Has Section 230 Created a ‘Vast Web of Vengeance’?

Slashdot reader GatorSnake shares “Another take of the implications of Section 230… One person poisoned the online personas of multiple people who had ‘wronged’ her, with it being nearly impossible to have the false accusations removed from the sites or from Google’s search results.” The New York Times reports:
Mr. Babcock, a software engineer, got off the phone and Googled himself. The…

What’s Missing From Oracle’s List of the 25 Greatest Java Apps Ever Written?

On the 25th anniversary of Java, Oracle’s director of developer content released a list of the 25 greatest Java apps ever written. This week they shared the responses it got. “The U.S. National Security Agency was secretly pleased we noticed its Ghidra binary decompilation tool…” The tenor of conversation was both positive and polite. That speaks volumes about the excellent character…

WordPress Founder Claims Apple Cut Off Updates To His Free App Because It Wants 30 Percent

WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg is accusing Apple of cutting off the ability to update its iOS app — until or unless he adds in-app purchases so Apple can extract its 30 percent cut of the money. The Verge reports: Here’s the thing: the WordPress app on iOS doesn’t sell anything. I just checked, and so did Stratechery’s Ben Thompson. The…

Vigilante Sabotages Malware Botnet By Replacing Payloads With Animated GIFs

An anonymous reader writes: An unknown vigilante hacker has been sabotaging the operations of the recently-revived Emotet botnet by replacing Emotet payloads with animated GIFs, effectively preventing victims from getting infected. The sabotage, which started on July 21, has grown from a simple joke to a serious issue impacting a large portion of the Emotet operation, reducing the biggest malware botnet…

Vulnerabilities in Popular Open Source Projects Doubled in 2019

A study that analyzed the top 54 open source projects found that security vulnerabilities in these tools doubled in 2019, going from 421 bugs reported in 2018 to 968 last year. From a report: According to RiskSense’s “The Dark Reality of Open Source” report, released today, the company found 2,694 bugs reported in popular open source projects between 2015 and March…

What’s new on Coursera for Business – April 2020

By Adam Lewis, Skills Transformation Consultant As we continue to adapt to the new norm, here are 114 new courses and projects to pick out what’s important to you.  You can try out Yale’s latest insights on why your Facebook friend is wrong about the stats they’re sharing. Or find your purpose with Michigan’s course […]
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What’s new on Coursera for Business – March 2020

By Kyle Clark, Senior Skills Transformation Consultant As our Chief Enterprise Officer Leah Belsky wrote to many of our customers last week, the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19) has profoundly affected our work – and our lives. At Coursera, we’re grateful for the opportunity we have to continue to serve businesses, universities, and governments during this […]
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An Update On Microsoft’s ‘GitHub Arctic Vault Program’

news.com.au reports:
The GitHub Arctic Vault program is part of the now Microsoft-owned code repository GitHub…aimed at preserving the information for generations to come… “We chose to store GitHub’s public repositories in the Arctic World Archive in Svalbard [a Norwegian island] because it is one of the most remote and geopolitically stable places on Earth and is about a mile down the…

Firefox, WordPress Move to Support Lazy Loading of Images and iFrames

“Lazy Loading” would augment HTML’s <img> tag (and <iframe> tag) with two new attributes — “eager” (to load immediately) and “lazy” (to load only when it becomes relevant in the viewport). Felix Arntz, a developer programs engineer at Google (and a WordPress core committer) notes the updates in the HTML specification for the lazy loading attributes, adding that it’s “already supported…

Is PHP Still a Worthwhile Language To Learn?

mbadolato (Slashdot reader #105,588) shares this post from Belgium-based programmer Brent Roose: It’s no secret among web developers and programmers in general: PHP doesn’t have the best reputation. Despite still being one of the most used languages to build web applications; over the years PHP has managed to get itself a reputation of messy codebases, inexperienced developers, insecure code, an inconsistent…