Google Encrypts Gmail

Astronaut Chris Hadfield at TED, Casey Neistat surfs in J. Crew, the origins of Matthew Dear and more in our weekly look at the web

If you look closely at the URL while accessing your Gmail account, you’ll now notice an “S” after the HTTP. To help deter the NSA from intercepting email messages as they move between data centers and servers, Google recently made all Gmail connections more secure with HTTPS encryption. While it certainly won’t stop surveillance attempts entirely, it will slow it down by adding an extra …

Facebook’s Hack

Astronaut Chris Hadfield at TED, Casey Neistat surfs in J. Crew, the origins of Matthew Dear and more in our weekly look at the web

This week, Facebook publicly revealed a new language, called Hack, which three of its engineers have been building for the past few years to improve the efficiency of their fellow developers—and that Facebook has been already using to run its website. While many suggest Hack is simply an updated version of PHP, its importance lies in the fact that it allows coders to use both …

Bearer of Good News

Astronaut Chris Hadfield at TED, Casey Neistat surfs in J. Crew, the origins of Matthew Dear and more in our weekly look at the web

When someone showed up at Russian physicist and Stanford University professor Andrei Linde’s doorstep with good news, it wasn’t Publisher’s Clearing House. Colleague and assistant professor Chao-Lin Kuo surprised Linde with the results of his team’s BICEP2 experiment—new evidence that supports Linde’s cosmic inflation theory of how the universe began, work that he proposed 30 years ago. The video capturing Linde and his wife’s (a …