September 2015

A lot is known about passwords. Most are short, simple, and pretty easy to crack. But much less is known about the psychological reasons a person chooses a specific password. We’ve analyzed the password choices of 10 million people, from CEOs to scientists, to find out what they reveal about the things we consider easy to remember and hard to guess.

From Unmasked: An Analysis of 10 Million Passwords

The best things in life are free, and libraries offer bountiful proof. Some are destinations in themselves, boasting spectacular architecture, secret gardens, hip lounges and free thrills for the whole family.

From Libraries worth traveling for | Dallas Morning News

So he’s not just sitting around waiting for that to happen. Spanfeller said he’s already looking at potential workarounds, whether that involves hiding content until people turn off their ad blockers (“But we’ll say it nicer than that”) or asking users to pay if they don’t want to see ads. He acknowledged that those tactics might anger readers — but, well, those are readers he’s not making money from anyway, so he’s not sure they provide much value.

“Are people pissed when they walk into a store and they don’t get a car for free?” he asked.

From What We Talk About When We Talk About Ad Blocking | TechCrunch

Most of us get to be thoroughly relieved that our emails weren’t in the Ashley Madison database. But don’t get too comfortable. Whatever secrets you have, even the ones you don’t think of as secret, are more likely than you think to get dumped on the Internet. It’s not your fault, and there’s largely nothing you can do about it.

Welcome to the age of organizational doxing.

From Ashley Madison, Organizational Doxing, and the End of Online Privacy – The Atlantic

Shakespeare has not lost his place in this new world, just as, despite the grim jeremiads of the cultural pessimists, he has not lost his place in colleges and universities. On the contrary, his works (and even his image) turn up everywhere, and students continue to flock to courses that teach him, even when those courses are not required.

But as I have discovered in my teaching, it is a different Shakespeare from the one with whom I first fell in love.

From Teaching a Different Shakespeare Than the One I Love – The New York Times

Open source is the foundation on which the Internet is built. For its continued success, it’s critical to incorporate diverse voices and engage people with different experiences, talents, and viewpoints. Otherwise we risk a world of technology created by, and supporting, a non-inclusive and hostile monoculture.

Together we can make things better. OS4W aims to be a resource for connecting all women, including women of color and transgender women, to open source projects that are welcoming, inclusive, and appreciative of diversity in their contributors.

Let’s start changing things and making the world of open source a better place for everyone.

From OS4W: Open Source for Women

Google is working with the social media service Twitter and major news publishers like The Guardian and The New York Times to create a new kind of web link and article storage system that would load online news articles and digital magazine pieces in a few milliseconds, according to several people involved in the project. That is a fraction of the five to 10 seconds it can take to load a typical website.

From Google, Twitter and Publishers Seek Faster Web – The New York Times

For regular folks, like me that want to make stuff and get work done, it is not an easy feat to do so with 100% privacy. To keep private you should spend a lot of time and work on it to setup and maintain the complicated systems. You have to change burner phones all the time and live like Harold from Person of Interest.

From Is it futile to un-Google? – Tasos Sangiotis

Today, the project sits in a kind of limbo. On one hand, Google has scanned an impressive thirty million volumes, putting it in a league with the world’s larger libraries (the library of Congress has around thirty-seven million books). That is a serious accomplishment. But while the corpus is impressive, most of it remains inaccessible. Searches of out-of-print books often yield mere snippets of the text—there is no way to gain access to the whole book. The thrilling thing about Google Books, it seemed to me, was not just the opportunity to read a line here or there; it was the possibility of exploring the full text of millions of out-of-print books and periodicals that had no real commercial value but nonetheless represented a treasure trove for the public. In other words, it would be the world’s first online library worthy of that name.

From What Ever Happened to Google Books? – The New Yorker

The average scientist is not statistically more likely than a member of the general public to have an artistic or crafty hobby. But members of the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society — elite societies of scientists, membership in which is based on professional accomplishments and discoveries — are 1.7 and 1.9 times more likely to have an artistic or crafty hobby than the average scientist is. And Nobel prize winning scientists are 2.85 times more likely than the average scientist to have an artistic or crafty hobby.

From The Correlation Between Arts and Crafts and a Nobel Prize