Outcries, over the privacy implications of accessing private Hotmail accounts, came shortly after Microsoft defended itself against how it accessed a bloggers private account to find out if a former employee stole trade secrets.

Microsoft is now making a change to its privacy policy. This change would require its legal team to look into individual cases to see if a court order is absolutely required to access private user data. The company would then proceed to have the evidence “audited” if you will, by an outside lawyer, and then perform the search - only if a judge allows it by signing off on the evidence. Microsoft will also publish a bi-annual transparency report that will highlight these types of searches.

Recently, reports emerged that previous Microsoft staffer Alex Kibkalo is confronting elected criminal chargers over assertions that he stole competitive advantages throughout his residency at the organization. The prosecution states Kibkalo "transferred restrictive programming and prerelease programming overhauls for Windows 8 RT and also the Microsoft Activation Server Software Development Kit (SDK)" to his particular Skydrive (now Onedrive) record in August 2012.

In 2012, a French blogger tipped off Microsoft that he gained a code from the Microsoft Server SDK, which had initially hailed from a Hotmail client and implied Microsoft could get to his record without a court request. This was lawful on the grounds that an explanation in Microsoft's terms of administration permitted the move to make place assuming that it was to ensure the security of its clients. In the long run, the move prompted an examination where, as stated by court archives, Kibkalo was recognized as the source and conceded spilling Microsoft code to outcasts.

Source: http://mashable.com/2014/03/21/microsoft-privacy-hotmail/

It's hard to learn to play the piano just by watching a video of a great pianist. Interactive learning is much more effective! oppia.org helps you make embeddable interactive educational "explorations" that let people learn by doing.

The second experiment, quietly announced on Google's Open Source Blog, was the launch of Oppia, a project that aims "To make it easy for anyone to create online interactive activities" that others can learn from.

Google's new open source project essentially aims to take the headache or mystery out of the process by providing the framework by which anyone can quickly create these types of interactive learning experiences and add them to their site.

In describing Oppia, Google says that one can think of it as a "Smart feedback system," which is an attempt to begin automating how we "Teach a person to fish" - to use its example.

On the technical side, Google says that it's based Oppia on an extensible framework, allowing developers to add their own inputs and extend the range of potential formats and types of responses that Oppia understands.

Explorations, as Google calls the lessons users can build through its system, that are created on an Oppia server can be embedded in any web page, and embeddings can "Refer to a particular version" of the exploration so that future changes don't mess with the principle version, Google explained.

As with many Google projects of this kind, it's not totally clear how much attention and support Google intends to throw at Oppia going forward.

The project's home page conspicuously says that Oppia is not officially a Google product, which would seem to imply that Google isn't planning to dedicate a ton of manpower or resources to the project.

More on Oppia at home here and in Google’s YouTube explainer below: