Fighting Hunger and Poverty with Mobile Technology

Steve Baragona | Washington, D.C.

Developing world farmers receive tips on improving crop yields by watching how-to videos on their mobile phones.

Mobile phones are the latest weapon in the fight against hunger and poverty.  The devices provide a new way to deliver information to developing world farmers in hard-to-reach places.

A group at the University of Illinois has produced several videos that demonstrate simple, low-cost ways to improve the lives of people in the developing world. One video shows farmers how to make a natural insecticide out of seeds from the neem tree.

Spreading the word

“There’s been a dramatic revolution in the way that we can share information,” says the University of Illinois’ Barry Pittendrigh. “And that’s come about both through the Internet and through the dramatic increase in the use of cell phones, especially in developing nations.”

Cell – or mobile – phones are everywhere in the developing world and they are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Read the rest of this entry »

Did Washington Block Discussion of a Security Patch?  Should It Have?

Reports of cyber-attacks and security hacks have been filling the Net lately.  Sony’s “Playstation Network” has suffered a very public series of crippling hacks that may have compromised the personal information of the network’s 100 million users – and cost the electronics giant over 14 billion yen ($170-million dollars.)  South Korean officials announced they were stepping up Internet security barriers in the wake of what it says are accelerating attacks from the North.   And at the other end of the globe, Ireland has been struggling to fend off computer attacks intended to infect otherwise clean local servers with malware.

Now comes news of a potentially debilitating security hole in certain industrial control systems that could possibly lead to massive industrial espionage – or worse.

As first reported in Wired, the flaws affect the “SCADA” systems of various Siemens control devices – many of which can be found in very high-level industrial, processing and generating facilities around the world.  SCADA stands for ‘supervisory control and data acquisition’ -  systems that allow users to both monitor and control a wide variety of processes – and not surprising for a company valued at $80 billion dollars, Siemens products can be found everywhere.  Nuclear plants, natural gas pipelines, waste-water treatment, chemical production – with a big enough security hole, all these and many other facilities are potentially at risk from hackers seeking to take control of the plant. Read the rest of this entry »

100 Years of IBM’s Technological Innovation

For one of the world’s foremost inventors, Bernie Meyerson is a fairly modest guy.

Perhaps that’s because his game-changing invention of silicon germanium – basically the stuff that makes every modern computer chip work – began as an accident.

“Many, many years ago,” says Meyerson, “when I was a grad student, I dropped a silicon wafer.  If you have goobers hanging from this piece of silicon, you probably don’t want to heat it up and make a real mess, so I washed it under water to clean it up.”  And here’s the puzzle: no matter how much water he used, the silicon wouldn’t get wet.  “Something wild had just happened.  It violated all the literature of the day.”

But Meyerson had work to do, so he “filed it away under odd things” in his mind and returned to his tasks.

Years later, while an employee at IBM, he returned to his dry silicon mystery.  The answer was complicated: it turns out the wafer had been treated with hydrofluoric acid, which combined with the silicon to form an atomic-level protective layer that kept everything – water, contaminants, even air – out.  Still, his response was immediate:  “That was my ‘Aha!’ moment.” Read the rest of this entry »

Using a “Man-in-the-Middle” to Target Activists

Given the civil unrest roiling the Middle East, Syria’s recent decision to unblock Facebook seemed…well, puzzling.  After all that’s been made of the social network’s role in helping organize the Egyptian and Tunisian uprisings, why would Damascus choose this moment to open it up?

Perhaps now we have the answer.

Illustration: German Ariel Berra

Peter Eckersley with the Electronic Frontier Foundation reports it appears Syrian authorities have launched a cyber-attack against Facebook aimed at intercepting messages and targeting activists inside Syria.  Calling it “very much an amateur attempt,” Eckersley says forensic data analysis makes clear that an unknown culprit – but one with Syrian fingerprints – has compromised Facebook’s security by using one of the oldest tricks in the spy-book: a “man-in-the-middle”, or MITM, attack.

In essence, an MITM hack is an electronic form of code-breaking between two people online who have been tricked into believing they’re communicating over a secure connection – such as https – but are actually passing messages through a third hidden party, where they can be recorded, blocked or altered.   That may seem like a mouthful, but it’s actually a lot less complicated than it sounds.  Let’s unpack it a bit. Read the rest of this entry »

How Long Before “New” Media Becomes “Old”?

This morning began with an experiment.

Rather than pick up my daily newspaper, flip on the radio or even look at the television, I decided to get all my news solely from my iPad.

photo: David Byrd

It was different…and honestly, not very satisfying.

For example, browsing through Google News there were at least a dozen different reports on Microsoft’s impending purchase of Skype – a story that broke too late for newspapers but surely would have been on the radio – but not a single preview of today’s Senate hearing on mobile phone privacy.  I skimmed through Twitter and found it long on opinion and short on news.  It was still too early for most of my Facebook friends to have shared any current stories that interested them (but did catch some funny dog videos) so I scanned the websites of several news sources I trust.

All the reports in print were no doubt there online – assuming I had the patience to thumb through them all.  But after five or six headline links, my eyes started to glaze.  Headlines began to blur into each other and within 10 minutes or so I simply gave up, left to hunt out that morning’s paper edition of the Washington Post.  Newsprint in hand, in just a few minutes I learned about the current U.S. Congressional debt ceiling debate, the outing of a CIA station chief in Pakistan (and who might be responsible), a closed-circuit TV news program in local prisons, and a few other items I never would have found on the Internet.

Old-fashioned?  Perhaps.  But it turns out I’m not alone. Read the rest of this entry »

Is the Internet Better, or Worse, Than TV?

It’s one of the most cited speeches of the 20th Century…or, at least, two of the most quoted words.  However the man who delivered it, Newton Minow, says we’re remembering the wrong two words.

In May 1961, President John F. Kennedy had only been in office for only four months.  Minow, his new Federal Communications Commission Chair, was slated to make his first public address before the nation’s broadcasters at the prestigious, annual convention of the National Association of Broadcasters.   It was usually an opportunity to mix policy proposals and gentle blandishments – a wonk’s dream, if slightly snoozy affair.

But Minow’s address was anything but snoozy.  More like a fire alarm.

“When television is good, nothing – not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers – nothing is better,” he began.

“But when television is bad, nothing is worse.  I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you – and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off.  I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.”

Punctuating his point, Minow decried the “…game shows, violence, audience-participation shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western badmen, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence and cartoons,” that daily poured from his television.  “Is there one person in this room who claims that broadcasting can’t do better?” Read the rest of this entry »

http://twitter.com/#!/ReallyVirtual

(Doug Bernard returns Tuesday to Digital Frontiers)

A software consultant living in Abbottabad, Pakistan may have been the first to alert his neighbors (and the world) to what was happening in his town when he  inadvertently tweeted about the Navy Seal raid on a nearby compound, in which the FBI’s (the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation) most wanted terrorist was killed.   Under the user name “Really Virtual,” Sohaib Athar tweeted May 1, “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).”

Athar went on to admonish the helicopter for hovering above as he tweeted, “Go away helicopter – before I take out my giant swatter :-/”  After learning that the helicopter crashed, he apologized to the pilots for the swatter comment.

From FBI website

The Twitter feed goes on for several hours with Athar and neighbors trying to figure out what’s  happening in Abbottabad, as the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound begins and then ends with the death of the al-Qaida leader.

Now, the Abbottabad tweeter is being inundated with media requests for an interview.  Yours truly included.

Athar also has a blog.  His last entry is titled The Guy Who Liveblogged the Osama Raid Without Knowing It and simply says, “is what I am for the next few hours on Twitter.  I am too tired and sleepy to blog or talk about it though, but I guess it is finally time to revive this abandoned blog. Maybe tomorrow…”

–Rebecca Ward

VOA’s Asia editor was monitoring the tweets overnight, Washington DC time.  He later spoke to Paul Westpheling, host of the English radio program “International Edition,” about the 33 year-old tweeter and the town in which he lives.