The Insider News

Business Insider[^]:

Jim Breyer, the venture capitalist who made a fortune investing early in Facebook, is optimistic about the long-term picture for the technology industry.

The Guardian[^]:

Search company’s head of ideas sees short term wins against non-tech-savvy organisation, but says stifling group’s propaganda must not be neglected

Gizmodo[^]:

Every year, SplashData complies a list of the millions of stolen passwords made public throughout the last twelve months, then sorts them in order of popularity.

Nick Desaulniers[^]:

I’m hacking on an assembly project, and wanted to document some of the tricks I was using for figuring out what was going on. This post might seem a little basic for folks who spend all day heads down in gdb or who do this stuff professionally, but I just wanted to share a quick intro to some tools that others may find useful.

Ars Technica[^]:

Brave will replace blocked ads with its own ads, taking a 15% cut of revenues.

grahamwahlberg.com[^]:

Graham Wahlberg wants to inspire you to create something new, start a startup, and make a billion dollars.

mjg59.dreamwidth.org[^]:

Up until recently individual members ($99 a year) could also elect two board members, allowing for community perspectives to be represented at the board level. As of last Friday, this is no longer true. The by-laws were amended to drop the clause that permitted individual members to elect any directors.

“We were amazed to find that the difference in the sizes of the pairs of synapses were very small, on average, only about eight percent different in size. No one thought it would be such a small difference. This was a curveball from nature,” says Bartol.

Because the memory capacity of neurons is dependent upon synapse size, this eight percent difference turned out to be a key number the team could then plug into their algorithmic models of the brain to measure how much information could potentially be stored in synaptic connections.

It was known before that the range in sizes between the smallest and largest synapses was a factor of 60 and that most are small.

But armed with the knowledge that synapses of all sizes could vary in increments as little as eight percent between sizes within a factor of 60, the team determined there could be about 26 categories of sizes of synapses, rather than just a few.

“Our data suggests there are 10 times more discrete sizes of synapses than previously thought,” says Bartol. In computer terms, 26 sizes of synapses correspond to about 4.7 “bits” of information. Previously, it was thought that the brain was capable of just one to two bits for short and long memory storage in the hippocampus."

thenextweb[^]:

Today, the US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced a program that aims to build an implantable neural device that would allow the human brain to communicate directly with a computer.

thenextweb[^]:

Facebook has been fighting tooth and nail to continue running Free Basics in India, where the country’s regulatory authorities are mulling policies concerning net neutrality and differential pricing for data services.

Daily Dot[^]:

A senior Homeland Security official recently argued that Internet anonymity should outlawed in the same way that driving a car without a license plate is against the law.