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Tor shutters its anonymous Cloud service

May08
by on May 8, 2015 at 6:41 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Design & Dev

torfeat
Tor has announced that it is closing its Cloud Project, which allows users to browse the Web anonymously, effective today. The not-for-profit organization said it cannot find enough help to properly maintain its operations and thus bugs in the system have made parts of the service unusable, according to its blog post. The main reason for discontinuing Tor Cloud is the fact that software requires maintenance, and Tor Cloud is no exception. There is at least one major bug in the Tor Cloud image that makes it completely dysfunctional (meaning that users could not use this particular service to access the Internet), and there are…

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Explore all of Google Maps in Lego form with this Web app

May08
by on May 8, 2015 at 6:23 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Insider

Brick Street View 3
Many kids have built plastic brick cities out of Lego, but what if you could see any location on Google Maps in Lego form? That’s what designer Einer Öberg has done with the appropriately named Brick Street View. The Web app renders Street View locations in block form, even inserting traditional Lego vehicles and plants into the cityscapes. You’ll start out with a top-down view of New York City by default, but you can move to anywhere available on Google Maps. To navigate around, you simply grab your Lego avatar and drop her onto the location you want. Or, if…

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11 tools for a healthy hadoop relationship

May08
by on May 8, 2015 at 5:51 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Design & Dev, hadoop

hadoop
Supreet Oberoi is the vice president of field engineering, Concurrent, Inc. I’m often asked which Hadoop tools are “best.” The answer, of course, is that it depends, and what it depends on is the stage of the Hadoop journey you’re trying to navigate. Would you show up with a diamond ring on a first date? Would you arrange dinner with your spouse by swiping right on Tinder? In the same way, we can say that some Hadoop tools are certainly better than others, but only once we know where you are in your data project’s lifecycle. Here then, are the…

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Square $Cashtags now let you set payment amounts right in the URL

May08
by on May 8, 2015 at 5:31 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Insider, Product Updates

SQUARECASH
Square Cash now lets you send a direct payment of a specific amount to a person or organization using a ‘$Cashtag’. For the uninitiated, a ‘$Cashtag’ is Square’s payment system for accepting simple payments over the Web via a customized URL. Before, you could just direct someone to your page, but now you can request a specific amount in the URL. These can be used for businesses, charity organizations or because you need to pay your friend back for that movie ticket. For example, the URL cash.me/$wikipedia/10 automatically creates a $10 donation to the Wikimedia Foundation. If you want to create your own automatic donation, just swap…

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The NSA really does have a Skynet program, and a bad sense of humor

May08
by on May 8, 2015 at 4:48 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Insider

terminator
Someone at the NSA thinks they have a sense of humor. Or really likes the Terminator movies. Or secretly wants the plot of the Terminator movies to come true. That’s right, while you might have thought Skynet was an artificial intelligence hell-bent on destroying the human race in movies alone, it turns out there really is an NSA program with the same name. Thankfully, as far as The Intercept reports, it has a less lethal – but potentially legally dubious – aims. It’s a tracking system designed to harvest data about suspected terrorists, but which was actually used to identify well-known and long-standing Al…

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