LinkedIn Launches its Online Learning Portal With Over 9,000 Courses

LinkedIn, the business-focused social network which Microsoft recently bought for an astounding $26 Billion, is now trying to turn over a new leaf. They have now introduced a new online-learning section with over 9,000 courses covering everything from coding and programming to writing and accounting.

Called “LinkedIn Learning”, it is built on content taken from the popular e-learning portal, Lynda. LinkedIn acquired the portal back in 2015 for $1.5 billion and is now finally making full use of their plethora of courses.

What is LinkedIn Learning?

LinkedIn Learning is an ambitious e-learning portal tailored to individuals. The subjects available include business, technology, and creative topics. The social network has also added some extra features to make the online learning system work better with their business-minded goal. Consequently, businesses looking to keep training their employees and even educational institutions exploring e-learning courses can make use of the portal.

Currently, individuals looking to start learning through LinkedIn will have to sign-up for LinkedIn’s Premium service. Once signed up, LinkedIn Premium users will get 25 new courses every week. You can also try out LinkedIn Learning for free for a whole month.

LinkedIn Learning for Business

Employers and HR managers can recommend courses for their employees and then track their performance through LinkedIn’s analytics products. The analytics tools can not only monitor employees’ progress but also look at the wider range of what is being studied as a point of reference.

The company has also said that they will soon be releasing an enterprise tier so that large companies can take subscriptions for their entire employee base.

Apart from its e-learning initiative, LinkedIn has introduced a handful of other changes. They announced an updated design for their desktop website which will come with a revamped newsfeed as well as new messaging features.

Google makes it easier to search your Files in Google Drive

Google’s cloud storage service, Google Drive, just got a big search update. The update will enable Drive to respond to search queries just like Google’s very own search engine sifts through the internet, billions of pages at a time.

Google’s search engine is a marvel of software engineering and the search giant wants its other products to perform in the same way. It has now brought over Natural Language Processing (NLP) over to Google Drive, allowing it to understand your search queries much better and present better results.

For example, you can now say things like “find my budget spreadsheet from last December” or “show me presentations from Alissa” and Drive will quickly pull them up. Previously, you were restricted to using a specific syntax or keywords in order to find your required document(s).

Moreover, Drive can also auto-correct terms in your search queries, just like Google. It’s a really small addition but an incredibly useful one and can be a big time-saver. There are also a couple of other small changes like the ability to split your document into multiple columns and auto-saving of a copy of non-Google files when editing them in Docs, Sheets, and Slides.

Google says that the features are going to be available globally and the rollout has already started

WhatsApp Introduces Group Chat Mentions, GIFs and more in Latest Update

On social media, many people expressed their discomfort when it came to group chat conversations, especially when using Whatsapp.

The users were very keen in asking for a feature which allows users to scroll directly to the related part with their name being tagged then having to go through the entire conversation to do so.

It seems that Whatsapp has finally granted them their wish. WhatsApp has added a much need option which allows users to tag other group chat members in the latest update (Version 2.16.272).

How to Use @mentions in Group Chats

To tag a group member, all you have to do is use the symbol @ and select them from the drop down list and add them as a mention.

This feature is very similar to the method of tagging people on Twitter and WhatsApp competitor Telegram.

But that’s not the only new feature that Whatsapp is getting in this update.

If you are getting annoyed by increasing number of messages in the group chat but you can not mute the chat either, well, now you can! The new Whatsapp chat allows users to still get notification in muted chats if a member has mentioned him/her using “@”.

Whatsapp previously added the option to quote messages, a welcome change by the messaging giant. By introducing this feature, people might not feel that annoyed with a thousand messages waiting them in group chats.

Future Updates

Telegram may not be competing with WhatsApp in terms of users but it has the world’s most used messaging app beat in terms of features. However, that could soon change as WhatsApp plans to bring in features which have been Telegram exclusive for quite some time.

iOS users can now successfully send, receive and view gifs in conversations. However, Android users still cannot properly do that. Whatsapp is aiming to fix the issue in future updates.

For people who are concerned about their security, Whatsapp has also promised to bring a two step authentication system in the coming versions.

The new service agreement also reports that bots will also feature on Whatsapp for further automated help:

Adblock Plus to sell Ads

The popular browser extension that a lot of people use to block ads, Adblock Plus, will be selling ads too soon.

Yes you heard that right.

Good Ads and Bad Ads?

Instead of removing ads from the websites you visit, Adblock plus will instead replace the “bad” ads with the “good” ones.

Here’s how Adblock will classify the good ad from the bad – the ‘bad’ ones include any ad that are too big and intrusive and ultimately irrelevant to you. While the ‘good’ ones will be the smaller and more subtle ads.

And that’s not all. Adblock is going to be launching a marketplace for ‘good’ ads.

New Ad Marketplace

Adblock Plus will be launching an ad marketplace which will let blogs and publishers choose ads from and run them up on their websites.

Essentially, this means that if you have Adblock Plus installed on your browser you will still get ads on websites who are using the ad marketplace, thus entirely killing the idea of installing the Adblock.

Ben Williams, operations and communications director of Adblock Plus says,

It allows you to treat the two different ecosystems completely differently and monetize each one, and crucially, monetize the ad blockers on on their own terms.

In fairness, Adblock had been running an Acceptable Ads program since 2011 but it was fairly limited in scope.

Whitelisted ads could be displayed on websites but the process of whitelisting was a complex and time consuming process. Not to mention Adblock Plus charged the websites to allow them to display whitelisted ads specifically on their websites.

Extension to “Acceptable ads” Program

Through the new ad marketplace, Adblock Plus is hoping to expand their already existing Acceptable Ads program. The publishers will be able to sign up and start running the whitelisted ads after making small modifications to their website’s code.

Whitelisted ads will not be able to track you from different websites and will adhere to specific site and relevancy guidelines as defined by Adblock Plus.

Toll Charging Gatekeepers

They are aiming to place themselves as the gatekeepers, charging a toll from the publishers to let them have that ad revenue they are missing due to blocked ads.

This move is said to be “publisher-friendly” as 80 percent of the ad revenue will go to the publisher while the remaining 20 percent to third parties involved in serving ads (including Adblock Plus, which will be getting 6 percent of it).

The Ad marketplace launches in beta today while the full version is expected to roll out later this year.

Kali Linux 2016.2 - Ready for Pentesters & Hackers

As promised at the Black Hat and Def Con security and hacking conferences, Offensive Security – the creators of Swiss army knife for researchers, penetration testers, and hackers – has finally released the much awaited Kali Linux 2016.2.

Kali Linux is an open-source Debian-based Linux distribution designed to help ethical hackers and security professionals with a wide range of tools for penetration testing, forensics, hacking and reverse engineering together into a single package.

Earlier the Kali Linux distribution was known as BackTrack.

Kali Linux 2016.2 is an updated Live ISO image of the popular GNU/Linux distribution that includes the latest software versions and enhancements for those who want to deploy the operating system on new systems.

What's new?

Besides bringing the updated Live ISOs of Kali Linux, the Kali Linux team brings multiple variants of the GNU/Linux distribution with various Desktop Environments, specifically KDE, Xfce, MATE, LXDE, and Enlightenment – all available only for 64-bit platforms.

What's even more exciting is that, from Kali Linux 2016.2 onwards, the team promises to release updated Live ISO images of Kali with new software versions and the latest security patches every week.

Since Kali Linux has been the most advanced and widely used distro for penetration testing and forensics, this weekly update has come up as exciting news for those involved in various hacking and security-related projects.

It's been several months since the last update to the official Kali Linux Live ISOs, and there are a few hundred new or updated packages pushed to the Kali repositories.

This means that the packages incorporated in the previous Kali Linux ISOs need bug fixes and OS improvements, which are implemented in the most recent versions of the Linux distro.

"Since our last release several months ago, there's a few hundred new or updated packages which have been pushed to the Kali reports," the Kali Linux team's announcement reads. "This means that anyone downloading an ISO even 3 months old has somewhat of a long 'apt-get dist-upgrade' ahead of them."

You can download the latest Kali Linux 2016.2 ISOs from its official website now. The Kali Linux team has also promised to bring a lot of exciting announcements in the next few weeks, so keep an eye on its announcements for the latest updates