Distance learners rejoice! Harvard University and MIT jointly announced their new non-profit edX online learning initiative in Cambridge earlier today, which aims to both enhance on-campus teaching and make courses from both schools available to people around the world for free.

“This is the single biggest change in education since the printing press,” said Anant Agarwal, newly-installed president of edX. Despite both schools chipping in $30 million a piece (not to mention a chunk of their respective staffs), edX is an independent entity with Agarwal reporting to the organization’s own board.

Beyond just offering Harvard and MIT courses to scores of avid learners worldwide, the two schools plan to build up the open-source MITx platform which itself was only announced at the end of last year. The goal is to make the platform available other to institutions as well, so they too can jump in and offer their own content. It’s still early days for the platform though, so no additional partners have been announced just yet.

Still, MITx provides quite the framework to begin with. Rather than just providing videos of lectures and scanned class handouts, MITx takes things a step further further with “embedded quizzes, immediate feedback, student-ranked questions and answers, online laboratories and student-paced learning.” Access to these online courses will be free to anyone with an Internet connection, though the issue of monetization quickly came up during the event’s Q&A period.

“The drive is not to make money,” said MIT Provost Rafael Reif. “That said, we intend to find a way to support those activities. There are several approaches we are considering, and we don’t want this project to become a drain on the budgets of MIT or Harvard.”

EdX president/professor Agarwal noted that in the prototype class MITx class he taught, students who passed the course received a free certificate to commemorate their achievement. That should soon change though, as a FAQ posted to MITNews points out that the two schools are considering charging a “nominal fee” for those certificates when a student proves their mastery of a subject.

AllThingsD reports that the first slew of EdX courses will go live this fall, but it seems as though Harvard may be looking to start a little sooner than that. The Boston Globe reports that Harvard is considering launching their first EdX courses this summer, with classes in computer science, social science, and the humanities expected to round out that first online term.

Agarwal went on to say that the more online educators there were, the better off the world would be, and there’s little question at this point that edtech space will continue picking up steam. Online education startup Coursera announced just weeks ago that their own distance learning platform would soon play host to courses from Princeton, Stanford, UPenn, and the University of Michigan. Meanwhile, StraighterLine also recently announced that they raised $10 million in funding for their plan to offer general requirement courses online (and on the cheap).

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Harvard, MIT Will Bring Classes To The Masses With Their ‘edX’ Online Learning Initiative

George Hotz—better known as GeoHot—might be the most famous hardware hacker in the world. He unlocked the iPhone so people could use it with any carrier and hacked the PS3 so it would play bootlegged games. Some of GeoHot’s hacks are clearly illegal, but are they wrong? More »

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The Case For GeoHot [Hackers]

In a rare example where 3D has the potential to actually be something more than a headache-inducing gimmick, researchers at the Japan Science and Technology Agency have developed the world’s first scanning electron microscope capable of capturing a 3D images in real time. More »

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Even the Tiniest Objects on Earth Are Now Viewable in 3D [Science]

Monitoring your CPU usage isn’t the most fun thing in the world, but when you’re working with CPU intensive programs it’s a necessity. If you’re sick of flicking back-and-forth between programs to see how much power you’re pushing, DIY blog Cuznersoft shows off a clever way to use LED lights to broadcast the CPU usage visually. More »

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Add LED Lights to a Computer that Change Color Based on CPU Usage [DIY]

When a suspected al-Qaeda member was arrested in May of 2011 in Berlin, he was found with a memory card with a password-protected folder—and the files within it were hidden. But, as the German magazine Zeit reports, computer forensics experts from the German Federal Criminal Police (BKA) eventually uncovered its contents—what appeared to be a pornographic video called “KickAss.”

Within that video, they discovered 141 separate text files, containing what officials claim are documents detailing al-Qaeda operations and plans for future operations—among them, three entitled “Future Works,” “Lessons Learned,” and “Report on Operations.”

So just how does one store a terrorist’s home study library in a pirated porn video file? In this case the files had been hidden (unencrypted) within the video file through a well-known approach for concealing messages in plain sight: steganography.

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Steganography: how al-Qaeda hid secret documents in a porn video

While Google keeps cramming its search results pages full of tools and social content, today Bing confirmed with me the full roll out a redesigned search results page that completely clears the left sidebar, and replaces the tabbed header with a cleaner set of links. Bing’s Facebook integration is also more subtle now, instead of plastering names and faces beneath Liked results.

This more relaxing, dare I say zen, design gives Google a more claustrophobic and exhausting feel by comparison. Microsoft seems to have realized that if it can’t match Google’s algorithmic prowess, it could win with sleek design that doesn’t bombard you with a thousand options.

Bing has been testing several of these changes for a few months. Here are the rest of details on redesign that’s supposed to reach everyone by the end of Tuesday if it hasn’t already:

• Related Searches have been shifted from the now-gone left rail to beneath the ads in the right rail
• A ‘thumbs up’ icon now indicates that friends have Liked a search result, and you can see who did by hovering over the icon
• The “narrow by time range” filter formerly in the left rail now only appears if you select the “News” search type from the “More” options

Personally, I dig minimalist product design that keeps things focused. If there’s a tool or option I only need sometimes, I’m okay spending an extra click to reveal it. The desktop Internet is brain-frying enough with so many applications and windows and tabs displayed at once. That’s why it seems more people are championing streamlined apps like Path, ad-blockers, and services that strip clutter out of news articles.

When faced with a much more established competitor, your only move is to differentiate or die. For a while that meant Bing getting cozy with Facebook and Twitter. It appeared to be working as it surpassed Yahoo in search query volume in January, though the product was still bleeding billions of dollars. But then Google Search went social, sparking controversy and solidifying the public as uncomfortable with personalized results.

In fact, Google’s disastrous Search Plus Your World created an opportunity for a clever Bing pivot. Microsoft heard that people were asking for a return to the simple results pages of yesteryear. Today that’s what we got. Now we’ll see if less really is more — more market share for Bing and less for Google, that is.

[Image Credits: Old Bing Diesgn Tnooz, Mr. Clean]

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Bing Strips Down Results Page To Make Google Look Like “Search Overload”

BrandYourself, a startup offering a cheap and easy approach to managing your Google results, has added a new feature to answer one of those burning questions: Who are the people Googling me?

To be clear, it’s not actually plugging in to Google and sending you an alert every single time someone enters your name. Instead, it’s revealing data about who’s visiting your BrandYourself profile page in a way that’s probably more meaningful and comprehensible to your average consumer than, say, Google Analytics. So every time someone visits your profile, BrandYourself can tell you (either via your dashboard or an email alert) what city they’re in, how they found you, and what company they work for. Co-founder and CEO Patrick Ambron compares the feature to the way LinkedIn and other social sites can alert you about other members who have viewed your profile, “except applied to the entire web.”

Here’s an example Ambron provided about why this might be useful:

Let’s say an advertising student Jim is interviewing at agencies [in] NYC. We can alert Jim and let him know that somebody from Ogilvly just Googled “Jim Armstrong, portfolio” and found his profile. This information is really useful for Jim because it shows him these employers are Googling him and finding him on Twitter, so it’s important he make sure his BrandYourself profile is up to date and he’s using BrandYourself to make sure his first page if filled with positive results, and nothing negative or irrelevant.

By the way, you don’t have to have a BrandYourself profile page to use the service, but it’s highly encouraged, and as you can tell in Ambron’s example, it’s something the new feature is encouraging too.

BrandYourself relaunched a couple of months ago, paring away other features and focusing exclusively on the DIY SEO angle. It now has 25,000 registered users and nearly 1,000 paying ones.

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Now BrandYourself Users Can See The Companies Googling Them

The March smartphone market share tally for the US is in from comScore, and it paints a familiar picture that’s rosy for Apple, Google and Samsung, but not so flush-cheeked for everyone else. Android is still tops and jumped almost four points to 51 percent of new American buyers. Apple’s still riding high after shipping 35.1 million iPhones, however, and moved up to 30.7 percent. As is often becoming the case, it was Microsoft and RIM that took the biggest hit, with the BlackBerry dropping as much as Android gained and tumbling down to 12.3 percent.

A total of 106 million Americans had a smartphone, nine percent higher than in December, and that was mirrored in the hurt dealt out among total cellphone market share. Outside of Samsung’s gangbuster run in smartphones keeping it on top at 26 percent, the only other company to move up as an individual cellphone brand was Apple, which staked out 14 percent of the US cellphone space for itself. HTC, Motorola and LG are all shedding market share, with HTC no doubt hoping that the One X and One S will turn its fortunes around pretty soon.

comScore: Android tips the 51% mark in US share, iPhone nips its heels with 31% originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 May 2012 13:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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comScore: Android tips the 51% mark in US share, iPhone nips its heels with 31%

mask.of.sanity writes “An online search portal has been launched that reveals the IP addresses of any Skype user. The portal needs only a Skype username entered in a search bar for it to produce the IP address of a target user. It then uses IP addresses to geo-locate users on a map and reveal their ISP information.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Hacked Skype IP Address Search Shows Who's Speaking From Where