Bitstrips, Inc. was a Canadian media and technology company based in Toronto, founded in 2007 by Jacob Blackstock, David Kennedy, Shahan Panth, Dorian Baldwin, and Jesse Brown. The company created and offered a web application, Bitstrips.com, which allowed users to create comic strips using personalized avatars, and preset templates and poses. Brown and Blackstock explained that the service was meant to enable self-expression without the need to have artistic skills. Bitstrips was first presented in 2008 at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, and the service later piloted and launched a version designed for use as educational software. The service achieved increasing prominence following the launch of versions for Facebook and mobile platforms. In 2014, Bitstrips launched a spin-off app known as Bitmoji, which allows users to create personalized stickers for use in instant messaging. In July 2016, Snapchat Inc. announced that it had acquired the company; the Bitstrips comic service was shut down, but Bitmoji remains operational, and has subsequently been given greater prominence within Snapchat's overall platform. == History == Bitstrips was co-developed by Toronto-based comic artist Jacob Blackstock and his high school friend, journalist Jesse Brown. The service was originally envisioned as a means to allow anyone to create their own comic strip without needing artistic skills. Brown explained that "it's so difficult and time-consuming to tell a story in comic book form, drawing the same characters again and again in these tiny little panels, and just the amount of craftsmanship required. And even if you can do it well, which I never could, it takes years to make a story." Brown stated that the service would be "groundwork for a whole new way to communicate", and went as far as describing the service as being a "YouTube for comics". Blackstock explained that the concept of Bitstrips was influenced by his own use of comics as a form of socialization; a student, Blackstock and his friends drew comics featuring each other and shared them during classes. He felt that Bitstrips was a "medium for self-expression", stating that "It's not just about you making the comics, but since you and your friends star in these comics, it's like you're the medium. The visual nature of comics just speaks so much louder than text." The service was publicly unveiled at South by Southwest in 2008. In 2009, the service introduced a version oriented towards the educational market, Bitstrips for Schools, which was initially piloted at a number of schools in Ontario. The service was praised by educators for being engaging to students, especially within language classes. Brown noted that students were using the service to create comics outside of class as well, stating that it was "so gratifying and shocking what people do with your tool to make their own stories in ways that you never would have anticipated. Some of them are just brilliant." In December 2012, Bitstrips launched a version for Facebook; by July 2013, Bitstrips had 10 million unique users on Facebook, having created over 50 million comics. In October 2013, Bitstrips launched a mobile app; in two months, Bitstrips became a top-downloaded app in 40 countries, and over 30 million avatars had been created with it. In November 2013, Bitstrips secured a round of funding from Horizons Ventures and Li Ka-shing. In October 2014, Bitstrips launched Bitmoji, a spin-off app that allows users to create stickers featuring Bitstrips characters in various templates. In July 2016, following unconfirmed reports earlier in the year, Snapchat Inc. announced that it had acquired Bitstrips. The company's staff continue to operate out of Toronto, but the original Bitstrips comic service was shut down in favour of focusing exclusively on Bitmoji, leaving many Bitstrips users to call for a reboot of the comic service.
Law practice management software
Law practice management software is software designed to manage the business operations of a law firm. This can include software that manages cases, client intake, court communications, electronic discovery, time tracking, trust accounting, and billing. == Features of law practice management software == Common features of practice management software include: Case management Time tracking Document assembly Contact management Calendaring Docket management Client portal Contract Management Court Case Status Tracker Trust accounting == Examples of law practice management software == Smokeball LEAP Legal Software PracticeEvolve Dye & Durham
Hardware security
Hardware security is a discipline originated from the cryptographic engineering and involves hardware design, access control, secure multi-party computation, secure key storage, ensuring code authenticity, measures to ensure that the supply chain that built the product is secure among other things. A hardware security module (HSM) is a physical computing device that safeguards and manages digital keys for strong authentication and provides cryptoprocessing. These modules traditionally come in the form of a plug-in card or an external device that attaches directly to a computer or network server. Some providers in this discipline consider that the key difference between hardware security and software security is that hardware security is implemented using "non-Turing-machine" logic (raw combinatorial logic or simple state machines). One approach, referred to as "hardsec", uses FPGAs to implement non-Turing-machine security controls as a way of combining the security of hardware with the flexibility of software. Hardware backdoors are backdoors in hardware. Conceptionally related, a hardware Trojan (HT) is a malicious modification of electronic system, particularly in the context of integrated circuit. A physical unclonable function (PUF) is a physical entity that is embodied in a physical structure and is easy to evaluate but hard to predict. Further, an individual PUF device must be easy to make but practically impossible to duplicate, even given the exact manufacturing process that produced it. In this respect it is the hardware analog of a one-way function. The name "physical unclonable function" might be a little misleading as some PUFs are clonable, and most PUFs are noisy and therefore do not achieve the requirements for a function. Today, PUFs are usually implemented in integrated circuits and are typically used in applications with high security requirements. Many attacks on sensitive data and resources reported by organizations occur from within the organization itself.
Virtual Print Fee
Virtual Print Fee (VPF) is a subsidy paid by a film distributor towards the purchase of digital cinema projection equipment for use by a film exhibitor in the presentation of first release motion pictures. The subsidy is paid in the form of a fee per booking of a movie, intended to match the savings that occurs by not shipping a film print. The model is designed to help redistribute the savings realized by studios when using digital distribution instead of film print distribution and is intended to vanish when the transition phase is over when the vast majority of cinemas screens are equipped. == History == The first public demonstration of digital projection for cinema took place at ShoWest in 1999, and it was readily apparent that the technology was further ahead than the business model. Early technology presentations attempted to claim that the technology would pay for itself through new revenues generated by new forms of content. But exhibitors knew their audience, and could see that digital projection was only a replacement technology, creating new financial liabilities, and not new revenue. It wasn’t until the rollout of digital 3-D years later in 2005 that digital projection demonstrated that it could be used to generate additional revenue. The economics were challenging. Film projectors and platters cost in the neighborhood of US$30,000, while early digital projectors cost up to US$150,000. Further, film projectors had a lifetime of 30 years with relatively small annual expenditures in maintenance and replacement parts. On the other hand, exhibitors felt they would be lucky to get 10 years of service from a digital projector, after which there would have to be a refresh in capital expenditure. Meanwhile, distributors would realize significant savings by eliminating the high cost of film prints with corresponding shipping costs, and instead distributing digital files either by satellite or hard drive. The Virtual Print Fee was designed to better balance savings and expenditures for both exhibitors and distributors. It is intended to primarily assist in the replacement of film projectors, and not assist in the purchase of new projection equipment for new construction. To give confidence to financial institutions that digital cinema technology was stable and worthy of investment, Digital Cinema Initiatives was created in 2002, resulting in the release of the first version of the DCI Digital Cinema System Specification in 2005. The DCI Specification continues to be the core specification for digital cinema, establishing the baseline technology and system requirements for which studios will release digital movies. The first set of VPF agreements executed with four major studios were announced by Christie/AIX in November 2005. Christie/AIX at that time was a subsidiary of Access Integrated Technology, now renamed Cinedigm Digital Cinema Corp. The agreements were for the rollout of digital cinema technology to 4000 screens. Since that time, numerous other Digital Cinema Deployment Agreements have been executed around the world, allowing exhibitors in nearly every territory to benefit from VPF subsidies in the conversion from film projection to digital projection.
Fediverse
The Fediverse (commonly shortened to fedi) is a collection of social networking services that can communicate with each other (formally known as federation) using a common protocol. Users of different websites can send and receive status updates, multimedia files and other data across the network. The term Fediverse is a portmanteau of federation and universe. The majority of Fediverse platforms are based on free and open-source software, and create connections between servers using the ActivityPub protocol. Some software still supports older federation protocols as well, such as OStatus, the Diaspora protocol and Zot, while newer protocols such as AT Protocol connect via network bridges. Diaspora is the only actively developed software project classified under the original definition of Fediverse that does not support ActivityPub. == Design == While a traditional social networking service will host all its content on servers managed by the owner of the website, the decentralized structure of the Fediverse allows any individual or organization to host a social platform using their own servers (referred to as an "instance"). Every instance is independent, and can set its own rules and expectations. Even so, much like how users of one email service such as Gmail can still send emails to users of another service such as Outlook, users may still view content and interact with users on any other instance in the Fediverse. A user on one Mastodon instance, for example, may view and interact with posts made by a user on a different instance even if it is not running Mastodon. Instances hosted by different social networking services may also communicate with one another. A user on the microblogging platform Misskey, for example, may view and interact with posts made by users on Mastodon. Some Fediverse networks even allow users to interact with different social networking formats from the same platform. For example, a user on a social news instance running Lemmy can interact with another post from an mbin instance, a similar service, as well as microblog statuses from Mastodon. === Content moderation and user safety === Decentralized social networking platforms introduce new challenges and difficulties for user trust and safety. By nature of the Fediverse, operators of an instance are solely responsible for moderation of its content. As there is no form of centralized governance or moderation across the Fediverse, it is impossible for an instance to be "removed" from the Fediverse; it can only be defederated per an instance operator's choice, which makes that instance's content inaccessible from the operator's instance. Individual instances are responsible for defining their own content policies, which may then be enforced by its staff. Moderation of a Fediverse instance differs significantly from that of traditional social media platforms, as moderators are responsible not only for content posted by users of that instance ("local users"), but also for content posted by users of other instances ("remote users"). == History == === Historical protocols === The concept and the functionality of the Fediverse existed before the ActivityPub protocol and the term itself. One of the first projects that included support for a decentralized social networking service was Laconica, a microblogging platform which implemented the OpenMicroBlogging protocol for communicating between different installations of the software. The software was later renamed to StatusNet in 2009, before being merged into the GNU social project in 2013 along with Free Social, with the two latter servers being a fork of StatusNet. Over time, the limitations of the OpenMicroBlogging protocol became more apparent, being designed as a one-way text messaging system. To replace the ageing protocol, OStatus was devised as an open standard for microblogging, combining various other technologies like Salmon, Atom, WebSub and ActivityStreams into a single protocol used for communicating between instances. StatusNet first implemented the OStatus protocol on March 3, 2010, with version 0.9.0, and OStatus quickly became the most popular federated protocol in usage. Around the same time as OStatus was gaining popularity, the Diaspora social network was formed, using its own federated protocol. To illustrate the differences between the two protocols, the terms of the Fediverse and the federation began to enter common usage, mainly after 2017. The term "the Fediverse" was used to describe the network formed by software using the OStatus protocol, such as GNU Social, Mastodon, and Friendica, in contrast to the competing diaspora protocol under "the federation". === ActivityPub === In December 2012, the flagship StatusNet instance at the time, identi.ca, transitioned away to a new software named pump.io, with a new federation protocol to replace OStatus. The new protocol was designed to be useful for general activity streams and not just status updates, and replaced many of OStatus' external dependencies with JSON-LD and a REST API for its messaging and inbox systems, as well as making more use of ActivityStreams. While not as utilized as its OStatus predecessor, it would later become influential in the development of the ActivityPub standard. In January 2018, the W3C presented the ActivityPub protocol as a recommended standard. The standard aimed to improve the interoperability between different software packages running on a wide network of servers and to supersede both the OStatus protocol and Pump.io. By 2019, almost all software that was using OStatus had added support for ActivityPub. While Mastodon began to remove OStatus support, other projects maintained it in their code, such as Friendica (which also maintained diaspora support along with ActivityPub). === AT Protocol === A major protocol often contrasted with ActivityPub is the AT Protocol, which powers the Bluesky social network. While both protocols aim to create decentralized social networks, they employ different technical philosophies regarding user identity. Developers of the AT Protocol, including Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, have stated they chose not to use ActivityPub because it did not natively support easy "account portability", the ability for a user to move their account, data, and social graph to a new provider without relying on the original server to authorize the move. In the ActivityPub model (used by Mastodon), a user's identity is typically tied to a specific server, similar to an email address; if that server goes offline, the identity can be lost. The AT Protocol aims to solve this by separating identity from hosting, allowing users to switch providers without losing their identity. Although the two protocols are technically incompatible by default, third-party "bridges" such as Bridgy Fed have been developed to allow users on ActivityPub networks to follow and interact with users on the AT Protocol network, and vice versa. === Other Fediverse protocols === While the Fediverse has traditionally been the network most commonly referred to and used as an example regarding the subject of decentralized social networks, alternatives to it and the accompanying ActivityPub have been developed and deployed. Smaller competitors such as Nostr and Farcaster have become popular within the cryptocurrency community. These protocols have used ActivityPub as a frame of reference for which to design their own architecture, as these newer protocols use a different federation model based on publishing content to relays for distribution rather than ActivityPub's server-centric model. Despite their differences, software exists that permit the bridging of user content between these protocols, including "double-bridges" that span multiple protocols for the purpose of distributing the same content. == Adoption == Users have been slow to embrace the Fediverse due to poor user experience and excessive complexity. Following the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk in November 2022, certain major social networks, including Threads, Tumblr and Flipboard, expressed interest in supporting the ActivityPub protocol, as a large number of users began to migrate to Mastodon, a server that supports the Fediverse and was also the most popular alternative to Twitter at the time. Flickr also expressed support in supporting ActivityPub. As of November 2022, no information had been released by Flickr after the initial tweets by the CEO, with support for ActivityPub suspected to be on hold or cancelled. In 2024, the local government of the Stary Sącz municipality in Poland launched their own PeerTube instance in order to de facto abolish its presence on YouTube. According to the government, they stopped using YouTube for official communications "in order to adhere to the appropriate regulations". In the same year, VIVERSE, HTC Vive's metaverse platform, implemented support for ActivityPub in their chat feature, allowing users to send direct messages to other
Semantic space
Semantic spaces in the natural language domain aim to create representations of natural language that are capable of capturing meaning. The original motivation for semantic spaces stems from two core challenges of natural language: Vocabulary mismatch (the fact that the same meaning can be expressed in many ways) and ambiguity of natural language (the fact that the same term can have several meanings). The application of semantic spaces in natural language processing (NLP) aims at overcoming limitations of rule-based or model-based approaches operating on the keyword level. The main drawback with these approaches is their brittleness, and the large manual effort required to create either rule-based NLP systems or training corpora for model learning. Rule-based and machine learning based models are fixed on the keyword level and break down if the vocabulary differs from that defined in the rules or from the training material used for the statistical models. Research in semantic spaces dates back more than 20 years. In 1996, two papers were published that raised a lot of attention around the general idea of creating semantic spaces: latent semantic analysis and Hyperspace Analogue to Language. However, their adoption was limited by the large computational effort required to construct and use those semantic spaces. A breakthrough with regard to the accuracy of modelling associative relations between words (e.g. "spider-web", "lighter-cigarette", as opposed to synonymous relations such as "whale-dolphin", "astronaut-driver") was achieved by explicit semantic analysis (ESA) in 2007. ESA was a novel (non-machine learning) based approach that represented words in the form of vectors with 100,000 dimensions (where each dimension represents an Article in Wikipedia). However practical applications of the approach are limited due to the large number of required dimensions in the vectors. More recently, advances in neural network techniques in combination with other new approaches (tensors) led to a host of new recent developments: Word2vec from Google, GloVe from Stanford University, and fastText from Facebook AI Research (FAIR) labs.
Deluxe Media
Deluxe Media Inc., also known simply as Deluxe and formerly Deluxe Entertainment Services Group, Inc., is an American multinational multimedia and entertainment service provisions company owned by Platinum Equity, founded in 1915 by Hungarian-born American film producer William Fox and headquartered in Burbank, California. The company services multiple clients in the film, television, digital content and advertising industries across the globe, and has been recognized with 10 Academy Awards for scientific and technical achievements, including developments in CinemaScope pictures (as part of 20th Century Fox) and more recently for a process of creating archival separations from digital image data. == History == Deluxe began as a film processing laboratory established in 1915 by William Fox under the name De Luxe as part of his eponymous film conglomerate corporation in Fort Lee, New Jersey. In 1916, Fox Film Corporation opened its studio in Hollywood on 13 acres at Sunset and Western. The first Deluxe film laboratory on the west coast was built on the south side of the lot (Fernwood and Serrano), and the laboratory was moved to the new Fox studios building on Manhattan's west side in 1919, where it remained for over 40 years. The "business manager" (later president) of the laboratory was Alan E. Freedman, who guided the company into the 1960s. In 1927, Fox (Deluxe) received a patent for sound-on-film, the Fox Movietone system. In 1927, "Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans," an early Movietone film, opened. Fox Movietone News, ran weekly in theaters until 1963. During the Great Depression, Fox Film Corporation encountered financial difficulties. Among the actions taken to maintain liquidity, Fox sold the laboratories in 1932 to Freedman, who renamed the operation Deluxe. Under Freedman's leadership, Deluxe added two more plants in Chicago and Toronto. In January 1934, Fox was granted an option to rebuy DeLuxe before December 31, 1938. On 31 May 1935, under Sidney Kent, Fox merged his film company with Twentieth Century Pictures to form The Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation following a bank-infused reorganisation. The merged company then exercised this option in July 1936, with Freedman remaining as president. In 1953, Deluxe developed the widescreen format CinemaScope. Titles included "There's No Business Like Show Business" (1954) and "The Seven Year Itch" (1955). Other innovations included the processing and sound striping of CinemaScope, and were patented and/or received Academy awards. In 1962 Freedman retired. In the 1960s, Deluxe closed its New York plant, followed by its plants in Chicago and Toronto, as motion picture production declined on the East Coast. In 1972, Deluxe began large volume videocassette production, with a billion by 1996. In 1990, The Rank Organisation acquired Deluxe from Fox. In 2000, Deluxe began large volume DVD production. In 2006, The Rank Organisation sold Deluxe Film Group to MacAndrews & Forbes, renamed Deluxe Entertainment Services Group. On 9 February 2012, Deluxe acquired Hong Kong–based visual effects and post-production company, Centro Digital Pictures, with its founder John Chu remaining as president while reporting to Alaric McAusland, managing director for Deluxe in Australia. In May 2014, Deluxe shut down its Los Angeles plant at Sunset & Western Studios complex, where other studios themselves were demolished way back in 1971. Also that same year, Deluxe closed the Hollywood film labs, and they gave thousands of orphaned film elements to the Academy Film Archive. The Deluxe Laboratories Collection at the Academy Film Archive consists of over 7,500 35mm and 16mm film elements of various motion pictures dating back to the early 1960s. On 22 April 2015, Deluxe and its longtime competitor, Technicolor S.A., announced that they had entered into a binding agreement to create a new joint venture known as Deluxe Technicolor Digital Cinema which will specialize in cinema mastering, distribution and management services. Deluxe got acquired on 4 September 2019 by creditors in a debt-for-equity swap to avoid bankruptcy. On 3 October 2019, Deluxe filed for bankruptcy, pending in the Southern District of New York. The same month on the 24th, the company received court approval to emerge from bankruptcy with a comprehensive restructuring plan. On July 1, 2020, Platinum Equity agreed to acquire the distribution division of Deluxe and re-unite with former CEO Cyril Drabinsky who would merge CineVizion, a film distribution company he founded after leaving Deluxe in 2016, into it. The companies Company 3 and Method Studios which formed the creative divisions of Deluxe were sold to Framestore in November 2020.