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s, well ... what the Internet has always been about. Though I think it has made the lives of some IT managers easier and I do like Rdio. The second, Big Data, has lots of potential applications. But, as Tim Berners-Lee noted today, the people benefiting from more sophisticated machine learning techniques are the people buying consumer data, not the consumers themselves. How many Big Data startups might help people see their lives in different ways? Perhaps the personal genomics companies, but so far, they've kept their efforts focused quite narrowly. And third, we have the daily deal phenomenon. Groupon and its 600 clones may or may not be good companies, but they are barely technology companies. Really, they look like retail sales operations with tons of sales people and marketing expenses.
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we've reached a point in this technology cycle where the old thing has run its course. I think the hardware, cellular bandwidth, and the business model of this tottering tower of technology are pushing companies to play on one small corner of a huge field.
We've maxed out our hardware. No one even tries to buy the fastest computer anymore because we don't give them any tasks (except video editing, I suppose) that require that level of horsepower. I remember breathlessly waiting for the next-generation processor so that my computer would be capable of a whole new galaxy of activities. Some of it, sure, is that we're dumping the computation on the servers on the Internet. But the other part is that we mostly do a lot of the things that we used to do years ago -- stare at web pages, write documents, upload photos -- just at higher resolutions.
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Meanwhile, despite the efforts of telecom carriers, cellular bandwidth remains limited, especially in the hotbeds of innovation that need it most. It turns out building a superfast, ultrareliable cellular network that's as fast as a wired connection is really, really hard.
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Generally speaking, when you go to a web site, images are downloaded to temporary storage on your computer — whether it’s a personal computer, pad, laptop or certain smartphones. This temporary storage is called “cache.” The pictures and video are temporarily stored to make it easier for your computer to display those images from the web site if you go back. It makes the processing time faster. This is an automatic process conducted by your computer’s operating system.
Yes, that means you or a client can accidentally access child pornography unknowingly. There may be pictures or videos that depict child pornography that you haven’t viewed that get automatically downloaded and stored in temporary Internet storage or cache. Yes, that means that even if you or a client accidentally access child pornography and try to delete it, if the police find out about it, they will make an arrest, push to prosecute and the resultant conviction will garner a mandatory minimum sentence of incarceration.
Web wanderers are more likely to get a computer virus by visiting a religious website than by peering at porn, according to a new study.
"Drive-by attacks" in which hackers booby-trap legitimate websites with malicious code continue to be a bane, the US-based anti-virus vendor Symantec said in its Internet Security Threat Report.
Websites with religious or ideological themes were found to have triple the average number of "threats" that those featuring adult content, according to Symantec.
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"It is interesting to note that websites hosting adult/pornographic content are not in the top five, but ranked tenth," Symantec said in the report.
"We hypothesise that this is because pornographic website owners already make money from the internet and, as a result, have a vested interest in keeping their sites malware-free; it's not good for repeat business."
alongside the rise of the Internet and the empowerment of the Internet generation has emerged the greatest inequalities of wealth and privilege that any of the increasingly Internet enabled economies/societies have experienced at least since the great Depression and perhaps since the beginnings of systematic economic record keeping. The association between the rise of inequality and the rise of the Internet has not yet been explained and if may simply be a coincidence but somehow I’m doubtful and we await a newer generation of rather more critical and less dewey economists to give us the models and explanations for this co-evolution.
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But in the context of the Open Government Partnership and the 70 or so countries that have already committed themselves to this or are in the process I’m not sure that the world can afford to wait to see whether this correlation is direct, indirect or spurious especially if we can recognize that in the world of OGP, the currency of accumulation and concentration is not raw economic wealth but rather raw political power.
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in the same way as there appears to be an association between the rise of the Internet and increasing concentrations of wealth one might anticipate that the rise of Internet enabled structures of government might be associated with the increasing concentration of political power in fewer and fewer hands and particularly the hands of those most adept at manipulating the artifacts and symbols of the new Internet age.
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In the skies above the city a drone flock drifts into formation broadcasting their local file sharing network. Part nomadic infrastructure and part robotic swarm they form a pirate internet, an aerial napster, darting between the buildings....
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Revolutionary communities are coalescing around social networks and text messages and occupy the city with the force to topple governments. The U.S. military’s has development autonomous aerial drones that they can be launched across a place like Egypt, when the government cut off internet access to prevent people from organizing protests. These drones would fly off and hover above the city, and create ad hoc connections and networks in a new form of nomadic territorial infrastructure.
the concept from Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today: “In the skies above the city a drone flock drifts into formation broadcasting their local file sharing network. Part nomadic infrastructure and part robotic swarm they form a pirate internet, an aerial napster, darting between the buildings…”
Protesters could upload images, video, etc, on the run.
Information on the web can help us catch terrorists and criminals and it can also identify a practice called astroturfing — creating the false impression that there's huge grassroots support for some cause or person using false user accounts. It's a big problem in elections and other types of political conflicts.
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We spoke to Hsinchun Chen from the University of Arizona, who is involved with the dark web terrorism research project which develops automated tools to collect and analyse terrorist content from the Internet. We also spoke to Fillipo Menzcer from Indiana University about Truthy, a free tool for analysing how information spreads on Twitter that has been useful in spotting astroturfing.
"You have to code, not because you need to be good at it, but because technical employees are far more likely to follow a founder with technical experience."
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Understanding how difficult a requested feature will be to implement has made me better at prioritizing our company's time appropriately. The only way to truly know how a feature or a product works is to understand code.
India’s awkward attempts to control its citizens’ activities online are shifting further and further away from the liberal democratic principles that inform the US-India relationship, and towards the cliché of “Asian democracy”, where individual freedoms and rights are secondary to societal cohesion.
The propaganda office of Chongqing used public funds to invite 32 [so-called] well-known bloggers to evaluate Chongqing, and the resulting news report says that these bloggers believe “Chongqing is a city of ideas and ideals.” I’ve been active online since 1998 and I’ve never heard of any of these well-known bloggers. How strange! Everyone judge for themselves. http://t.cn/SAMo3f
these cases illustrate the dilemma faced by citizen journalists and commentators who want to critique the government more forcefully than the mainstream media does. The internet can be used either as a hiding place or as a connector. Each strategy has its pros and cons.
Those who use the internet to stay clear of the authorities, like the old Temasek Review, tend to find it difficult to cultivate sources and allies – this was a key reason why TREmeritus decided to come out of the shadows, according to Wan. In contrast, the likes of Yawning Bread and The Online Citizen have strong connections with Singapore’s civil society. Operating openly and transparently tends to make sites more credible. However, working in the open also means that they are no longer immune to the same post-publication legal constraints that restrict mainstream journalists.
Three trends on China’s internet in 2011
I am an author, as well as a reader. One marvel of the Internet is that some of my older works, long out of print, are now far more widely available than they ever were before – in pirated versions. Of course, I am more fortunate than many authors or creative artists, because my academic salary means that I am not forced to rely on royalties to feed my family. Nevertheless, it isn’t hard to find better purposes for my royalty earnings than Kim Dotcom’s environmentally damaging lifestyle. We need to find a way to maximize the truly amazing potential of the Internet, while properly rewarding creators.
Australia, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and many European countries now have a public lending right, designed to compensate authors and publishers for the loss of sales caused by the presence of their books in public libraries. We need something similar for the Internet. A user fee could pay for it, and, if the fee were low enough, the incentive to use pirated copies would diminish. Couple that with law enforcement against the mega-abusing Web sites, and the problem might be soluble. Otherwise, most creative people will need to earn a living doing something else, and we will all be the losers.
the craze for native apps is a short one and we are already seeing it on the wane. Native apps, which need to be distributed via a proprietary app store controlled by an operator or device manufacturer, also suffer from being restricted to the platform for which they are built, necessitating an almost complete rewrite for each different platform. Maintaining separate, functionally equivalent apps for Android, iOS, Blackberry OS6, Playbook, WebOS AND Windows Phone is an expensive and time consuming business, something that major publishers realise only too well.
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Native apps have other limitations too. Web technology has matured over 15 years to provide a rich set of tools for making web applications that are open, accessible and linkable. The very ethos of web development is that it is fundamentally an open platform, inviting integration, connecting, linking and sharing of information. Native apps construct a silo around themselves and operate in their own artificially constructed world. Everything in that world may be beautiful and the user experience may be dazzling, but the value is locked into that container.
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Native apps will always have a place on mobile devices, particularly for applications such as gaming where the performance demands are high and graphics requirements are intensive. Games often also take advantage of features such as accelerometers which are not (yet) available to access from web applications. For apps that need to take advantage of bleeding edge technology and offer exceptional performance, native code is still a good option. But for news and magazine publishers, the tide is turning.
Timothy Gowers of the University of Cambridge, who won the Fields Medal for his research, has organized a boycott of Elsevier because, he says, its pricing and policies restrict access to work that should be much more easily available. He asked for a boycott in a blog post on January 21, and as of Monday evening, on the boycott’s Web site The Cost of Knowledge, nearly 1,900 scientists have signed up, pledging not to publish, referee, or do editorial work for any Elsevier journal.
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a recent experience in which he was recruited by "a prestigious venue" to review a paper that related in some ways to research he had done. Barlow's work wasn't mentioned anywhere in the piece. Barlow said he realized that the journal editor figured Barlow would be annoyed by the omission. And although he was, Barlow said he didn't feel assigning the piece to him was fair to the author. "It was a set-up. The editor didn't want a positive review, so the burden of rejection was passed on to someone the author would not know."
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traditional peer review simply delays publication and leaves decision-making "in the dark." Peer review -- in the sense that people will comment on work and a consensus may emerge that a given paper is important or not -- doesn't need to take place prior to publication, he said.
the peer review system for scholarly journals doesn’t work very well, needs to be reformed, and really ought to take radical advantage of new technologies. There is, of course, going to be quite a bit of resistance to any change coming from the usual quarters, beginning with older academics who still think of social networking in terms of meeting colleagues after work for a martini (well, okay, nothing wrong with that), administrators who are used to the simple (and simplistic) bean counting operations for tenure and promotion made possible by the current system, and journal publishers who make a ton of money while adding next to nothing in value to people’s publications (after all, they don’t pay for the research, don’t pay the writers, and don’t pay the editors and reviewers — which of course doesn’t stop them from charging an arm and a leg to university libraries).
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as a matter of fact most peer review has always taken place after publication. A lot of bad or simply irrelevant stuff gets published and ends up augmenting someone’s c.v. by a line or two (good for promotion and tenure!), but then dies the common death of much academic scholarship: complete lack of citations by anyone other than the author.
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The question that Barlow is raising is whether it wouldn’t be better to skip the preliminary step — the pre-publication filter — and simply leave everything to the community at large.
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The new digitally-enabled system (presumably oriented toward mobile access as is much of the Internet in China) appears to be aggravating existing divisions between social and economic “have’s” and “have not’s” that is between those who have ready and usable access to the Internet and those who do not.
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the question I think, is not whether the Internet is a right (or a tool) or simply an enabler of rights but rather whether the Internet as a fundamental platform (and “opposable thumb”) for ensuring economic, social and even political participation in the 21st century is accessible to, and usable, by all.
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Among the possible “divides” suggested by this article there is that between those who have access and can pay for the physical devices delivering the Internet including in-home computers or mobiles; those who can afford to pay for the digital data/Internet service which in many locations is quite expensive relative to local incomes; those who have the literacy, numeracy and conceptual training and manual dexterity to master the use of the devices, the software and the applications (such as this one); the elderly and women who in many environments lack access to education and technical skills development; and those who do not.
I really have no idea what the end number would be if one cascaded all of the “divides” indicated in the above to find what overall proportion in a country or globally was in fact, able to make use of the various “opportunities” and benefits being offered by mobile and digital technologies.
Students here might be increasingly turning to the Internet as a source of information but a study has raised red flags on their information literacy - or the ability to manage the information, such as discerning its authenticity and using it ethically.
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Conducted by the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information (WKWSCI) at Nanyang Technological University, the "National Information Literacy Survey for Singapore Schools 2010" involved more than 3,000 secondary school students. The findings showed that the overall score across all info-literacy competencies stood at 38.7 per cent - some way off the ideal score of at least 50 per cent.
While the study found that the participants appeared most adept in defining a project task and knowing where to seek information, their lack of aptitude to cite the sources of information used were of particular concern. -
The participants were also found to be lacking in the abilities to compare information with other sources and to form critical assessments from the information.
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