Why an Animated Flying Cat With a Pop-Tart Body Sold for Almost $600,000

In the 10 years since Chris Torres created Nyan Cat, an animated flying cat with a Pop-Tart body leaving a rainbow trail, the meme has been viewed and shared across the web hundreds of millions of times. On Thursday, he put a one-of-a-kind version of it up for sale on Foundation, a website for buying and selling digital goods. In the…

Firefox’s Total Cookie Protection Aims To Stop Tracking Between Multiple Sites

As part of its war on web tracking, Mozilla is adding a new tool to Firefox aimed at stopping cookies from keeping tabs on you across multiple sites. From a report: The “Total Cookie Protection” feature is included in the web browser’s latest release — alongside multiple picture-in-picture views — and essentially works by keeping cookies isolated between each site you…

Australian Law Could Make Internet ‘Unworkable’, Says World Wide Web Inventor Tim Berners-Lee

Internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee has said Australia’s plan to make tech giants pay for journalism could render the internet as we know it “unworkable.” From a report: The inventor of the World Wide Web claimed that proposed laws could disrupt the established order of the internet. “Specifically, I am concerned that that code risks breaching a fundamental principle of the web…

The Rich Got Richer: GameStop’s Trading Frenzy Benefited Wall Street’s Elite

While GameStop’s surge has been heralded as a victory for underdogs, “Growing evidence casts doubt on the idea that the episode mostly benefited small-time investors…” reports the Washington Post. (Alternate URLs here and here “And, in at least some cases, novice investors lost their shirts.” Giant mutual funds that own the largest stakes in GameStop saw the biggest gains in value….

VLC Will Get a New UI This Year With 4.0 Launch

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: News website Protocol ran an extensive piece on the history and status of the popular open source video player VLC, and the story includes new details about the next major version of the software. Among other things, VLC 4.0 will bring a complete user interface overhaul. “We modified the interface to be…

Daniel’s inspiring story shows how learning new skills can benefit your own career as well as your community!

Meet Daniel, an undergraduate student at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana. He’s currently pursuing a bachelor of science in medical laboratory science, but as a passionate learner, he also has many other interests. Daniel came to Coursera to explore topics outside of his field of study such as IT, computer science, and more. Today, […]
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To Re-Enable Flash Support, South Africa’s Tax Agency Released Its Own Web Browser

“The South African Revenue Service (SARS) has released this week its own custom web browser,” reports ZDNet, “for the sole purpose of re-enabling Adobe Flash Player support, rather than port its existing website from using Flash to HTML-based web forms.” To prevent the app from continuing to be used in the real-world to the detriment of users and their security, Adobe…

Phone Numbers For 533 Million Facebook Users Were Being Sold On Telegram

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: This week a security researcher discovered a bot on Telegram that sold the phone numbers of Facebook users for $20 apiece. “The security researcher who found this vulnerability, Alon Gal, says that the person who runs the bot claims to have the information of 533 million users, which came from a Facebook vulnerability that was patched in…

How Tim Berners-Lee Will Fix the Internet

“Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist who was knighted for inventing the internet navigation system known as the World Wide Web, wants to re-make cyberspace once again,” reports Reuters: With a new startup called Inrupt, Berners-Lee aims to fix some of the problems that have handicapped the so-called open web in an age of huge, closed platforms such as Facebook….

Is Letterboxd Becoming a Blockbuster?

Early last decade, Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow, web designers based in Auckland, New Zealand, were seeking a passion project. Their business, a boutique web design studio called Cactuslab, developed apps and websites for various clients, but they wanted a project of their own that their team could plug away at when there wasn’t much else to do. From a…