Tag: OPENSOURCE

The revolutions across the Middle East may have ushered in a new era of U.S. intelligence-gathering -- one that could even include Google. Gabriel Koehler-Derrick, an instructor at West Point, and Joshua Goldstein, from Princeton, recently used Google Trends to analyze the terms that Web users in Egypt searched at the height of the country's recent upheaval. "What we did was a comparison of ...

Crowd-sourcing is not just a hot buzzword. When done right, turning to the Internet and its many voices can raise money, awareness and the profile for a project, putting a really great idea into practice. Kickstarter, the site that allows anyone with an e-mail account to invest in whatever great proposals they find (with some perks, of course), is a great example of the collective power of the ...

Google follows you around the Web, analyzing your data in order to serve you perfectly tailored advertisements, and creeping out privacy advocates to the max. A new open-source program dubbed The Locker Project hopes to help you keep track of your digital footprints -- or "exhaust data" -- as you maneuver around online. Sing.ly, the startup behind the program, says that the idea is to stalk ...

Vladimir Putin is throwing his weight behind the free and open-source software movement. The Russian prime minister has apparently signed an order to move the government to an infrastructure built on freely available, open-source software by the third quarter of 2014. The plan would see all major government systems transition to Linux starting in the second quarter of 2012. The move to open-source ...

For many women, strolling down the streets of Cairo is no walk in the park. Whether it's in the form of catcalls, leers or gropes, sexual harassment has become increasingly common in Egypt, where strict social norms and widespread public negligence have offered little recourse to female victims. A forthcoming site called Harassmap, however, may provide Egypt's women with a new voice -- and, ...

In the wake of Facebook's repeated privacy failures, a group of students from NYU decided to take a stab at the world of social networking with Diaspora. It's billed as "the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network." The focus on privacy is key to its marketing strategy, as are open-source solutions. Rather than being hosted on a central server, its creators ...

Firefox commands enough market share to make it the world's second most popular browser, but Internet Explorer has always kept a significant lead thanks to its presence in the enterprise market. Microsoft is very good at making things easy for large businesses, and Mozilla showed little interest in approaching that market until 2007. But Mozilla's efforts to improve deploying and managing Firefox ...

We already knew that the PR2 robot could fold a mean basket of laundry. But we had no idea it could also play a mean game of billiards. In the matter of a week, the Willow Garage team that developed the PR2 has taught its brainchild how to play pool -- although, as Gizmodo reports, it certainly wasn't easy. Willow Garage had to create a special bridge and grip to enable its bot to hold a cue, ...

Share Most people have always been taught to take anything they read on Wikipedia with a grain of salt. The site's usually pretty reliable for general information, or for those times when you need to sound off on the intricacies of Vulcan law. But its open-source format still leaves it vulnerable to a host of factual inaccuracies that usually deter students or academics from citing the online ...

Now that the dust from the recent U.K. parliamentary elections appears to have settled, the new Liberal Democrat/Tory coalition government has wasted no time in publicizing its new agenda. And, as ArsTechnica reports, major changes may be on the horizon. Today, the new government issued its official unified policy statement (.PDF), which aims to reverse many of the controversial policies of the ...

If you're anything like us, all these recent changes and revelations about your privacy on Facebook has you up in arms. But perhaps you're not quite ready to go cold turkey and delete your account. Maybe you're content to simply lock-down your profile using Facebook's privacy and security settings. Sadly, navigating those tools can be a tad confusing, with Instant Personalization, application ...

Share It seems that every time Ubuntu gets an update there's talk about how the new version will finally usher in the era of user-friendly Linux and turn the open-source operating system (OS) into a serious competitor to OS X and Windows. We've been running the latest version, 10.04 (code-named Lucid Lynx), since it first hit beta in mid-March. While we have a hard time seeing it replace ...

Have you ever dreamed of launching something into space? If so, a satellite engineer claims it's more of a possibility than you might think. According to Make, Song Hojun created an affordable do-it-yourself satellite system and wrote a book, available on Google Books for free, that tells other amateur space enthusiasts how to do the same thing. We won't bore you with the nuts-and-bolts of the ...

Let us just say that we hate IM-speak and Webby abbreviations, but being that this is a family-friendly publication, a simple "WTF" will have to suffice for our reaction on this one. Our minds are really blown by this: A middle school teacher, Karen, had a mini-meltdown when she spotted a student showing off the capabilities of his Linux-powered laptop and handing out Linux discs provided by ...

When it comes to productivity software, it's hard to cover all the bases better than Microsoft's Office suite. It handles writing letters, tracking numbers in spreadsheets, making presentations, and even creating simple databases for archiving large amounts of data. It's the worldwide standard -- but it isn't cheap. A full copy with all the bells and whistles can set you back nearly $700 (unless ...