You are so wrong!
Your online activity is tracked with Browser Fingerprinting.
What is Browser Fingerprinting?
Peter Eckersley of the Electronic Frontier Foundation showed in 2010 that from a sample of 470,161 browsers who participated in the experiment, 84% produced unique fingerprints. (94 % including those that supported Adobe Flash or a Java Virtual Machine). The attributes that fingerprinting was based on included user’s screen size, time zone, browser plugins and a set of installed fonts. All these attributes create a unique fingerprint for a computer.
IEEE Spectrum has a detailed article on how web advertisers stealthily monitor our browsing habits.
How can I test my browser?
You can test and see your browser’s fingerprint here.
There are a couple of tools (browser add-ons) that you can use. Two of them are Lightbeam and Ghostery.
Ghostery is available for all the major browsers. Ghostery has the largest tracker database available on the web. Ghostery profiles and culls over 1,900 trackers and 2,200 tracking patterns.
Lightbeam is a Firefox add-on that uses interactive visualizations to show you the first and third party sites you interact with on the Web.
What are your thoughts?
]]>One of the ebooks (1311 pages) is Programming Windows Store Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, Second Edition, by Kraig rockschmidt.
MVA has added 3 New Free ebooks. You can access them here.
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DuckDuckGo was founded by Gabriel Weinberg in February 2008 in Valley Forge, PA (USA).
By May 2012, the search engine was attracting 1.5 million searches a day. The search engine currently gets over 120 million direct queries per month and this number is rising.
I want to keep my searches private so I am switching from Google to DuckDuckGo. What are you going to do?
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There are three different acronyms for Cloud Computing, the 3 faces,
SaaS applications are run from your browser. Usually you do not have to install something to run them. Email services like Yahoo or Gmail are SaaS applications. Google search is a SaaS application. Using these services you do not care on what type of servers are run, who makes the OS (operation system) updates, who writes the code, where your data is stored, how the vendor load balances the traffic to the application. You only care on the availability of the service and the security of your data.
IaaS gives companies or individuals the opportunity to move their computers or servers on the cloud. Why you may choose to do that? Because of cost benefits, space benefits, stuff benefits, scale benefits etc.Infrastructure means that the provider of the service (Amazon, Google, Rackspace and many others) provides the tools to create a virtualization platform with storage and networking services. To give you an example, assume that you have two servers running your applications and sharing files / information at you premisses . When you decide to move them to the cloud you have the ability to create two virtual servers on a stronger physical machine. You can do it on your premisses too, but by putting them on the Cloud gives you more advantages like you will stop worrying about hardware issues, bandwidth, network infrastructure and scalability issues.
PaaS is a great way to create distributed applications that can have 99.999% availability. To leverage the benefits of a PaaS you have to architect your solution to take advantages of the platform offerings in queues, blobs, storage and other areas. Why to choose PaaS to develop your application? You have numerous benefits such as scalability, reliability, no OS administration time and costs and many other advantages. I will discuss in another blog post how to architect such solutions.
You have to remember that by just putting your application on a cloud server you do not transform them to a PaaS application or to a SaaS application. In almost all the cases you will need to rewrite parts of your application.
Which of the 3 faces of Cloud computing is suitable for you?
]]>The technology used in No More Woof is the result of combining the latest technologies in three different tech-areas, EEG(Electroencephalography)-sensoring, Micro Computing and special BCI (Brain Computer Interface) software. The EEG reads the brain’s electrical signals, they get analyzed and translated by the BCI using a Raspberry PI and you hear the results.
This is an ingenious use of technology which might improve inter species communication.
What are your thoughts?
]]>The top 10 global trending searches of 2013:
You can view more here.
]]>Imporved Multitasking, iOS schedules updates during power-efficient times.
AirDrop for iOS lets you quickly and easily share photos, videos, contacts — and anything else from any app with a Share button. The transfer of information is encrypted.
Control Center gives you quick access to the controls and apps you always seem to need right this second. Just swipe up from any screen — including the Lock screen — to do things like switch to Airplane mode, turn Wi-Fi on or off, or adjust the brightness of your display.
A well designed UI can greatly improve productivity. We all depend more and more to our devices to get information. The new intelligent multitasking promises to update the app information before the user uses them. The iOS 7 can learn your app usage habits.
On September 18th the new iOS will be available.
]]>Firefox OS is available to buy from Movistar stores in Spain, Venezuela and Colombia. You can also purchase through T-Mobile stores in Poland.
To date, 17 operators spanning the globe have committed to distributing Firefox OS devices: América Móvil, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat, Hutchison Three Group, KDDI, KT, MegaFon, Qtel, SingTel, Smart, Sprint, Telecom Italia Group, Telefónica, Telenor, TMN and VimpelCom.
Let’s see when Firefox OS Phones will be available for the rest of the world.
Photo credit: Some rights reserved by pierofix
]]>For example, if you search for censorship, you’ll find an article in The New Yorker by Salman Rushdie , a piece in the Guardian, and another article about Iran. In his blog post, employee Pandu Nayak said that “I’m happy to see people continue to invest in thoughtful in-depth content that will remain relevant for months or even years after publication. This is exactly what you’ll find in the new feature.”
I can add that I am waiting to experience the new feature.
]]>In 2010 took place the first direct conversion of skin cells to nerve cells in the lab. The method used so far was largely guided by trial and error. Now, the LCB researchers have replaced trial and error with computer calculations. “Our theoretical model first queries databases where vast amounts of information on gene actions and their effects are stored and then identifies the genes that maintain the stability of differentiated cells. Working from the appropriate records, the model suggests which genes in the starting cells need to be switched on and off again, and when, in order to change them into a different cell type.” explains PhD student at LCSB Isaac Crespo
“Our predictions have proved very accurate in the lab,”says Professor del Sol: “And it turns out it makes no difference at all how similar the cells are. The models work equally well for cell lines that have only just branched off from one another as for those that are already very far apart.”
The model could be of enormous benefit for regenerative medicine, for example to reprogram a patient’s own healthy skin cells and develop them to nerve cells and treat conditions such as Parkinson’s disease.
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