Practical Technology

A year after Google+’s  last remake, Google decided to give Google+ a radical new look and feel. Some users love it, some hate it, but no one’s indifferent to it. Love and hate: The New Google+ look. More >

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Tragically, Aaron Swartz, hounded by an apparently over-zealous prosecutor, committed suicide in early 2013. His just-unveiled major open-source privacy project, DeadDrop, lives on in a citizen and press protection program, The New Yorker’s Strongbox. Strongbox is the first use of DeadDrop technology. The New Yorker magazine will use it so that its readers can “communicate [...]

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Since Facebook started open-sourcing the data center in 2011 in the Open Compute Project (OCP), Facebook and its OCP partners have had some successes in making data-center computing more open and affordable. Now, the OCP takes on what may be its biggest challenge to date: Creating open-source, high-end network switches. Open Compute to open-source high-end [...]

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Intuit, makers of Quicken and QuickBooks, is making its popular online personal finance service Mint available to financial institutions. As Ron Shevlin, senior analyst at Aite Group, told American Banker, “I’m surprised it took so long“. Indeed, you could see this move coming at least three years ago when Aaron Patzer, Mint’s founder and then Intuit [...]

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While some people may have been surprised that Google has finally made Blink, its own fork of the popular WebKit Web browser engine, in Web developer circles this move came as no surprise. While Apple and Google had long worked together on the open-source WebKit project for years, developers both inside and outside of Google wanted [...]

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