Howard Lutnick, the chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, one of the world’s largest financial-services firms, still cries when he talks about it. Not long after the planes struck the twin towers, killing 658 of his co-workers and friends, including his brother, one of the first things on Lutnick’s mind was passwords. This may seem callous, but it was not.
When you surf the web, you may have noticed that links (URLs) usually begin with HTTP or HTTPS. I won’t go into what HTTP actually is or how it works, but it’s enough to say that the extra “S” stands for “Secure.” Basically, when you use HTTP, everything that is sent or received by your browser is in plain text. If someone (a hacker, the NSA, Verizon) wants to see what you were doing on the internet, HTTP makes it very easy for them. HTTPS adds encryption and other protections so that you can be fairly sure that only two people can see your data: you, and the web server on the other end of the link.
Earlier this week, Mozilla released Firefox Developer Edition — a web browser with an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) built right in. If you’re in the web development business, this means that Firefox just became relevant again.
The company announced its plan to roll out its video-streaming platform in Australia and New Zealand in a carefully designed tweet posted Wednesday…. “Internet-connected users in Australia and New Zealand will be able to subscribe to Netflix and instantly watch a curated selection of popular movies and TV shows in high-definition or even 4K where available,” the California-based company said in a release.
Dataspelsbranschen, or the Swedish Games Industry, has been awarded a $36,672 grant by Vinnova – an “innovation agency” funded by the Swedish government – to work directly with game developers to take a look at ways in which video games depict gender issues. Still in its conceptual phase, the project aims to spark a larger conversation about the ways gender and diversity is depicted in games.