Isis Wenger, Platform Engineer with identity management firm OneLogin, told TECHtonics she never anticipated what would happen when she participated in this recruiting ad: Never mind the guys featured on the left and right sides of the poster. It was Wenger’s part, right in the center of the poster, which attracted all the attention. Some […]
All posts by Aida Akl
Isis Wenger Rallies Women in Tech Against Stereotypes
Facebook; HTC; Windows 10 Privacy; the Cult of Apple
Today’s Tech Sightings: Facebook Axes Internship for Student Who Exposed Location Flaw Facebook did not appreciate an app created by enterprising Harvard student Aran Khanna that exploited a privacy flaw in Facebook’s Messenger. The flaw allowed Messenger to automatically share the location of users whenever they chatted. The plugin Khanna created allowed buddies to see […]
Tech in Ghana; IoT Privacy; Mobile Churn; Lenovo
Today’s Tech Sightings: Simple Technology Offers Rural Ghana Communities Powerful Communications In Suke, a remote village in northern Ghana, American entrepreneur Cliff Schmidt and local technologist Andy Bayor have found a way to help communities access services not provided locally. Equipped with Talking Book devices, villagers can access agricultural content, health and social messages for […]
Sundar Pichai; Alphabet; IoT Security; Microsoft’s Funny AI
Today’s Tech Sightings: Who Is Sundar Pichai, Google’s New CEO? Out of the blue, Google announced Monday that it is restructuring. The Google you know will now be a subsidiary lead by a new CEO – Sundar Pichai. The new parent company is called Alphabet. Pichai has been with Google for the past 11 years. […]
Mobile Extends Reach, Potential of Distance Learning
Distance education is increasingly becoming available to mobile users, both as an alternative and a compliment to structured learning. Some educators hope it could even level the global skills gap. But that remains a work in progress. Open universities that offer MOOCs or Massive Open Online Courses with content from participating universities are not new. […]
Black Hat; Facebook Personality Dabbling; iPhone Fakes
Today’s Tech Sightings: Black Hat Keynote Speaker: Dream of Internet Freedom Is Dying As the annual Black Hat security conference kicked off in Las Vegas, Jennifer Granick, Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, warned that overregulation, censorship and bad laws are killing the dream of a free and open […]
Privacy; China’s Online Police; OS X; Android Fragmentation
Today’s Tech Sightings: ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ Online Is Poised to Spread Europe’s highest court’s ruled more than a year ago that search engines had to give Internet users the “right to be forgotten” to help safeguard privacy. But some privacy and free speech advocates expect the controversial “right to be forgotten” to expand beyond […]
3-D Printed Drug; Mac Thunderstrike 2; Windows 10 Privacy
Today’s Tech Sightings: FDA Approves First 3-D Printed Drug Increasingly, 3-D printing has been leaving its mark in the fields of prosthetics, industrial parts and other areas. Now, Aprecia Pharmaceuticals has announced that the U.S. Federal Drug Administration (FDA) has approved its new 3-D-printed drug, SPRITAM, for the treatment of epilepsy. The company said it is the […]
People With Disabilities Still an Afterthought in Tech Design
Progress over the past 25 years has made computing more accessible to people with disabilities. But from design to finish, accessibility is still an afterthought in the race to technological innovation. Despite breakthroughs in robotics, speech recognition, eye-motion sensors, virtual reality and many other areas, the general design approach to new products still excludes people with […]
Facebook; Google Translate; Wearable Tech; Windows 10; e-Sports
Today’s Tech Sightings: Half of the World’s Population Is on Facebook Facebook’s daily active users now average 968 million, an increase of 17 percent over last year. According to Facebook, up to 1.49 billion users – half of the world’s online population of three billion – accessed the social network by the end of the […]