].

Here, +Field Trip attempts to builds one such compelling story.  The experience of contextual information making itself available without interrupting your interactions with the real world is so tantalizingly close you can feel it, but one wonders just how much control the user will have over the frequency and relevance of the information "popups".  In the early days of the software industry (late 60s, early 70s), an ongoing debate between the [then] default of free software vs. closed software unfolded, setting the foundation for today's conversation around open source and free [5] software.  I'll be talking more about this in a presentation at the upcoming #RTP180 : Open Source All Things event [6] in North Carolina.

It's another step forward for ubiquitous augmented reality, an exciting one indeed, but one that won't achieve mass adoption until the user can control their own experience [7].

[1]: https://www.spaceglasses.com/
[2]: SpaceGlasses are the future of computing
[3]: https://vimeo.com/8569187
[4]: http://unlogo.org/pages/about
[5]: that's free as in libertas, not as in gratis.
[6]: http://www.rtp.org/rtp-180-open-source-all-things
[7]: I recently started a project to this effect called "Para", a client-agnostic peer-to-peer network for implementing a data layer on top of the real world.  I'm seeking collaborators!  Check it out: http://para.io

Attachments

Field Trip on Glass

Heads up! Your city is trying to tell you something. The history, architecture, insider tips and hidden gems from over 100 local publisher partners come to l...

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You&#39;re right, <span class="proflinkWrapper"><span class="proflinkPrefix">+</span><a class="proflink"... in reply to

You're right, +Debbie Coultis.  The problem is that more often than not, any customizations made to the existing open resources (+MIT OpenCourseWare, for example) never make their way back "upstream", or otherwise made available to future educators or students who might have use of them.  I talked a bit about how +Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), specifically with software, was involved in the open-source community very early on, but perhaps I should've gone into more depth here.

There are many free (and some open) educational resources emerging, but we need deeper interchangeability between them if their innovations are to be capitalized on.

+Bob Calder I don't know if Robert Panoff was in the audience or not, but you're right.  +Coursera isn't the answer, but it is at least a step forward in increasing the availability of the delivery system.  Once we're able to edit that content and the processes (e.g., make everything hackable), we'll close the loop on collaboration in education.

Thanks, +Nathan Greenling!  Once +Coursefork ships more robust composition features, I'll attach the slides into the YouTube video at their corresponding points and perhaps include some further speaker notes.

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Onward, and Ever Upward

2013 was an amazing year; between founding +Coursefork, building soundtrack.io and para.io, working with several amazing startups [1], and being allowed to call myself a peer to some of the smartest people I know all throughout, it has been a year of both great achievement and personal growth.  This sets an incredibly compelling stage for 2014 and everything to come therein.

Today, I'm excited to announce that I'll be joining the likes of Jeff Garzik [2], Patrick Nagurny, and Ian Patton under the leadership of CTO Stephen Pair at +Bitpay, which allows anyone to quickly and seamlessly accept Bitcoin as payment, settling immediately in any currency, including USD.

Bitcoin has become one of the biggest stories of 2013, having grown over 9000% in value [3] and even surpassing Western Union in transaction volume [4].  As potentially the most counterfeit-proof form of payment in history, Bitcoin is poised to become one of the most disruptive technologies since the invention of the Internet as society moves increasingly into decentralized systems in an era of waning trust and increasing technological awareness by growing economies like China, India, and Brazil [5].

Taking advantage of this trend of decentralization, BitPay is perfectly positioned to serve as the mechanism for BitCoin's mass-adoption as massive merchants such as +Overstock.com move to accept this new form of payment.  It's exciting to be involved with a company in this position at such an early stage, and expand the breadth of my experience to include another decentralized system, and especially to be holding the responsibility of expanding the company's open-source initiatives and engaging the developer community in a meaningful way.

After parting ways with Coursefork late last year, I've taken a seat on the Board of Advisors, allowing the amazing team we built to realize the vision of open-sourcing the world of education [6] under the leadership of CTO +Brian Marks.  Brian was previously the CTO of successful education startup WebAssign [7], and will be an excellent steward of Coursefork's team and technology as they move towards the much-needed decentralization and open-sourcing of the education industry.  My best wishes to the team as they endeavor to do so!

Exciting times all around, and I'm truly lucky to be a part of it in so many ways.  Now let's go make the world a better place.

[1]: One of which, DigaForce, was just acquired: http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/news/2014/01/02/apex-tech-firm-strategic-link-partners.html?page=all — congratulations to +Anthony Pompliano and +Matthew Cotter!
[2]: Jeff is one of the core developers of Bitcoin and a former +Red Hat team member from Raleigh.  How's that for the Triangle Company Family tree, +Derrick Minor?!
[3]: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/11/29/which-currency-is-up-over-9000-this-year-and-sells-for-almost-as-much-as-an-ounce-of-gold/
[4]: http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-can-be-the-new-western-union-2013-12
[5]: You might recall that in March of 2013, the Cypriot government restricted withdrawals and then utilized citizens' bank accounts directly to bail out their banking system, resulting in a surge in Bitcoin prices as individuals fled the fiat currency: http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/28/investing/bitcoin-cyprus/
[6]: Here's an interview I did while CTO of Coursefork with +Jason Hibbets from +Opensource.com that explains the vision: http://opensource.com/education/13/9/coursefork-education-tool
[7]: As a cofounder and CTO at WebAssign for 13 years, Brian took the education company from zero to over $30M in yearly revenue before becoming my co-founder at Coursefork.

Attachments

Stephen Pair: BitCoin Economy

Stephen Pair, Cofounder and CTO, BitPay on doing business in the BitCoin economy.

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Onward, and Ever Upward 2013 was an amazing year; between founding +Coursefork, building soundtrack.io...

Onward, and Ever Upward
2013 was an amazing year; between founding +Coursefork, building soundtrack.io and para.io, working with several amazing startups [1], and being allowed to call myself a peer to some of the smartest people I know all throughout, it has been a year of both great achievement and personal growth.  This sets an incredibly compelling stage for 2014 and everything to come therein.

Today, I'm excited to announce that I'll be joining the likes of Jeff Garzik [2], Patrick Nagurny, and Ian Patton under the leadership of CTO Stephen Pair at +Bitpay, which allows anyone to quickly and seamlessly accept Bitcoin as payment, settling immediately in any currency, including USD.

Bitcoin has become one of the biggest stories of 2013, having grown over 9000% in value [3] and even surpassing Western Union in transaction volume [4].  As potentially the most counterfeit-proof form of payment in history, Bitcoin is poised to become one of the most disruptive technologies since the invention of the Internet as society moves increasingly into decentralized systems in an era of waning trust and increasing technological awareness by growing economies like China, India, and Brazil [5].

Taking advantage of this trend of decentralization, BitPay is perfectly positioned to serve as the mechanism for BitCoin's mass-adoption as massive merchants such as +Overstock.com move to accept this new form of payment.  It's exciting to be involved with a company in this position at such an early stage, and expand the breadth of my experience to include another decentralized system, and especially to be holding the responsibility of expanding the company's open-source initiatives and engaging the developer community in a meaningful way.

After parting ways with Coursefork late last year, I've taken a seat on the Board of Advisors, allowing the amazing team we built to realize the vision of open-sourcing the world of education [6] under the leadership of CTO +Brian Marks.  Brian was previously the CTO of successful education startup WebAssign [7], and will be an excellent steward of Coursefork's team and technology as they move towards the much-needed decentralization and open-sourcing of the education industry.  My best wishes to the team as they endeavor to do so!

Exciting times all around, and I'm truly lucky to be a part of it in so many ways.  Now let's go make the world a better place.

[1]: One of which, DigaForce, was just acquired: http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/news/2014/01/02/apex-tech-firm-strategic-link-partners.html?page=all — congratulations to +Anthony Pompliano and +Matthew Cotter!
[2]: Jeff is one of the core developers of Bitcoin and a former +Red Hat team member from Raleigh.  How's that for the Triangle Company Family tree, +Derrick Minor?!
[3]: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/11/29/which-currency-is-up-over-9000-this-year-and-sells-for-almost-as-much-as-an-ounce-of-gold/
[4]: http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-can-be-the-new-western-union-2013-12
[5]: You might recall that in March of 2013, the Cypriot government restricted withdrawals and then utilized citizens' bank accounts directly to bail out their banking system, resulting in a surge in Bitcoin prices as individuals fled the fiat currency: http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/28/investing/bitcoin-cyprus/
[6]: Here's an interview I did while CTO of Coursefork with +Jason Hibbets from +Opensource.com that explains the vision: http://opensource.com/education/13/9/coursefork-education-tool
[7]: As a cofounder and CTO at WebAssign for 13 years, Brian took the education company from zero to over $30M in yearly revenue before becoming my co-founder at Coursefork.

Attachments

Stephen Pair: BitCoin Economy

Stephen Pair, Cofounder and CTO, BitPay on doing business in the BitCoin economy.

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Onward, and Ever Upward 2013 was an amazing year; between founding +Coursefork, building soundtrack.io...

Onward, and Ever Upward
2013 was an amazing year; between founding +Coursefork, building soundtrack.io and para.io, working with several amazing startups [1], and being allowed to call myself a peer to some of the smartest people I know all throughout, it has been a year of both great achievement and personal growth.  This sets an incredibly compelling stage for 2014 and everything to come therein.

Today, I'm excited to announce that I'll be joining the likes of Jeff Garzik [2], Patrick Nagurny, and Ian Patton under the leadership of CTO Stephen Pair at +Bitpay, which allows anyone to quickly and seamlessly accept Bitcoin as payment, settling immediately in any currency, including USD.

Bitcoin has become one of the biggest stories of 2013, having grown over 9000% in value [3] and even surpassing Western Union in transaction volume [4].  As potentially the most counterfeit-proof form of payment in history, Bitcoin is poised to become one of the most disruptive technologies since the invention of the Internet as society moves increasingly into decentralized systems in an era of waning trust and increasing technological awareness by growing economies like China, India, and Brazil [5].

Taking advantage of this trend of decentralization, BitPay is perfectly positioned to serve as the mechanism for BitCoin's mass-adoption as massive merchants such as +Overstock.com move to accept this new form of payment.  It's exciting to be involved with a company in this position at such an early stage, and expand the breadth of my experience to include another decentralized system, and especially to be holding the responsibility of expanding the company's open-source initiatives and engaging the developer community in a meaningful way.

After parting ways with Coursefork late last year, I've taken a seat on the Board of Advisors, allowing the amazing team we built to realize the vision of open-sourcing the world of education [6] under the leadership of CTO +Brian Marks.  Brian was previously the CTO of successful education startup WebAssign [7], and will be an excellent steward of Coursefork's team and technology as they move towards the much-needed decentralization and open-sourcing of the education industry.  My best wishes to the team as they endeavor to do so!

Exciting times all around, and I'm truly lucky to be a part of it in so many ways.  Now let's go make the world a better place.

[1]: One of which, DigaForce, was just acquired: http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/news/2014/01/02/apex-tech-firm-strategic-link-partners.html?page=all — congratulations to +Anthony Pompliano and +Matthew Cotter!
[2]: Jeff is one of the core developers of Bitcoin and a former +Red Hat team member from Raleigh.  How's that for the Triangle Company Family tree, +Derrick Minor?!
[3]: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/11/29/which-currency-is-up-over-9000-this-year-and-sells-for-almost-as-much-as-an-ounce-of-gold/
[4]: http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-can-be-the-new-western-union-2013-12
[5]: You might recall that in March of 2013, the Cypriot government restricted withdrawals and then utilized citizens' bank accounts directly to bail out their banking system, resulting in a surge in Bitcoin prices as individuals fled the fiat currency: http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/28/investing/bitcoin-cyprus/
[6]: Here's an interview I did while CTO of Coursefork with +Jason Hibbets from +Opensource.com that explains the vision: http://opensource.com/education/13/9/coursefork-education-tool
[7]: As a cofounder and CTO at WebAssign for 13 years, Brian took the education company from zero to over $30M in yearly revenue before becoming my co-founder at Coursefork.

Attachments

Stephen Pair: BitCoin Economy

Stephen Pair, Cofounder and CTO, BitPay on doing business in the BitCoin economy.

1 Replies

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Onward, and Ever Upward 2013 was an amazing year; between founding +Coursefork, building soundtrack.io...

Onward, and Ever Upward
2013 was an amazing year; between founding +Coursefork, building soundtrack.io and para.io, working with several amazing startups [1], and being allowed to call myself a peer to some of the smartest people I know all throughout, it has been a year of both great achievement and personal growth.  This sets an incredibly compelling stage for 2014 and everything to come therein.

Today, I'm excited to announce that I'll be joining the likes of Jeff Garzik [2], Patrick Nagurny, and Ian Patton under the leadership of CTO Stephen Pair at +Bitpay, which allows anyone to quickly and seamlessly accept Bitcoin as payment, settling immediately in any currency, including USD.

Bitcoin has become one of the biggest stories of 2013, having grown over 9000% in value [3] and even surpassing Western Union in transaction volume [4].  As potentially the most counterfeit-proof form of payment in history, Bitcoin is poised to become one of the most disruptive technologies since the invention of the Internet as society moves increasingly into decentralized systems in an era of waning trust and increasing technological awareness by growing economies like China, India, and Brazil [5].

Taking advantage of this trend of decentralization, BitPay is perfectly positioned to serve as the mechanism for BitCoin's mass-adoption as massive merchants such as +Overstock.com move to accept this new form of payment.  It's exciting to be involved with a company in this position at such an early stage, and expand the breadth of my experience to include another decentralized system, and especially to be holding the responsibility of expanding the company's open-source initiatives and engaging the developer community in a meaningful way.

After parting ways with Coursefork late last year, I've taken a seat on the Board of Advisors, allowing the amazing team we built to realize the vision of open-sourcing the world of education [6] under the leadership of CTO +Brian Marks.  Brian was previously the CTO of successful education startup WebAssign [7], and will be an excellent steward of Coursefork's team and technology as they move towards the much-needed decentralization and open-sourcing of the education industry.  My best wishes to the team as they endeavor to do so!

Exciting times all around, and I'm truly lucky to be a part of it in so many ways.  Now let's go make the world a better place.

[1]: One of which, DigaForce, was just acquired: http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/news/2014/01/02/apex-tech-firm-strategic-link-partners.html?page=all — congratulations to +Anthony Pompliano and +Matthew Cotter!
[2]: Jeff is one of the core developers of Bitcoin and a former +Red Hat team member from Raleigh.  How's that for the Triangle Company Family tree, +Derrick Minor?!
[3]: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/11/29/which-currency-is-up-over-9000-this-year-and-sells-for-almost-as-much-as-an-ounce-of-gold/
[4]: http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-can-be-the-new-western-union-2013-12
[5]: You might recall that in March of 2013, the Cypriot government restricted withdrawals and then utilized citizens' bank accounts directly to bail out their banking system, resulting in a surge in Bitcoin prices as individuals fled the fiat currency: http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/28/investing/bitcoin-cyprus/
[6]: Here's an interview I did while CTO of Coursefork with +Jason Hibbets from +Opensource.com that explains the vision: http://opensource.com/education/13/9/coursefork-education-tool
[7]: As a cofounder and CTO at WebAssign for 13 years, Brian took the education company from zero to over $30M in yearly revenue before becoming my co-founder at Coursefork.

Attachments

Stephen Pair: BitCoin Economy

Stephen Pair, Cofounder and CTO, BitPay on doing business in the BitCoin economy.

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DMOZ In Danger? Not So Much, Says DMOZ Editor

DMOZ: Open DirectoryThere's been a lot of active discussion about the state of AOL's directory project, DMOZ. There have been many attempts to unseat the directory project from its position as the most authoritative listing resource, such as the Yahoo Directory. Many of these attempts have fallen by the wayside, as Rand Fiskin points out, but none have remained more controversial than DMOZ. More recently, Chris Crum's post on WebProNews about his lack of respect for DMOZ has stirred up a hornet's nest of DMOZ criticism, including a particular post claiming DMOZ is a waste of time.

I forwarded a lot of this on to Philip Nicolcev, known by username as "frug", who is the editor of several roleplay-oriented categories on DMOZ. He responded to me directly with a highly insightful email, and I was fortunate enough to receive his permission to share its contents.

I've been editing the pbp category at DMOZ for what... 4 years now? About that. This article is a big whiny complaint which misses the mark. They are both correct and sadly mistaken. Yes, dmoz is outdated and yes, it fails because of attitude problems, but not silly allegations of 'corruption' or people who are bitter because they didn't get listed. We don't list everything, I don't list even half of the submissions I get, and anyone who has been an administrator or an editor for a similar type of project knows better than to take these kinds of complaints seriously. One thing they say is definitely correct: Apply once carefully following their rules if you wish and then, as Will suggested, forget about them.

This is exactly the approach that should be modeled for any directory, regardless of its state or condition. When you are submitting a link to a directory, you are being offered the privilege to be listed as a resource by the owners and management of that directory. They are not obligated to list your link, let alone review it in a timely fashion--but this would be genuinely appreciated and would reflect on the directory's position as a "good" resource.

DMOZ is the primary source for Google's Directory, and you must respect the opinion of such a large and successful company. It's obvious that the idea behind an open directory like DMOZ is good, but where they fail is in execution. More on that later.

He continues:

That is what you should do. Apply once and forget about it, don't claim anybody is corrupt because whether you believe my opinion or not, there's no corruption. Nobody cares enough about dmoz anymore for it to be valuable for extortion. Don't be ridiculous. Furthermore if you were to speak to some of the senior editors you'd discover that they are pretty damn uptight, even obsessive. The problems with dmoz are, in my opinion, twofold. First off, you have the dated trashy look of the website which is a relic of the 1990's. It's not user friendly, it doesn't entice anyone to go browsing, and it hasn't adapted or added features that would help people understand the structure of the directory or find what they're looking for. The editor forums still use phpBB2, and you should see the editing panel. You wouldn't believe how dated this stuff is. Frankly it has needed an overhaul for years now.

I largely agree with him. The phpBB team deprecated the phpBB2 branch at the beginning of this year, ending support for the outdated platform. AOL would do well to do a complete overhaul of the site's design now that "Web 2.0" has come and gone (and I could reference posts all day on that) - and AOL has completely missed their opportunity to latch on and ride the wave.

Philip finishes his correspondance with the frightening truth that has been plaguing many post-Web2.0 sites and services:

The second problem, attitude, is partially the cause of the first problem. It's a stagnant atmosphere where nothing gets done and nobody gets listened to. They would rather leave a directory as a cluttered mess of garbage than risk breaking its structure by overhauling it. Fixing my category took me about two years before I had approval to restructure it, and I'm in a small niche category nobody pays much attention to. Since becoming an editor I have deleted about 60% of the outdated links listed. Had I not joined, they'd still be there cluttering things up with linkspam geocities pages from 10 years ago. So yeah, dmoz is failing, but not because of corruption or because some guy didn't get what he wanted. And, honestly, if the author of this article was applying to dmoz just to 'test how fair it was' then I'm glad they rejected him. Somehow they made the right decision because he's wasting their time.

And that's the exact problem - the DMOZ community has completely stagnated, which has resulted in the puddle of goop that the directory has become. In my personal opinion, I think that AOL could do a lot better job at community management (all reputation management aside) by setting up a more rigid structure of responsibility. The editors need to be held responsible for a timely review specified by their superiors, and there needs to be cross-checking of the editor's work by other qualified editors.

Is this another example of AOL's purchases being mismanaged and ultimately being forgotten, such as what many people claim is the case with ex-Nullsoft product WinAmp? Perhaps, but I think that remains to be seen. After all, even our favored Google took a questionable amount of time to convert phone-consolidation service GrandCentral to the new Google Voice after its 2007 acquisition. DMOZ was in fact originally a Netscape project, which then-strong AOL acquired in 1998. Since that acquisition, little has changed.

All said and done, DMOZ needs some love if it's going to survive as anything more than a relic of trust and authority in the Web 2.0 bubble. As Philip points out, it has both good and bad traits and deserves further attention, but it needs to be attention in (and from) the right direction. The questions remain; where has AOL been? What can be done about the editors (or lack thereof)? How can DMOZ be improved?

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RPGChat Forum Review

RPGChat is one of the other large roleplaying forums out there, and they've been around since about May, 2001. Since then, RPGChat has gone through many evolutions, and has expanded rapidly - they started with a forum, grew into a decent sized roleplaying chat, and finally removed the chat and went back to forums.

RPGChat\'s Forum Index You'll immediately notice the large number of forums, which for most boards isn't an issue. In today's roleplaying world, RPGChat's index fits right in.

They've got four basic navigation options at the top of the page, which are images instead of text, which isn't very good for SEO. The four menu options are Home, Forums, Chat, and Rules. I gave each of them a shot, but it looks like only the "Home" and "Rules" link work.

I'm going to take a look at their code, because using images for links isn't horrible if you specify the right attributes. Let's have a glance:

<a href="http://forums.rpgchat.com/index.php"> <img src="header/but_home.jpg" border="0"> </a>

Yikes! Not only does the anchor not have a title attribute, but the image doesn't have an alt attribute! Search engines won't be able to understand the context of these links, and the flow of link juice to the two working links won't be very beneficial.

I participated on these forums for a few months as the username Alighieri, for that period, I became the single most active user in their welcome forum. I posted in several other topics, but got pretty frustrated with the limitation on the length of a post (20,000 characters).

When attempting to post a profile for one of my characters, I was immediately snubbed by the limitation. This makes well-researched posts difficult to make, specifically with the citations that must be put in place for accurate references. Ultimately, I was forced to cut out portions of my character's history to fit it into the post.

After posting for a few weeks nonstop in the Welcome Forum, I headed off to the The Arena area, where turn-based fighting is largely popular. I opened a topic with a list of the top turn based fighters, placed into a neat little image and posted right into the topic. It took a few days to get any response at all, (save for a few people who contacted me over AIM) and when I did get a response, I logged in to RPGChat to find that I had been banned for "advertising on multiple occasions", much to my surprise.

However, while my visit was cut short, I met some good friends, and had some great discussions. Unfortunately, the forum does not allow any links to external sites of any kind, and also does not allow signatures, which makes it very difficult to spread the word about the topics you start there. This isn't very good for encouraging member interaction, and makes it very difficult for momentum of any sort to be gained within the community.

RPGChat\'s LogoAfter speaking with someone who had messaged me on AIM prior to my banning, I confirmed my worst fears - RPGChat is a closed community, and is not very open to outside communities or positive interaction with those communities. This is the number one concern mentioned to me about RPGChat and their future, and there is ongoing fear of the community continuing to stagnate without any growth other than direct referral.

I sent a request via the site's contact form, as listed at the bottom every page, which merely opened a new email to their support address, forums@rpgchat.com - I sent a couple questions in my email, and I identified who I was, but I haven't yet received a response. It'd be great if we could get an interview with an admin from RPGChat on the history of the site!

In terms of organic visitors, a search for pages on RPGChat has about 16,200 results. When digging through the pages, I noticed that only 477 pages were in the primary index, with the remainder in the supplemental index. That's scary!

Let's take a look at their search results: Running a Google search on RPGChat

As you can see from the above search, we can confirm that there is some duplicate content problems. However, from what we've seen - most of RPGChat's traffic is a result of direct referral. We can identify with the importance of defensible traffic, but organic traffic is also a high-quality method of driving laser-targeted traffic to your site, and it looks like RPGChat is seriously missing out on this.

RPGChat has a relatively active forum; 63,708 threads, 1,925,709 posts, and 59,352 "active" members. While that's only an average of about 30 posts per thread and only about 32 posts per user, they do have some great quality and style elements in their posts that you simply don't see in many other places in roleplaying forums these days. I think it would be a great move for them to deactivate a lot of their older and inactive members, and send out reminders to these users to come back and join in on the fun.

It also seemed like a consensus that the single best area on RPGChat was the Clans & Guilds forum, which most users simply called "C/G" for short. It looks like most other forums' version of a multiverse, where roleplay is freeform, and most action is player-driven with rules being defined by the status quo.

Lack of availability aside, RPGChat leaves a pretty strong impression, and if you're careful to follow their 500 word list of rules, you can likely make some friends and enjoy some great high-quality roleplay. The administration needs to do some overhauling if they're going to keep the community healthy, but for the time being - RPGChat makes for a great roleplaying destination.

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The slides for my "Open Source:...

The slides for my "Open Source: Beyond Bitcoin" talk, featuring #ChainDB, are open source & available here:

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martindale.github.io/beyond-bitcoin

martindale.github.io/beyond-bitcoin

martindale.github.io/beyond-bitcoin

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RT @martindale: The slides for my...

RT @martindale: The slides for my "Open Source: Beyond Bitcoin" talk, featuring #ChainDB, are open source & available here:

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martindale.github.io/beyond-bitcoin

martindale.github.io/beyond-bitcoin

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RT @martindale: The slides for my...

RT @martindale: The slides for my "Open Source: Beyond Bitcoin" talk, featuring #ChainDB, are open source & available here:

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martindale.github.io/beyond-bitcoin

martindale.github.io/beyond-bitcoin

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RT @martindale: The slides for my...

RT @martindale: The slides for my "Open Source: Beyond Bitcoin" talk, featuring #ChainDB, are open source & available here:

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martindale.github.io/beyond-bitcoin

martindale.github.io/beyond-bitcoin

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RT @martindale: The slides for my...

RT @martindale: The slides for my "Open Source: Beyond Bitcoin" talk, featuring #ChainDB, are open source & available here:

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martindale.github.io/beyond-bitcoin

martindale.github.io/beyond-bitcoin

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RT @martindale: The slides for my...

RT @martindale: The slides for my "Open Source: Beyond Bitcoin" talk, featuring #ChainDB, are open source & available here:

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martindale.github.io/beyond-bitcoin

martindale.github.io/beyond-bitcoin

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RT @martindale: The slides for my...

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martindale.github.io/beyond-bitcoin

martindale.github.io/beyond-bitcoin

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RT @martindale: The slides for my...

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martindale.github.io/beyond-bitcoin

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RT @martindale: The slides for my...

RT @martindale: The slides for my "Open Source: Beyond Bitcoin" talk, featuring #ChainDB, are open source & available here:

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martindale.github.io/beyond-bitcoin

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RT @martindale: The slides for my...

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martindale.github.io/beyond-bitcoin

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RT @martindale: The slides for my...

RT @martindale: The slides for my "Open Source: Beyond Bitcoin" talk, featuring #ChainDB, are open source & available here:

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martindale.github.io/beyond-bitcoin

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RT @martindale: The slides for my...

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martindale.github.io/beyond-bitcoin

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RT @martindale: The slides for my "Open Source: Beyond Bitcoin" talk, featuring #ChainDB, are open source & available here:

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martindale.github.io/beyond-bitcoin

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RT @martindale: The slides for my...

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martindale.github.io/beyond-bitcoin

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RT @martindale: The slides for my...

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martindale.github.io/beyond-bitcoin

martindale.github.io/beyond-bitcoin

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martindale.github.io/beyond-bitcoin

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RT @martindale: The slides for my...

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martindale.github.io/beyond-bitcoin

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RT @martindale: The slides for my...

RT @martindale: The slides for my "Open Source: Beyond Bitcoin" talk, featuring #ChainDB, are open source & available here:

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martindale.github.io/beyond-bitcoin

martindale.github.io/beyond-bitcoin

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RT @martindale: The slides for my...

RT @martindale: The slides for my "Open Source: Beyond Bitcoin" talk, featuring #ChainDB, are open source & available here:

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martindale.github.io/beyond-bitcoin

martindale.github.io/beyond-bitcoin

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martindale.github.io/beyond-bitcoin

martindale.github.io/beyond-bitcoin

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RT @martindale: The slides for my...

RT @martindale: The slides for my "Open Source: Beyond Bitcoin" talk, featuring #ChainDB, are open source & available here:

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martindale.github.io/beyond-bitcoin

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What does the future of open education look like? Learn about our founders' vision for open source education...

What does the future of open education look like?
Learn about our founders' vision for open source education in our latest interview by +Anthony Pompliano.

#OpenSource   #education  

Attachments

The Power of Open Collaboration in Education | Techli

By: Anthony Pompliano. Content is king in the modern world. This lesson rings true in business, media, and even education. It's no secret that many people think the current education system is broken. Most individuals and organizations are focused on how to improve the delivery and cost of ...

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Open Source is the Future of Education If you're familiar with coding, chances are you've seen how the...

Open Source is the Future of Education
If you're familiar with coding, chances are you've seen how the open source software landscape has changed over the past few years with the advent of +GitHub.  With my new company +Coursefork, I'm hoping to incite the same kind of change in the world of #education .

+Jason Hibbets from +Opensource.com interviewed me recently about how we're building a better education, but it can't stop with us—he correctly identifies that the most important ingredient is the community of people who will be a part of the social fabric of education as we move forward.

Check out the interview and let me know your thoughts.

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Coursefork is like a GitHub for course creation, interview with Eric Martindale |

Interview with Eric Martindale of Coursefork; how him and his team created an open source tool for developing better educational materials.

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Open Source is the Future of Education If you're familiar with coding, chances are you've seen how the...

Open Source is the Future of Education
If you're familiar with coding, chances are you've seen how the open source software landscape has changed over the past few years with the advent of +GitHub.  With my new company +Coursefork, I'm hoping to incite the same kind of change in the world of #education .

+Jason Hibbets from +Opensource.com interviewed me recently about how we're building a better education, but it can't stop with us—he correctly identifies that the most important ingredient is the community of people who will be a part of the social fabric of education as we move forward.

Check out the interview and let me know your thoughts.

Attachments

Coursefork is like a GitHub for course creation, interview with Eric Martindale |

Interview with Eric Martindale of Coursefork; how him and his team created an open source tool for developing better educational materials.

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Open Source is the Future of Education If you're familiar with coding, chances are you've seen how the...

Open Source is the Future of Education
If you're familiar with coding, chances are you've seen how the open source software landscape has changed over the past few years with the advent of +GitHub.  With my new company +Coursefork, I'm hoping to incite the same kind of change in the world of #education .

+Jason Hibbets from +Opensource.com interviewed me recently about how we're building a better education, but it can't stop with us—he correctly identifies that the most important ingredient is the community of people who will be a part of the social fabric of education as we move forward.

Check out the interview and let me know your thoughts.

Attachments

Coursefork is like a GitHub for course creation, interview with Eric Martindale |

Interview with Eric Martindale of Coursefork; how him and his team created an open source tool for developing better educational materials.

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Open Source is the Future of Education If you're familiar with coding, chances are you've seen how the...

Open Source is the Future of Education
If you're familiar with coding, chances are you've seen how the open source software landscape has changed over the past few years with the advent of +GitHub.  With my new company +Coursefork, I'm hoping to incite the same kind of change in the world of #education .

+Jason Hibbets from +Opensource.com interviewed me recently about how we're building a better education, but it can't stop with us—he correctly identifies that the most important ingredient is the community of people who will be a part of the social fabric of education as we move forward.

Check out the interview and let me know your thoughts.

Attachments

Coursefork is like a GitHub for course creation, interview with Eric Martindale |

Interview with Eric Martindale of Coursefork; how him and his team created an open source tool for developing better educational materials.

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The Weekend

I just found an awesome list of Open source applications for Windows, and thought I'd take the time to update.

I think I'm sick or getting sick from the weekend, which was awesome all in itself. Rode over to Ian's on Saturday, enjoyed a good night with some new friends, playing Unreal Tournament (the original, what else?) until somewhere around 3AM. Ah, good times. I woke up the next day in time to give Amber a call before she left for work. We got to gaming shortly after lunch, and for once, our ship didn't esplode! (partly because we left it behind for the majority of the game...)

Sunday we relaxed and watched football, both American and World. Poor poor Chelsea! I ended up rolling in at about 4PM, and proceeded to put together some home cooking for when Amber got off work. Unfortunately, my plans were foiled by her work schedule, and she got off at six instead of the planned five, denying us the opportunity of going to the park to eat while the sun set. We enjoyed ourselves nonetheless, and had a good cuddly evening.

Work today was a pain, though. Internet was out, and Bellsouth took until 5PM to bring us a mediocre solution. One of our major clients was having email problems, which I couldn't troubleshoot until the internet was up. Pity.

And, now I come home, GWing is having some people problems, and the GT League is bumbling along as usual. Now, about that roleplaying social reform...

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Exhaustion

Remote Desktop-ing from work to my personal computer at the house today... and there I was, multitasking AGAIN... Photoshop and Dreamweaver both open... and I was DRAWING with RDP. Well, so Photoshop decides to lock EVERYTHING up. So, I restart the computer and open Remote Desktop again. I connect to my computer, I log in... and KAZZAM!!!!!111one!

There's everything running perfectly just as it was. I was happy. IPG!

I'm tired as hell now, too. We ended up doing like... 400 jumping jacks... and 100 kicks of each type. I'm tired as fook. Oh, and for those that don't understand what I'm talking about, I take Isshin-ryu Karate. Since I'm too tired to list my other experience in martial arts, I think I'm going to lay down.

Readygo.

OR NOT!

Our car decided not to start. Hell, it wasn't even turning. I kicked it. It turned.

You see, certain things deserve a good kick in the face sometimes. Of course, I'd never do that to a person. Unless they did something wrong. That's human nature, though.... ANYWAY. Before I trail off into philosophy, I'll continue on my previous subject. Things such as cars and the occasional computer deserve a good kick. Not just a love tap, but not a decapitation, either. I mean, have you ever build a quantum particle accelerator that just randomly stopped working until you kicked it out of frustation, at which point it sends 300W of microwave energy into your stomach?

Kicking something isn't always the solution, though. There I was using Windows, and it decided to choke and DIE! DIE! DIE! I digress. It was loading something, probably explorer.exe ... and I decided to stroke it. Stroking my machine isn't exactly conventional, but of course, it suddenly worked. Ever since, I've been extremely superstitious about the way I touch my machine. One wrong bump, and it gets irrated at me, and starts shooting sparks everywhere. But a little scratch on the top of the case and it's all good. It works like a charm, let me tell you. Your computer will be cooking popcorn and making your bed in no time.

Speaking of your computer popping teh popcorn, has anyone talked to HAL on GWing lately? Is it just me, or is Chrono trying to get HAL to grow a body and assassinate me? For real? He's getting thoroughly viscious. I've already started a topic on GWing about it, and I guess it'll evolve with time. http://gwing.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=539

Readyslowgo.

--
Eric Martindale
IT Professional
Admin of GWing.net

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Letter Sweep

Following suit with the likes of Tim Bray and Eric Meyer, I figured I'd throw together my browser's letter sweep tonight.

  • [A]dmin Site. Yeah, I guess I would be visiting the admin panel for this. Quite frequently.
  • Mirascape's [B]log. An infrequent haunt of mine, but fairly obvious.
  • [C]MON. Cluster Monitor for MySQL Cluster, something I almost always have open.
  • Google [D]ocs. This one is painfully obvious, I use Google Docs extensively.
  • [E]ricMartindale.com. Okay, that's a gimme. Does this make me egocentric?
  • [F]acebook. I'm actually fairly ashamed of this one. Why can't I have a cool F site? sadface
  • [G]mail. Three accounts linked using Google's Multiple Sign-in. Open [almost] all day.
  • [H]ighcharts JS. A pretty kick-ass Javascript library for generating charts on the clientside.
  • [I]nternal Discussion. A site for communication with my team. :)
  • [J]Query Mobile Demo, 1.0 alpha 3. I've been spending a lot of time toying with jQuery Mobile, seeing where it's going compared to Sencha Touch.
  • [K]r.github.com. Keith Rarick's GitHub redirect. Total ass-kicker.
  • [L]inkedIn. Pretty straightforward, between hiring for our team at @Mirascape and the travel to and from various conferences and Meetups lately.
  • [M]irascape. The augmented reality platform I'm responsible for.
  • [N]oxBot. A nice PHP-powered IRC bot with various plugins. A bit out of date, but very powerful. Been using it for a couple things lately.
  • [O]K, QR Me!. A QR Code-generating link shortener I built.
  • [P]ostmark. Best Email delivery service I've used. Nice RESTful API, flat rate for emails sent.
  • [Q]uora. These guys nail Q&A, and they're doing it pretty well. Check out all their buzz, too. But for some reason, I just don't stick.
  • Google [R]eader. “From your 1,040 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 21,549 items, clicked 274 items, starred 853 items, shared 37 items, and emailed 8 items.” -- </stats>
  • [S]erver Stats for Mirascape. Powered by Munin, it's how I keep track of the status and metrics of all my servers.
  • [T]witter. Not surprising. I love their webapp for my personal use, but own and manage at least five accounts using SplitTweet.
  • [U]serVoice. Pretty sweet tool I use for giving the communities I manage a good way to build a consensus on what they desire most. Examples I run: for RolePlayGateway, and EVE UserVoice for EVE Online.
  • Google [V]oice. Allows me to use SMS from my computer, read (as opposed to listen to) voicemail. Great tool. If only it supported MMS.
  • [W]achovia. One of the places I do banking.
  • [X]DA Developers. An indisposable resource for getting rid of carrier-installed crap and running my own choice of software on the hardware I purchased!
  • [Y]ouTube. Another big namer. No surprise.
  • [Z]ecco. Where I trade most of my public stocks. :)

Surprisingly populist, and there's a lot of Google-owned properties in there. I'm also using Chromium, so I think it prefers the roots of the sites I visit instead of searching through my history for individual pages.

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Is this a free (open source)... in reply to

Is this a free (open source) event?

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Ah, I opened the link, very... in reply to

Ah, I opened the link, very nice indeed.

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Education is open at many universities... in reply to

Education is open at many universities and other institutions 

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I'm now on day 66 of...

I'm now on day 66 of my open-source coding streak: StackOverflow.

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github.com/martindale

github.com/martindale

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I'm now on day 66 of...

I'm now on day 66 of my open-source coding streak: StackOverflow.

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github.com/martindale

github.com/martindale

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This makes me so happy; Mattermost,...

This makes me so happy; Mattermost, an open-source and self-hosted version of Slack:

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mattermost.org

mattermost.org

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Burnout is a real threat to...

Burnout is a real threat to the open-source ecosystem. Building a strong, supportive community is hard, but necessa…

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twitter.com/i/web/status/8…

twitter.com/i/web/status/8…

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Exciting day for an open-source effort...

Exciting day for an open-source effort of mine. Societies require liberty to succeed, yet technology is stifling ou…

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twitter.com/i/web/status/8…

twitter.com/i/web/status/8…

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I&#39;ve been quite lonely on Google+... in reply to

I've been quite lonely on Google+ so far to be honest, Eric. I had the experience you described on Twitter, but not so here. Hope it improves for me once this opens to the public.

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Any of the speakers at #ATO2013...

Any of the speakers at #ATO2013 planning on open-sourcing their talks? I'd love to chat with you.

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Its partly Iran&#39;s fault for not... in reply to

Its partly Iran's fault for not using Linux. You cant expect your house to not get robbed if you leave all the gates and windows open.

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Its partly Iran&#39;s fault for not... in reply to

Its partly Iran's fault for not using Linux. You cant expect your house to not get robbed if you leave all the gates and windows open.

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Its partly Iran&#39;s fault for not... in reply to

Its partly Iran's fault for not using Linux. You cant expect your house to not get robbed if you leave all the gates and windows open.

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Today is my 100th consecutive day...

Today is my 100th consecutive day of publishing open-source code in 2015. I've even gotten enough done to give a talk on one of my projects.

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Today is my 100th consecutive day...

Today is my 100th consecutive day of publishing open-source code in 2015. I've even gotten enough done to give a talk on one of my projects.

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I'll be speaking next week at...

I'll be speaking next week at the 2014 Bitcoin Conference in Amsterdam, Netherlands about how important open source is to the new financial infrastructure. Anything else I should touch on?

Attachments

Bitcoin Conference 2014

Bitcoin Conference 2014 - Thursday, 15 May 2014 - Saturday, 17 May 2014, Passenger Terminal Amsterdam

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RT @martindale: I'm now on day...

RT @martindale: I'm now on day 66 of my open-source coding streak:

Attachments

github.com/martindale

github.com/martindale

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RT @martindale: This makes me so...

RT @martindale: This makes me so happy; Mattermost, an open-source and self-hosted version of Slack:

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mattermost.org

mattermost.org

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RT @martindale: This makes me so...

RT @martindale: This makes me so happy; Mattermost, an open-source and self-hosted version of Slack:

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mattermost.org

mattermost.org

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RT @martindale: This makes me so...

RT @martindale: This makes me so happy; Mattermost, an open-source and self-hosted version of Slack:

Attachments

mattermost.org

mattermost.org

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Among the open-source projects I've been...

Among the open-source projects I've been working on: this collaborative music-listening site, like @turntablefm was.

Attachments

twitter.com/soundtrackio/s…

twitter.com/soundtrackio/s…

twitter.com/soundtrackio/s…

twitter.com/soundtrackio/s…

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If our enemies are going to... in reply to

If our enemies are going to use cyberattacks, threaten to close free and open seas, and threaten our allies, we must use all means to defend our Country, freedom of the Seas, and show them that America's resolve and our goals are clear.

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Clever @TeslaMotors strategy for supercharger stations:...

Clever @TeslaMotors strategy for supercharger stations: place them between cities. Burlington station opens Thursday:

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bizjournals.com/triangle/blog/…

bizjournals.com/triangle/blog/…

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Let me show you why I...

Let me show you why I started Coursefork, and subsequently began work on BitPay. Not only is the quality of education plummeting, but the cost of it is linearly increasing [1]. What are you doing about it? [1]: http://coursefork.org/martindale/open-freedom-and-education#the-problem

Attachments

It's impossible to work your way through college nowadays | Randal S. Olson

Randy Olson explains why it's impossible to work your way through college nowadays.

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Today, BitPay is excited to announce...

Today, BitPay is excited to announce the general availability of Bitcore, an open-source library to interact directly with #bitcoin. If you're building anything related to #cryptofinance, I'm happy to answer questions. Happy Valentine's Day, crypto-lovers.

Attachments

Bitcore

Bitcore is a complete, native interface to the Bitcoin network, and provides the core functionality needed to develop apps for bitcoin.

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RT @martindale: Burnout is a real...

RT @martindale: Burnout is a real threat to the open-source ecosystem. Building a strong, supportive community is hard, but necessary for l…

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Hassan: yes, this is my workstation.... in reply to

Hassan: yes, this is my workstation. The top three (in order) are: Google Chrome, MongoDB, and VirtualBox. Chrome is using about 12GB on its own (I have about ~350 tabs open on six different workspaces at the moment), but I'm also running both Chromium and Epiphany, which are a close fourth and fifth.

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I've been keeping so many tabs...

I've been keeping so many tabs open that when I "restore crashed tabs", I get temp-banned from @HackerNews due to flooding. Serves me right.

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RT @martindale: Exciting day for an...

RT @martindale: Exciting day for an open-source effort of mine. Societies require liberty to succeed, yet technology is stifling our freedo…

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RT @martindale: Exciting day for an...

RT @martindale: Exciting day for an open-source effort of mine. Societies require liberty to succeed, yet technology is stifling our freedo…

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RT @martindale: Exciting day for an...

RT @martindale: Exciting day for an open-source effort of mine. Societies require liberty to succeed, yet technology is stifling our freedo…

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RT @martindale: Exciting day for an...

RT @martindale: Exciting day for an open-source effort of mine. Societies require liberty to succeed, yet technology is stifling our freedo…

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RT @martindale: Exciting day for an...

RT @martindale: Exciting day for an open-source effort of mine. Societies require liberty to succeed, yet technology is stifling our freedo…

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RT @martindale: Exciting day for an...

RT @martindale: Exciting day for an open-source effort of mine. Societies require liberty to succeed, yet technology is stifling our freedo…

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RT @martindale: Exciting day for an...

RT @martindale: Exciting day for an open-source effort of mine. Societies require liberty to succeed, yet technology is stifling our freedo…

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RT @martindale: Exciting day for an...

RT @martindale: Exciting day for an open-source effort of mine. Societies require liberty to succeed, yet technology is stifling our freedo…

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RT @martindale: Exciting day for an...

RT @martindale: Exciting day for an open-source effort of mine. Societies require liberty to succeed, yet technology is stifling our freedo…

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RT @martindale: Exciting day for an...

RT @martindale: Exciting day for an open-source effort of mine. Societies require liberty to succeed, yet technology is stifling our freedo…

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RT @martindale: Exciting day for an...

RT @martindale: Exciting day for an open-source effort of mine. Societies require liberty to succeed, yet technology is stifling our freedo…

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RT @martindale: Exciting day for an...

RT @martindale: Exciting day for an open-source effort of mine. Societies require liberty to succeed, yet technology is stifling our freedo…

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RT @martindale: Exciting day for an...

RT @martindale: Exciting day for an open-source effort of mine. Societies require liberty to succeed, yet technology is stifling our freedo…

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RT @martindale: Exciting day for an...

RT @martindale: Exciting day for an open-source effort of mine. Societies require liberty to succeed, yet technology is stifling our freedo…

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RT @martindale: Exciting day for an...

RT @martindale: Exciting day for an open-source effort of mine. Societies require liberty to succeed, yet technology is stifling our freedo…

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RT @martindale: Exciting day for an...

RT @martindale: Exciting day for an open-source effort of mine. Societies require liberty to succeed, yet technology is stifling our freedo…

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RT @martindale: Exciting day for an...

RT @martindale: Exciting day for an open-source effort of mine. Societies require liberty to succeed, yet technology is stifling our freedo…

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RT @martindale: Exciting day for an...

RT @martindale: Exciting day for an open-source effort of mine. Societies require liberty to succeed, yet technology is stifling our freedo…

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RT @martindale: Exciting day for an...

RT @martindale: Exciting day for an open-source effort of mine. Societies require liberty to succeed, yet technology is stifling our freedo…

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RT @martindale: Exciting day for an...

RT @martindale: Exciting day for an open-source effort of mine. Societies require liberty to succeed, yet technology is stifling our freedo…

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40 days of consecutive open-source contributions...

40 days of consecutive open-source contributions down, 328 more do go. Not sure if I've found myself yet. #yearofcode http://t.co/a52PMXNzV1

Attachments

pic.twitter.com/a52PMXNzV1

40 days of consecutive open-source contributions down, 328 more do go. Not sure if I've found myself yet. #yearofcode http://t.co/a52PMXNzV1

pic.twitter.com/a52PMXNzV1

40 days of consecutive open-source contributions down, 328 more do go. Not sure if I've found myself yet. #yearofcode http://t.co/a52PMXNzV1

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Progress update: day 56 of publishing...

Progress update: day 56 of publishing open source code. Major updates to Maki! I've since re-discovered @jeresig's

Attachments

ejohn.org/blog/write-cod…

ejohn.org/blog/write-cod…

ejohn.org/blog/write-cod…

ejohn.org/blog/write-cod…

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RT @martindale: Any of the speakers...

RT @martindale: Any of the speakers at #ATO2013 planning on open-sourcing their talks? I'd love to chat with you.

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RT @martindale: Any of the speakers...

RT @martindale: Any of the speakers at #ATO2013 planning on open-sourcing their talks? I'd love to chat with you.

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RT @martindale: Today is my 100th...

RT @martindale: Today is my 100th consecutive day of publishing open-source code in 2015. I've even gotten enough done to give a talk on on…

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RT @martindale: Today is my 100th...

RT @martindale: Today is my 100th consecutive day of publishing open-source code in 2015. I've even gotten enough done to give a talk on on…

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RT @martindale: Today is my 100th...

RT @martindale: Today is my 100th consecutive day of publishing open-source code in 2015. I've even gotten enough done to give a talk on on…

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RT @martindale: Today is my 100th...

RT @martindale: Today is my 100th consecutive day of publishing open-source code in 2015. I've even gotten enough done to give a talk on on…

0 Replies

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I'm giving a talk next week...

I'm giving a talk next week about open-source education and @coursefork. How about that speaker list!? #HackEducation

Attachments

RTP 180: Open Source All the Things

Open source. It's faster, cleaner, and more accurate than traditional methodologies -- and it's the culture the Triangle is fast-becoming known for. There's a reason that Red Hat, the first billion-dollar open source company, has built its headquarters here. For September's “RTP 180," we're celebrat...

5 Replies

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Scratch and AppInventor are awesome and... in reply to

Scratch and AppInventor are awesome and are truly the new Logo - When appinventor was hosted by Google, I taught a few intro sessions to managers at our (ostensibly) IT shop and local meetup groups to great success. Lots of opened eyes. The efforts that Treehouse and CodeAcademy are doing with javascript are also immediate and useful.

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#TSW2013 has startups working on @GoogleGlass,...

#TSW2013 has startups working on @GoogleGlass, Bitcoin, and open source. If that doesn't scream "innovative region", I don't know what does.

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It's official, @bitpay is launching copay,...

It's official, @bitpay is launching copay, an open-source #bitcoin wallet for secure m-of-n transactions (multi-sig):

Attachments

blog.bitpay.com/2014/07/09/cop…

blog.bitpay.com/2014/07/09/cop…

blog.bitpay.com/2014/07/09/cop…

blog.bitpay.com/2014/07/09/cop…

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RT @martindale: 40 days of consecutive...

RT @martindale: 40 days of consecutive open-source contributions down, 328 more do go. Not sure if I've found myself yet. #yearofcode http:…

Attachments

pic.twitter.com/a52PMXNzV1

RT @martindale: 40 days of consecutive open-source contributions down, 328 more do go. Not sure if I've found myself yet. #yearofcode http:…

0 Replies

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I'm finally settling in on @TheOldReader...

I'm finally settling in on @TheOldReader as a replacement for @GoogleReader; I'd like to implement a couple fixes, but it isn't open-source.

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RT @martindale: Among the open-source projects...

RT @martindale: Among the open-source projects I've been working on: this collaborative music-listening site, like @turntablefm was. https:

Attachments

twitter.com/soundtrackio/s…

twitter.com/soundtrackio/s…

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<span class="proflinkWrapper"><span class="proflinkPrefix">+</span><a class="proflink" href="https://plus.google.com/106734796011714755852" oid="106734796011714755852">Brett... in reply to

+Brett Bjornsen He suffered two broken legs (including one with a nasty compound fracture), but what could have been much worse was prevented by Corliss opening his chute after coming into contact with a ridge.

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Beginning with open mic pitches on Friday, attendees bring their best ideas and inspire others to join...

Beginning with open mic pitches on Friday, attendees bring their best ideas and inspire others to join their team. Over Saturday and Sunday teams focus on customer development, validating their ideas, practicing LEAN Startup Methodologies and building a minimal viable product. On Sunday evening teams demo their prototypes and receive valuable feedback from a panel of experts.

Attachments

Triangle Startup Weekend

Beginning with open mic pitches on Friday, attendees bring their best ideas and inspire others to join their team. Over Saturday and Sunday teams focus on customer development, validating their ideas, practicing LEAN Startup Methodologies and building a minimal viable product. On Sunday evening teams demo their prototypes and receive valuable feedback from a panel of experts.

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Beginning with open mic pitches on Friday, attendees bring their best ideas and inspire others to join...

Beginning with open mic pitches on Friday, attendees bring their best ideas and inspire others to join their team. Over Saturday and Sunday teams focus on customer development, validating their ideas, practicing LEAN Startup Methodologies and building a minimal viable product. On Sunday evening teams demo their prototypes and receive valuable feedback from a panel of experts.

Attachments

Triangle Startup Weekend

Beginning with open mic pitches on Friday, attendees bring their best ideas and inspire others to join their team. Over Saturday and Sunday teams focus on customer development, validating their ideas, practicing LEAN Startup Methodologies and building a minimal viable product. On Sunday evening teams demo their prototypes and receive valuable feedback from a panel of experts.

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DMOZ launches Blog

"Since 1998, the Open Directory Project has been the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a passionate, global community of volunteer editors." - and they just launched a blog.

read more | digg story

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RT @martindale: Progress update: day 56...

RT @martindale: Progress update: day 56 of publishing open source code. Major updates to Maki! I've since re-discovered @jeresig's http:/

Attachments

ejohn.org/blog/write-cod…

ejohn.org/blog/write-cod…

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RT @martindale: #TSW2013 has startups working...

RT @martindale: #TSW2013 has startups working on @GoogleGlass, Bitcoin, and open source. If that doesn't scream "innovative region", I don'…

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RT @martindale: #TSW2013 has startups working...

RT @martindale: #TSW2013 has startups working on @GoogleGlass, Bitcoin, and open source. If that doesn't scream "innovative region", I don'…

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RT @martindale: #TSW2013 has startups working...

RT @martindale: #TSW2013 has startups working on @GoogleGlass, Bitcoin, and open source. If that doesn't scream "innovative region", I don'…

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RT @martindale: I'm giving a talk...

RT @martindale: I'm giving a talk next week about open-source education and @coursefork. How about that speaker list!? #HackEducation http:

Attachments

rtp180opensource.eventbrite.com

rtp180opensource.eventbrite.com

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RT @martindale: I'm giving a talk...

RT @martindale: I'm giving a talk next week about open-source education and @coursefork. How about that speaker list!? #HackEducation http:

Attachments

rtp180opensource.eventbrite.com

rtp180opensource.eventbrite.com

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RT @martindale: I'm giving a talk...

RT @martindale: I'm giving a talk next week about open-source education and @coursefork. How about that speaker list!? #HackEducation http:

Attachments

rtp180opensource.eventbrite.com

rtp180opensource.eventbrite.com

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RT @martindale: I'm giving a talk...

RT @martindale: I'm giving a talk next week about open-source education and @coursefork. How about that speaker list!? #HackEducation http:

Attachments

rtp180opensource.eventbrite.com

rtp180opensource.eventbrite.com

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RT @martindale: I'm giving a talk...

RT @martindale: I'm giving a talk next week about open-source education and @coursefork. How about that speaker list!? #HackEducation http:

Attachments

rtp180opensource.eventbrite.com

rtp180opensource.eventbrite.com

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RT @martindale: I'm giving a talk...

RT @martindale: I'm giving a talk next week about open-source education and @coursefork. How about that speaker list!? #HackEducation http:

Attachments

rtp180opensource.eventbrite.com

rtp180opensource.eventbrite.com

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RT @martindale: It's official, @bitpay is...

RT @martindale: It's official, @bitpay is launching copay, an open-source #bitcoin wallet for secure m-of-n transactions (multi-sig): http:

Attachments

blog.bitpay.com/2014/07/09/cop…

blog.bitpay.com/2014/07/09/cop…

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RT @martindale: It's official, @bitpay is...

RT @martindale: It's official, @bitpay is launching copay, an open-source #bitcoin wallet for secure m-of-n transactions (multi-sig): http:

Attachments

blog.bitpay.com/2014/07/09/cop…

blog.bitpay.com/2014/07/09/cop…

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RT @martindale: It's official, @bitpay is...

RT @martindale: It's official, @bitpay is launching copay, an open-source #bitcoin wallet for secure m-of-n transactions (multi-sig): http:

Attachments

blog.bitpay.com/2014/07/09/cop…

blog.bitpay.com/2014/07/09/cop…

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RT @martindale: It's official, @bitpay is...

RT @martindale: It's official, @bitpay is launching copay, an open-source #bitcoin wallet for secure m-of-n transactions (multi-sig): http:

Attachments

blog.bitpay.com/2014/07/09/cop…

blog.bitpay.com/2014/07/09/cop…

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RT @martindale: It's official, @bitpay is...

RT @martindale: It's official, @bitpay is launching copay, an open-source #bitcoin wallet for secure m-of-n transactions (multi-sig): http:

Attachments

blog.bitpay.com/2014/07/09/cop…

blog.bitpay.com/2014/07/09/cop…

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RT @martindale: It's official, @bitpay is...

RT @martindale: It's official, @bitpay is launching copay, an open-source #bitcoin wallet for secure m-of-n transactions (multi-sig): http:

Attachments

blog.bitpay.com/2014/07/09/cop…

blog.bitpay.com/2014/07/09/cop…

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RT @martindale: It's official, @bitpay is...

RT @martindale: It's official, @bitpay is launching copay, an open-source #bitcoin wallet for secure m-of-n transactions (multi-sig): http:

Attachments

blog.bitpay.com/2014/07/09/cop…

blog.bitpay.com/2014/07/09/cop…

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RT @martindale: It's official, @bitpay is...

RT @martindale: It's official, @bitpay is launching copay, an open-source #bitcoin wallet for secure m-of-n transactions (multi-sig): http:

Attachments

blog.bitpay.com/2014/07/09/cop…

blog.bitpay.com/2014/07/09/cop…

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<span class="proflinkWrapper"><span class="proflinkPrefix">+</span><a class="proflink" href="https://plus.google.com/109596373340495798827" oid="109596373340495798827">Daniel... in reply to

+Daniel Ely Rankin thanks, appreciate it. Feel free to give me your thoughts. My startup is already taking into account things like GitHub accounts in how software engineers should be evaluated but if you have other ideas on how you think a potential employer could fairly evaluate a canidate outside a resume, I'm always open to some ideas.

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RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited...

RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited to announce #Bitcore, an open-source Javascript library to interact directly with #bitcoin: http:

Attachments

bitcore.io

bitcore.io

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RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited...

RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited to announce #Bitcore, an open-source Javascript library to interact directly with #bitcoin: http:

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bitcore.io

bitcore.io

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RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited...

RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited to announce #Bitcore, an open-source Javascript library to interact directly with #bitcoin: http:

Attachments

bitcore.io

bitcore.io

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RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited...

RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited to announce #Bitcore, an open-source Javascript library to interact directly with #bitcoin: http:

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bitcore.io

bitcore.io

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RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited...

RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited to announce #Bitcore, an open-source Javascript library to interact directly with #bitcoin: http:

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bitcore.io

bitcore.io

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RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited...

RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited to announce #Bitcore, an open-source Javascript library to interact directly with #bitcoin: http:

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bitcore.io

bitcore.io

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RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited...

RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited to announce #Bitcore, an open-source Javascript library to interact directly with #bitcoin: http:

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bitcore.io

bitcore.io

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RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited...

RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited to announce #Bitcore, an open-source Javascript library to interact directly with #bitcoin: http:

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bitcore.io

bitcore.io

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RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited...

RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited to announce #Bitcore, an open-source Javascript library to interact directly with #bitcoin: http:

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bitcore.io

bitcore.io

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RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited...

RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited to announce #Bitcore, an open-source Javascript library to interact directly with #bitcoin: http:

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bitcore.io

bitcore.io

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RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited...

RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited to announce #Bitcore, an open-source Javascript library to interact directly with #bitcoin: http:

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bitcore.io

bitcore.io

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RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited...

RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited to announce #Bitcore, an open-source Javascript library to interact directly with #bitcoin: http:

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bitcore.io

bitcore.io

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RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited...

RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited to announce #Bitcore, an open-source Javascript library to interact directly with #bitcoin: http:

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bitcore.io

bitcore.io

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RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited...

RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited to announce #Bitcore, an open-source Javascript library to interact directly with #bitcoin: http:

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bitcore.io

bitcore.io

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RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited...

RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited to announce #Bitcore, an open-source Javascript library to interact directly with #bitcoin: http:

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bitcore.io

bitcore.io

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RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited...

RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited to announce #Bitcore, an open-source Javascript library to interact directly with #bitcoin: http:

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bitcore.io

bitcore.io

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RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited...

RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited to announce #Bitcore, an open-source Javascript library to interact directly with #bitcoin: http:

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bitcore.io

bitcore.io

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RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited...

RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited to announce #Bitcore, an open-source Javascript library to interact directly with #bitcoin: http:

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bitcore.io

bitcore.io

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RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited...

RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited to announce #Bitcore, an open-source Javascript library to interact directly with #bitcoin: http:

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bitcore.io

bitcore.io

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RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited...

RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited to announce #Bitcore, an open-source Javascript library to interact directly with #bitcoin: http:

Attachments

bitcore.io

bitcore.io

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RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited...

RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited to announce #Bitcore, an open-source Javascript library to interact directly with #bitcoin: http:

Attachments

bitcore.io

bitcore.io

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RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited...

RT @martindale: Today, @BitPay is excited to announce #Bitcore, an open-source Javascript library to interact directly with #bitcoin: http:

Attachments

bitcore.io

bitcore.io

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“At a high level, it’s based on XMPP MUC (XEP-0045) and Jingle (XEP-0166/167), with some other enhancements...

“At a high level, it’s based on XMPP MUC (XEP-0045) and Jingle (XEP-0166/167), with some other enhancements needed to handle our architecture.”
-- +Justin Uberti

Open-source continues to find a home at Google. Looking forward to seeing more of the Hangout technology pushed back upstream!

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“At a high level, it’s based on XMPP MUC (XEP-0045) and Jingle (XEP-0166/167), with some other enhancements...

“At a high level, it’s based on XMPP MUC (XEP-0045) and Jingle (XEP-0166/167), with some other enhancements needed to handle our architecture.”
-- +Justin Uberti

Open-source continues to find a home at Google. Looking forward to seeing more of the Hangout technology pushed back upstream!

1 Replies

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“At a high level, it’s based on XMPP MUC (XEP-0045) and Jingle (XEP-0166/167), with some other enhancements...

“At a high level, it’s based on XMPP MUC (XEP-0045) and Jingle (XEP-0166/167), with some other enhancements needed to handle our architecture.”
-- +Justin Uberti

Open-source continues to find a home at Google. Looking forward to seeing more of the Hangout technology pushed back upstream!

1 Replies

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“At a high level, it’s based on XMPP MUC (XEP-0045) and Jingle (XEP-0166/167), with some other enhancements...

“At a high level, it’s based on XMPP MUC (XEP-0045) and Jingle (XEP-0166/167), with some other enhancements needed to handle our architecture.”
-- +Justin Uberti

Open-source continues to find a home at Google. Looking forward to seeing more of the Hangout technology pushed back upstream!

1 Replies

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Ouch. If you open a cover photo and create a post from the "Share" action, it removes the photo from...

Ouch. If you open a cover photo and create a post from the "Share" action, it removes the photo from your "cover photos" album and puts it into "Photos from posts" (thus breaking your cover photo).

If you subsequently edit your cover photo again, browse to the old picture and select it, it deletes any post associated with that photo, including +1s, comments, and reshares.

Thank you, #newgoogleplus . Ugh, and to think I used to be such a fan.

1 Replies

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Ouch. If you open a cover photo and create a post from the "Share" action, it removes the photo from...

Ouch. If you open a cover photo and create a post from the "Share" action, it removes the photo from your "cover photos" album and puts it into "Photos from posts" (thus breaking your cover photo).

If you subsequently edit your cover photo again, browse to the old picture and select it, it deletes any post associated with that photo, including +1s, comments, and reshares.

Thank you, #newgoogleplus . Ugh, and to think I used to be such a fan.

1 Replies

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Ouch. If you open a cover photo and create a post from the "Share" action, it removes the photo from...

Ouch. If you open a cover photo and create a post from the "Share" action, it removes the photo from your "cover photos" album and puts it into "Photos from posts" (thus breaking your cover photo).

If you subsequently edit your cover photo again, browse to the old picture and select it, it deletes any post associated with that photo, including +1s, comments, and reshares.

Thank you, #newgoogleplus . Ugh, and to think I used to be such a fan.

1 Replies

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Ouch. If you open a cover photo and create a post from the "Share" action, it removes the photo from...

Ouch. If you open a cover photo and create a post from the "Share" action, it removes the photo from your "cover photos" album and puts it into "Photos from posts" (thus breaking your cover photo).

If you subsequently edit your cover photo again, browse to the old picture and select it, it deletes any post associated with that photo, including +1s, comments, and reshares.

Thank you, #newgoogleplus . Ugh, and to think I used to be such a fan.

20 Replies

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So G+ has opened up the floodgates, and moved from a limited field trial to full on 'beta'. Getting ...

So G+ has opened up the floodgates, and moved from a limited field trial to full on 'beta'. Getting onto G+ no longer requires an invitation, and I am seeing a lot of new folk on here along with a lot of G+ user guides showing up on my stream, because us plusketeers are helpful like that ;)

My top piece of advice for the new folk who just joined G+? Stop treating it like a Facebook substitute. It's not Facebook and hopefully never will be.

Do you have any advice for the people new to G+? Use the comments below!

1 Replies

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So G+ has opened up the floodgates, and moved from a limited field trial to full on 'beta'. Getting ...

So G+ has opened up the floodgates, and moved from a limited field trial to full on 'beta'. Getting onto G+ no longer requires an invitation, and I am seeing a lot of new folk on here along with a lot of G+ user guides showing up on my stream, because us plusketeers are helpful like that ;)

My top piece of advice for the new folk who just joined G+? Stop treating it like a Facebook substitute. It's not Facebook and hopefully never will be.

Do you have any advice for the people new to G+? Use the comments below!

7 Replies

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So G+ has opened up the floodgates, and moved from a limited field trial to full on 'beta'. Getting ...

So G+ has opened up the floodgates, and moved from a limited field trial to full on 'beta'. Getting onto G+ no longer requires an invitation, and I am seeing a lot of new folk on here along with a lot of G+ user guides showing up on my stream, because us plusketeers are helpful like that ;)

My top piece of advice for the new folk who just joined G+? Stop treating it like a Facebook substitute. It's not Facebook and hopefully never will be.

Do you have any advice for the people new to G+? Use the comments below!

1 Replies

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So G+ has opened up the floodgates, and moved from a limited field trial to full on 'beta'. Getting ...

So G+ has opened up the floodgates, and moved from a limited field trial to full on 'beta'. Getting onto G+ no longer requires an invitation, and I am seeing a lot of new folk on here along with a lot of G+ user guides showing up on my stream, because us plusketeers are helpful like that ;)

My top piece of advice for the new folk who just joined G+? Stop treating it like a Facebook substitute. It's not Facebook and hopefully never will be.

Do you have any advice for the people new to G+? Use the comments below!

7 Replies

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What does the future of open education look like?

Learn about our founders' vision for open source education in our latest interview by +Anthony Pompliano.

#OpenSource   #education  

Attachments

The Power of Open Collaboration in Education | Techli

By: Anthony Pompliano. Content is king in the modern world. This lesson rings true in business, media, and even education. It's no secret that many people think the current education system is broken. Most individuals and organizations are focused on how to improve the delivery and cost of ...

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Yes I am also agreed with... in reply to

Yes I am also agreed with this post that “Education must be Open source and Free for all”; there are many potential students who are not able to get proper education because of high Tuition fees. However recently one of my friend got online Life experience degree from his professional Experience , This Good thing which universities have started to offer. You can more info here http://www.usauniversitiesonline.com/degree/awarding-honorary-doctorate-degree/  or you can Google it about online life experience degree.

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If done properly, it seems like... in reply to

If done properly, it seems like an obvious choice. Scientists are supposed to seek knowledge, not put up barriers to access. The free exchange of ideas is incredibly important for science, and making that exchange easier should be one of the goals. It's ironic that this, of all fields, should suffer from a sluggish move away from old fashioned models.
I think it's inevitable. The only question is how and when. I can understand why the current system is upheld because of its apparent benefits of filtering unwanted papers and comments, and backing up what's published with weighty names from established editors and scientists... but I'm quite sure it's inferior to more open networking models.

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Linux Mobile Phone

Oh, yes. I think I will.

FIC has announced an on-sale date for its Neo1973, expected to be the first low-cost, high-volume phone with a user-modifiable Linux-based operating system. Additionally, the OpenMoko project building open-source software for the phone has published a wealth of technical resources.


See the link for more information. This is a huge step towards my dream phone.

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Today, +Bitpay is excited to announce the general availability of Bitcore, an open-source library to...

Today, +Bitpay is excited to announce the general availability of Bitcore, an open-source library to interact directly with #bitcoin .  If you're building anything related to #cryptofinance , I'm happy to answer questions.  Happy Valentine's Day hacking, crypto-lovers!

Attachments

Bitcore

Bitcore is a complete, native interface to the Bitcoin network, and provides the core functionality needed to develop apps for bitcoin.

1 Replies

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Today, +Bitpay is excited to announce the general availability of Bitcore, an open-source library to...

Today, +Bitpay is excited to announce the general availability of Bitcore, an open-source library to interact directly with #bitcoin .  If you're building anything related to #cryptofinance , I'm happy to answer questions.  Happy Valentine's Day hacking, crypto-lovers!

Attachments

Bitcore

Bitcore is a complete, native interface to the Bitcoin network, and provides the core functionality needed to develop apps for bitcoin.

1 Replies

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Today, +Bitpay is excited to announce the general availability of Bitcore, an open-source library to...

Today, +Bitpay is excited to announce the general availability of Bitcore, an open-source library to interact directly with #bitcoin .  If you're building anything related to #cryptofinance , I'm happy to answer questions.  Happy Valentine's Day hacking, crypto-lovers!

Attachments

Bitcore

Bitcore is a complete, native interface to the Bitcoin network, and provides the core functionality needed to develop apps for bitcoin.

1 Replies

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Introducing Bitcore

Today, +Bitpay is excited to announce the general availability of Bitcore, an open-source library to interact directly with #bitcoin .  If you're building anything related to #cryptofinance , I'm happy to answer questions.  Happy Valentine's Day hacking, crypto-lovers!

Attachments

Bitcore

Bitcore is a complete, native interface to the Bitcoin network, and provides the core functionality needed to develop apps for bitcoin.

1 Replies

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Does this make me a narcissist?

So I've finally given in to the likes of John Chow and opened up a blog using my own name. Sadly, right as I've started and configured the blog - I've lost all interest in posting anything to it!

Here's what I've done so far:

  • Added new theme.
  • Installed All-in-one-SEO
  • Installed Google Sitemap plugin
  • Toyed with NextGen Gallery
  • Configured my permalinks
  • Conspired against humanity
And that's about all. Oh, just disabled the visual code editor too - I hate it. Please badger and pester me until I make this place worth your visit. Got it?

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On this week's one-hour show (a new format for us!), we're excited to be introducing our new cohost,...

On this week's one-hour show (a new format for us!), we're excited to be introducing our new cohost, Gordon Hall.  Having been a guest host before, we're extremely pleased that he's decided to join us as our new full-time partner!  Let's see what he's been up to since the last time we talked, and talk about all the open source goodness he can throw at us.

We'll also be discussing a number of topics; the Bitcoin scalability problem (yes, we'll even mention the block size debate!), Ethereum's new Frontier launch, and the announcement of t0, Overstock.com's new cryptoequity trading platform.

Join us, and ask us questions directly while we're live!

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DECENTRALIZE Episode 44: Gordon Hall

On this week's one-hour show (a new format for us!), we're excited to be introducing our new cohost, Gordon Hall.  Having been a guest host before, we're extremely pleased that he's decided to join us as our new full-time partner!  Let's see what he's been up to since the last time we talked, and talk about all the open source goodness he can throw at us. We'll also be discussing a number of topics; the Bitcoin scalability problem (yes, we'll even mention the block size debate!), Ethereum's new Frontier launch, and the announcement of t0, Overstock.com's new cryptoequity trading platform. Join us, and ask us questions directly while we're live!

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How to Get Funding for Your Idea If you're one of the growing number of people with the next big idea...

How to Get Funding for Your Idea
If you're one of the growing number of people with the next big idea, you might be wondering how to get the ball rolling.  At +Coursefork, we've been going through this process ourselves and my cofounder +Elliott Hauser has put together a great series of posts on how to it.  Here's the first post in the series, on choosing the right investors [1] and getting the meetings.

[1]: I can't stress how important this part is.  I've been burned in the past by allowing the wrong investors to participate, and am extremely cautious and selective as a result—you really want your investors to be excited about your vision, and for them to be ready to advise and otherwise open their own networks to ensure the success of your endeavor.

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How to Pitch Your Pre-Seed Startup | !ExitEvent

Coursefork is in the midst of pitching to angel investors and we've learned a ton, so I thought I'd take the time write a post that can hopefully save you time and/or effort.

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How to Get Funding for Your Idea If you're one of the growing number of people with the next big idea...

How to Get Funding for Your Idea
If you're one of the growing number of people with the next big idea, you might be wondering how to get the ball rolling.  At +Coursefork, we've been going through this process ourselves and my cofounder +Elliott Hauser has put together a great series of posts on how to it.  Here's the first post in the series, on choosing the right investors [1] and getting the meetings.

[1]: I can't stress how important this part is.  I've been burned in the past by allowing the wrong investors to participate, and am extremely cautious and selective as a result—you really want your investors to be excited about your vision, and for them to be ready to advise and otherwise open their own networks to ensure the success of your endeavor.

Attachments

How to Pitch Your Pre-Seed Startup | !ExitEvent

Coursefork is in the midst of pitching to angel investors and we've learned a ton, so I thought I'd take the time write a post that can hopefully save you time and/or effort.

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I&#39;ve been working for an industrial... in reply to

I've been working for an industrial company that's still struggling with the very idea of open-source, so unfortunately there's nothing on github I can point a potential employer at. I guess in theory I ought to be doing something on the side just for that reason, but after writing code all week long, it's not exactly high on the list of priorities in my free time. :-)

100% agree with the sentiment though -- résumés are almost worthless for Software Engineers. Once in a while I can tell that someone's not completely inept, based on the specific way they describe their current/past work on a CV. But even then, it's hardly worth the time it takes to sift through the pile, vs. just bringing people in to talk for a bit.

A few lines of code are worth a thousand words. HR at large companies tends to get bogged down with the specifics of which languages/technologies they know, but that's missing the point entirely. If you can just have someone design a small system in pseudocode that solves some simple problem, the orders-of-magnitude difference in talent between individual programmers becomes obvious.

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I'm competing in this event, and I need your vote! We're nearing the final 24 hours of this competition...

I'm competing in this event, and I need your vote! We're nearing the final 24 hours of this competition, and my startup has fallen into fifth place. Go here and vote for LocalSense : http://vator.tv/competition/vator-splash-la-june-2012?for=localsense&vote=1#participants

LocalSense™ was founded by myself, +Robert Rice, +Daniel Barbour, and +John Finocchiaro at the end of last year after seeing an enormous gap between how businesses and consumers use social media. We've spent the past six months building an incredibly powerful geo-aware platform to help bridge this gap and are extremely excited to get it into your hands. While we're in private alpha right now, but we're aiming to open a public beta by mid-June -- and winning this contest will help us get there.

Please vote for LocalSense, and if you want to be a really big help -- share it with your friends in the limited time we've got left!

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Vote for LocalSense in the competition: Vator Splash LA (June 2012)

Calling all entrepreneurs! Vator Splash is going back to LA for its second year. Like other Splash events and competitions, CEOs and/or founders of 10 companies, chosen by their p

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I'm competing in this event, and I need your vote! We're nearing the final 24 hours of this competition...

I'm competing in this event, and I need your vote! We're nearing the final 24 hours of this competition, and my startup has fallen into fifth place. Go here and vote for LocalSense : http://vator.tv/competition/vator-splash-la-june-2012?for=localsense&vote=1#participants

LocalSense™ was founded by myself, +Robert Rice, +Daniel Barbour, and +John Finocchiaro at the end of last year after seeing an enormous gap between how businesses and consumers use social media. We've spent the past six months building an incredibly powerful geo-aware platform to help bridge this gap and are extremely excited to get it into your hands. While we're in private alpha right now, but we're aiming to open a public beta by mid-June -- and winning this contest will help us get there.

Please vote for LocalSense, and if you want to be a really big help -- share it with your friends in the limited time we've got left!

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Vote for LocalSense in the competition: Vator Splash LA (June 2012)

Calling all entrepreneurs! Vator Splash is going back to LA for its second year. Like other Splash events and competitions, CEOs and/or founders of 10 companies, chosen by their p

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I'm competing in this event, and I need your vote! We're nearing the final 24 hours of this competition...

I'm competing in this event, and I need your vote! We're nearing the final 24 hours of this competition, and my startup has fallen into fifth place. Go here and vote for LocalSense : http://vator.tv/competition/vator-splash-la-june-2012?for=localsense&vote=1#participants

LocalSense™ was founded by myself, +Robert Rice, +Daniel Barbour, and +John Finocchiaro at the end of last year after seeing an enormous gap between how businesses and consumers use social media. We've spent the past six months building an incredibly powerful geo-aware platform to help bridge this gap and are extremely excited to get it into your hands. While we're in private alpha right now, but we're aiming to open a public beta by mid-June -- and winning this contest will help us get there.

Please vote for LocalSense, and if you want to be a really big help -- share it with your friends in the limited time we've got left!

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Vote for LocalSense in the competition: Vator Splash LA (June 2012)

Calling all entrepreneurs! Vator Splash is going back to LA for its second year. Like other Splash events and competitions, CEOs and/or founders of 10 companies, chosen by their p

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Pimp Status and further updates...

Now that I've upgraded to Google's Blogger Beta, I'm tweaking a bunch of controls on my blog. I am continually running into the user-friendly syndrome, where a feature is too user friendly and I can't get down to the nitty-gritty tech side of the application. While it saves me the five minute trouble of setting up a Wordpress or similiar in-house blog, it constantly reminds me of the merits of having the Wordpress, and consequently influencing me to neglect posting here at all.

I woke up this morning to a completed upgrade from Ubuntu's Dapper Drake (6.06 LTS) to Edgy Eft (6.10), after encountering some problems resulting from my own stupidity. Upgrading from the servers took a grand total of 16 hours, start to finish. This includes my time working out the kinks from my said stupidity, which I won't go into further here. Due to the complications, my personal alarm clock (XMMS and an alarm plugin...) failed to wake me at the goal of 5:30 AM, having not rung at all. Sadly, this caused me to miss the chance to see my beautiful Amber, with her leaving for school at 6:30, and me waking at 7. grumble

After rebooting the machine to seal the deal, I opened up my shiny new Firefox 2.0 to look at the GWing RSS feed. I clicked the most important thing at the time, a new topic titled A Tale of Two Wreckages: A True Story. I then proceeded to heartily laugh my way through the time I had remaining before I had to leave for work.

Pimp status, hrm?

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Hi everyone, Filter Stream for Google Plus just released to the gallery! In light of recent events,...

Hi everyone, Filter Stream for Google Plus just released to the gallery!

In light of recent events, I've felt the need to include certain filtering mechanisms in my stream to filter out posts for specific keywords.

So here is a plugin that filters out specific keywords that you can customize in the options screen. It also remembers the filtered out posts that is accessible in the popup from the icon appearing next to the wrench button.

You can install this Chrome Extension from the Gallery: http://goo.gl/7Ld4u
As usual, the code is open sourced on GitHub: http://goo.gl/uURvZ

Built in a Hangout! Thanks to +Andy Shaw for the graphics, +Lucas Johnson, +Jake McCuistion, +Carmelyne Thompson, +Melvin Severino and +Eric Martindale !

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Hi everyone, Filter Stream for Google Plus just released to the gallery! In light of recent events,...

Hi everyone, Filter Stream for Google Plus just released to the gallery!

In light of recent events, I've felt the need to include certain filtering mechanisms in my stream to filter out posts for specific keywords.

So here is a plugin that filters out specific keywords that you can customize in the options screen. It also remembers the filtered out posts that is accessible in the popup from the icon appearing next to the wrench button.

You can install this Chrome Extension from the Gallery: http://goo.gl/7Ld4u
As usual, the code is open sourced on GitHub: http://goo.gl/uURvZ

Built in a Hangout! Thanks to +Andy Shaw for the graphics, +Lucas Johnson, +Jake McCuistion, +Carmelyne Thompson, +Melvin Severino and +Eric Martindale !

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Progeny of Monotony

A big subject of contention in my life is my job. I work 60 hours a week, for less than minimum wage. I deal with clueless customers who are often surprised by my perfect greeting, as I am often complimented, sometimes chastised, on my well-rehearsed voice. Sometimes I think we lose call volume because I sound like an answering machine. Hah! It shall be no more, tonight was a successful night of Trixbox PBX goodness, our entire system is on the first run using the IVR answering. I digress.

My job sucks. I earn $5/hr, working what is supposed to be 60 hours a week, but is slowly dwindling downward. The stress of paying rent, utilities, and heaven forbid taxes on such a budget is indomitable: I can't imagine adding insurance and gas to this, when I get a car up and running. The love of my life chastises me for it, and I can't tell her enough how much I really do hate it. I do not have a working car, and I do not yet have insurance to provide the DMV with proof that I do have insurance, so I don't have a license. There are fast food places within walking distance, surely. Ideally, if I had a car, I could be an on-call Engineer and earn maybe an extra hundred bucks a week. Sure, I earn $33/hr as a consultant, but when business is the equivalent of dysentery on a hot summer day, I earn jack for nothing. Of course, in this scenario, it is difficult to find the finances to afford a car to begin with.

It's hard in these circumstances to even consider such things as school, a degree, or better living conditions. It's devastating to me, my life, my relationships, and everything that cascades on from such. It doesn't help when the doors in my house are left open, dissipating what little heat I've trapped in the kitchen into the other frozen rooms of my apartment. Piles of dirty dishes plague the sink, and I'm never home to wash them. Wait, remind me again why I'm washing someone else's dirty dishes? Oh, that's right - my apartment would be even dirtier if it weren't for the thirty minutes a night I spend after getting home from spending the remainder of my free time with Amber. Of course, directly after, shower and bed. Only to wake in the morning for work at 0800. Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday. Thursday. Friday. Saturday.

If only people were patient, if only I could let them into my world. Unfortunately, I'm expecting a box to be placed on my doorstep any day now, with all of the various items I've gifted out over the past year and a half. There's nothing I can do to stop it, as far as I can tell, except to go work at Subway. I wish I could tell her that it'd be by the grace of God if I got out of that position, once I went there. No, it's not understood. It can't be understood. How long can one love without being loved in return? The sad thing is, it is in both ways. How sick and maniacally twisted is that?

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Importing StackOverflow (...et al) into Chryp Using Aggregates

StackOverflow LogoAs I have mentioned before, I'm in a love affair with Chyrp, which is an up-and-coming platform meant to replace WordPress and work a bit like Tumblr, as a microblogging and lifestreaming service.

One of Chyrp's major draws for me is the Aggregator module, which is included in Chryp 2.0 by default. Mike Crittenden of MergeWeb Fame has covered the use of Chyrp's Aggregator previously, but I figured I'd dive in a bit further and help others in configuring their feeds.

You may also be familiar with StackOverflow, a crowd-sourcing social-media head-bashing awesome site that enables users to ask tech-related questions and get awesome community-approved answers. The same group runs several other sites using the same model, including SuperUser and ServerFault, and they are even releasing their codebase as free and open source as the <a href="http://stackexchange.com/>StackExchange project.

But, onward into the goodies: syndicating your activity on StackOverflow (and the other sites) using Chryp.

The first you'll need is your Activity Feed. To acquire this, visit the "Recent" tab of your user profile and look in the bottom right hand corner: you'll see a link to "user recent activity feed". This is the URL for your activity feed, grab that and let's move on to Chyrp.

In Chyrp, you'll want to add a new aggregate in your Admin panel. Paste your Activity Feed into the "Source URL" box, then configure the remaining settings as follows:

Feather: Link Post Attributes: name: "feed[title]" source: "feed[id]" description: "feed[description]"

Now, assign a "Name" and make sure the correct Author is selected, and click "Update". You're all done! You'll see new content from your feed the next time your aggregates update.

Questions? Comments? Lemme have 'em.

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On the Ongoing Attacks between China, U.S., Russia, Israel, etc.… The latest round of evidence of ongoing...

On the Ongoing Attacks between China, U.S., Russia, Israel, etc.…
The latest round of evidence of ongoing digital warfare between the superpowers is now being reported in the N.Y. Times [1] after an undeniably incriminating 60-page report on the Chinese attacks on the U.S. by security firm Mandiant [2].

“Either they are coming from inside Unit 61398, or the people who run the most-controlled, most-monitored Internet networks in the world are clueless about thousands of people generating attacks from this one neighborhood.”
                                                    — Kevin Mandia

The report goes on to track individual participants in the attack, tracing them back to the headquarters of P.L.A. Unit 61398.

Attacks from the Chinese have been ongoing for many years, notably back to Operation Titan Rain [3] in 2003, in which attackers gained access to military intelligence networks at organizations such as Lockheed Martin, Sandia National Laboratories, Redstone Arsenal, and NASA [4].  Direct military targets were also included in the assault, such as the U.S. Army Information Systems Engineering Command at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, the Defense Information Systems Agency in Arlington, Virginia, the Naval Ocean Systems Center, a Defense Department installation in San Diego, California, and the U.S. Army Space and Strategic Defense installation in Huntsville, Alabama [5]. 

These ongoing attacks are labeled "Advanced Persistent Threats" or "APT" by the American Military, are considered acts of war by both the White House [6] and the Department of Defense [7] as far back as 2011, and are not unique to the Chinese origins.  You may remember the 2007 attacks on Estonia [8], which has been attributed to entities within Russian territory operating with the assistance of the Russian government [9].  These attacks disabled a wide array of Estonian government sites, rendering services in the world's most digitally-connected country unusable.  The attacks also disabled ATM machines, effectively disabling some portion of the Estonian economy.

The United States [and arguably Israel, [10]] have also been actively participating in these attacks [11] with the deploying of FLAME and Stuxnet against Iran, which made international headlines this past year when the coordinated efforts of the tools were used to disable Iranian nuclear centrifuges in an attempt to slow their progress in their nuclear program [12].  These efforts are ongoing, with the latest addition of the Gauss and Duqu malwares [13] continuing to target middle-eastern countries.

“From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.”
                                                    — +The New York Times

Obama reportedly went on to sign a classified directive last year [14] enabling the government to seize control of private networks, and the 2012 NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) includes terms [15, section 954] that authorize offensive attacks on foreign threats [16].  The official United States policy already is to deem any cyberattack on the U.S. as an "act of war" [17], and it looks like these types of actions and attacks have already been made legal.

While it may once have been a subject of fiction [18], it's now and has been a harsh reality that we're in the middle of a new era in warfare, and the battles are already well-underway as countries around the world are openly engaging in offensive attacks on one another that are impacting economies on a massive scale.  I don't know what else to call this other than a world war—even the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence (CSI) predicted this [19], as have many others even earlier [20].  

Here's a thought; if our constitution gives us the right to bear arms, and the government deems these types of attacks as acts of war, then isn't it our right to keep and bear these arms?  Yet another case for a mass-algorate society [21], which Mr. Obama appears to agree with me on [22], at the very least.

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/technology/chinas-army-is-seen-as-tied-to-hacking-against-us.html
[2]: http://intelreport.mandiant.com/
[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_Rain
[4]: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1098371,00.html
[5]: http://www.zdnet.com/news/security-experts-lift-lid-on-chinese-hack-attacks/145763
[6]: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/international_strategy_for_cyberspace.pdf
[7]: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304563104576355623135782718.html
[8]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_cyberattacks_on_Estonia
[9]: http://www.vedomosti.ru/smartmoney/article/2007/05/28/3004
[10]: http://www.zdnet.com/meet-gauss-the-latest-cyber-espionage-tool-7000002405/
[11]: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ordered-wave-of-cyberattacks-against-iran.html?pagewanted=all
[12]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11388018
[13]: http://www.zdnet.com/meet-gauss-the-latest-cyber-espionage-tool-7000002405/
[14]: http://endthelie.com/2012/11/15/obama-reportedly-signs-classified-cyberwarfare-policy-directive-with-troubling-implications/#axzz2LMPlf8iA
[15]: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-112hr1540enr/pdf/BILLS-112hr1540enr.pdf
[16]: http://endthelie.com/2011/12/17/approval-of-covert-offensive-cyberwar-sneakily-inserted-into-ndaa/
[17]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/reuvencohen/2012/06/05/the-white-house-and-pentagon-deem-cyber-attacks-an-act-of-war/
[18]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer
[19]: https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol48no4/new_face_of_war.html
[20]: http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reprints/2007/RAND_RP223.pdf
[21]: https://plus.google.com/112353210404102902472/posts/MVQXyw9EJDE
[22]: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57569503-1/obama-endorses-required-high-school-coding-classes/

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China’s Army Is Seen as Tied to Hacking Against U.S.

An overwhelming percentage of the attacks on American companies and government agencies start in a building on the edge of Shanghai, say cybersecurity experts and American intelligence officials.

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On the Ongoing Attacks between China, U.S., Russia, Israel, etc.… The latest round of evidence of ongoing...

On the Ongoing Attacks between China, U.S., Russia, Israel, etc.…
The latest round of evidence of ongoing digital warfare between the superpowers is now being reported in the N.Y. Times [1] after an undeniably incriminating 60-page report on the Chinese attacks on the U.S. by security firm Mandiant [2].

“Either they are coming from inside Unit 61398, or the people who run the most-controlled, most-monitored Internet networks in the world are clueless about thousands of people generating attacks from this one neighborhood.”
                                                    — Kevin Mandia

The report goes on to track individual participants in the attack, tracing them back to the headquarters of P.L.A. Unit 61398.

Attacks from the Chinese have been ongoing for many years, notably back to Operation Titan Rain [3] in 2003, in which attackers gained access to military intelligence networks at organizations such as Lockheed Martin, Sandia National Laboratories, Redstone Arsenal, and NASA [4].  Direct military targets were also included in the assault, such as the U.S. Army Information Systems Engineering Command at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, the Defense Information Systems Agency in Arlington, Virginia, the Naval Ocean Systems Center, a Defense Department installation in San Diego, California, and the U.S. Army Space and Strategic Defense installation in Huntsville, Alabama [5]. 

These ongoing attacks are labeled "Advanced Persistent Threats" or "APT" by the American Military, are considered acts of war by both the White House [6] and the Department of Defense [7] as far back as 2011, and are not unique to the Chinese origins.  You may remember the 2007 attacks on Estonia [8], which has been attributed to entities within Russian territory operating with the assistance of the Russian government [9].  These attacks disabled a wide array of Estonian government sites, rendering services in the world's most digitally-connected country unusable.  The attacks also disabled ATM machines, effectively disabling some portion of the Estonian economy.

The United States [and arguably Israel, [10]] have also been actively participating in these attacks [11] with the deploying of FLAME and Stuxnet against Iran, which made international headlines this past year when the coordinated efforts of the tools were used to disable Iranian nuclear centrifuges in an attempt to slow their progress in their nuclear program [12].  These efforts are ongoing, with the latest addition of the Gauss and Duqu malwares [13] continuing to target middle-eastern countries.

“From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.”
                                                    — +The New York Times

Obama reportedly went on to sign a classified directive last year [14] enabling the government to seize control of private networks, and the 2012 NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) includes terms [15, section 954] that authorize offensive attacks on foreign threats [16].  The official United States policy already is to deem any cyberattack on the U.S. as an "act of war" [17], and it looks like these types of actions and attacks have already been made legal.

While it may once have been a subject of fiction [18], it's now and has been a harsh reality that we're in the middle of a new era in warfare, and the battles are already well-underway as countries around the world are openly engaging in offensive attacks on one another that are impacting economies on a massive scale.  I don't know what else to call this other than a world war—even the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence (CSI) predicted this [19], as have many others even earlier [20].  

Here's a thought; if our constitution gives us the right to bear arms, and the government deems these types of attacks as acts of war, then isn't it our right to keep and bear these arms?  Yet another case for a mass-algorate society [21], which Mr. Obama appears to agree with me on [22], at the very least.

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/technology/chinas-army-is-seen-as-tied-to-hacking-against-us.html
[2]: http://intelreport.mandiant.com/
[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_Rain
[4]: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1098371,00.html
[5]: http://www.zdnet.com/news/security-experts-lift-lid-on-chinese-hack-attacks/145763
[6]: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/international_strategy_for_cyberspace.pdf
[7]: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304563104576355623135782718.html
[8]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_cyberattacks_on_Estonia
[9]: http://www.vedomosti.ru/smartmoney/article/2007/05/28/3004
[10]: http://www.zdnet.com/meet-gauss-the-latest-cyber-espionage-tool-7000002405/
[11]: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ordered-wave-of-cyberattacks-against-iran.html?pagewanted=all
[12]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11388018
[13]: http://www.zdnet.com/meet-gauss-the-latest-cyber-espionage-tool-7000002405/
[14]: http://endthelie.com/2012/11/15/obama-reportedly-signs-classified-cyberwarfare-policy-directive-with-troubling-implications/#axzz2LMPlf8iA
[15]: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-112hr1540enr/pdf/BILLS-112hr1540enr.pdf
[16]: http://endthelie.com/2011/12/17/approval-of-covert-offensive-cyberwar-sneakily-inserted-into-ndaa/
[17]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/reuvencohen/2012/06/05/the-white-house-and-pentagon-deem-cyber-attacks-an-act-of-war/
[18]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer
[19]: https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol48no4/new_face_of_war.html
[20]: http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reprints/2007/RAND_RP223.pdf
[21]: https://plus.google.com/112353210404102902472/posts/MVQXyw9EJDE
[22]: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57569503-1/obama-endorses-required-high-school-coding-classes/

Attachments

China’s Army Is Seen as Tied to Hacking Against U.S.

An overwhelming percentage of the attacks on American companies and government agencies start in a building on the edge of Shanghai, say cybersecurity experts and American intelligence officials.

1 Replies

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On the Ongoing Attacks between China, U.S., Russia, Israel, etc.… The latest round of evidence of ongoing...

On the Ongoing Attacks between China, U.S., Russia, Israel, etc.…
The latest round of evidence of ongoing digital warfare between the superpowers is now being reported in the N.Y. Times [1] after an undeniably incriminating 60-page report on the Chinese attacks on the U.S. by security firm Mandiant [2].

“Either they are coming from inside Unit 61398, or the people who run the most-controlled, most-monitored Internet networks in the world are clueless about thousands of people generating attacks from this one neighborhood.”
                                                    — Kevin Mandia

The report goes on to track individual participants in the attack, tracing them back to the headquarters of P.L.A. Unit 61398.

Attacks from the Chinese have been ongoing for many years, notably back to Operation Titan Rain [3] in 2003, in which attackers gained access to military intelligence networks at organizations such as Lockheed Martin, Sandia National Laboratories, Redstone Arsenal, and NASA [4].  Direct military targets were also included in the assault, such as the U.S. Army Information Systems Engineering Command at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, the Defense Information Systems Agency in Arlington, Virginia, the Naval Ocean Systems Center, a Defense Department installation in San Diego, California, and the U.S. Army Space and Strategic Defense installation in Huntsville, Alabama [5]. 

These ongoing attacks are labeled "Advanced Persistent Threats" or "APT" by the American Military, are considered acts of war by both the White House [6] and the Department of Defense [7] as far back as 2011, and are not unique to the Chinese origins.  You may remember the 2007 attacks on Estonia [8], which has been attributed to entities within Russian territory operating with the assistance of the Russian government [9].  These attacks disabled a wide array of Estonian government sites, rendering services in the world's most digitally-connected country unusable.  The attacks also disabled ATM machines, effectively disabling some portion of the Estonian economy.

The United States [and arguably Israel, [10]] have also been actively participating in these attacks [11] with the deploying of FLAME and Stuxnet against Iran, which made international headlines this past year when the coordinated efforts of the tools were used to disable Iranian nuclear centrifuges in an attempt to slow their progress in their nuclear program [12].  These efforts are ongoing, with the latest addition of the Gauss and Duqu malwares [13] continuing to target middle-eastern countries.

“From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.”
                                                    — +The New York Times

Obama reportedly went on to sign a classified directive last year [14] enabling the government to seize control of private networks, and the 2012 NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) includes terms [15, section 954] that authorize offensive attacks on foreign threats [16].  The official United States policy already is to deem any cyberattack on the U.S. as an "act of war" [17], and it looks like these types of actions and attacks have already been made legal.

While it may once have been a subject of fiction [18], it's now and has been a harsh reality that we're in the middle of a new era in warfare, and the battles are already well-underway as countries around the world are openly engaging in offensive attacks on one another that are impacting economies on a massive scale.  I don't know what else to call this other than a world war—even the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence (CSI) predicted this [19], as have many others even earlier [20].  

Here's a thought; if our constitution gives us the right to bear arms, and the government deems these types of attacks as acts of war, then isn't it our right to keep and bear these arms?  Yet another case for a mass-algorate society [21], which Mr. Obama appears to agree with me on [22], at the very least.

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/technology/chinas-army-is-seen-as-tied-to-hacking-against-us.html
[2]: http://intelreport.mandiant.com/
[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_Rain
[4]: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1098371,00.html
[5]: http://www.zdnet.com/news/security-experts-lift-lid-on-chinese-hack-attacks/145763
[6]: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/international_strategy_for_cyberspace.pdf
[7]: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304563104576355623135782718.html
[8]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_cyberattacks_on_Estonia
[9]: http://www.vedomosti.ru/smartmoney/article/2007/05/28/3004
[10]: http://www.zdnet.com/meet-gauss-the-latest-cyber-espionage-tool-7000002405/
[11]: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ordered-wave-of-cyberattacks-against-iran.html?pagewanted=all
[12]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11388018
[13]: http://www.zdnet.com/meet-gauss-the-latest-cyber-espionage-tool-7000002405/
[14]: http://endthelie.com/2012/11/15/obama-reportedly-signs-classified-cyberwarfare-policy-directive-with-troubling-implications/#axzz2LMPlf8iA
[15]: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-112hr1540enr/pdf/BILLS-112hr1540enr.pdf
[16]: http://endthelie.com/2011/12/17/approval-of-covert-offensive-cyberwar-sneakily-inserted-into-ndaa/
[17]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/reuvencohen/2012/06/05/the-white-house-and-pentagon-deem-cyber-attacks-an-act-of-war/
[18]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer
[19]: https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol48no4/new_face_of_war.html
[20]: http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reprints/2007/RAND_RP223.pdf
[21]: https://plus.google.com/112353210404102902472/posts/MVQXyw9EJDE
[22]: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57569503-1/obama-endorses-required-high-school-coding-classes/

Attachments

China’s Army Is Seen as Tied to Hacking Against U.S.

An overwhelming percentage of the attacks on American companies and government agencies start in a building on the edge of Shanghai, say cybersecurity experts and American intelligence officials.

6 Replies

Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.

On the Ongoing Attacks between China, U.S., Russia, Israel, etc.… The latest round of evidence of ongoing...

On the Ongoing Attacks between China, U.S., Russia, Israel, etc.…
The latest round of evidence of ongoing digital warfare between the superpowers is now being reported in the N.Y. Times [1] after an undeniably incriminating 60-page report on the Chinese attacks on the U.S. by security firm Mandiant [2].

“Either they are coming from inside Unit 61398, or the people who run the most-controlled, most-monitored Internet networks in the world are clueless about thousands of people generating attacks from this one neighborhood.”
                                                    — Kevin Mandia

The report goes on to track individual participants in the attack, tracing them back to the headquarters of P.L.A. Unit 61398.

Attacks from the Chinese have been ongoing for many years, notably back to Operation Titan Rain [3] in 2003, in which attackers gained access to military intelligence networks at organizations such as Lockheed Martin, Sandia National Laboratories, Redstone Arsenal, and NASA [4].  Direct military targets were also included in the assault, such as the U.S. Army Information Systems Engineering Command at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, the Defense Information Systems Agency in Arlington, Virginia, the Naval Ocean Systems Center, a Defense Department installation in San Diego, California, and the U.S. Army Space and Strategic Defense installation in Huntsville, Alabama [5]. 

These ongoing attacks are labeled "Advanced Persistent Threats" or "APT" by the American Military, are considered acts of war by both the White House [6] and the Department of Defense [7] as far back as 2011, and are not unique to the Chinese origins.  You may remember the 2007 attacks on Estonia [8], which has been attributed to entities within Russian territory operating with the assistance of the Russian government [9].  These attacks disabled a wide array of Estonian government sites, rendering services in the world's most digitally-connected country unusable.  The attacks also disabled ATM machines, effectively disabling some portion of the Estonian economy.

The United States [and arguably Israel, [10]] have also been actively participating in these attacks [11] with the deploying of FLAME and Stuxnet against Iran, which made international headlines this past year when the coordinated efforts of the tools were used to disable Iranian nuclear centrifuges in an attempt to slow their progress in their nuclear program [12].  These efforts are ongoing, with the latest addition of the Gauss and Duqu malwares [13] continuing to target middle-eastern countries.

“From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.”
                                                    — +The New York Times

Obama reportedly went on to sign a classified directive last year [14] enabling the government to seize control of private networks, and the 2012 NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) includes terms [15, section 954] that authorize offensive attacks on foreign threats [16].  The official United States policy already is to deem any cyberattack on the U.S. as an "act of war" [17], and it looks like these types of actions and attacks have already been made legal.

While it may once have been a subject of fiction [18], it's now and has been a harsh reality that we're in the middle of a new era in warfare, and the battles are already well-underway as countries around the world are openly engaging in offensive attacks on one another that are impacting economies on a massive scale.  I don't know what else to call this other than a world war—even the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence (CSI) predicted this [19], as have many others even earlier [20].  

Here's a thought; if our constitution gives us the right to bear arms, and the government deems these types of attacks as acts of war, then isn't it our right to keep and bear these arms?  Yet another case for a mass-algorate society [21], which Mr. Obama appears to agree with me on [22], at the very least.

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/technology/chinas-army-is-seen-as-tied-to-hacking-against-us.html
[2]: http://intelreport.mandiant.com/
[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_Rain
[4]: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1098371,00.html
[5]: http://www.zdnet.com/news/security-experts-lift-lid-on-chinese-hack-attacks/145763
[6]: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/international_strategy_for_cyberspace.pdf
[7]: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304563104576355623135782718.html
[8]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_cyberattacks_on_Estonia
[9]: http://www.vedomosti.ru/smartmoney/article/2007/05/28/3004
[10]: http://www.zdnet.com/meet-gauss-the-latest-cyber-espionage-tool-7000002405/
[11]: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ordered-wave-of-cyberattacks-against-iran.html?pagewanted=all
[12]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11388018
[13]: http://www.zdnet.com/meet-gauss-the-latest-cyber-espionage-tool-7000002405/
[14]: http://endthelie.com/2012/11/15/obama-reportedly-signs-classified-cyberwarfare-policy-directive-with-troubling-implications/#axzz2LMPlf8iA
[15]: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-112hr1540enr/pdf/BILLS-112hr1540enr.pdf
[16]: http://endthelie.com/2011/12/17/approval-of-covert-offensive-cyberwar-sneakily-inserted-into-ndaa/
[17]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/reuvencohen/2012/06/05/the-white-house-and-pentagon-deem-cyber-attacks-an-act-of-war/
[18]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer
[19]: https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol48no4/new_face_of_war.html
[20]: http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reprints/2007/RAND_RP223.pdf
[21]: https://plus.google.com/112353210404102902472/posts/MVQXyw9EJDE
[22]: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57569503-1/obama-endorses-required-high-school-coding-classes/

Attachments

China’s Army Is Seen as Tied to Hacking Against U.S.

An overwhelming percentage of the attacks on American companies and government agencies start in a building on the edge of Shanghai, say cybersecurity experts and American intelligence officials.

5 Replies

Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.

Hurricane Sandy: Resources, Guides, and Information With #HurricaneSandy  already flooding streets ...

Hurricane Sandy: Resources, Guides, and Information

With #HurricaneSandy  already flooding streets [1] and causing damage [2] in #NYC  due to the effects of the combined hurricane, western stormfront, and full-moon tides [3], I wanted to take just a quick moment to collect some resources related to the storm.  I have quite a few friends directly in the path of the storm (ahem, +Sharon Strandskov!) and I want to urge everyone to stay safe. Make no illusion, this storm is serious business: take a look at the attached photo to see a comparison to Hurricane Irene.

As always, preparedness is key.  If you're in the path of the storm and haven't yet found your battery-powered radio, it's strongly recommend that you do so now while you have the light, as both your Internet and cell signals are likely to be interrupted.  If you haven't stocked up on water and [non-perishable] food, it's a bit late and you're going to have to hunker down and hope for the best.

Course of Action:
From the FEMA Guidelines [4]:
  1) Listen to the radio or TV for information. [ed.: or FEMA's Twitter [5]]
  2) Secure your home, close storm shutters, and secure outdoor objects or bring them indoors.
  3) Turn off utilities if instructed to do so. Otherwise, turn the refrigerator thermostat to its coldest setting and keep its doors closed.
  4) Turn off propane tanks.· Avoid using the phone, except for serious emergencies.
  5) Moor your boat if time permits.
  6) Ensure a supply of water for sanitary purposes such as cleaning and flushing toilets. Fill the bathtub and other large containers with water.

As an additional tip that I recently learned, you can fill plastic bags with water and put them in your freezer to prepare for extended power/water outages.  These will stay cool longer than bottled water in your refrigerator.

If you're in one of the evacuation areas and haven't yet followed the instructions or aren't able to do so, make sure to seek shelter and follow the appropriate guidelines. [4]

Resources:
Google Crisis Map: http://google.org/crisismap/2012-sandy -- this is awesome, and a great central resource keeping up to date.
NOAA Station 44065: http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=44065 -- this is a buoy off the coast of New York tracking the wind speed and direction, if you want direct from-the-source reports.
GOES-14 Satellite Imagery: http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/data/1min/index.php -- Composite satellite imagery from the SSEC program at WISC, on a 1 minute loop.
Weather.gov: http://www.weather.gov/ -- useful for official advisories and up-to-date information, straight from the source.
Weather.com: http://www.weather.com/

Take a moment and look up your local news station's Facebook / Twitter and subscribe, optionally via SMS so that when the power goes out, you still have a method of receiving realtime updates (provided cell coverage doesn't go down / get inundated with emergency requests).

As a bonus, there's a pretty awesome #HTML5  canvas wind visualization demo that updates in realtime [6].  Some pretty slick techniques there, so view the source [Luke].

Feel free to add your own resources in the comments.  I'll edit the post to add the most helpful resources.

[1]: http://observer.com/2012/10/gowanus-canal-flooding/
[2]: http://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2012/10/29/crane-dangles-from-nyc-high-rise-clearing-streets
[3]: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/10/26/hurricane-sandy-looms-over-the-us/
[4]: http://m.fema.gov/hu_during.htm
[5]: https://twitter.com/fema
[6]: http://hint.fm/wind/

Attachments

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Hurricane Sandy: Resources, Guides, and Information With #HurricaneSandy  already flooding streets ...

Hurricane Sandy: Resources, Guides, and Information

With #HurricaneSandy  already flooding streets [1] and causing damage [2] in #NYC  due to the effects of the combined hurricane, western stormfront, and full-moon tides [3], I wanted to take just a quick moment to collect some resources related to the storm.  I have quite a few friends directly in the path of the storm (ahem, +Sharon Strandskov!) and I want to urge everyone to stay safe. Make no illusion, this storm is serious business: take a look at the attached photo to see a comparison to Hurricane Irene.

As always, preparedness is key.  If you're in the path of the storm and haven't yet found your battery-powered radio, it's strongly recommend that you do so now while you have the light, as both your Internet and cell signals are likely to be interrupted.  If you haven't stocked up on water and [non-perishable] food, it's a bit late and you're going to have to hunker down and hope for the best.

Course of Action:
From the FEMA Guidelines [4]:
  1) Listen to the radio or TV for information. [ed.: or FEMA's Twitter [5]]
  2) Secure your home, close storm shutters, and secure outdoor objects or bring them indoors.
  3) Turn off utilities if instructed to do so. Otherwise, turn the refrigerator thermostat to its coldest setting and keep its doors closed.
  4) Turn off propane tanks.· Avoid using the phone, except for serious emergencies.
  5) Moor your boat if time permits.
  6) Ensure a supply of water for sanitary purposes such as cleaning and flushing toilets. Fill the bathtub and other large containers with water.

As an additional tip that I recently learned, you can fill plastic bags with water and put them in your freezer to prepare for extended power/water outages.  These will stay cool longer than bottled water in your refrigerator.

If you're in one of the evacuation areas and haven't yet followed the instructions or aren't able to do so, make sure to seek shelter and follow the appropriate guidelines. [4]

Resources:
Google Crisis Map: http://google.org/crisismap/2012-sandy -- this is awesome, and a great central resource keeping up to date.
NOAA Station 44065: http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=44065 -- this is a buoy off the coast of New York tracking the wind speed and direction, if you want direct from-the-source reports.
GOES-14 Satellite Imagery: http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/data/1min/index.php -- Composite satellite imagery from the SSEC program at WISC, on a 1 minute loop.
Weather.gov: http://www.weather.gov/ -- useful for official advisories and up-to-date information, straight from the source.
Weather.com: http://www.weather.com/

Take a moment and look up your local news station's Facebook / Twitter and subscribe, optionally via SMS so that when the power goes out, you still have a method of receiving realtime updates (provided cell coverage doesn't go down / get inundated with emergency requests).

As a bonus, there's a pretty awesome #HTML5  canvas wind visualization demo that updates in realtime [6].  Some pretty slick techniques there, so view the source [Luke].

Feel free to add your own resources in the comments.  I'll edit the post to add the most helpful resources.

[1]: http://observer.com/2012/10/gowanus-canal-flooding/
[2]: http://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2012/10/29/crane-dangles-from-nyc-high-rise-clearing-streets
[3]: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/10/26/hurricane-sandy-looms-over-the-us/
[4]: http://m.fema.gov/hu_during.htm
[5]: https://twitter.com/fema
[6]: http://hint.fm/wind/

Attachments

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Hurricane Sandy: Resources, Guides, and Information With #HurricaneSandy  already flooding streets ...

Hurricane Sandy: Resources, Guides, and Information

With #HurricaneSandy  already flooding streets [1] and causing damage [2] in #NYC  due to the effects of the combined hurricane, western stormfront, and full-moon tides [3], I wanted to take just a quick moment to collect some resources related to the storm.  I have quite a few friends directly in the path of the storm (ahem, +Sharon Strandskov!) and I want to urge everyone to stay safe. Make no illusion, this storm is serious business: take a look at the attached photo to see a comparison to Hurricane Irene.

As always, preparedness is key.  If you're in the path of the storm and haven't yet found your battery-powered radio, it's strongly recommend that you do so now while you have the light, as both your Internet and cell signals are likely to be interrupted.  If you haven't stocked up on water and [non-perishable] food, it's a bit late and you're going to have to hunker down and hope for the best.

Course of Action:
From the FEMA Guidelines [4]:
  1) Listen to the radio or TV for information. [ed.: or FEMA's Twitter [5]]
  2) Secure your home, close storm shutters, and secure outdoor objects or bring them indoors.
  3) Turn off utilities if instructed to do so. Otherwise, turn the refrigerator thermostat to its coldest setting and keep its doors closed.
  4) Turn off propane tanks.· Avoid using the phone, except for serious emergencies.
  5) Moor your boat if time permits.
  6) Ensure a supply of water for sanitary purposes such as cleaning and flushing toilets. Fill the bathtub and other large containers with water.

As an additional tip that I recently learned, you can fill plastic bags with water and put them in your freezer to prepare for extended power/water outages.  These will stay cool longer than bottled water in your refrigerator.

If you're in one of the evacuation areas and haven't yet followed the instructions or aren't able to do so, make sure to seek shelter and follow the appropriate guidelines. [4]

Resources:
Google Crisis Map: http://google.org/crisismap/2012-sandy -- this is awesome, and a great central resource keeping up to date.
NOAA Station 44065: http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=44065 -- this is a buoy off the coast of New York tracking the wind speed and direction, if you want direct from-the-source reports.
GOES-14 Satellite Imagery: http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/data/1min/index.php -- Composite satellite imagery from the SSEC program at WISC, on a 1 minute loop.
Weather.gov: http://www.weather.gov/ -- useful for official advisories and up-to-date information, straight from the source.
Weather.com: http://www.weather.com/

Take a moment and look up your local news station's Facebook / Twitter and subscribe, optionally via SMS so that when the power goes out, you still have a method of receiving realtime updates (provided cell coverage doesn't go down / get inundated with emergency requests).

As a bonus, there's a pretty awesome #HTML5  canvas wind visualization demo that updates in realtime [6].  Some pretty slick techniques there, so view the source [Luke].

Feel free to add your own resources in the comments.  I'll edit the post to add the most helpful resources.

[1]: http://observer.com/2012/10/gowanus-canal-flooding/
[2]: http://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2012/10/29/crane-dangles-from-nyc-high-rise-clearing-streets
[3]: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/10/26/hurricane-sandy-looms-over-the-us/
[4]: http://m.fema.gov/hu_during.htm
[5]: https://twitter.com/fema
[6]: http://hint.fm/wind/

Attachments

9 Replies

Replies are automatically detected from social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. To add a comment, include a direct link to this post in your message and it'll show up here within a few minutes.

Hurricane Sandy: Resources, Guides, and Information With #HurricaneSandy  already flooding streets ...

Hurricane Sandy: Resources, Guides, and Information

With #HurricaneSandy  already flooding streets [1] and causing damage [2] in #NYC  due to the effects of the combined hurricane, western stormfront, and full-moon tides [3], I wanted to take just a quick moment to collect some resources related to the storm.  I have quite a few friends directly in the path of the storm (ahem, +Sharon Strandskov!) and I want to urge everyone to stay safe. Make no illusion, this storm is serious business: take a look at the attached photo to see a comparison to Hurricane Irene.

As always, preparedness is key.  If you're in the path of the storm and haven't yet found your battery-powered radio, it's strongly recommend that you do so now while you have the light, as both your Internet and cell signals are likely to be interrupted.  If you haven't stocked up on water and [non-perishable] food, it's a bit late and you're going to have to hunker down and hope for the best.

Course of Action:
From the FEMA Guidelines [4]:
  1) Listen to the radio or TV for information. [ed.: or FEMA's Twitter [5]]
  2) Secure your home, close storm shutters, and secure outdoor objects or bring them indoors.
  3) Turn off utilities if instructed to do so. Otherwise, turn the refrigerator thermostat to its coldest setting and keep its doors closed.
  4) Turn off propane tanks.· Avoid using the phone, except for serious emergencies.
  5) Moor your boat if time permits.
  6) Ensure a supply of water for sanitary purposes such as cleaning and flushing toilets. Fill the bathtub and other large containers with water.

As an additional tip that I recently learned, you can fill plastic bags with water and put them in your freezer to prepare for extended power/water outages.  These will stay cool longer than bottled water in your refrigerator.

If you're in one of the evacuation areas and haven't yet followed the instructions or aren't able to do so, make sure to seek shelter and follow the appropriate guidelines. [4]

Resources:
Google Crisis Map: http://google.org/crisismap/2012-sandy -- this is awesome, and a great central resource keeping up to date.
NOAA Station 44065: http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=44065 -- this is a buoy off the coast of New York tracking the wind speed and direction, if you want direct from-the-source reports.
GOES-14 Satellite Imagery: http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/data/1min/index.php -- Composite satellite imagery from the SSEC program at WISC, on a 1 minute loop.
Weather.gov: http://www.weather.gov/ -- useful for official advisories and up-to-date information, straight from the source.
Weather.com: http://www.weather.com/

Take a moment and look up your local news station's Facebook / Twitter and subscribe, optionally via SMS so that when the power goes out, you still have a method of receiving realtime updates (provided cell coverage doesn't go down / get inundated with emergency requests).

As a bonus, there's a pretty awesome #HTML5  canvas wind visualization demo that updates in realtime [6].  Some pretty slick techniques there, so view the source [Luke].

Feel free to add your own resources in the comments.  I'll edit the post to add the most helpful resources.

[1]: http://observer.com/2012/10/gowanus-canal-flooding/
[2]: http://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2012/10/29/crane-dangles-from-nyc-high-rise-clearing-streets
[3]: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/10/26/hurricane-sandy-looms-over-the-us/
[4]: http://m.fema.gov/hu_during.htm
[5]: https://twitter.com/fema
[6]: http://hint.fm/wind/

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Every time I think of maths... in reply to

Every time I think of maths education, I think of Lockharts Lament: (pdf) https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&ei=KhJDU9naJYn0lAXzCA&url=http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf&cd=6&ved=0CDkQFjAF&usg=AFQjCNFGDSuprzF62frJ9aW3y61xxH-w3A&sig2=lGf-UZ-HvOPUhbO3P3HG5A

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In terms of source control, my past few weeks have been spent entirely in Git for one project or another...

In terms of source control, my past few weeks have been spent entirely in Git for one project or another. I've had my ups and downs. Conveniently enough, +Nick Farina provides this timely post on how simple it really can be. No rocket science required! (Hat tip, +Bob Cleveland!)

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Nick Farina - Git Is Simpler Than You Think

Git Is Simpler Than You Think It was about one year ago that we switched to Git. Previously, we used Subversion, through the Mac app Versions, which (rightly) holds an Apple Design Award. I made the.....

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In terms of source control, my past few weeks have been spent entirely in Git for one project or another...

In terms of source control, my past few weeks have been spent entirely in Git for one project or another. I've had my ups and downs. Conveniently enough, +Nick Farina provides this timely post on how simple it really can be. No rocket science required! (Hat tip, +Bob Cleveland!)

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Nick Farina - Git Is Simpler Than You Think

Git Is Simpler Than You Think It was about one year ago that we switched to Git. Previously, we used Subversion, through the Mac app Versions, which (rightly) holds an Apple Design Award. I made the.....

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In terms of source control, my past few weeks have been spent entirely in Git for one project or another...

In terms of source control, my past few weeks have been spent entirely in Git for one project or another. I've had my ups and downs. Conveniently enough, +Nick Farina provides this timely post on how simple it really can be. No rocket science required! (Hat tip, +Bob Cleveland!)

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Nick Farina - Git Is Simpler Than You Think

Git Is Simpler Than You Think It was about one year ago that we switched to Git. Previously, we used Subversion, through the Mac app Versions, which (rightly) holds an Apple Design Award. I made the.....

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In terms of source control, my past few weeks have been spent entirely in Git for one project or another...

In terms of source control, my past few weeks have been spent entirely in Git for one project or another. I've had my ups and downs. Conveniently enough, +Nick Farina provides this timely post on how simple it really can be. No rocket science required! (Hat tip, +Bob Cleveland!)

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Nick Farina - Git Is Simpler Than You Think

Git Is Simpler Than You Think It was about one year ago that we switched to Git. Previously, we used Subversion, through the Mac app Versions, which (rightly) holds an Apple Design Award. I made the.....

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“It really is a great place to exchange ideas. I've been in hangouts where people have practiced wedding...

“It really is a great place to exchange ideas. I've been in hangouts where people have practiced wedding toasts, given tours of their home cities in distant lands, crowd-sourced dating advice, music hangouts, concerts, art hangouts, hangouts with news people while they were live on air, or just a casual hangout where we decided to toss back a couple beers and put on silly hats and talk about random things going on in the world.”
-- +Brett Bjornsen, talking about Google+ Hangouts.

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Amanda Blain - Google+ - Since the launch of google plus... I have been very active…

Since the launch of google plus... I have been very active with the hangout feature... I've hosted a ton of fun hangouts and met hundreds of people from…

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“It really is a great place to exchange ideas. I've been in hangouts where people have practiced wedding...

“It really is a great place to exchange ideas. I've been in hangouts where people have practiced wedding toasts, given tours of their home cities in distant lands, crowd-sourced dating advice, music hangouts, concerts, art hangouts, hangouts with news people while they were live on air, or just a casual hangout where we decided to toss back a couple beers and put on silly hats and talk about random things going on in the world.”
-- +Brett Bjornsen, talking about Google+ Hangouts.

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Amanda Blain - Google+ - Since the launch of google plus... I have been very active…

Since the launch of google plus... I have been very active with the hangout feature... I've hosted a ton of fun hangouts and met hundreds of people from…

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“It really is a great place to exchange ideas. I've been in hangouts where people have practiced wedding...

“It really is a great place to exchange ideas. I've been in hangouts where people have practiced wedding toasts, given tours of their home cities in distant lands, crowd-sourced dating advice, music hangouts, concerts, art hangouts, hangouts with news people while they were live on air, or just a casual hangout where we decided to toss back a couple beers and put on silly hats and talk about random things going on in the world.”
-- +Brett Bjornsen, talking about Google+ Hangouts.

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Amanda Blain - Google+ - Since the launch of google plus... I have been very active…

Since the launch of google plus... I have been very active with the hangout feature... I've hosted a ton of fun hangouts and met hundreds of people from…

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“It really is a great place to exchange ideas. I've been in hangouts where people have practiced wedding...

“It really is a great place to exchange ideas. I've been in hangouts where people have practiced wedding toasts, given tours of their home cities in distant lands, crowd-sourced dating advice, music hangouts, concerts, art hangouts, hangouts with news people while they were live on air, or just a casual hangout where we decided to toss back a couple beers and put on silly hats and talk about random things going on in the world.”
-- +Brett Bjornsen, talking about Google+ Hangouts.

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Amanda Blain - Google+ - Since the launch of google plus... I have been very active…

Since the launch of google plus... I have been very active with the hangout feature... I've hosted a ton of fun hangouts and met hundreds of people from…

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Error In Translation

Amber and I have been yelling at each other on and off for the past hour or so, due to the problems she is having with her current math project. I'm glad she's sloughed off her English project, as doing five people's annotations, comparisons, and evaluations of Shakespeare's Othello on her own was clearly wearing thin on her.

Unfortunately, she doesn't own a copy of Microsoft Office, which includes Excel, which is apparently what she needs. A few months ago I pointed her in the direction of OpenOffice, but errors in conversion and viewing (Comments made in Word won't display in OpenOffice, but they will work vice versa), changes and differences in interface and menu placement, broken features, etc etc., have been an endless source of frustration for her. I really wish I knew how to use it at an expert level, but it just seems like I can't help her, because I know so little about the software. Having to communicate via the phone doesn't help, either.

I'm heading over there after work, maybe I can help her more then. Hoorah for another night of sleep deprivation!

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Dear +Google, please thread shares further than one child. I'm sure you can come up with a good way ...

Dear +Google, please thread shares further than one child. I'm sure you can come up with a good way to represent this flow in the UI while still attributing the original source!

+Vic Gundotra, +Joseph Smarr, +Bradley Horowitz, and I'm sure +Louis Gray and +Robert Scoble have an opinion on this!

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Dear +Google, please thread shares further than one child. I'm sure you can come up with a good way ...

Dear +Google, please thread shares further than one child. I'm sure you can come up with a good way to represent this flow in the UI while still attributing the original source!

+Vic Gundotra, +Joseph Smarr, +Bradley Horowitz, and I'm sure +Louis Gray and +Robert Scoble have an opinion on this!

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In speech recognition breakthrough, Microsoft converts spoken English into spoken Mandarin, using the...

In speech recognition breakthrough, Microsoft converts spoken English into spoken Mandarin, using the same voice.

Jump to 7:11 in the video for the speech demo. Quote below from Rick Rashid, Microsoft’s Chief Research Officer:

“Just over two years ago, researchers at Microsoft Research and the University of Toronto made another breakthrough. By using a technique called Deep Neural Networks, which is patterned after human brain behavior, researchers were able to train more discriminative and better speech recognizers than previous methods.

[...] We have been able to reduce the word error rate for speech by over 30% compared to previous methods. This means that rather than having one word in 4 or 5 incorrect, now the error rate is one word in 7 or 8.”

Source: http://blogs.technet.com/b/next/archive/2012/11/08/microsoft-research-shows-a-promising-new-breakthrough-in-speech-translation-technology.aspx

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Speech Recognition Breakthrough for the Spoken, Translated Word

Chief Research Officer Rick Rashid demonstrates a speech recognition breakthrough via machine translation that converts his spoken English words into compute...

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In speech recognition breakthrough, Microsoft converts spoken English into spoken Mandarin, using the...

In speech recognition breakthrough, Microsoft converts spoken English into spoken Mandarin, using the same voice.

Jump to 7:11 in the video for the speech demo. Quote below from Rick Rashid, Microsoft’s Chief Research Officer:

“Just over two years ago, researchers at Microsoft Research and the University of Toronto made another breakthrough. By using a technique called Deep Neural Networks, which is patterned after human brain behavior, researchers were able to train more discriminative and better speech recognizers than previous methods.

[...] We have been able to reduce the word error rate for speech by over 30% compared to previous methods. This means that rather than having one word in 4 or 5 incorrect, now the error rate is one word in 7 or 8.”

Source: http://blogs.technet.com/b/next/archive/2012/11/08/microsoft-research-shows-a-promising-new-breakthrough-in-speech-translation-technology.aspx

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Speech Recognition Breakthrough for the Spoken, Translated Word

Chief Research Officer Rick Rashid demonstrates a speech recognition breakthrough via machine translation that converts his spoken English words into compute...

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In speech recognition breakthrough, Microsoft converts spoken English into spoken Mandarin, using the...

In speech recognition breakthrough, Microsoft converts spoken English into spoken Mandarin, using the same voice.

Jump to 7:11 in the video for the speech demo. Quote below from Rick Rashid, Microsoft’s Chief Research Officer:

“Just over two years ago, researchers at Microsoft Research and the University of Toronto made another breakthrough. By using a technique called Deep Neural Networks, which is patterned after human brain behavior, researchers were able to train more discriminative and better speech recognizers than previous methods.

[...] We have been able to reduce the word error rate for speech by over 30% compared to previous methods. This means that rather than having one word in 4 or 5 incorrect, now the error rate is one word in 7 or 8.”

Source: http://blogs.technet.com/b/next/archive/2012/11/08/microsoft-research-shows-a-promising-new-breakthrough-in-speech-translation-technology.aspx

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Speech Recognition Breakthrough for the Spoken, Translated Word

Chief Research Officer Rick Rashid demonstrates a speech recognition breakthrough via machine translation that converts his spoken English words into compute...

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In speech recognition breakthrough, Microsoft converts spoken English into spoken Mandarin, using the...

In speech recognition breakthrough, Microsoft converts spoken English into spoken Mandarin, using the same voice.

Jump to 7:11 in the video for the speech demo. Quote below from Rick Rashid, Microsoft’s Chief Research Officer:

“Just over two years ago, researchers at Microsoft Research and the University of Toronto made another breakthrough. By using a technique called Deep Neural Networks, which is patterned after human brain behavior, researchers were able to train more discriminative and better speech recognizers than previous methods.

[...] We have been able to reduce the word error rate for speech by over 30% compared to previous methods. This means that rather than having one word in 4 or 5 incorrect, now the error rate is one word in 7 or 8.”

Source: http://blogs.technet.com/b/next/archive/2012/11/08/microsoft-research-shows-a-promising-new-breakthrough-in-speech-translation-technology.aspx

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Speech Recognition Breakthrough for the Spoken, Translated Word

Chief Research Officer Rick Rashid demonstrates a speech recognition breakthrough via machine translation that converts his spoken English words into compute...

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Interested in #sustainability? +Daniel Ely Rankin recently introduced me to Liquid-Flouride Thorium ...

Interested in #sustainability? +Daniel Ely Rankin recently introduced me to Liquid-Flouride Thorium Reactors (LFTR), which were passed up in the 50s as commercial sources of nuclear energy because they apparently didn't provide "viable weapons-grade plutonium". [1] They provide a possibly viable safe alternative to the current form of nuclear fission reactors, and deserve the same level of attention that things like solar and wind power have been earning.

If you gather one thing from this post, it's that you should sign this WhiteHouse.gov Petition to fund further research into LFTR Reactors: http://goo.gl/KVnvO

It's a tragedy when we see disasters like #Fukushima. Extenuating circumstances indeed; but likely an avoidable tragedy nonetheless. As opposed to other reactors like the Boiling Water Reactors (BWR) at the heart of the Japanese disaster, LFTR Reactors cannot meltdown, [2] instead stabilizing themselves naturally because their power decreases as their temperature increases.

If you're further interested, check out +Daniel Ely Rankin's post [3] and read up on the technology yourself. It's completely fascinating, and it's a healthy balance to the anti-nuclear rhetoric that's become so much louder recently.

[1]: http://books.google.com/books?id=fOtxQpPPyyIC
[2]: http://www.energyfromthorium.com/pdf/ - Section 5.3, WASH 1097, Energy From Thorium's Document Repository "The Use of Thorium in Nuclear Power Reactors"
[3]: https://plus.google.com/109596373340495798827/posts/4SF6fr99Jsv

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Provide Funding for Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) Research and Development for Energy Independence. | The White HouseProvide Funding for Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) Research and De...

Thorium is nearly a Perfect Fuel. Fund it's development. It has been presented to Google and TED.com. Videos below. Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) has been proven by previous US research a...

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Interested in #sustainability? +Daniel Ely Rankin recently introduced me to Liquid-Flouride Thorium ...

Interested in #sustainability? +Daniel Ely Rankin recently introduced me to Liquid-Flouride Thorium Reactors (LFTR), which were passed up in the 50s as commercial sources of nuclear energy because they apparently didn't provide "viable weapons-grade plutonium". [1] They provide a possibly viable safe alternative to the current form of nuclear fission reactors, and deserve the same level of attention that things like solar and wind power have been earning.

If you gather one thing from this post, it's that you should sign this WhiteHouse.gov Petition to fund further research into LFTR Reactors: http://goo.gl/KVnvO

It's a tragedy when we see disasters like #Fukushima. Extenuating circumstances indeed; but likely an avoidable tragedy nonetheless. As opposed to other reactors like the Boiling Water Reactors (BWR) at the heart of the Japanese disaster, LFTR Reactors cannot meltdown, [2] instead stabilizing themselves naturally because their power decreases as their temperature increases.

If you're further interested, check out +Daniel Ely Rankin's post [3] and read up on the technology yourself. It's completely fascinating, and it's a healthy balance to the anti-nuclear rhetoric that's become so much louder recently.

[1]: http://books.google.com/books?id=fOtxQpPPyyIC
[2]: http://www.energyfromthorium.com/pdf/ - Section 5.3, WASH 1097, Energy From Thorium's Document Repository "The Use of Thorium in Nuclear Power Reactors"
[3]: https://plus.google.com/109596373340495798827/posts/4SF6fr99Jsv

Attachments

Provide Funding for Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) Research and Development for Energy Independence. | The White HouseProvide Funding for Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) Research and De...

Thorium is nearly a Perfect Fuel. Fund it's development. It has been presented to Google and TED.com. Videos below. Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) has been proven by previous US research a...

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Interested in #sustainability? +Daniel Ely Rankin recently introduced me to Liquid-Flouride Thorium ...

Interested in #sustainability? +Daniel Ely Rankin recently introduced me to Liquid-Flouride Thorium Reactors (LFTR), which were passed up in the 50s as commercial sources of nuclear energy because they apparently didn't provide "viable weapons-grade plutonium". [1] They provide a possibly viable safe alternative to the current form of nuclear fission reactors, and deserve the same level of attention that things like solar and wind power have been earning.

If you gather one thing from this post, it's that you should sign this WhiteHouse.gov Petition to fund further research into LFTR Reactors: http://goo.gl/KVnvO

It's a tragedy when we see disasters like #Fukushima. Extenuating circumstances indeed; but likely an avoidable tragedy nonetheless. As opposed to other reactors like the Boiling Water Reactors (BWR) at the heart of the Japanese disaster, LFTR Reactors cannot meltdown, [2] instead stabilizing themselves naturally because their power decreases as their temperature increases.

If you're further interested, check out +Daniel Ely Rankin's post [3] and read up on the technology yourself. It's completely fascinating, and it's a healthy balance to the anti-nuclear rhetoric that's become so much louder recently.

[1]: http://books.google.com/books?id=fOtxQpPPyyIC
[2]: http://www.energyfromthorium.com/pdf/ - Section 5.3, WASH 1097, Energy From Thorium's Document Repository "The Use of Thorium in Nuclear Power Reactors"
[3]: https://plus.google.com/109596373340495798827/posts/4SF6fr99Jsv

Attachments

Provide Funding for Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) Research and Development for Energy Independence. | The White HouseProvide Funding for Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) Research and De...

Thorium is nearly a Perfect Fuel. Fund it's development. It has been presented to Google and TED.com. Videos below. Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) has been proven by previous US research a...

4 Replies

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Interested in #sustainability? +Daniel Ely Rankin recently introduced me to Liquid-Flouride Thorium ...

Interested in #sustainability? +Daniel Ely Rankin recently introduced me to Liquid-Flouride Thorium Reactors (LFTR), which were passed up in the 50s as commercial sources of nuclear energy because they apparently didn't provide "viable weapons-grade plutonium". [1] They provide a possibly viable safe alternative to the current form of nuclear fission reactors, and deserve the same level of attention that things like solar and wind power have been earning.

If you gather one thing from this post, it's that you should sign this WhiteHouse.gov Petition to fund further research into LFTR Reactors: http://goo.gl/KVnvO

It's a tragedy when we see disasters like #Fukushima. Extenuating circumstances indeed; but likely an avoidable tragedy nonetheless. As opposed to other reactors like the Boiling Water Reactors (BWR) at the heart of the Japanese disaster, LFTR Reactors cannot meltdown, [2] instead stabilizing themselves naturally because their power decreases as their temperature increases.

If you're further interested, check out +Daniel Ely Rankin's post [3] and read up on the technology yourself. It's completely fascinating, and it's a healthy balance to the anti-nuclear rhetoric that's become so much louder recently.

[1]: http://books.google.com/books?id=fOtxQpPPyyIC
[2]: http://www.energyfromthorium.com/pdf/ - Section 5.3, WASH 1097, Energy From Thorium's Document Repository "The Use of Thorium in Nuclear Power Reactors"
[3]: https://plus.google.com/109596373340495798827/posts/4SF6fr99Jsv

Attachments

Provide Funding for Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) Research and Development for Energy Independence. | The White HouseProvide Funding for Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) Research and De...

Thorium is nearly a Perfect Fuel. Fund it's development. It has been presented to Google and TED.com. Videos below. Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) has been proven by previous US research a...

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RSS is back, or "a brief history of EricMartindale.com"

Hello there, adoring internet-stalkers! (I'm kidding. ~_~) You may have noticed (if you were loyal, that is ;)) that my Feedburner-powered RSS Feed has been lacking in activity lately. There's a reason for that.

Recently, I got rid of WordPress and Sweetcron in favor of a new CMS platform, Chyrp. I had been running Wordpress for a long time, using it to share my thoughts with the general internet populace. However, it had become a bit of a chore to maintain, and it really felt like duplicate work on top of all the other content-generation I was already performing (i.e., forum posts, blog comments, Last.fm "Loved" Tracks, Google Reader shared items, etc.), so I began to look for a way to aggregate this content into a central place.

For a while, FriendFeed served this purpose well, but I didn't like the lack of control I had over the source. Facebook also filled part of this gap (and it still does, to a point), and they've even purchased FriendFeed, but I was looking for something quite a bit more customizable and self-hosted. Through various referrals, I came across Yongfook's Sweetcron project which was a new platform designed specifically for this new thing they called, le gasp, "Lifestreaming".

However, after fighting with Sweetcron and its aggregation methods, particularly its lack of support for various service feed formats; I decided to look into something else. Initial searches landed me upon Tumblr, who had conveniently announced a feature that syncs comments across multiple services (or aggregates). Sadly, I didn't want to get back into a world where all my code was hosted by someone else, and I had no control over it. I kept Sweetcron running on my site under lifestream/, but I continued searching for a better solution.

I then stumbled across Bazooka, which was billed as "the first free PHP tumblelog engine". Thanks to Bazooka developer Evan Walsh, who alerted me to a more up-to-date and current replacement called Chyrp. And I was sold. I immediately spent a few hours converting my existing content from WordPress and SweetCron over to a test installation of Chyrp, and then took the next night changing my site structure and 301'd all my old links to the new URLs.

That's where EricMartindale.com stands today. I've spent a few weeks getting my stream set up the way I want it, and I'm turning the RSS feed back on. Posts should begin flowing into your RSS reader very shortly. Post comments, feedback, and questions here!

Edit 10:13 PM EST: It looks like Feedburner is having some trouble parsing my new RSS content. You can subscribe to my direct feed and it will always work.

Edit 10:58 PM EST: I've fixed the problem and committed the patch to GitHub.

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Why I Don't Use Skype (and why you shouldn't, either)

I often get asked for my Skype address, sometimes in relation to business or casual conversation. I politely decline with some degree of hand-waving about my reasons, and suggest an alternative form of communication (typically either Google Talk or Google Hangouts, depending on the context—both are built right in to Gmail!). I'd like to outline some of the reasons why I've made the decision to avoid Skype, primarily so I have something to link to when someone asks me about it.

First and foremost, we don't really know what Skype actually does. The binary (the actual program you run on your computer) is obfuscated, so attempts at disassembling it [PDF] to verify some of its strange behavior and the information it is transmitting have so far come up with very little. This is an issue, because Skype produces encrypted traffic even when you are not actively using Skype. This means we can only speculate on what information Skype is collecting about you after you've so graciously chosen to install it, and perhaps more importantly who it is sending that information to.

Quoting Salman Baset:

When a Skype client is not in a call and is running on a machine with public IP address, it has on the average 4-8 active TCP connections and atleast one UDP connection.

While connecting to external IP addresses is normal for a server/client architecture and necessary for receiving notifications, the volume of traffic and number of connections is concerning, considering the compounding issues between Skype's peer-to-peer architecture [PDF] and the "reasonable level of detection accuracy" in snooping on voice calls in Skype [PDF], despite the [purportedly] encrypted nature of the Skype protocol.

Speaking in general terms, Skype is "black box" software which has undergone no public review despite very concerning observed behavior. When new Skype malware (like Skype IMBot, of which an analysis is available, or the more recent Skype account hijacking) is released, there are very few options to protect ourselves if we've got Skype installed. On Linux, tools like AppArmor and TOMOYO exist, but without the ability to easily view the source and understand the attack (per perhaps even fix it proactively, before it occurs) we are at the mercy of Skype's new maintainers to provide a timely resolution in a reactive approach.

If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.
— Richard Stallman
In conclusion, while Skype may be convenient, it presents a series of questions that must be asked and implications to be considered before choosing it over other chat, VoIP, and video chat solutions. I can only hope that more people consider these things before doing so.

Asides

Some of the other things I found interesting, more recently than the research I've linked in this post, include Skype's role in the Syrian conflict, in which a claim was made as follows:
A media activist in Idlib named Mohamed said a rebel informant working for the government was killed in Damascus six months ago after sending warnings to the Free Syrian Army on Skype. “I saw this incident right in front of my eyes,” Mohamed said. “We put his info on Skype so he was arrested and killed.”

Skype (Microsoft) has also made other concerning statements after accusations of helping the U.S. Government spy on its own citizens.

Wikipedia also lists a large number of known flaws in Skype, which I've chosen to avoid duplicating in this post.

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