DuckDuckGo Is Growing Fast

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine, announced that August 2020 ended in over 2 billion total searches via its search platform. While Google remains the most popular search engine, DuckDuckGo has gained a great deal of traction in recent months as more and more users have begun to value their privacy on the internet….

Coursera Launches Two New Entry-Level Professional Certificates in Partnership With Salesforce, SV Academy, and IBM

By Betty Vandenbosch, Chief Content Officer, Coursera Over half of the active workforce in the US does not have a college degree. This group has been disproportionately affected by the pandemic, experiencing more than double the job loss rates compared to college-educated workers.  Coursera has teamed up with Salesforce, SV Academy, and IBM to launch […]
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IBM Publishes its Quantum Roadmap, Says it Will Have a 1,000-qubit Machine in 2023

IBM today, for the first time, published its road map for the future of its quantum computing hardware. There is a lot to digest here, but the most important news in the short term is that the company believes it is on its way to building a quantum processor with more than 1,000 qubits — and somewhere between 10 and 50…

Moon and Venus adorn the morning September 13 to 15

On the mornings of September 13, 14 and 15, 2020, look for the waning crescent moon and the dazzling planet Venus in the eastern sky before sunrise. Source: https://earthsky.org/tonight/moon-venus-adorn-morning-sky…

China Bans Scratch, MIT’s Programming Language for Kids

China’s enthusiasm for teaching children to code is facing a new roadblock as organizations and students lose an essential tool: the Scratch programming language developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. From a report: China-based internet users can no longer access Scratch’s website. Greatfire.org, an organization that monitors internet censorship in China, shows that the website was…

Boardwatch/EVTV Founder Jack Rickard Dies at Age 65

I’ve only paid for a magazine subscription once in my life — to Jack Rickard’s Boardwatch magazine, which through the late 1990s was the geekiest read in town. You can still read 70 issues of the magazine from more than 25 years ago at Archive.org. But this week the small Southeast Missourian newspaper reported that the magazine’s original editor/publisher Jack Rickard…