ReadWriteHack

It's perhaps the one way that database interaction can work reliably using any format, any server and any client on the Web today. It happens to be a protocol created by Microsoft. But in a symbol of how Microsoft is now perceived today as just another major player instead of a dominant force, the leading platform makers are joining Microsoft in a formal move to standardize OData, the Open Data Protocol. The reason Microsoft and IBM are no longer fighting over this? The real competition is no longer just amongst these old-line technology companies, but largely between them and a new breed of competitors often based around new mobile devices and consumer platforms.

You can do a lot more with Twitter than the official Web, mobile and desktop clients allow. To do it, though, you'll need to access Twitter's API — or use a tool that digs deeper into the API than the usual clients. If you're comfortable with a command line interface, or willing to learn how to use one, t gives you simple, fine-grained control over your Twitter stream.

Everyone ought to be able to read and write; few people within the global mainstream would argue with that statement. But should everyone be able to program computers? The question is becoming critically important as digital technology plays an ever more central role in daily life. The movement to make code literacy a basic tenet of education is gaining momentum, and its success or failure will have a huge impact on our society.

Google has long provided an API for automating Google Analytics, but it required developers to jump through a few more hoops than many would like. Yesterday, the company announced its Easy Dashboard Library, which should let developers speed up custom-tailored dashboards and reports.

As Windows 8 approaches, Mozilla developers have been working hard on a Metro version. If you're using Windows 8 on the desktop, no problem. Tablet users, however, are going to be denied a fully functional Firefox - and will face restrictions on many other third-party applications. In the name of security, Microsoft is forcing them into a "sandbox" on ARM devices. The lockdown renegs on the company's prior promises, and it's going to have some far-reaching effects on many applications.

It's a valid question: "Why has all the data the government has been collecting turned out to be too big to handle?" The results of a U.S. and state government IT survey released this week by the public sector IT community MeriTalk sheds a bright, halogen spotlight on the answer: It's because it's being collected in an unfiltered format and is waiting for someone - anyone - to claim it and write viable applications for it.

Congratulations, you’ve finally convinced the powers that be that your next Web-design project needs to be responsive. It was tough work convincing them, but you can’t rest on your laurels now. The most critical decision of the project remains: how is your team going to build it?

Having data available electronically is not the same thing as the data being useful. Campaign finance disclosures provided electronically by the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), are a good example of that. The New York Times's Fech (not "fetch") is a RubyGem - a packaged application - designed to help journalists and public interest organizations access and make sense of FEC filings.

We all know about those authentication blocks of text called CAPTCHAs, perhaps too well. (Today's fun trivia: The acronym stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.). A new idea from PlayThru is to embed a small Flash or HTML5-based game that a human plays with a mouse to prove he or she really is a carbon-based life form. It is intriguing, potentially less annoying, and has captured (if you will excuse the pun) a few supporters already. The service is just getting started, and it is free to try out.

News of a potential security leak in Skype’s network protocols may be overblown, an investigation by ReadWriteWeb reveals today. Though it is possible for a program to expose IP addresses that have, at some point in history, been utilized by Skype users, this particular program is not Skype itself or anything that exploits a flaw in Skype.

Rather, it’s a separate, nonendorsed, reverse-engineered form of Skype 5.5. Though the reverse engineering project responsible for this program calls itself “open source,” in actuality, its proprietors appear to have merely de-obfuscated Skype’s proprietary code, made adjustments to it, and recompiled it. Those adjustments can, we discovered, produce human-readable IP addresses.