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What open source means for the Average Joe or Jodi
Ask just about any person you meet whether they are using open source software (OSS) and the chances are good you will be met by a blank stare. Read More »
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What Transparency Reports Don't Tell Us
These reports give us a lot of numbers, but very little information about how hard these companies fight on the behalf of users. Read More »
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When Bushfires Sound Alarms, Social Media Can Save Lives
These days, social media and online apps have become a major source of disaster information and warnings. But how much can we trust them? Read More »
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White House Accused Of Letting Politics Influence HealthCare.gov Design
Congressional overseers made their first move to apportion blame on Monday for the troubled launch of HealthCare.gov, the government’s online health insurance marketplace, while the White House turned to social media to drum up public support for the ailing and embattled website. Read More »
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Why Medical Education Should Embrace Social Media
[... I] know Twitter is technically considered social media, but why can’t social media be used as an educational tool? Large renowned institutions and organizations are tweeting valuable information pertaining to my livelihood and I can’t access it “on the job” where I’m supposed to be gaining an education. [...] Read More »
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Why Privacy Policies Are So Inscrutable
The agreements of the 50 most popular websites in America are composed of 145,641 words. This is why...
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Why Public Libraries Need to Support Open Source
People turn to public libraries for answers, and a lot of times libraries are superb at providing them. But when it comes to providing answers about open source, libraries have an uneven track record. What can we do to make this better so that more people can turn to their public library to learn about open source software, hardware, and principles? Right now, if you walked into my public library and pelted me with questions about open source—like, "What is it?" "How does it work?" "How can I use open source?"—I'd rattle off answers so fast you'd be walking out with a new tool or technology under your belt. Open source is a big world, so of course there are some things I don't know, but guess what?...
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Why Social Media Apps Should Be in Your Disaster Kit
With floodwaters at four feet and rising, a family in Houston, Texas abandoned their possessions and scrambled to their roof during Hurricane Harvey to sit with their pets and await rescue. Unable to reach first responders through 911 and with no one visible nearby, they used their cellphones to send out a call for help through a social media application called Nextdoor. Within an hour a neighbor arrived in an empty canoe large enough to carry the family and their pets to safety. Thanks to a collaboration with Nextdoor, we learned of this and hundreds of similar rescues across Harvey’s path...
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Why Sony Is Threatening To Sue Twitter — And Why It Would Probably Never Win
Sony Pictures Entertainment's lawyer has suggested that Twitter is violating state and federal laws by letting one of its users tweet data stolen by North Korean hackers...
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Why The Future Of Digital Security Is Open
The topic of digital security often brings to mind the image of bleak and dark future, where computers, mobile devices and other systems are riddled with malware and cyber criminals lurk, ready to steal our data and crash our systems. We have good reason to be nervous...
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Why This Tech Bubble is Worse Than the Tech Bubble of 2000
Ah the good old days. Stocks up $25, $50, $100 more in a single day. Day trading was all the rage. Anyone and everyone you talked to had a story about how they had made a ton of money on such and such a stock. In an hour. Stock trading millionaires were being minted by the week, if not sooner. You couldn’t go anywhere without people talking about the stock market. Everyone was in or knew someone who was in. There were hundreds of companies that were coming public and could easily be bought and sold. You just pick a stock and buy it. Then you pray it goes up. Which most days it did...
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Wikipedia’s Open Content Production Platform Creates Significant Spillover Benefits That Encourage Users To Contribute Further.
Many organisations are developing open platforms to create, store and share knowledge. Aleksi Aaltonen and Stephan Seiler analyse editing data by Wikipedia users to show how content creation by individuals generates significant ‘spillover’ benefits, encouraging others to contribute to the collective process of knowledge production...
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Your Garbage Data Is A Gold Mine
One of the lesser understood aspects of what you can do with massive stockpiles of data is the ability to use data that would traditionally have been overlooked or in some cases even considered rubbish. This whole new category of data is known as "exhaust" data—data generated as a by-product of some other process...
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Your Toaster May Be Bad For Your Health IT
the cyberattack last week...shut down access to many major websites...What does this have to do with health care? Plenty, as it turns out. IoT devices are increasingly helping us manage our health and medical care. IoT in health care is expected to be a huge market -- perhaps 40% of the total IoT, and worth some $117b by 2020, according to McKinsey. Expected major uses include wearables, monitors, and implanted medical devices. The problem is that many manufacturers haven't necessarily prepared for cyberattacks. Kevin Fu, a professor at the University of Michigan's Archimedes Center for Medical Device Security, told CNBC: "the dirty little secret is that most manufacturers did not anticipate the cybersecurity risks when they were designing them [devices] a decade ago, so this is just scratching the surface."
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‘Cybersecurity Has Become a Full-Time Job’ in Healthcare
If 2015 was supposed to be the “year of the hack” in healthcare, cybercriminals really were just getting started. This year, we have seen the rise of ransomware targeting healthcare organizations, plus continued phishing attacks and even some good, old-fashioned laptop theft. Then, on Oct. 21, hackers unleashed a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on the East Coast, effectively shutting down access for millions to popular sites, including Twitter, Spotify, PayPal, Netflix and Comcast...
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