One year ago, Abha Dawesar was living in blacked-out Manhattan post-Sandy, scrounging for power to connect. As a novelist, she was struck by this metaphor: Have our lives now become fixated on the drive to digitally connect, while we miss out on what’s real?
via Abha Dawesar: Life in the “digital now” | Video on TED.com.
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In early October, Adobe announced that 2.9 million customers were hit in a major data breach. As it turns out, the breach went much further, affecting 38 million users, according to a report from Naked Security.
The attackers gained access to users’ customer IDs, names, encrypted passwords, encrypted debit and credit card numbers and other personal data.
“So far, our investigation has confirmed that the attackers obtained access to Adobe IDs and (what were at the time valid), encrypted passwords for approximately 38 million active users,” said Adobe spokesperson Heather Edell.
Adobe initially believed the hackers accessed source code from Adobe Reader, Acrobat and ColdFusion. New data shows that a portion of source code for its Photoshop software was stolen, too.
Adobe set up a help page for affected users, notified them and reset their passwords. The company advises users to change their passwords entirely not only for Adobe products, but also for other sites where they used the same password.
Adobe Data Breach Affects 38 Million — Not 3 Million, as Reported | Mashable.
Gupta set out to find a way to teach very young children the basics of coding–sequences of instructions, subroutines, events, conditional statements–in a playful way. Today Play-i launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise $250,000 to manufacture two kid-friendly robots called Bo and Yana, which teach high-level programming concepts to children as as young as five.
Read more: Screw Teaching Your Kids–Get This Robot Instead ⚙ Co.Labs ⚙ code + community.
Facebook’s analytics chief Ken Rudin recently opened up to The Journal about how the social network plans to track user behavior. Long story short, Facebook plans to track it very closely. At the moment, the company is testing software that would record everything from when a user’s Newsfeed is visible on the screen to how long a user hovers over a certain part of the page.
That’s right. Facebook wants to know exactly where you’re moving your mouse. At all times.
Read: Facebook Is Testing Software That Tracks Your Cursor’s Every Move | Gizmodo.
Study: 38 Percent of Toddlers Have Used a Mobile Device | PCMag
According to a recent Common Sense Media research study, 38 percent of kids under two years old have used a mobile device — with a watchful eye from their parents, surely. In 2011, that number reached only 10 percent.
Pediatricians: Limit kids’ media use to 2 hours a day | CNET
American Academy of Pediatrics also tells parents to discourage any screen time for children 2 and younger and keep Internet-connected devices out of kids’ bedrooms.
Report: Piracy Isn’t Killing Content | Gizmodo
Contrary to what the popular press might have us believe, piracy isn’t killing content. At least, that’s what a team of scholars from the London School of Economics has found after conducting a deep analysis of the situation.
Deloitte Survey Finds 18% of U.S. College Students Own Tablets, 14% Own E-Readers | InfoDocket
Launching Later This Week: New York Public Library’s Shelley-Godwin Digital Archive | InfoDocket
The archive will offer digital versions of romantic texts.
Blogging Startup Medium Opens to All | AllThingsD
Medium, the blogging startup created by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, announced on Friday that it is now open for all to use. Newcomers are required to sign in with a Twitter account, and can only post from Chrome, Firefox and Safari browsers.
Metadata: Pinterest and Getty Images Announce Partnership | InfoDocket
Getty Images and Pinterest partner to learn more about the images you pin.
Apple CEO: We’ve locked up 94% of education tablet market | CNET
Tim Cook calls the company’s share in the education arena unheard of in most businesses.
Nielsen to add web viewers to future TV ratings, with a little help from Facebook | Engadget
After several months of testing within the industry, Nielsen is finally ready to reveal its efforts to bake mobile viewing habits into its TV ratings system.
Authors face censorship decision to publish in China | Melville House
Kraków joins UNESCO Cities of Literature | thenews.pl
Yandex Buys KinoPoisk, ‘Russia’s IMDb’, To Move Into Film Search And Recommendation | TechCrunch
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Gamers of a certain age will no doubt scream Oh wow, I remember that! as they click through the Internet Archive’s latest project.
The non-profit organization recently launched the Historical Software Collection, with the mission of making old programs accessible (including plenty of games!) that were originally released for platforms like Atari 2600, Apple II, and Commodore 64.
Software itself isn’t new to the Archive, but it’s spent the past couple of years making these programs playable in-browser. So whether it’s E.T. on Atari 2600 from 1982 or VisiCalc on the Apple II from 1979, there’s no need to download a heap of emulators to try them out.
Archiving video games can present special challenges, as David Gibson at the Library of Congress has explained so well. But the independent Internet Archive claims to have the largest software archive in the world, and it should be interesting to see how the next few years work out for them.
Perhaps one of the greatest challenges they’ll face is copyright. Technically, all of these programs are still covered under copyright law. And I have no doubt that the myriad companies responsible for managing the rights to something like E.T. are figuring out if they should intervene. Hopefully, no one will try to pull these programs. But if they do, it will be just one more example of how desperately broken our current copyright system is. [Internet Archive]
The Internet Archive Opens Its Historical Software Collection To All | Gizmodo
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