Mar 17 2009

Mich. teen turns to Web for help getting to UND

Inspired in part by President Barack Obama use of the Internet as a fundraising tool, Harris said, “I decided to try and use the power of the Internet to help me pay for my college education.”

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Mar 17 2009

ESA Launches GOCE To Map Earth’s Gravity

DSG2 sends in an ESA press release which reads in part: “This afternoon, the Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) satellite developed by the European Space Agency was lofted into a near-Sun-synchronous, low Earth orbit by a Rockot launcher lifting off from the Plesetsk cosmodrome in northern Russia. GOCE is the first of a new family of ESA satellites designed to study our planet and its environment in order to enhance our knowledge and understanding of Earth-system processes and their evolution, to enable us to address the challenges of global climate change. In particular, GOCE will measure the minute differences in the Earth’s gravity field around the globe.” One consequence of mapping the planet’s geoid in finer detail is that ocean currents can be limned more accurately. This BBC article from 2007 goes into some detail about this application.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mar 17 2009

Wikileaks Pages Added To Australian Internet Blacklist

cpudney writes “The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has added several Wikileaks pages to its controversial blacklist. The blacklisted pages contain Denmark’s list of banned websites. Simply linking to addresses in ACMA’s blacklist attracts an ,000 per-day fine as the hosts of the popular Australian broadband forum, Whirlpool, discovered last week when they published a forum post that linked to an anti-abortion web-site recently added to ACMA’s blacklist. The blacklist is secret, immune to FOI requests and forms the basis of the Australian government’s proposed mandatory ISP-level Internet censorship legislation. Wikileaks’ response to notification of the blacklisting states: ‘The first rule of censorship is that you cannot talk about censorship.'” So Australians aren’t allowed to see what it is that the Danes aren’t allowed to see?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mar 16 2009

Passwords of 8000 Comcast Customers Exposed

A list of more than 8,000 user names and passwords for customers of Comcast, one of the nation’s largest Internet service providers, sat unprotected on the Web for the last two months.

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Mar 16 2009

IBM Develops Technology To Talk To Web

ProgramErgoSum writes to tell us that IBM’s Indian-based research arm is trying to bring a new dimension to web interaction through voice interaction on your mobile phone. Developing a new protocol, Hyperspeech Transfer Protocol (HSTP), the hope is to allow users to talk to the web and get a response. Without more explanation I’m hoping this goes about as far as the gopher web. “The spoken web is a network of voice sites or interconnected voice and the response the company got in some pilot projects in Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat and the kind of innovations that people came up with were just mind-boggling, Gupta said. “

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mar 16 2009

Web 2.0 tools can foster growth in hard times

A must read for anyone involved with social media and web 2.0 sites.

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Mar 16 2009

Apple holding back on web-based 3D graphics for the desktop

Apple has added 3D position and transform capabilities to WebKit, along with the 2D CSS-based transform abilities added some time ago. However, Apple allows access to these advanced 3D abilities only via Mobile Safari. If Apple enables the features on the desktop, they could kickstart the development of a whole new class of visually rich web applic

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Mar 16 2009

Assemble the Social Web with Zembly

stoolpigeon writes “Web applications are all the rage. Web applications that function within the context of social networking sites doubly so. I think it is safe to say that pretty much anyone looking to garner a large audience on the web, for financial or any other reasons, has to be considering how they can reach people on sites like Facebook, or all those users out there accessing the web via their iPhones. Sun Microsystems has entered this arena by providing a set of web based development tools and a platform on which to host the resulting products that is now in beta and named Zembly. And while Zembly has not been open to the public for all that long, two of Zemblys architects with the help of two writers have published a new cookbook for the aspiring Zembly developer, Assemble the Social Web with Zembly.” Read below for the rest of JR’s review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mar 15 2009

Top Five Web Design Tools

There are many applications available to our disposal, but there are some that just stand out from the crowd. The tools in this article are what’s regarded as the most popular tools used for web design.

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Mar 15 2009

Is IE8 a Fast Browser?

Microsoft’s own speed tests show IE beating Chrome, Firefox. Microsoft has released its own tests that show IE8 can load many websites faster than two open source browsers: Firefox and Chrome…

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