Tips, Expertise, Articles and Advice from the Pro's for Your Website or Blog to Succeed
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Anyone who sits at a computer for long stretches of time knows how absolutely draining it can be. And it turns out, there’s a biological reason for that: According to Dr. Steven Feinsilver, the director of sleep medicine at Lenox Hill Hospital, using your brain takes a lot of work.
If you work in an open office (like me), you probably have your earbuds in constantly – because of course you do; open offices are the worst. But if those earbuds happen to be wireless, you may want to reconsider.
As this piece in Quartz explains, there was a bit of an uproar last week when reports began circulating the web that more than 200 scientists from around the globe were warning of serious health risks tied to this technology.
Artificial technology may not actually be turning us into superheroes, at least not in the timeframe posited by this piece in VentureBeat, but it is giving us some pretty sweet new abilities.
“Wouldn’t it be great if everyone could be an artist?” asks NVIDIA’s VP of Applied Deep Learning Research, Dr. Bryan Catanzaro. His excitement is palpable as he reveals one of NVIDIA’s newest AI projects in the above video, a generative adversarial network known as GauGAN that gives everyone the power to create lifelike works of art in minutes.
You know what was absolutely adorable back in the 90s? Me. Just look at that bow, that flannel, that innocent glow that can only exist before adulting smacks it right off your face.
Yep, there really isn’t anything else quite like perusing old pics to make you feel so absolutely past your prime – unless, of course, you’re the Internet. (Or Jeff Bezos, but that’s another matter entirely.)
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital has long been known as a leader in the fight to cure childhood cancer. And now it’s being recognized as another type of leader – in digital innovation.
With the launch of the St. Jude Cloud, cancer researchers can not only store their data in one central location, making it accessible to others around the globe, but they can also analyze it right on the spot using groundbreaking technology, an initiative that’s earned the organization the coveted Digital Edge 50 Award for 2019.
When HackerRank released its Student Developer Report last year, there probably weren’t too many devs out there surprised by the fact that more than half of all developers are largely self-taught, with almost 30 percent being entirely so. As the report explains, “computer science programs lag behind the pace at which technology evolves, [so] for skills that are growing in the industry today, students have to rely on self-teaching to learn.”
And as this piece from CIO explains, machine learning skills are among the most coveted by today’s tech companies. Unfortunately, however, “demand continues to outpace the supply of qualified talent for these emerging skills.”
In honor of his brainchild’s 30th birthday, Sir Tim Berners-Lee has a bone to pick with the likes of Google, Facebook, Verizon, AT&T, and the FCC. Like any good parent, he’s not so sure these so-called friends have his World Wide Web’s best interests at heart, so he’s laying down some ground rules.
Introduced at last year’s Web Summit in Lisbon, but relaunched on this ever so joyous occasion, Berners-Lee’s Contract for the Web seeks to reverse the social, corporate, and governmental trends jeopardizing his creation’s future.
The Internet can certainly feel like a cold, dark place, especially for those of us who can’t help but stay mired in it day in and day out. I’m one of those people, and while I’d like to think I do a pretty good job keeping above the fray, it can be really hard when you just happen to stumble across pieces like this horrifying (and incredibly important) revelation in The Verge. (It turns out, being a professional Facebook moderator and having to witness the worst of the worst things people do to each other on a daily basis is extremely caustic for your health.)
But thankfully, we also have journalists like The Ringer’s Victor Luckerson, who did some work to uncover those times over the last decade when we weren’t trying to kill each other – times when we were actually able to put aside our differences and celebrate the things that connect us. And this isn’t just some dude sharing his favorite viral memes; it’s actually backed by UVM research.
Introduced back in August of last year, the IoT Cybersecurity Certification Program sought to encourage the adoption of better security features in cellular-connected IoT devices. And now almost six months later, a manufacturer has finally managed to meet the hefty requirements.
HARMAN Spark, an aftermarket connected car device offered exclusively through AT&T, underwent testing at one of the CTIA’s authorized labs.
In a recent blog post on Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg laid out his vision for “building a privacy-focused messaging and social network platform.” Too bad it’s a bunch of BS.
“I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services,” he wrote, “where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won't stick around forever.” Zuckerberg acknowledged the company’s abysmal reputation for protecting users’ privacy, saying, “I understand that many people don’t think Facebook can or would even want to build this kind of privacy-focused platform.” He then set out to reassure the apparently gullible masses that Facebook has officially turned over a new leaf.
Photo credit Flickr/Christoph Scholz
The National Security Agency’s newest contribution to the open source community is here. Unveiled at this year’s RSA security conference in San Francisco, Ghidra is the platform the agency has been developing internally for years to help them reverse engineer questionable pieces of code.
Apple is once again in the news for something they’re certainly not happy about: Another coding bug has been found in the MacOS operating system, this time allowing hackers to change the data of a computer’s most privileged code.
As this piece from Wired explains, the BuggyCow trick (named after the loophole hackers found in the OS’s copy-on-write or CoW protection) “takes advantage of the fact that when a program mounts a new file system on a hard drive – basically loading a whole collection of files rather than altering just one – the memory manager isn't warned. So a hacker can unmount a file system, remount it with new data, and in doing so silently replace the information that some sensitive, highly privileged code is using.”
It seems everything is going smart these days: refrigerators, entire factories, shoes, this ball thing that spies on your pets. But you know what else is getting pretty smart? Hackers, especially since this burgeoning IoT boom – which Gartner estimates will reach 20.4 billion connected devices by 2020 – is all-too-often setting people up to have their networks hijacked much in the same way babies lose candy to morally bankrupt people. (Monsters.) Indeed, as this piece from CNET points out, “There's a running joke regarding connected gadgets and the internet of things: ‘The 'S' in IoT stands for security.’”
But companies like Telit are trying to make room for that ‘S.’ Recently unveiled to the world, their WL865E4-P module, a low-power Wi-Fi Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) combo unit based on the Qualcomm QCA4020 system-on-chip (SoC), features integrated crypto hardware, enabling “IoT developers to meet demanding requirements for power consumption, security, performance, size, and reliability,” the company explained in a press release. Designed for high-bandwidth applications, the module is ideal for uses in “health care, video, smart home, and industrial control.”
We’ve all been that woman in the above video: A stressful day leaves us with little capacity to deal when things start taking a turn for the worse. But unlike this woman, played by Bryce Dallas Howard in the season 3 opener of Black Mirror, our irritability doesn’t generally result in our being kicked out of an airport after being denied admittance to the flight we’ve already booked.
Unless you’re living in China sometime in the near future, that is. As this recent piece from Wired explains, China is developing a social credit system that seeks to reward citizens (and businesses) for social trustworthiness while punishing others for apparently harmful behaviors.
Photo credit Flickr/Alan Levine
A new survey of 5,558 IT professionals reveals a staggering amount of enterprise-level practices that may very well lead to the next Equifax-type data breach. Published by Sonatype (in partnership with Cloudbees, Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute, Signal Sciences, 9th Bit, and Twistlock), the 2019 DevSecOps Community Survey paints a rather unsettling picture of how a large number of enterprises are handling cybersecurity concerns, particularly when it comes to their use of open source components.
Photo credit Flickr/Eli Christman
Can we be real for a second? OK, good. There’s a lot of really terrible advice out there for people trying to get ahead at the office. I mean, so horrific that I honestly wonder if these writers’ editors even read the work before publishing.
Photo credit Flickr/Iñaki Quenerapú
Gary Plowman is an Ireland-based web and videogame developer who happens to think that BASIC is pretty darn cool. So cool, in fact, that he wrote an entire book about it: ZX Spectrum Games Code Club: 20 Fun Games to Code and Learn.