The Wall Street Journal.: Twitter Takes Over a Shuttered Twitpic. http://google.com/newsstand/s/CBIwo6qp2ho
Twitter will maintain archive for now, but no new pics can be uploaded.
Summary of the 9/13/14 Legal Citation Hackathon includes links to outcomes and sources. There are a number of interesting things including using the Fastcase API.
Legal Citation Hackathon, 13 September 2014: Results, storify, links, and resources | Legal Informatics Blog :: http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2014/09/14/legal-citation-hackathon-13-september-2014-results-storify-links-and-resources/
TechCrunch reminds us about what happened to that MOOC revolution
Three years ago this week, Sebastian Thrun recorded his Stanford class on Artificial Intelligence, released it online to a staggering 180,000 students, and started a “revolution in higher education.” Soon after, Coursera, Udacity and others promised free access to valuable content, supposedly delivering a disruptive solution that would solve massive student debt and a struggling economy. Since then, over 8 million students have enrolled in their courses.
This year, that revolution fizzled. Only half of those who signed up watched even one lecture, and only 4 percent stayed long enough to complete a course. Further, the audience for MOOCs already had college degrees so the promise of disrupting higher education failed to materialize. The MOOC providers argue that completion of free courses is the wrong measure of success, but even a controlled experiment run by San Jose State with paying students found the courses less effective than their old-school counterparts.
via The MOOC Revolution That Wasn’t | TechCrunch.
OK round up of where the MOOC thingy got to. Turns out that MOOCs where not the thing that disrupted higher education.
A bad day for TwitPic users, the end is nigh
Twitpic will be shutting down September 25th. You will be able to export all your photos and videos. We’ll let everyone know when this feature is live in the next few days.This is an unexpected and hard announcement for us to make and we want to lay out what led us to this decision.A few weeks ago Twitter contacted our legal demanding that we abandon our trademark application or risk losing access to their API. This came as a shock to us since Twitpic has been around since early 2008, and our trademark application has been in the USPTO since 2009.
via Twitpic is shutting down | Twitpic Blog.
Another example of a BigCo flex some weird muscle and putting a perfectly fine operation out of business for no really good reason.
‘Hackcess to Justice’ winners look to increase the reach of their apps
Award winners from the recent Hackcess to Justice legal hackathon are working hard to fulfill the main goal of the event: Improving access for all Americans to effective legal assistance.
via ‘Hackcess to Justice’ winners look to increase the reach of their apps.
Re/code: IBM Says Sale of Low-End Server Business Gets Regulator Approval
Re/code: IBM Says Sale of Low-End Server Business Gets Regulator Approval. http://google.com/newsstand/s/CBIwnfqmrB8
Flaw in PHP XML Processing Hits Drupal, WordPress. Time To Patch ’em Up.
For the first time, the open-source Drupal and WordPress content management teams have coordinated joint security releases to fix a new vulnerability.
The flaw, first reported by security researcher Nir Goldshlager, is a potential denial-of-service (DoS) issue with PHP’s XML processing module. Drupal and WordPress use the same PHP module, which is why both content management systems are at risk from the same flaw. Drupal is particularly prominent because it is used on U.S. government sites, including WhiteHouse.gov, and WordPress is deployed on more than 60 million sites.
“This bug can be utilized without the aid of any plug-ins, and it functions smoothly on the default installation of WordPress and Drupal,” Goldshlager explained in an advisory (which is running on a WordPress site itself). “Only one machine needed to exploit this vulnerability.”
In an advisory on the drupal.org site, the vulnerability is rated as moderately critical. The Drupal advisory explains that the bug that Goldshlager found is within the PHP XML parser and could trigger CPU and memory exhaustion, in turn causing a DoS condition on the affected site.
via New Flaw Puts Millions of WordPress, Drupal Sites at Risk.
Patches are provided by Drupal 7.31, 6.33 and WordPress 3.9.2.
MSFT Encourages Use of Latest Versions of IE, Urges Upgrades of Commercial Installations
Microsoft recommends enabling automatic updates to ensure an up-to-date computing experience—including the latest version of Internet Explorer—and most consumers use automatic updates today. Commercial customers are encouraged to test and accept updates quickly, especially security updates. Regular updates provide significant benefits, such as decreased security risk and increased reliability, and Windows Update can automatically install updates for Internet Explorer and Windows.
After January 12, 2016, only the most recent version of Internet Explorer available for a supported operating system will receive technical support and security updates. For example, customers using Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 9, or Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 7 SP1 should migrate to Internet Explorer 11 to continue receiving security updates and technical support. For more details regarding support timelines on Windows and Windows Embedded, see the Microsoft Support Lifecycle site.
As some commercial customers have standardized on earlier versions of Internet Explorer, Microsoft is introducing new features and resources to help customers upgrade and stay current on the latest browser. Customers should plan for upgrading to modern standards—to benefit from the additional performance, security, and productivity of modern Web apps—but in the short term, backward compatibility with legacy Web apps may be a cost-effective, if temporary, path. Enterprise Mode for Internet Explorer 11, released in April 2014, offers enhanced backward compatibility and enables you to run many legacy Web apps during your transition to modern Web standards.
via Stay up-to-date with Internet Explorer – IEBlog – Site Home – MSDN Blogs.
Even though January 2016 may seem like the distant future, it’ll be here before you know it. If your still using apps that rely on IE 8 or 9 you’d better get those upgraded or risk running into issues later.
GitHub Updates Issues
We’ve rebuilt GitHub Issues to be smarter: search smarter, filter smarter, and manage your issues and pull requests smarter.
If you want to see it in action, check out Bootstrap’s issues. To learn more, read on.
via The New GitHub Issues · GitHub.
The interface is very different now. I like it, especially the search capabilities. A useful tool gets more useful.
April 2014 Web Server Survey From Netcraft
In the April 2014 survey we received responses from 958,919,789 sites — 39 million more than last month.
Microsoft made the largest gain this month, with nearly 31 million additional sites boosting its market share by 1.9 percentage points. IIS is now used by a third of the world’s websites. Although this is not Microsoft’s largest ever market share (it reached 37% in October 2007), this is the closest it has ever been to Apache’s leading market share, leaving Apache only 4.7 points ahead. Although Apache gained 6.9 million sites, this was not enough to prevent its market share falling by 0.87 to 37.7%. nginx, which gained 3.1 million sites, also lost some of its market share.
via April 2014 Web Server Survey | Netcraft.
The monthly Netcraft report is easy to forget about as we get bombarded with more and sexier data about what’s going on behind the scenes on the web. I still find it useful to help keep an eye on what may be going out there beyond the walls of legal academia. I’m always surprised by the scale of the numbers, with millions of new websites coming online every month. Anyone else remember when the Mozilla browser came with a bookmark list of every known website?