OneSwarm is a privacy preserving BitTorrent client that offers permissions for restricting access to shared content and sharing without attribution, with the anonymity being provided by fellow OneSwarm peers routing transfers.
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posted by jeffburdges
on Feb 6, 2012 -
13 comments
Sometimes, adding bandwidth can actually hurt rather than help. Most people have no idea what they can do about bufferbloat.
posted by DU
on Feb 3, 2012 -
25 comments
Too much internet may not be a good thing. This
Errors video is totally having a "marmite-like effect". Warning SLYT and Long.
posted by bquarters
on Feb 2, 2012 -
5 comments
What's a JavaScript Closure? Ever wonder about some of JavaScript's more advanced and esoteric features? Nathan Whitehead's interactive tutorial explains and walks through each of these concepts one step at a time. At the end of each lesson, you are encouraged to write short snippets of code demonstrating the concepts that you just learned, which are then automatically checked for errors and verified.
Perhaps you're new to JavaScript, or programming in general;
CodeAcademy offers similar interactive tutorials that will teach you the basics, and hold your hand along the way. Perhaps you'd rather learn at a more even pace; CodeAcademy's
CodeYear will introduce you to one new concept every week throughout 2012.
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posted by schmod
on Jan 20, 2012 -
42 comments
"The online world of Islamic extremists, like all the other worlds of the Internet, operates on a subtly psychological level that does a brilliant job at keeping people like Abumubarak clicking and posting away -- and amassing all the rankings, scores, badges, and levels to prove it. Like virtually every other popular online social space, the social space of online jihadists has become "gamified," a term used to describe game-like attributes applied to non-game activities.
It turns out that what drives online jihadists is pretty much exactly what drives Internet trolls, airline ticket consumers, and World of Warcraft players: competition."
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posted by vidur
on Jan 14, 2012 -
22 comments
So you wake up tomorrow morning to find almost everyone on Earth missing.
The Internet will continue to work for a few hours: what information could you download to ensure your survival and rebuild civilization? A few suggestions:
The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics.
Third Word Development (18 GB of information on agriculture, livestock, food processing, construction, water, sanitation, health and much more).
The Global Village Construction Set (previously). Copies of
Gray's Anatomy,
Where There Is No Doctor, and
The Ship Captain’s Medical Guide.
A few more that might be handy even in ordinary times: all of
Wikipedia, or perhaps
just a portion. (Ideally, of course, you’d already have a
bound, printed copy),
Offline Google Mail (Chrome) to save correspondence;
SiteSucker to download sites you’d like to keep around while offline.
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul
on Jan 5, 2012 -
89 comments
What is art, really? Is it dependent on context? Do you need an art history degree to appreciate it? Was Jackson Pollock an artist or a scam artist? Are Grand Tour portraits considered art merely because of their age? These questions have been objectively unanswerable -
until now. Through the power of the internet, and the experience of Hot or Not, we can measure the democratic answer to these questions.
posted by Pants!
on Dec 29, 2011 -
93 comments
"In all other circumstances we praise non-violent activities and when people, for whatever personal reasons, enjoy sexual violence even in a consenting context I think we shouldn't just say “whatever turns you on”. We should say “There's something wrong here”. But people on the left are so terrified of being accused of moralising and therefore of being oppressive that they've abandoned their critical faculties in this area."
Clive Hamilton on
God, Sex, and the Left (
Part 2).
posted by daniel_charms
on Dec 26, 2011 -
358 comments
A new form of wireless network known as
White Spaces will come online next month, the
FCC announced today.
White Spaces has been called "WiFi on steroids". White spaces are unused spectrum between broadcast television channels. It is faster than WiFi so it can handle more data. It can bring (nearly) free Internet access to the most remote areas of the country, places that can't get WiFi. Because it uses broadcast television signals, any place that can pick up a broadcast TV signal should be able to tap into
White Spaces.
posted by cashman
on Dec 22, 2011 -
34 comments
The concept behind
VoyURL is simple: A browser plugin records your every click, which you can then choose to share publicly in a real-time feed. Their website
analyzes and
shows you your online history in customized infographics, to identify patterns, recommend content and help you learn more about the way you use the internet. You can see the browsing history of all users in one giant timeline or follow a specific user. The service is currently in beta, but you can slip in
here or
here.
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posted by zarq
on Dec 16, 2011 -
35 comments
Over the past several years, Mozilla's
collection of developer documentation for its own web browsers has turned into a wiki-editable reference of web standards for developers working with
all browsers, hosting a comprehensive, no-nonsense reference of
HTML,
HTML5,
CSS,
JavaScript, the
DOM, and
more. If you find yourself turning to this reference frequently,
dochub provides instant access to Mozilla's documentation for any HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or DOM-related topic. If you're worried that a fancy new standard might not work in an older browser,
canIuse will tell you exactly how many browsers will support that new standard. Still want to use that shiny new standard?
Modernizr and
yepnope will let you detect missing features, and load
tiny bits of code to make old browsers support the latest HTML5 hotness.
[via the carefully-curated selections of
JavaScript and
HTML5 Weekly, run by
MetaFilter's own wackybrit]
posted by schmod
on Dec 7, 2011 -
23 comments
"The rigorous division of websites into narrow interests, the attempts of Amazon and Netflix to steer your next purchase based on what you’ve already bought, the ability of Web users to never encounter anything outside of their established political or cultural preferences, and the way technology enables advertisers to identify each potential market and direct advertising to it, all represent the triumph of cultural segregation that is the negation of democracy. It’s the reassurance of never having to face anyone different from ourselves." – Charles Taylor,
The Problem with Film Criticism
posted by Rory Marinich
on Nov 24, 2011 -
56 comments
On 11/11/11,
Homestuck entered
Act 6 (of 7). This follows
an explosive 13-minute finale to Act 5, which brought down its host
Newgrounds on the day of its unveiling and was released with
a fantastic companion soundtrack. In the two and a half years since it was created, Homestuck has become a full-blown epic, approaching the length of War and Peace, but with hours of
accompanying animation,
several interactive games, a
loop machine, and a baffling 19 soundtrack albums, ranging from
VG-inspired soundtrack to
jazzy mood music to
solo piano to
parody kids TV show soundtrack. It also has an obsession with
Nic Cage and
Betty Crocker, and comes with a metawebcomic called
Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff which is in and of itself pure gold. Intimidated? You probably should be! But it's hilarious, epic, and surprisingly addictive, so if you've got nothing else on your plate, you can either
start from the beginning, or, if it seems too daunting, you can learn...
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posted by Rory Marinich
on Nov 17, 2011 -
66 comments
Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors. "Lower Manhattan’s 60 Hudson Street is one of the world’s most concentrated hubs of Internet connectivity. This short documentary peeks inside, offering a glimpse of the massive material infrastructure that makes the Internet possible."
posted by twirlip
on Nov 10, 2011 -
18 comments
150 years ago, a primitive Internet united the USA. "Long before there was an Internet or an iPad, before people were social networking and instant messaging, Americans had already gotten wired. Monday marks the 150th anniversary of the completion of the
transcontinental telegraph. From sea to sea, it electronically knitted together a nation that was simultaneously tearing itself apart, North and South, in the Civil War. Americans soon saw that a
breakthrough in the spread of technology could enhance national identity and, just as today, that it could vastly change lives."
posted by homunculus
on Oct 23, 2011 -
49 comments
Why people like digital comics: you can charge for them, and they look pretty on an iPad. Why people like webcomics: they're free. - Warren Ellis looks at
The Broadcast Of Comics.
posted by Artw
on Oct 11, 2011 -
14 comments
