Monday, October 15, 2018

Microsoft is getting into the lumber business

To help offset carbon, Microsoft plans to plant hundreds of acres of native trees in Ireland over the next few years -- the largest corporate investment in Irish forestry in a decade. The plan by Microsoft will focus on native trees, such as Pedunculate Oak, Downy Birch, Common Alder, and Scots Pine. This will help to offset Irish greenhouse gas emissions.


Friday, October 12, 2018

Real-World Decentralized Web Apps

There is a push by many -- including the inventor of the World Wide Web -- to make a decentralized internet more possible. There are a number of apps available that leverage this model, and this article discusses a word processing app...

The distributed web is being promoted by people I admire, including web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the Internet Archive’s Brewster Kahle and Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker. It also has a valid reason to exist: people really should own and control their own data, not just labour as unpaid serfs for surveillance capitalism. However, most people follow the line of least resistance, so the web is not going to change overnight.
Services like Graphite are worth considering if you need both encryption and the ability to share secure files online, though there are other ways to do this, such as Boxcryptor and Whisply. DWeb apps will need to become easier to use and mobile before they can reach a mass market.

Read more here...