Canadian Programmer Wins Design Competition at 2010 TopCoder Open in Las Vegas

October 15, 2010 · Filed Under Software News · Comment 

TopCoder, Inc. announced that Michael Paweska of Toronto, Canada, is the Design Competition Champion of the 2010 TopCoder Open (TCO), the world’s foremost competitive computer programming and creative design tournament.

Know by his TopCoder Community handle ‘argolite’, Paweska faced top rated programmers from Ukraine, Indonesia, Italy, Romania, India China, and the Russian Federation, and earned $20,000 first prize for his win in a design competition that required greater time than previous championship design competitions.

“This year’s TCO format was very favorable to the way I operate – this was a true marathon of a design competition,” said Paweska. “The really cool thing is to see all the new talent here. It bodes well for the kind of quality competitions we can expect in the future.”

Michael Paweska is one of the most successful TopCoder members of all time having earned nearly $1 million in winnings during his eight years of TopCoder participation. Paweska’s brother Piotr Paweska aka AleaActEst, of Canada, was also a finalist in the competition.

The event took place October 11th -14th at the MGM Mirage in Las Vegas as 82 top performers from around the world competed across multiple tracks for a share of $150,000 in prizes. More details are available at http://www.topcoder.com/tco10

The 2010 TopCoder Open was supported in part by sponsors Yandex, Facebook and PayPal as well as patron NSA.

TopCoder offers a comprehensive array of outcome-based software competitions 24 x 7 in which real world business solutions are built on time and on budget.  For creative work, TopCoder Studio provides a competitive arena for creative skills such as graphic arts and digital design.

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Safe Eyes 6 adds new protections for children online, including industry-first ratings-based Internet TV content filter

January 8, 2010 · Filed Under Internet Software, Security Software, Software News · Comment 

Major Upgrade to Leading Family Internet Manager

InternetSafety.comannounced Safe Eyes® 6, a major upgrade to its award-winning family Internet management software that includes an industry-first Internet TV content filter enabling parents to restrict children’s access to inappropriate online TV shows and movies based on standard TV and movie ratings. Parents will be able to block children’s access to explicit music lyrics, enforce tamper-proof safe search on major search engines, receive daily or weekly reports on children’s online activities by email, and use a new easy setup wizard to quickly tailor settings to each child.

These new features will enhance Safe Eyes’ established tools for safeguarding and managing children’s Internet usage. The software also automatically blocks objectionable websites in a choice of 35 categories as well as by user-defined URLs and/or keywords to shield children from undesirable online content; provides instant messaging controls, email blocking and social network monitoring to protect against risky online communications; and allows parents to schedule Internet usage in order to manage the time that their family spends online.

Safe Eyes 6 adds:
– Internet TV filtering on Hulu, iTunes and major TV network websites including ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox, based on the ratings level that parents deem appropriate for their children. Parents can set the software to limit content by user to TV-G and G-rated, TV-PG and PG-rated, TV-14 and PG-13-rated, or TV-MA and R-rated TV shows and movies. No other family Internet manager has these filtering capabilities.

– Blocking the viewing or purchase of songs with explicit lyrics on iTunes by selecting the appropriate setting on the setup page.

– Stronger protection against objectionable search results, with the ability to enable safe search features on popular sites such as Google, Yahoo, Bing and YouTube from Safe Eyes and thereby prevent children from disabling the safe search setting.

– Easy-to-understand daily or weekly activity reports sent by email, offering an at-a-glance overview of each user’s top search terms, most visited websites, blocked websites and programs, personal information posted online, and time-of-day Web usage patterns.

– Easy setup wizard giving parents the option to copy settings from one child to another, utilize InternetSafety.com’s suggested settings based on age, or customize user settings for each activity (websites, videos, music, instant messaging, games, social networking and email) from dropdown menus.

“There is a major disconnect in managing children’s media activities today. You can have parental controls on a TV that prevent children from watching a show that you consider objectionable, but the child can watch the same show on the family computer. One of our primary goals in Safe Eyes 6 was to remedy that problem,” said InternetSafety CEO Forrest Collier. “At the same time, we have added other new protections, simplified setup, and equipped parents with more meaningful reports that keep them informed and aware of their family’s Internet activities.”

Safe Eyes 6 will be available for download at www.safeeyes.com later this month. A one-year $49.95 subscription will cover up to three PCs with the ability to customize settings for each child. An advance demo can be seen at the InternetSafety.com booth (#3128) in the Living in Digital Times area at the 2010 International CES conference in Las Vegas.

Source: InternetSafety.com

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