| Radio Preacher Predicts End of World, Web Plays Along Self-reinforcing delusional and Family Radio babblespout Harold Camping has predicted the "rapture" for tomorrow. (He predicted it for June of '94, but...never mind.) A - God help us - "radio evangelist" (I'm going to run out of quotation marks and parentheses before this is done, I can tell), he has junked up the American cityscape with billboards to this effect. (And seriously, dude, hire a graphic designer.) In fact, my friend's cousin was hired to put them up in Eugene, Oregon, inspiring a dual epidemic of eye-rolling and hand-wringing. The Web has responded to this with its typical enthusiasm, combining the snackbar wisdom of the hipster with the maudlin goop of the true believer.
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10 Interesting Details About Twitter's Mysterious CTO The first Chief Technology Officer of one of the most important communication technology companies of our time has left his job today - and for a guy who made public disclosure easier than ever, we hardly knew the man. Greg Pass joined Twitter three years ago when his search company Summize was acquired. He went on to become Twitter CTO and today it was reported and confirmed that he is leaving the company. People close to the company say he's a quiet, humble and very smart man. His Twitter profile, @gregpass, makes no mention of his work at the company and he never Tweets about it. He's Tweeted thousands of words over the past three years though and I just looked at every one of them. (Well, almost every one; the archive only goes back so far. Greg, could you...oh, nevermind.) Here are ten interesting things you probably didn't know about Twitter's mysterious outgoing CTO.
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A Step Towards a Secure Internet: Google Developers Make Progress with SSL False Start Securing the Internet is no easy task but Google researchers think they have taken a step closer this week with a program called SSL False Start that decreases the load time of SSL connections up to 30%. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is a certification that encrypts data between an end-users' browser and the server. It is a headache to implement and increases connection latency and only a few of the major sites on the Web have instituted "always on" SSL/TLS protection on top of HTTP to create the more secure HTTPS. While SSL False Start is a good step in creating a safer Internet, it is not the cure for all SSL woes. But, it does look like a step in the right direction.
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Sophos Researcher Calls Out Microsoft for Questionable Security Stats Earlier this week Microsoft Development blogs posted an update about its SmartScreen Application Reputation ranking software for Internet Explorer. In the post, Microsoft had some statistics about users downloading malicious Web applications and the pop-up warnings that IE delivers to users warning them about potentially harmful downloads. Chet Wisniewski of Sophos Security is calling shenanigans on Microsoft's statistics. In a blog post on Sophos' blog, Naked Security, Wisniewski says, "Microsoft is comparing Apples to...nothing." Microsoft's post says that users get two pop-up warnings a year, which Wisniewski says means that IE users make 20 downloads a year. Wisniewski looks at these numbers and thinks something is not quite right in Microsoft land.
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EFF Calls On Apple to Defend Developers Against Patent Trolls Earlier this month, patent-holding company Lodsys started going after small-time iOS developers, sending them "notice" letters which claim the developers are infringing on one of Lodsys' patents for in-app purchasing technology. In these notices, Lodsys demands that developers license the patent from them for 0.575% of the U.S. revenue generated using in-app purchases and many companies have been put between a rock and a hard place, with the cost of fighting a potential lawsuit could be far greater than simply paying Lodsys. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the real problem isn't just that, but the fact that Apple actually requires developers to use the technology they could be sued for using and it's called on the company to stand up and shoulder the burden.
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Great Firewall Founder Gets a Boot Upside the Head Chinese technologist Fang Binxing is credited as the father of the Great Firewall of China, the ring of blocks and filters that keeps the Internet in that country under the political control of the ruling regime. Known as the "Golden Shield" in Chinese, is was begun as a way to seize economic opportunities for the country without sacrificing Communist Party control. Fang, the president of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, was speaking at Wuhan University in China's Hubei province when he was pelted with an egg (which missed) and a shoe (which did not).
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What is the Math Gender Stereotype Doing to Silicon Valley Innovation? I recently came across University of Wisconsin professor Janet Hyde's research into the gender differences in math performance, which I found fascinating especially since my wife's desire is for our two-year-old twin girls to become software engineers. I decided to contact Hyde and follow up with questions that I thought were relevant to the greater community of startup entrepreneurs and engineers. I appreciated her efforts and insights into a quiet issue that I believe has a huge effect on our nation's innovation engine and economic growth. Moon: How did you first become interested in exploring the stereotype that girls had less mathematical abilities than boys?
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#unfollowedghonimbecause: Egyptians Use Twitter to Criticize Revolutionary Leader If the Egyptian revolution was inspired and organized on Facebook, maybe the post-revolution is destined to run its course on Twitter. Wael Ghonim, the former Google executive who launched We are all Khalid Said, the Facebook page that acted as a clearinghouse for the uprising, has fallen under opprobrium for recent comments and a lot of the criticism is being expressed via the Twitter hashtag #unfollowedghonimbecause.
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Groupon's New Partnership With Loopt: Is This How Location Will Be Monetized? Mobile, location based social networking is a young but exciting field. How will it gain mainstream adoption and how will it become a viable business, though? A new partnership announced today between notable location service Loopt and high-flying mega-discount provider Groupon provides an interesting data point in the discussion. Loopt tracks the location of users persistently, without their having to check-in manually (though you can do that too), and it will now send push notifications of Groupon deals nearby. GigaOm's Ryan Kim does a good job covering the announcement, but there are a few details in particular that I want to raise.
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Google Maps Mobile Matches Pace With the Web I don't know about you, but when it comes down to figuring out the "where" of my life on my smartphone, Google Maps is pretty much it. On the Android, the Maps experience is great and complete, but on iOS, the maps app can be a bit lacking. Thankfully, Google offers an equalizer in its mobile website - which comes complete with biking directions and places. In comparison to the website, however, the Google Maps mobile website has been straggling and today the company announced that it is updating the site to a set of features parallel to those found on the Web.
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