Displaying items by tag: Reddit

The Mac world had an unsettling wakeup call today as it found out what most people have known for years: Macs are no more secure than any other PC. This wakeup call is not the first of its kind and it is certainly not going to be the last, we just wonder if anyone will actually listen or if Apple PR will continue to claim Macs cannot get malware.

After Anonymous pulled their support from WikiLeaks many thought the group would drift off into obscurity. After all, many in the press still think that Anonymous was formed after WikiLeaks started, so why not have that misguided opinion. The reality is that Anonymous existed long before WikiLeaks, and will continue to exist when WikiLeaks is a long forgotten memory. The collective (there is no leader despite what you might here from other media sources) has matured in many ways though, and does not appear to be hell-bent on hitting every single site that annoys them anymore. At least that is what we are seeing: there will always be members who will lash out or simply try to hack a site for the fun of it, but the collective has calmed for the most part.

Scientists from the U.S. and from around the world went into an internet campaign on Twitter posting links to PDF files of scientific research in honor of the late Aaron Swartz who believed that access to such data should be free for all. Swartz was faced with a lawsuit because of his attempts to share scientific papers from JSTOR's. The lawsuit was $4 million in fines and 50 years in prison for allegedly "stealing" from a database, but in fact he had the legal right to access those papers.

So Digg will be re-launching on Wednesday August 1st with a completely new design and a more image friendly interface (according to the developers at Betaworks). Right now the question on everyone’s mind is will the new redesign and focus make any difference? A reinvented Digg faces massive competition from sites like Reddit, Facebook and even Google+ so how will this new social sharing site fare?

The big news story today is of the purchase of social news sharing site Digg to Betaworks for the small sum of $500,000. The world was shocked at this number considering the massive impact that Digg once had. When they first launched they were THE way to share your content on the internet.  Unfortunately Digg has had a series of bad management decisions as well as facing serious competition from rivals like Reddit, Stumbleupon and others. However, the story behind the $500k price tag might not be complete as new information has come to light about the way the company was sold in parts to different buyers.

On June 11^th something happened across the internet that has reverberated through many online services that we take for granted. Starting with Facebook there was an unexplained (and Facebook still refuses to comment) run of legitimate sites suddenly being marked as spam, then just as suddenly being “fixed”. We saw this with our links where after posting an article on Microsoft we lost all links between June 11^th and May 28^th. When we tried to repost them we were told that the links were blocked because they were “spammy”. Our report of this issue resulted in well over 100 others stating the same thing was happening to them.

In a world (insert dramatical music here) where the forces of greed, evil and bad comb-overs are plotting to control the very lines of communication used for free speech there stands one group of rag tag heroes ready to fight them. Coming this summer … Ok so enough of the cheesy intro. After the headaches and pains of fighting both SOPA and PIPA some of the core activist groups (activists for a free and open internet) have decided to get together and create a method for notifying website owners that are interested in fighting this type of legislation when a new bill comes out.