The Benefits, and Pitfalls, of Cloud Computing If you’re wondering what the latest, biggest “New New Thing” on the web may be, just look up at the sky for a clue. It’s something called ‘cloud computing,’ and while there’s not much agreement what exactly it is, it’s clearly the topic of the moment. “Forecast: Increasing […]
While We’re Away
Posted July 7th, 2011 at 6:06 pm (UTC-4)
Digital Frontiers editor Doug Bernard is off this week, but while he’s away, we’d like to highlight several stories elsewhere on voanews.com. On Wednesday, President Barack Obama went where no U.S. president has gone before, by holding his first-ever “Town Hall” meeting using the social media network Twitter. The cyberspace event focused on the U.S. […]
Security or Idiocy?
Posted July 3rd, 2011 at 12:41 pm (UTC-4)
Who, And Where, Are The Greatest Threats To Internet Security? The web has been humming with talk this week – talk, concern, worry and general shpilkes – about Internet security. There’s good reason: not only are there renewed questions about just which hacker group is responsible for what cyber-attack, but the rate and severity of […]
LulzSec Laughs Last
Posted June 28th, 2011 at 4:00 pm (UTC-4)
Why the Latest, Hottest Hacker Group May Never Have Existed. I’ll admit it. Like many of my colleagues, I’m a sucker for a great story. Sure, I run it through the standard fact-checking traps, and try to question and independently confirm each detail. And always, I remind myself that if it smells too good to […]
Twitter and the Congressman
Posted June 7th, 2011 at 1:43 pm (UTC-4)
And The Lesson That Never Gets Learned As news stories go, the tale of Congressman Anthony Weiner and his recent online activities seems rather limited. It’s not a story about war, or disease, or a major environmental disaster. But given what it hints at – online sex – there’s little surprise it’s front page news […]
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 […]
On Our Site
Posted April 27th, 2011 at 5:04 pm (UTC-4)
Digital Frontiers’ Doug Bernard is out of the office at the moment, but DF would like to draw your attention to a few stories elsewhere on voanews.com. The first is from Dorian Jones in Istanbul, and this story describes a web trend in Turkey: Turkey already bans more websites than any other European country. Now […]
Leaping Over the Censors
Posted April 13th, 2011 at 3:15 pm (UTC-4)
JulieAnn McKellogg | Washington While it’s hard to generalize across the nations, it seems apparent the Internet and digital networks continue to play a serious role in helping pro-democracy activists organize and communicate. This, despite efforts by a growing number of governments to limit, censor, or totally block portions of the web. This week the […]
Protecting Arabs Online
Posted April 9th, 2011 at 1:48 pm (UTC-4)
…And Taking Armenia Off Two items recently caught our eye. There’s not much on our part to add, but in retrospect they both seem to speak to a similar theme – that of how fragile our online worlds can be. First, the nonprofit Access Now – a loose group campaigning for expanded online freedom and […]
