Fighting Hunger and Poverty with Mobile Technology Steve Baragona | Washington, D.C. 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, […]
Fingers in the Dike
Posted May 24th, 2011 at 5:29 pm (UTC-4)
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 […]
Inventing the Future
Posted May 18th, 2011 at 3:22 pm (UTC-4)
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 […]
Syria’s Internet Hijack
Posted May 12th, 2011 at 4:35 pm (UTC-4)
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 […]
When News Isn’t News
Posted May 10th, 2011 at 6:03 pm (UTC-4)
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. It was different…and honestly, not very satisfying. For example, browsing through Google News there […]
A Vaster Wasteland?
Posted May 5th, 2011 at 5:10 pm (UTC-4)
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 […]
The Tweet Heard Round the World
Posted May 2nd, 2011 at 3:04 pm (UTC-4)
(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 […]
