Credible Cats

Data Collection as a Business Have you every wondered why so many web applications seem completely free to use on the web? Why you are prompted to accept or decline cookies when you visit a website? Or why apps and services sometimes ask for permissions? The answer is the same: your personal data is worth money. That free web application may be monitoring all your activity on the site and discreetly collecting as much information about you as possible. Cookies can be used to identify specific devices and potentially track it for years. Permissions let apps and services collect information about you and you're device, like all your contacts, what files you have, what phone calls and texts you make and send, device information, health data, and so much more. All this collected information is sent to information brokers, advertising companies, or big corporations with the goal of harvesting the data for business insights and advertising campaigns.  Location Data One of the biggest of...

By Freepik Technology Over the Years A little over thirty years ago the world was a very different place. Hookups to the Internet were relatively scarce per building. People did not have cell phones to connect to online services to do things like email or fax, cell phones were for phone calls, period. The Internet itself was vastly different as well. Websites acted more like phone book pages in comparison to the face of a business. In the '90s, social media platforms were more like enhanced bulletin boards rather than the multimedia content sharing platforms we've come to know them as. File sharing and image posting came along towards to end of the '90s, but online conversation was generally limited to text. People still met face to face often, technology was to the consumer, gadgets instead of a way of life at this point.  Now in 2025, technology has become nigh ubiquitous. The Internet of Things (IoT, smart devices connected to the Internet) has taken off. Nearl...

Examples of Open Source Software by Cobalt   What is Open Source? Open source software (OSS) are computer programs that fall under special distribution licenses that make them free to modify, learn about, use, and distribute. Most of the popular versions of this software distribution format are in the form of apps and large programs. The Linux kernel (core of an operating system) is open source. So is Mozilla Firefox, a popular browser. WordPress, a content management system (CMS, an advanced site maintainer and builder) is also open source software  (Black Duck, 2023) . Most open source software typically operates like this: a public repository of code, like on GitHub, is created for all the source code (program code) to reside. Anyone and everyone can access this repository, taking the code for themselves to use, to give to their friends, maybe to change and sell, or to improve upon and contribute to the repository. Do not confuse OSS with free software however, distribu...

picisuperstar on Freepik The Long Tail and Social Media The idea behind the Long Tail is the collection of a vast amount of digital content, not just the popular ones, but the obscure. That collection can then be used to accrue customers and visitors over time. Massive databases, a technology designed to hold large sets of data, make this possible by bringing the cost of storing content down to a point where all of it provides value, even the ones that do not generate thousands of visitor interactions every day. Social media platforms are the veritable embodiment of this concept. Each of these platforms operates off of vast database type structures, all holding user generated content in the form of posts, blogs, images, profiles, videos, music, text, practically anything. Social media companies benefit from users interacting with their platform, when they put up posts, view ads, and collect their data. To push users to engage, features to connect users with each other through forums or...

pch.vector on Freepik Technology and the Internet: What They've Done For Photo Editing Before the advent of  software like Adobe Photoshop in the 1990s, photo editing meant magnifying glasses and art supplies. You needed skilled artists and a whole lot of patience to change a photo. Software like Photoshop turned that paradigm on its head. Now, you just need people skilled in using these applications to edit photos. The bar is lower in other words.  The Internet has taken the requirements for digital photo editing: in-application skill and money, and lowered them dramatically. Now we have hundreds of photo editing applications on the web, accessible from anywhere, with many offering freemium plans (free software features for anyone to use but withholding the advanced features for the paying users), accessible and simple user interfaces (UI, the part of the application users interact with), to draw in thousands of users of all skill levels. I myself have been requested to edit ...

By brgfx on Freepik Software in Your Day to Day Software is code, assembled into a program that accomplishes a function on a computer of some kind. There is software for just about everything nowadays: weather apps, Internet design tools, operating systems, and Internet browsers are just a few examples. What the average consumer recognizes as software though, is something much further from computer hardware than an operating system. What they will most likely be familiar with are apps like freeware , and Software as a Service (SaaS) applications in the form of webware. Software as a Service SaaS is a type of cloud application model, meaning that this type of software functions entirely separate from a SaaS user's computer and uses a company's devices remotely to preform its function. Think of Software as a Service as a program which utilizes computer resources owned and controlled by the owner of that program, but potentially accessible by hundreds of paying customers with an ...