Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that answer the question.
Query: When was github created?
GitHub was developed by Chris Wanstrath, PJ Hyett, Tom Preston-Werner and Scott Chacon using Ruby on Rails, and started in February 2008. The company, GitHub, Inc., has existed since 2007 and is located in San Francisco.
Facebook is a social networking service launched in July 2003, as FaceMash, later changing to TheFacebook on February 4, 2004. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommate and fellow Harvard University student Eduardo Saverin. The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and gradually most universities in the United States and Canada, corporations, and by September 2006, to everyone with a valid email address along with an age requirement of being 13 and older.
FaceMash, Facebook's predecessor, opened in 2003. Developed by Mark Zuckerberg, he wrote the software for the Facemash website when he was in his second year of college. The website was set up as a type of "hot or not" game for Harvard students. The website allowed visitors to compare two female student pictures side-by-side and let them decide who was hot or not.
The project was started at the end of 2009 in Pittsburgh by Carnegie Mellon University professor Luis von Ahn (creator of reCAPTCHA) and his graduate student Severin Hacker, and then developed along with Antonio Navas, Vicki Cheung, Marcel Uekermann, Brendan Meeder, Hector Villafuerte, and Jose Fuentes.
Hotmail service was founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, and was one of the first webmail services on the Internet along with Four11's RocketMail (later Yahoo! Mail). It was commercially launched on July 4, 1996, symbolizing "freedom" from ISP-based email and the ability to access a user's inbox from anywhere in the world. The name "Hotmail" was chosen out of many possibilities ending in "-mail" as it included the letters HTML, the markup language used to create web pages (to emphasize this, the original type casing was "HoTMaiL"). The limit for free storage was 2 MB. Hotmail was initially backed by venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. By December 1997, it reported more than 8.5 million subscribers. Hotmail initially ran under Solaris for mail services and Apache on FreeBSD for web services, before being partly converted to Microsoft products, using Windows Services for UNIX in the migration path.
Brian Acton (born February 17, 1972) is an American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur. He is the co-founder (with Jan Koum) of WhatsApp, a mobile messaging application which was acquired by Facebook Inc. in February 2014 for US$19 billion. He was formerly employed at Yahoo Inc. In September 2017, Acton announced that he was leaving WhatsApp to start a foundation. On February 21, 2018, Acton and Moxie Marlinspike announced the formation of the Signal Foundation.
Development of Swift started in July 2010 by Chris Lattner, with the eventual collaboration of many other programmers at Apple. Swift took language ideas "from Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, CLU, and far too many others to list". On June 2, 2014, the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) application became the first publicly released app written with Swift. A beta version of the programming language was released to registered Apple developers at the conference, but the company did not promise that the final version of Swift would be source code compatible with the test version. Apple planned to make source code converters available if needed for the full release.
The client was created by WhatsApp Inc., based in Mountain View, California, which was acquired by Facebook in February 2014 for approximately US$19.3 billion. By February 2018, WhatsApp had a user base of over one and a half billion, making it the most popular messaging application at the time. WhatsApp has grown in multiple countries, including Brazil, India, and large parts of Europe, including the United Kingdom and France.
Yahoo grew rapidly throughout the 1990s. Yahoo went public in April 1996 and its stock price rose by 600 percent within two years. Like many search engines and web directories, Yahoo added a web portal, putting it in competition with services like Excite, Lycos and America Online. By 1998, Yahoo was the most popular starting point for web users, and the human-edited Yahoo Directory the most popular search engine, receiving 95 million page views per day which was triple the number compared to rival Excite. It also made many high-profile acquisitions. Yahoo began offering free e-mail from October 1997 after the acquisition of RocketMail, which was then renamed to Yahoo! Mail. In 1998, Yahoo! decided to replace AltaVista as the crawler-based search engine underlying the Directory with Inktomi. Yahoo's two biggest acquisitions were made in 1999 - that of Geocities for $3.6 billion, and Broadcast.com for $5.7 billion.
Aaron Greenspan created a web portal as a Harvard undergraduate called houseSYSTEM that launched in August 2003. In February 2004, when thefacebook.com launched, Greenspan recognized aspects of his own work in the site, and later came to believe that Zuckerberg was copying his work one feature at a time—a claim that Zuckerberg denied. Regarding Greenspan's allegations, Zuckerberg was described in "The New York Times" as "saying through a spokeswoman that he was not sure how to respond". Greenspan's company filed a Petition to Cancel the "Facebook" trademark, which included claims of prior use and fraud by Facebook, Inc. against the USPTO. Facebook, Inc. agreed to a formal settlement with Greenspan in late May 2009 and issued a press release, but the terms were not disclosed.
GMT's name comes from the first name initials of founders Gene Billingsley, Mike Crane, and Terry Shrum. However, Crane and Shrum soon split acrimoniously with GMT, and founded their own company, the Fresno Gaming Association.
The World Wide Web, also known as the WWW and the Web, is an information space where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), interlinked by hypertext links, and accessible via the Internet. English scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. He wrote the first web browser in 1990 while employed at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. The browser was released outside CERN in 1991, first to other research institutions starting in January 1991 and to the general public on the Internet in August 1991.
reCAPTCHA is a CAPTCHA-like system designed to establish that a computer user is human (normally in order to protect websites from bots) and, at the same time, assist in the digitization of books. reCAPTCHA was originally developed by Luis von Ahn, David Abraham, Manuel Blum, Michael Crawford, Ben Maurer, Colin McMillen, and Edison Tan at Carnegie Mellon University's main Pittsburgh campus. It was acquired by Google in September 2009.
The reCAPTCHA program originated with Guatemalan computer scientist Luis von Ahn, and was aided by a MacArthur Fellowship. An early CAPTCHA developer, he realized "he had unwittingly created a system that was frittering away, in ten-second increments, millions of hours of a most precious resource: human brain cycles".
In August 2007, a tool called WikiScanner—developed by Virgil Griffith, a visiting researcher from the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico—was released to match edits to the encyclopedia by non-registered users with an extensive database of IP addresses. News stories appeared about IP addresses from various organizations such as the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Republican Congressional Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Diebold, Inc. and the Australian government being used to make edits to Wikipedia articles, sometimes of an opinionated or questionable nature. Another story stated that an IP address from the BBC itself had been used to vandalize the article on George W. Bush. The BBC quoted a Wikipedia spokesperson as praising the tool: "We really value transparency and the scanner really takes this to another level. Wikipedia Scanner may prevent an organisation or individuals from editing articles that they're really not supposed to." Not everyone hailed WikiScanner as a success for Wikipedia. Oliver Kamm, in a column for "The Times", argued instead that:
As the Web grew, search engines and Web directories were created to track pages on the Web and allow people to find things. The first full-text Web search engine was WebCrawler in 1994. Before WebCrawler, only Web page titles were searched. Another early search engine, Lycos, was created in 1993 as a university project, and was the first to achieve commercial success. During the late 1990s, both Web directories and Web search engines were popular—Yahoo! (founded 1994) and Altavista (founded 1995) were the respective industry leaders. By August 2001, the directory model had begun to give way to search engines, tracking the rise of Google (founded 1998), which had developed new approaches to relevancy ranking. Directory features, while still commonly available, became after-thoughts to search engines.
In December 2007, SRI launched a spin-off company, Siri Inc., which Apple acquired in April 2010. In October 2011, Apple announced the Siri personal assistant as an integrated feature of the Apple iPhone 4S. Siri's technology was born from SRI's work on the DARPA-funded CALO project, described by SRI as the largest artificial intelligence project ever launched. Siri was co-founded in December 2007 by Dag Kittlaus (CEO), Adam Cheyer (vice president, engineering), and Tom Gruber (CTO/vice president, design), together with Norman Winarsky (vice president of SRI Ventures). Investors included Menlo Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures.
Microsoft Office is a family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a marketing term for an office suite (bundled set of productivity applications), the first version of Office contained Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint. Over the years, Office applications have grown substantially closer with shared features such as a common spell checker, OLE data integration and Visual Basic for Applications scripting language. Microsoft also positions Office as a development platform for line-of-business software under the Office Business Applications brand. On July 10, 2012, Softpedia reported that Office is used by over a billion people worldwide.
It is the world's largest security company measured by revenues and has operations in more than 90 countries. With over 570,000 employees, it is the world's third-largest private employer, the largest European and African private employer, and among the largest on the London Stock Exchange. G4S was founded in 2004 by the merger of the UK-based Securicor plc with the Denmark-based Group 4 Falck.
The World Wide Web Virtual Library was the first index of content on the World Wide Web and still operates as a directory of e-texts and information sources on the web. It was started by Tim Berners-Lee creator of HTML and the World Wide Web itself, in 1991 at CERN in Geneva. Unlike commercial index sites, it is run by a loose confederation of volunteers, who compile pages of key links for particular areas in which they are expert. It is sometimes informally referred to as the "WWWVL", the "Virtual Library" or just "the VL".
The open-source movement is branched from the free-software movement which began in the late 80s with the launching of the GNU project by Richard Stallman. Stallman is regarded within the open-source community as sharing a key role in the conceptualization of freely-shared source code for software development. The term "free software" in the free software movement is meant to imply freedom of software exchange and modification. The term does not refer to any monetary freedom. Both the free-software movement and the open-source movement share this view of free exchange of programming code, and this is often why both of the movements are sometimes referenced in literature as part of the FOSS or "Free and Open Software" or FLOSS "Free/Libre Open-Source" communities.
In 1998 the term "open-source software" (as abbreviation "OSS") was coined as alternative for "free software". There were several reasons for the proposal of a new term. On one hand a group from the free software ecosystem perceived the Free Software Foundation's attitude on propagandizing the "free software" concept as "moralising and confrontational", which was also associated with the term. In addition, the "available at no cost" ambiguity of the word "free" was seen as discouraging business adoption, as also the historical ambiguous usage of the term "free software". In a 1998 strategy session in California, "open-source software" was selected by Todd Anderson, Larry Augustin, Jon Hall, Sam Ockman, Christine Peterson, and Eric S. Raymond. Richard Stallman had not been invited. The session was arranged in reaction to Netscape's January 1998 announcement of a source code release for Navigator (as Mozilla). Those at the meeting described "open source" as a "replacement label" for free software, and the Open Source Initiative was soon-after founded by Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens to promote the term as part of "a marketing program for free software". The Open Source Definition is used by the Open Source Initiative to determine whether a software license qualifies for the organization's insignia for open source software. The definition was based on the Debian Free Software Guidelines, written and adapted primarily by Bruce Perens. Perens did not base his writing on the four freedoms of free software from the Free Software Foundation, which were only later available on the web. According to the OSI, Stallman initially flirted with the idea of adopting the open source term.
Wanstrath co-founded GitHub in 2008 and served as its CEO until October 2018. He stepped down as CEO after finishing a search for his own replacement beginning in early 2017. After Microsoft's acquisition of Github in June of 2018, Wanstrath went on to become a technical fellow at Microsoft, working on strategic software initiatives.
GitHub renamed Octopuss to Octocat, and trademarked the character along with the new name. Later, GitHub hired illustrator Cameron McEfee to adapt Octocat for different purposes on the website and promotional materials; McEfee and various GitHub users have since created hundreds of variations of the character, which are available on The Octodex.
On January 26, 2013, GitHub users in China experienced a man-in-the-middle attack in which attackers could have intercepted traffic between the site and its users in China. The mechanism of the attack was through a fake SSL certificate. Users attempting to access GitHub received a warning of an invalid SSL certificate, which, due to being signed by an unknown authority, was quickly detected. A spokesperson for GitHub said: "Early last week, it appeared that GitHub was being at least partially blocked by the Great Firewall of China... After a couple days, it appeared that GitHub was no longer being blocked." NETRESEC performed forensics of the attack and determined that it was legitimate due to the large number of router hops involved (6) and because the user submitting the packet capture was from China.
Also in 2014, she created the Contributor Covenant, a code of conduct used in over 40,000 open source projects including all such projects from Google, Microsoft, and Apple. In 2016, she received a Ruby Hero award in recognition of her work on the Contributor Covenant. After allegations of sexual harassment were made against the founder and CEO of GitHub and his wife in March 2014, Ehmke joined Betsy Haibel to create a service called the Culture Offset. Culture Offset allowed people who wished to boycott GitHub but were unable to do so because it was necessary for their work to "offset" their use by directing donations to organizations working to help underrepresented people in the technology industry. This project was featured in the "Wall Street Journal" and "Wired" Magazine.