The issue of data privacy on the web gets a lot of attention, thanks to the practices of sites such as Facebook and Google, but the positive aspects of those companies’ data practices tend to get overlooked. Not only does data drive the overall experience of our favorite sites and services, but it also...
This week the Semantic Web company Sindice released SIREn, a new semantic search plugin for Apache Lucene built on top of Apache Solr. “While Lucene has long offered these capabilities, its native capabilities are not intended for large semi-structured document collections (or documents with very different schemas),” the project website says. “For this reason...
This post is part of our ReadWriteCloud channel, which is dedicated to covering virtualization and cloud computing. The channel is sponsored by Intel and VMware. Read the white paper about how Intel Xeon processors help organizations get unprecedented levels of performance. In a big win for MongoDB and its sponsor company 10Gen, Craigslist is...
For as long as I can remember, there has been one constant in tech news: Google News sucks at it. Now, that’s not entirely fair since Google News doesn’t actually provide any of their own content. Instead, they use the supposedly magical Google algorithms to curate others’ content from around the web. Still, there’s...
As Small Business Week gets underway in the United States, online business card creation service MOO is marking the occasion by launching a self-service portal for small businesses. MOO’s Business Services accounts are available to companies with at least 10 employees. They’re simply a way for small teams to order business cards for multiple...
Earlier this month Attachmate laid off the developers working on Mono, an open source implementation of Microsoft .NET sponsored by Novell. Attachmate acquired Novell last year. Today Mono creator Miguel de Icaza announced the formation of a new startup to support the open source project: Xamarin.
I don’t know about you, but the term ‘cyberspace’ brings to mind a time when AOL stuffed free trial CDs into PC magazine sleeves and Netscape Navigator was pretty neat, really. The U.S. government today outlined its strategy for ‘cyberspace’. I guess that shouldn’t be surprising. Governments are meant to be, of course, twenty...
Last week, just prior to day one of Google I/O, we noted that some updates in the Chrome OS code and forums indicated that a formal unveiling was likely very close. Sure enough, on day two of I/O, Google unveiled the first Chromebooks, the first shipping products running Chrome OS. But Google also noted...
A complaint filed with the FTC last week charges that the popular cloud-based storage system Dropbox misled its users about the security and privacy afforded by its services. Although security and privacy have been some of Dropbox’s selling points, the complaint alleges that the company deceived users into thinking their files were completely encrypted...
It is one of those things that make you ask the question: what took you so long, guys? If you are a T-Mobile USA subscriber and use one of the mobile phones that support UMA, now all your calls made over the Wi-Fi are free. Earlier, all Wi-Fi-based calls counted towards your minute plan,...